“The union with Christ into which the Spirit brings us is the foundation for and prelude to communion with Christ in the Spirit.
The believer who is baptized into Christ is baptized into His resurrection as well as into His death, into newness of life as well as into His death to sin.
In putting off the ways of the old man, the ways of the new man are put on and life in the Spirit begins.
The whole of the Christian life then, with its deep roots in the love of the Father and its foundation in the grace of Christ, is characterized by what Paul calls the koinōnia of the Holy Spirit (2 Cor. 13:14; cf. Phil. 2:1).
Paul’s genitive here (tou hagiou pneumatos) poses for us the happy problem of deciding whether the communion is that which the Spirit creates or that in which the Spirit is partner.
Strong arguments can be advanced for both, and it is possible that the expression may itself be intended to cover both.
It is in communion with the Spirit that we experience the communion which the Spirit creates in the blessings of the gospel in the context of the church of Christ. These are ordinarily inseparable.
This communion of or with the Spirit is, as we have seen, paradigmatically expressed in the life and ministry of Jesus, the man of the Spirit par excellence.
As such he was filled with the Spirit and walked in the Spirit; Christians are exhorted to enter into a like communion.”
–Sinclair B. Ferguson, The Holy Spirit, ed. Gerald Bray, Contours of Christian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 175–76.
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