Getting a Glimpse of the Holy Spirit (Without Taking a Sabbatical)
By Erin Thomas
Without being too lofty or taking an extended sabbatical to study the divine interconnections of the Trinity—God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit—we are going to launch our look at the Holy Spirit from the belief that these three each have a distinct role and function, but are in every way and every purpose one unified God.
The most important point to grasp about the Holy Spirit is that He plays an unmistakable, unlimited role in the lives of Christians. Without His empowerment and insights, we would be hard-pressed—and find it impossible—to live lives pleasing to God.
If He’s so important, what should we know about Him? For starters, Who He is, why He’s important, what He does, and how we should respond. These are the points we’ll discover together on this two-part Holy Spirit hoedown!
Who is the Holy Spirit? Are we sure He’s not an It?
The Spirit of God (also called the Holy Ghost and the Holy Spirit) is the part of the Trinity that is often misinterpreted as a force, an influence, or something other than a person of the triune God.
As Charles Spurgeon, a nineteenth-century British preacher, said, “God the Holy Spirit is not an influence, not an emanation, not a stream of something flowing from the Father; but He is as much an actual person as either God the Son or God the Father.”1 In Billy Graham’s book The Holy Spirit (Warner Books, 1980), he asserts the same truth: “There is nothing that God is that the Holy Spirit is not. All the essential aspects of the deity belong to [both].”
But how do we know the Spirit is a He? Couldn’t the Spirit be an it? Jesus’ references to the Spirit (John 14 and 16) and the Spirit’s position as one-third of the Godhead permits us to confidently acknowledge that He is, in fact, a He. Is this distinction even important? It very much is; namely because it reinforces the truth that the Spirit is not a force or a thing, but a person—God.
Is the Holy Spirit really that important?
The short answer—You bet He is! And we’d be toast without Him.
Throughout the Bible, we see that the Spirit has a mind, emotions, and a will and that He manifests Himself in various ways to counsel, direct, and empower God’s people to fulfill God’s purposes. This is the primary reason God the Father sent Him to dwell inside followers of Christ.
In Acts 2—the account of he events of Pentecost—we see the Holy Spirit first permanently inhabit believers. This was the fulfillment of Jesus’s promise in John 14 and 16, that the Father would send a “Counselor,” also translated “Comforter”—the Spirit—that would be even better for Christians than Christ’s presence on the earth.
What?! It’s true. Jesus said in John 16:7: “But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” As the Son of God on earth, Jesus did not actually live inside of His followers, but the Spirit’s role would be to do just that.
The Apostle Paul tells us this in 1 Corinthians 3:16. With God’s Spirit inside of us at all times, leading us to make godly decisions, we are empowered to live in a way that’s pleasing to God because the Spirit helps us understand Him and His purposes. The Message explains it this way: “The Spirit, not content to flit around on the surface, dives into the depths of God, and brings out what God planned all along. Who ever knows what you’re thinking and planning except you yourself? It’s the same with God—except that he not only knows what he’s thinking, but he lets us in on it” (1 Cor. 2:10–12).2
The Spirit’s unmistakable, unlimited role in the lives of Christians is, as author and pastor Andrew Murray said, to dwell inside men, “working from within, outwards and upwards.”3 In Part 1, we’ve seen we have a perfect, powerful inside Companion and Advisor Who frees us to not only live by the Spirit, but to walk by the Spirit (Gal. 5:25). In Part 2, we learn to walk.
