How the Spirit Works
Today our church celebrated the Feast of Pentecost, commemorating Jesus’ sending of the Holy Spirit upon the nascent church. I wanted to take a few minutes and help us develop our thinking about the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is incredibly misunderstood today. On the one hand, you have folks who basically ignore Him, or are afraid to mention him (just in case they’d sound Pentecostal). But we must talk about the Holy Spirit, because his work is absolutely vital to what the church does. Without the Holy Spirit, everything we do is useless (see below). We’re Christians, we believe that God is a Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, three persons, one God. So if we neglect the Holy Spirit, we are neglecting God himself. We must talk about the Holy Spirit.
And yet on the other side of things, when the Holy Spirit is spoken about, it’s almost always in terms of our experience/emotions/enthusiasm, etc. But the Holy Spirit is not our experience or our emotions. The Holy Spirit is a Person. Now it’s very rare that I feel or experience another person. In fact, I’ve taken some vows to the effect that I’m basically only allowed to feel one person, my wife. But all the time, we are surrounded by persons, who are real, and active, and engaged. Sometimes we’re more affectively aware of them, but it doesn’t diminish their reality or their when we aren’t. So, rather than the Holy Spirit being understood in terms of our emotions and feelings, the picture we find in the Bible and the Reformed (this isn’t just Reformed, but also catholic in the good sense) tradition (of which we’re a part) is that the Holy Spirit is the one by whom we relate to God. Every time and every way we relate to God the Holy Spirit is at work.
He inspired the Bible. He causes the Bible to be living and active rather than just a dead letter. He works in preaching so that the preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God. He works in and through the sacraments so that they are more than just empty signs. He mystically unites us with Christ because as John Calvin says, “As long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value to us” (Insitutes of the Christian Religion, 3.1.1). He applies the benefits of Jesus’ redemption to us, opening our hearts to receive Christ and giving us the gift of faith. He empowers our prayer, so that as we speak, we are in communion with God. He bridges the gap between us and God, so that God is present with us in a meaningful way. It’s boring to say that God is with us unless we understand the Holy Spirit. Because God is omnipresent. He’s everywhere. It doesn’t tell us anything to say that he’s here apart from the work of the Holy Spirit. So the Holy Spirit brings the reality and the power of God into our lives in a personal and meaningful way. Because he is fully personal and fully God, he doesn’t just bring us information about God, he brings us God himself. It is through the Holy Spirit that Jesus is with us always, objectively, not just when we feel like it or experience it. This is so much better and more profound than the typical understanding that the Holy Spirit sends shivers down our spines. And the Bible teaches in Romans 8.9 and Ephesians 1.13-14 that all Christians are given a share in the Holy Spirit. If you trust in Jesus, you belong to him, and he has given you this power, this Holy Spirit so that you can know him and serve him, and as Acts 1.8 says, be his witness.
So take some time and thank the Father and the Son for sending to us the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Posted by: Gene Schlesinger
