Who is the Holy Spirit?
When people hear the word “Holy Spirit” today, it may seem strange and mysterious. This is especially true when we use the old English term, “Holy Ghost.”
As mysterious as the word may sound, it’s really no more mysterious than God Himself is. There is mystery, but the Holy Spirit is the presence of God with us for comfort, encouragement, guidance, and power.
Christians believe that God is one, but we also believe that God has revealed Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (read more about this here).
The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have existed forever. You can find references to the Son (as The Angel of the Lord among other references) and the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament. However, the Son is uniquely revealed when He comes in human form and reveals Himself as Jesus, the Son of God. The Holy Spirit comes into the world after Jesus’ resurrection as the unique revealer of Jesus to the world (see John 14:15–18 and Acts 2).
The Holy Spirit is the one who makes Jesus real, known, and believed in by human hearts. People from all over the world with different languages, cultures, socioeconomic backgrounds, and educational levels have embraced the crucified Jesus as “the unique Son of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). How can this be? The answer is: the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is not merely the one who reveals Jesus, He continues to apply Jesus’ love and care to Jesus’ followers throughout their lives. He is the one who brings His followers love, joy, and peace. These are all “fruits” of the Spirit in their lives (see Gal. 5:22–23).
However, the Holy Spirit is there not merely to give us personal peace. He wants to use us to spread the love of God and bring restoration and redemption to a world in need of hope. He invites us to be a part of a larger project.
How do we experience this? I usually find that the Holy Spirit is waiting for me . . . one step outside of my comfort zone. When I “walk across the room” to encounter the people around me, I find that the Holy Spirit is ready to use those lines of communication to communicate His love, care, and blessing to those around me. But I have to move outside of my comfort zone to experience what God is doing in the world.
We can see this in a thousand different ways each day. It’s stopping what we are doing to talk to a co-worker. It’s taking time to read to our children. It’s getting up a little earlier to pray about our day. It’s making that extra effort to go to our small group. It’s making that call to invite someone over for dinner. We have more opportunities to see the Spirit’s work each day than we think, and we’ve probably seen it and many times not noticed it.
However, there are also those times when the Holy Spirit calls us to enter something totally new or totally different. In Spearfish, SD where I served as Pastor for 10 years, there was a path that went along Spearfish Creek that wound its way around our church and terminated at Spearfish Canyon. I regularly walked this path for the beauty of it, for prayer, and for meditation.
One day, I walked all the way to the canyon. It was around Sturgis Bike Week, and there were quite a few motorcycles parked at the mouth of the canyon. There, in the parking lot was a man who was sitting on a motorcycle looking at a map. I thought, he is probably trying to figure out where to go. I felt a strong sense that I should go talk to him.
So, I took a step and started moving toward him to ask him if he needed any help. As I got closer, I realized that it was a person from Spearfish who lived near the church and whom I’d seen and said “hello” to regularly but whom I had never spoken to at length.
The result of going up to him is that we ended up talking. It turned out that his wife had just left for another state for rehab to try to recover from alcohol abuse. He was really struggling with the whole situation. He began to tell me about it at length.
That was the first of many conversations with this man. He moved to another part of the state a year later, but before he did, I had many opportunities to talk about God and bigger realities with him. All these opportunities came out of one walk across the parking lot at the mouth of the Spearfish Canyon on a summer day.
But how many times have I let opportunities like that go? Many times I have not gone because I didn’t know what to say or was just more concerned about other things. What I know is this: when I take that step, the Holy Spirit is waiting for me with all that I need, with power on the way.
Ain’t that the truth.