Why the Holy Spirit?                                                                                                                                             Rev. Colin S. Marshall

24th January 2010                                                                                                                     St. John’s Presbyterian Church, Mt. Roskill

Readings: Psalm 143, Isaiah 32:14-20, John 3:1-15, Acts 2:1-21

The role and presence of the Holy Spirit in the church and the life of an individual is one that, over the ages, has repeatedly been seriously misunderstood.  Even over the last century the Holy Spirit has gone from being almost completely ignored, to become almost the exclusive focus of some parts of the church, to being a topic of much confusion and serious, almost abusive manipulation. So this morning we ask: why the Holy Spirit?  Who is the Holy Spirit? And what role and function should the Holy Spirit play in our lives?  In answering these questions I also want to highlight some of the problems that have plagued the church both historically and today as a result of not addressing these questions in an appropriate manner.

The presence of the Holy Spirit was known to every Jewish boy and girl as they grew up on the account of God’s creation of the earth and of Adam and Eve.  From Genesis 1:2 we know that the Holy Spirit was involved the formation of the earth as the Spirit moved over the face of the waters.  And early in the piece, as the Hebrew people came out of Egypt, God’s Holy Spirit led the population by fire and by cloud. But as time when by people became enamored of the things of the world and the worship of God became lackluster and less important to people’s lives. 

In the Old Testament we tend to focus on Jesus’ coming, but the coming of the Holy Spirit in a new way was also foretold in various places, including the writings of the prophet Isaiah.  Speaking in prophetic voice to Jacob, Isaiah said, “I will pour my Spirit upon your descendants, and my blessing on your offspring” (44:1).  Why, was such a prophesy necessary?  Because, as we heard in today’s reading from Isaiah, God’s people had become increasingly blind to the things of God and needed refreshing.  Isaiah foretold some very real physical consequences of ignoring God: that the land would become increasingly desolate, the once beautiful palaces would become abandoned outposts of a once impressive civilization, and the fields a wilderness and barren. In the face of humanities inability to be its own salvation, it would take God’s direct intervention to turn things around. We should not doubt the practical reality of prophecy.  When the Jewish people rejected God in their day to day lives, both as individuals and as a nation, they began to suffer, and they have continued to do so in many ways, missing out on the blessing they could have had.  Removing themselves form God’s protection the Jewish people have suffered through the ages right up to and including today.  This should be a lesson for us.  If we ignore what God wants of us we will also miss out on the blessing that God wants to pour out in our lives.  In Israel’s case Isaiah (63:10) tells us that “they rebelled and grieved His Holy Spirit, therefore He turned to be their enemy, and Himself fought against them?”  Why?  God wants His people to be holy and a witness to the world for Him. Sometimes firm discipline is needed to turn an unruly child around and Israel was a decidedly unruly child.  But this is not discipline as such.  This is akin to a child walking out on a parent and getting into all sorts of things that are not healthy.  All we can do in such a situation is to continue to love and care and bear with what is happening.  As a general rule people cannot be helped until they want to be helped.  When Jewish people turn to God today they receive His blessing just as when we turn to God we receive new life in Christ by the power of the Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity, that non-biblical word used to describe a central biblical concept.  God is God, eternal, incomprehensible by humanity in His absolute otherness from all we know except as He reveals Himself to us.  And He has revealed Himself in His Son Jesus, as we discussed last week.  God also reveals Himself through the Holy Spirit.  Jesus had obvious limitations in being a human being.  At the most basic level He simply could not be omnipresent or omniscient, everywhere present and all-knowing inhuman form.  It would be a contradiction in terms.  But the Holy Spirit can be and is.  Jesus promised that when He went He would send the Holy Spirit to fulfill a number of functions that He was unable to perform.  So what does the Holy Spirit do? Let us consider five brief points.

Firstly, as I’ve just mentioned, the Holy Spirit gives life, physical life and spiritual life.  The Spirit (ruah in Hebrew or pneuma in Greek) of God, is equally translated the Wind or Breath of God. In Genesis God breathed on Adam and He lived.  God’s breath is life.  We live, each and every person alive, every single living thing, because of the breath of God that is in us.  When this is withdrawn, as King Saul found out, we die.  I am constantly reminded, in that privileged place of being with people when they die, that the last real living thing we do as human beings is to let out that last final breath. Job understood this as he said, If God “should take back His Spirit to himself, and gather to Himself His breath, all flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust”.  And might we add all the living animals and birds and everything else on this planet.  The Spirit gives life.  Have you ever considered the real irony of the fact that all those people who do believe in the Lord or are even diametrically opposed to Jesus only live because His breath is in them.

But we do not stop there because spiritual life is equally important as physical life. Jesus’ words to Nicodemus are also to be carefully considered.  Jesus told Nicodemus that that which is born of the flesh is flesh, but that born of the Spirit is Spirit. Nicodemus who was a teacher of Israel should have recognized this but didn’t.  And he wasn’t alone.  Paul would later castigate the Corinthians who had also swapped human pursuits for a true spiritual nature while at the same time telling everyone how spiritual they were.  The greatest damage a church can do to itself is to be full of people who place the things of this life before the things of God.  I believe there are many people in the world and in the church who have no idea of the type of spirituality that God wants.  Nor do they have any idea how it is to be recognized or evaluated.

The last three decades have seen some of the most crazy stuff in human history purporting to be of the Holy Spirit, when in fact it has often been degrading of anything truly spiritual.  But none of this is new.  In the first century numerous heresies developed that would lead people astray – heresies that are being copied by an amazing number of pseudo-Christian religious groups, and some blatantly, non-Christian groups.  We will look at some of these in a few weeks time but not today.  When people have little idea of who the Holy Spirit really is, or of the changes that the Scriptures tell us He will bring about in a person’s life, it seems that anything goes in the name of the Spirit. But this should not be.  Nor should we be fooled or deceived into things that are not of God.  We should be aware of the role of the Holy Spirit, who He is, what He does, and what He will not do.  We need to know these things from the Bible.  As the Scriptures advise, we should test everything (1 Thess 5:21) so that the life we receive is indeed the life that God wants to impart to us.

Romans 8:11 states, “If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through His Spirit which dwells in you.”  What then is this Spirit for and how do we recognize His work within us and others? What is the life that He wants to give us?

If we were to briefly summarize what the Holy Spirit does in our lives we could say: (1) He empowers us for service.  (2) That He purifies our hearts, our minds, and our lives sanctifying us.  (3) He reveals things to us.  (4) He unifies. (5) He gives us presence.  We are going to consider each of these briefly.

Firstly, He empowers us for service.  God gives gifts and skills to us to use in the tasks He has prepared in advance for us to do. In the Old Testament Joshua was given leadership skills to lead.  Bezalel was give artistic skill to build the Temple.  David was given the skill to play and calm Saul’s torment. Isaiah and Ezekiel were given prophecy to warn the nation.  In the New Testament Jesus was given power by the Holy Spirit to carry out His mission, as were the disciples and Paul.  Stephen, filled by the Spirit, was given power to preach so dramatically he aroused the Jewish leadership such that they could not ignore the Christian presence in Jerusalem. Sometimes the gifts are simple and In Corinth we see many individual Christians given multiple gifts of service as is normal in the church – teaching, healing, preaching, administration, helping and so on. And the greatest gift, the ability to love others.  The Holy Spirit is the agency by which God equips us for His work in the world.  And we need to learn how to use and not abuse these gifts.  We also need to learn to have the confidence to use them.

Secondly the Holy Spirit sanctifies us.  When we sin we act against God, ourselves and the community.  The Holy Spirit works to purify our lives by convicting us, in our hearts, of our sin.  If you like the Holy Spirit takes our conscience and fine tunes it to the standards of God so that we know when we are acting out of line with God’s will.  When we come to faith and commit our lives to the Lord the Holy Spirit cleanses us and gives us a new start.  But, because of our flawed humanity, we will continue to wrestle with sin all our lives.  The Spirit gives us the ability to recognize this sin and deal with it.  The Christian, led by the Spirit, will be seem to be increasingly putting to death the deeds of the corrupt nature and becoming more like Jesus, growing in personal holiness.

Thirdly the Holy Spirit reveals things to us.  As Jesus told Nicodemus, spiritual things need to be understood and perceived spiritually.  The Holy Spirit opens the doors of spiritual insight to us.  This works in multiple spheres and situations. When we read the Scriptures, we are made aware of God’s will by the Spirit.  The Spirit makes the text come alive to us and identifies things in our lives we need to be aware of or deal with.  Because of the Holy Spirit we can read the same passage whole new ways one week to another.  The Spirit can also make us aware of God’s presence in a special way.  We see this in the Scriptures at Pentecost, when Paul was directed to particular missionary activity and as God directed and led the early church.  It is the Holy Spirit that will lead and guide us if we truly want to seek after God’s will. 

Fourthly, the Holy Spirit unites us together as one body.  There is more than just a common knowledge among Christians.  Together we share in the One Spirit and are joined as brothers and sisters together.  In the Spirit there is no difference based on race, socio-economics, gender or anything else.  In God’s Spirit we are equal with each other before God.  When we realize this it should impact dramatically how we think, look at and feel about other people.  It is an attitude of heart and mind that often runs against our natural inclinations and training.  He shows us how the gifts and abilities we have been given are to be used for the benefit of the whole body.  In Phil 2:1-2 Paul states, “If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion,^ then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus…”.  One of the strongest and most persistent themes in the New Testament is the common for the church to be united.  How sad the Spirit of God must be by what has happened in the world.  But we can make a difference in how we live, work, worship and pray in unity with believers we know.

And fifthly, sometimes, just sometimes, the Spirit will give us the encouragement of that very real sense of God’s personal presence with us.  He assures us and comforts, counsels and teaches us.  And let me suggest something to you that you might not know and want to think about.  In both the Old and New Testaments we see that God tends to place His blessing and presence on us according to how pleased He is with us.  In John 1:32 we see that because Jesus was completely without sin the Holy Spirit remained upon Him.  In the Old Testament, Saul, David and Samson were all great warriors for God who achieved incredible things inspired by the Spirit.  But when they decided to walk in sin, in each and every case, that special presence and power of the Holy Spirit was removed from them.  In the New Testament Paul warned the church not to grieve the Holy Spirit (Eph 4:30) for good reason. 

To conclude then, we can answer the question ‘Why the Holy Spirit?’ By recognizing that the Holy Spirit is God’s personal presence with us and in us to inspire, motivate, warn, and gift us with much that is needed to maintain a close relationship with God and walk an effective Christian life.  When we rebel against His Spirit we become increasingly isolated and alone, we lack true worship, become self-centered impure in thought and deed, frustrated in what we want to achieve and powerless to bring about real change.  And worst of all God seems miles away.  But when we walk with and in the Spirit we can never be separated from God no matter how far or near, how content or pressured, how troubled or peaceful, how well or ill, how alone or in a crowd.  By the Spirit the Lord is always with us.  In allowing and embracing His work in our lives we are purified and made more Christ-like. We are drawn together into becoming the people God wants us to be and we are given gifts, sometimes incredible gifts, for the service of others.  Why the Holy Spirit?  So we can have life, real life.

Next week we ask the question: why the church?

Let us pray: Loving Father help us to be open to the working of Your Holy Spirit in our lives.  We have heard words this morning but we need to know the reality of the outpouring of Your Spirit. Help us humble ourselves so that we can receive that which You would impart to us so that we can serve You and those around us. This we pray in Jesus’ Name. Amen.