Welcome to the Pastor’s Pen.  A weekly blog for mind and heart.  In the last several months we have been doing a study on the person and work of the Holy Spirit.  In an effort to help refresh our memory of what we have covered I plan to write a short devotional from each of the messages I have given on this subject.  While these will be brief, I trust they will be edifying to you as we consider together this great topic.  Today’s blog is on the Holy Spirit as a Person.

     A.W. Tozer once said that, “what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us . . . and the gravest question before the church is always God himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like.  We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.”  All of us have some mental image of God and this certainly applies to how we think of the Holy Spirit.  Depending on your upbringing, church experience, the teaching you received or didn’t receive and the examples you had, all these influence how we think about the Holy Spirit.  Most people struggle with the doctrine of the Holy Spirit for a variety of reasons.  There’s the practical problem of the extremes.  We see or experience the over emphasis on the Holy Spirit as if the Father and Son are hardly present, or we have the tendency to neglect the Spirit out of fear of the false and spurious.  Then there’s the person problem, where we tend to think or treat the Spirit not as a person but as force or some sort emanation.  The term “Spirit” reinforces this false concept.  Then there’s the theological problem of the Trinity.  God reveals Himself in scripture as a triune God.  Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  One God yet three distinct persons who are equally God and yet still indivisible.  How can this be?  This is the revelation of God who is complex, totally sufficient in himself and worthy of our worship.  What difference does this make and why does it matter?  As Tozer said we have a mental image of God, that image must be refined and defined by how God has made himself known.  One of the issues for us in our relationship with God is understanding and relating to the Holy Spirit as a person.  He is a person.  He thinks, he leads, he guides, he teaches, he can be lied to, he can be grieved, he prays, he calls and so much more.  All of these activities reveal the personhood of this member of the Godhead.  As a result, every believer in Jesus needs to grasp that the one who lives within us is a person not a force, not a influence, not a feeling but a full fledged person.  I stress this because this it is foundational as we grow in our understanding of His role in our lives.  To not grasp this can lead into many areas of wrong beliefs and practices.  Let me close this meditation with two applications.  First, as a believer in Jesus you have received the very person of God himself to dwell with you and to be in you.  He comes to take up residence with in you.  That means that God is always with you.  When you’re discouraged he is there.  When you’re helpless he is there.  When you’re afraid he is there.  When you’re successful he is there.  When you’re defeated he is there.  When you sin and blow it he is there.  Everywhere we go, everything we do is done with the person and presence of the Holy Spirit involved.  Second.  The Holy Spirit is given to help us come to know God by experience.  The Spirit works to take the reality of Jesus and our salvation in him and make that real to our hearts.  In other words, the Spirit of God helps you experience the love of God.  He helps you experience the truth of God.  He helps you experience the presence of Jesus.  He helps you experience the nearness of God.  All these and many more are his work to bring the reality of God to you in a personal way.  Thank the Lord today that He has given you the very person of the Holy Spirit to be with you and in you.  Ask him, to make the person and presence of Jesus real to you as you seek to walk with him. 

Grace and Peace,

Pastor Paige