The Ministry of the Holy Spirit

I want you to pray for me, because I want to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit

(my words on June 15, 1977, to my roommate in the hospital).

and in a single moment, my entire life changed.  Before that moment, I was supposedly 'in charge' of my life, and it was a struggle to maintain control.  After that moment, the Holy Spirit was in charge, and I had only to learn how to yield my control to His.  Sometimes it was still a struggle, but He was there to teach me on a daily basis.  And since He is faithful when I am not, He has not left me all these years.

Immediately, I grew fearful that I would "lose" the Holy Spirit because I was too weak and/or too ignorant to know how to hold onto to this amazing new Presence in my life.  When I confessed my fears to my doctor, who had first prayed for me, he laughed:  "You do not 'have' the Holy Spirit," he told me; "He has you, and He's not letting go."  Those words made me relax.  Nothing depended on my efforts; everything depended on His.  And for the first time in my life, I could trust in God, despite my own insufficiency.

To know ourselves as weak and insufficient for life's demands is both a fearful and a wonderful thing.  As teens, we think ourselves powerful, knowledgeable, and indestructible.  As we grow into maturity, we come face-to-face with our own inadequacies, our own lack of knowledge, and our own vulnerabilities.  Then we either retreat into anxiety or we learn to grow in trust of God.

If the Old Testament covenant and laws had been enough, Jesus would not have had to come.  But as it turned out, the Jews by and large found it impossible to live according to the measure and standards of God as written in the law.  They had to continue year after year offering sacrifices to 'cover' their nakedness before God. 

And today, we have the Bible, including the New Testament, which gives us God's thoughts and His standards for daily life.  And again, we find that we can hardly read the Bible, much less live up to its revelation.  There is a reason for this:  the "letter of the law" is the written expression of God's will, but it is impossible for natural man to embrace the will of God without the ministry of the Holy Spirit.  As promised in the Old Testament, when God spoke through his prophets, His Spirit, when poured out on us, writes His Word, not on tablets of stone, but on our hearts.  It is the Spirit that breathes life into the Word of God; it is the Spirit that brings Jesus to life in us, as He did in Mary. 

If we want to know Jesus face to face, if we want to know God as "Abba/Father," if we want to be able to read the Word of God and have it written on tablets of flesh (our hearts), there is only one way.  At the Feast of Tabernacles, when the Jews remembered and celebrated God's Presence and Ministry to them in the desert, and when they remembered and celebrated how He gave them water from the rock when they were thirsty, Jesus stood up and said, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink...[and] streams of living water will flow from within him."  By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive.  Up to that time, the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified (Jn. 7:37ff).

Jesus put to death on the cross our 'natural man' who cannot and does not embrace the Spirit of God in order to raise from the dead "a new man," who lives by the Spirit.  Would we allow Him to die for nothing?  Why would we not ask for and receive what He is 'dying' to give us -- the Holy Spirit, who creates in us all that God the Father desires us to have through His Son?

Our choice is clear:  we can continue to live in our own strength, knowledge, and control, or we can yield to the Spirit of God and allow Jesus to live His life unto God through us, through the Gift of the Holy Spirit. 

I am so thankful He parted the curtains shielding the Holy of Holies and gave us all access into the heart of God!