Listen to the Holy Spirit

Since the dawn of the Pentecostal movement about a century ago, references to the work of the Holy Spirit tend to deal with things like speaking in tongues and other flashy, sometimes intimidating, spiritual fireworks. It’s unfortunate that those of us who don’t emphasize these kinds of spiritual gifts have come to ignore the powerful work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, how She draws us to God, and how important She is for our Christian discipleship. (Re-read my May article if you’re curious about why I refer to the Holy Spirit as “She.”)

According to the ancient Greeks, Hermes was the messenger god. He’s the one with wings on his hat and feet. He had to be fast, but he also had to figure out how to take something that the gods said and figure out how to make it understandable for humans. After all, gods are different from people, and what makes sense to one is incomprehensible for the other. My doctoral work focuses on hermeneutics, which gets its name from Hermes. It’s a fancy word for interpretation: how to understand something that comes from a different culture, time, or way of understanding the world.

The Holy Spirit is the Christian Hermes. As the Bible tells us, God’s thoughts are as different from ours as the sky is higher than the earth (Isaiah 55:8-9). Because God is so different from us, we need help to understand what He wants to say to us. Otherwise, His word to us would be incomprehensible, and would probably overwhelm our puny human brains.

One of functions of the Holy Spirit is to bring God’s word to life within us. Without the Holy Spirit’s work, the Bible would be an ancient book written by people long gone. It would have nothing to do with our lives. Without the Holy Spirit, our prayers would be nothing more than talking to ourselves. Our words would fade away as soon as we speak them, and we would never hear God’s response. Without the Holy Spirit, even the work of Christ would be strange and inaccessible for us. We’d have no way to comprehend the new life that he offers us.

Fortunately, that’s not the case. As Jesus promised (John 14:26), He sent the Holy Spirit to teach and instruct us about divine matters and to help us continue to have an open line of communication with God.

The work of the Holy Spirit goes in both directions. We need the Holy Spirit to understand what God wants to tell us, whether it’s through the words of Scripture, a sermon, or some other way. And we need the Holy Spirit to lift up our prayers for us, because we cannot do it ourselves (Romans 8:26-27).

As you lift up your heart to God the Father and to God the Son, don’t forget the third Person of the Trinity. Praise the Holy Spirit for the connection with God that She makes possible.