Life “de-powers” us. It saps our energies, depletes our courage, drains our patience. People–pressures get us down; problems stir us up; physical ills distress us; worry over people we love disturbs us.
We all need strength—strength to think clearly, love creatively, endure consistently; strength to fill up our diminished reserves; supernatural strength that flows from a limitless source, quietly filling us with power.
I want you to meet Someone who can provide that kind of strength. He is willing to listen to us and understand, He will encourage us to talk until we know what we really want to say. He will probe to the nub of the issue of our fears and frustrations with X-ray discernment and wisdom, and will help us to see any confusion in our thinking or distortions in our emotions. He not only can lead us to the truth about ourselves, but possesses the power to help us act on what He guides us to be, say or do. He has the power to heal our painful memories, sharpen our vision of what is best for our future, and enlist us in a purpose that’s big enough to fire our imaginations and give ultimate meaning and lasting joy to our daily living.
That’s a tall order. No loved one, friend, psychiatrist, psychologist, pastor, or social worker can meet all of these qualifications. But there is One Who has all of these qualifications—and much more.
He alone has the omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence to give us the kind of help we need. He can help us with our problems, relationships, and decisions, for He knows everything. He is with us always, for He never sleeps. He has all power to give us the gift of primary faith as well as pertinacious faith, guidance for our daily lives, conviction and courage to face the future unafraid.
Who is this? A Person spelled with a capital “P.” He is a Person in the Trinity. He is the Holy Spirit.
We celebrate Pentecost and remember the time fifty days after Passover when Jesus’ disciples and followers received the power of the Holy Spirit. (read Acts, chapter 2). There is no greater need in your life and mine and in the church throughout the world than for a contemporary Pentecost. We confess with John Oxenham,
Not for one single day,
Can I discern the way,
But this I surely know—
Who gives the day
Will show the way
So I securely go.
The Holy Spirit is the Greatest Counselor in the World. The word, “counselor” may not be the first word that comes to your mind when you think of the Holy Spirit. For many, the Holy Spirit is the least known and understood Person of the Trinity.
Jesus used this propitious word, “Counselor,” to declare what the Spirit is meant to be in our lives. The Greek word is Parakletos, a cornucopian word overflowing with inspiring implications. It is translated as Comforter in the King James Bible, Helper in the New King James, and Counselor in the Revised Standard Version and the New International Version. The translation of the word Parakletos as Counselor is both accurate and impelling.
We can appreciate more fully the ministry of the Holy Spirit as our Counselor when we understand the use of this many-faceted name. The Greek word is rich in meaning. It was associated with courts of law and signifies one who is the counselor for the defense, one who pleads on behalf of another. In a broader sense, it identifies one who stands by a person’s side, or one who is ready to aid a soldier in battle.
The word is used for Christ Himself. The apostle John wrote in I John 2:1-2, “We have an Advocate (Parakletos) with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And He Himself is the propitiation (hilasmos—the means whereby sin is remitted) for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world.” John knew this to be true from Jesus’ own self-identification to the disciples, and then in the apostle’s own personal experience of the risen Lord. Christ pleads our case before the Father on the basis of His sacrifice on the cross. When we believe in Christ and His atoning death for us, He is our Advocate before the Father, claiming the same love for us as the Father has for Him. Incredible!
Now listen to Christ’s words spoken the Upper Room on the night before He was crucified. He promised ANOTHER Advocate. “And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Counselor to be with you forever-----the Spirit of truth----He lives with you and will be in you” (John 14:16-17) The word, “Another” needs underlining. The Greek word used is, “allos”, meaning another of the same kind, not “heteros” meaning another of a different kind.
The pre-existent Holy Spirit, one with the Father and the Son before creation and the One who had been with them all through Jesus’ ministry, would come within them.
It happened on the day of Pentecost. The disciples and followers of Jesus were gathered together for prayer in the same Upper Room where they had first heard Jesus’ promise that they would be filled with the Holy Spirit. The Savior’s life, message, death and resurrection gave birth to a new creation, a new breed of humanity--men and women who could be filled with the gifts and power of the Holy Spirit. As the disciples prayed, a mighty wind blew through the room. How appropriate: the Hebrew word for Spirit is Ruach, wind. We need the wind of the Spirit to fill our sails and keep us moving.
I remember one day while I was sailing, the wind went down and the sea became calm and flat. There was nothing to do but sit in irons and wait for the wind. “Irons” is a sailing term for a windless time of stillness and drifting.
While waiting for the wind, I drifted past another sailboat that was floating aimlessly. The people on board the craft waved and made a flat of the hand gesture of complaint about the lack of wind. The men on board, who obviously had too many beers, stood by the sails and blew on them.
I thought about that for a long time afterward. How like many Christians today and far too many churches. Human breath blowing on the sails—no wonder we make so little progress! Daily Pentecost is the source of the wind of the Holy Spirit to fill our sails.
The other outward manifestation of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was fire. John the Baptist had prophesied about that. “One mightier than I is coming, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to loose. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clean out His threshing floor, and gather the wheat into His barn; but the chaff He will burn with unquenchable fire” (Luke 3:16-17). And, in keeping with this promise the indwelling Spirit filled the disciples with spiritual fire of conviction and courage.
In the same way today, the Holy Spirit, our Counselor, helps us confront the proclivities of our personalities and seeks to reform us in the image of Christ. It is nothing less than a character transplant. The fruit of the Spirit is really a delineation of the character of Christ: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
I am stunned by the magnificent way the three Persons of the Trinity work together. Irenaeus, church father of the second century, has given us an apt image for this unity. Picture the Father reaching out with two arms. One is Christ through Whom He reached out to redeem the world and now reaches you and me with the power of the cross. The other arm is the Holy Spirit who works in us, convincing us of Christ’s atoning death and our forgiveness, giving us the gift of faith to respond. With the two arms the Father draws us to His heart. Both arms are crucial. Without the arm of the Holy Spirit, it is impossible for us to appropriate what the arm of Christ has done for us. We dare not amputate either arm!
All three persons of the Trinity work, not in tandem (one after the other), but in triune interaction. All three were involved in creation, throughout the Old Testament, and sublimely in the Incarnation. The Father sent the Son.
The Son humbled Himself in obedience, was conceived in the Virgin Mary by the miracle of the Holy Spirit, was born in Bethlehem, and lived as the Son of God and the Son of Man with a perfect balance of the divine and the human in His nature. With the power of the Holy Spirit at work in and around Him, Christ healed the sick, performed miracles, and revealed God as He is and what we are meant to be.
Allow your mind and heart to soar as you reflect on the mutual submission of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Jesus was obedient to the Father and dependent in the flesh upon the power of the Holy Spirit. The Father glorified the Son, the Son glorified the Holy Spirit, and together they prepared for you and me to be drawn into that glory circle.
After His atoning death on the cross, the Father raised up Christ, glorified Him, and gave Him the name of Yahweh, Lord, His own name, the name above all names (Phil 2:9-11). AND the Father gave to Christ, as the reigning Lord over all creation, the authority to pour out the power of the Holy Spirit. On the day of Pentecost, Peter witnessed to this: “Therefore being exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He poured out this which you now see and hear” (Acts 2:33).
Sadly, many Christians settle for two-thirds of God. They are what I call “bi-tarians” rather than Trinitarians. God the Father is way up there somewhere, aloof and apart from their daily lives. Christ is out there, somewhere between them and the Father. The Holy Spirit is some kind of vague force or impersonal power but they do not know Him personally.
The greatest misconception is that a relationship with God through Christ is something that we, on our own, can conjure up. We overlook the clear biblical assertion that “no one can say that Jesus Christ is Lord except by the Holy Spirit” (I Cor. 12: 3). The truth is that the Holy Spirit creates in us our attraction to Christ. He engenders the gift of faith. He instigates our conversion, and He enables us to take our first steps in the Christian life. The Holy Spirit is gracious. His purpose is not to glorify Himself, but to glorify Christ.
For some, their introduction to the Christian life included clear teaching about the power of the Holy Spirit. Accepting His counseling ministry was part of their initial conversion. Others of us have tried to live the Christian life on our own strength and sagacity. It’s an impossibility. Life becomes a cycle of brave attempts and sad failures. We feel defeated, impotent, and frustrated. When problems mount, or a big crisis hits, we realize that we don’t have what it takes, and cry out for help. This is when we are ready to discover the dynamic counseling ministry of the Holy Spirit.
Five words help us. The Holy Spirit is the executor,
equipper, energizer expeditor, encourager and equalizer of the Trinity.
III My Own Story
Allow me to share my own experience of the Holy Spirit as Counselor. It began many years ago while I was a post-graduate student at the University of Edinburgh. I had been a “bi-tarian” for eight years since I became a Christian. I had a firm belief in God the Father, and had a firm trust in Christ as my Lord and Savior. I studied the Scriptures about the Holy Spirit, but had no experience of Him as the third person of the Trinity. I did my best to be an orthodox believer with evangelical enthusiasm. Seldom a day passed without Bible study and prayer. With a crusader’s zeal, I had entered into battles for social justice.
The reality, however, was that I was trying to live for Christ without taking seriously my need for the Counselor He had promised. My problem was pride: I wanted to be a good Christian on my own strength. I was a polished Christian on the outside; inside I felt empty, unsure, and insecure. And I tried all the harder to keep the exterior shining bright so no one else would know. Keeping up the image of victorious Christian living became very exhausting, particularly when I failed. I searched the message of Christ in the New Testament for an answer, all the time crying out, “Lord, help me!”
The answer I received was liberating. The Lord seemed to keep repeating the same message: “Lloyd, two-thirds is not enough. It was the Holy Spirit who led you to Me, now let Me lead you to the Holy Spirit. You are adrift.
Lift the sails of your mind and heart. Receive the wind of the Holy Spirit. Don’t be afraid of losing Me by being filled with the Holy Spirit. As I am your Advocate with the Father, the Holy Spirit is your Advocate, your Counselor, to help you press on and discover the abundant life. Remember what I taught you about the Holy Spirit: He is the Spirit of Truth who makes known to you the truth about Me. He will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said and done. He will convict you of sin and then assure you of My atonement. He will guide you. He will help you grow. Let Him be your Parakletos!
I got down on my knees. “Lord Jesus,” I prayed, “ I know I could not have belived in You without the gift of faith from the Holy Spirit. But since then, I’ve given little thought to the Holy Spirit. Now You have shown me that You and He work together in perfect oneness. With the same earnestness that I confessed my faith in You, Christ, I confess my trust in, and need for, the Holy Spirit. I ask to be filled with the Holy Spirit daily. I need His guidance, strength, wisdom, vision, and power to live as Your disciple and not my limited, depleted strength. Lord, I need the Holy Spirit, I want the Holy Spirit, I yield myself to the Holy Spirit.”
While still on my knees, I felt a palpable surge of power throbbing in my body. A warmth flooded my whole being. A sense of peace, security and will-being invaded my turbulent heart and mind. I felt loved and cherished, energized and exuberant. I felt closer to Christ than ever before. The Holy Spirit did not displace Christ, but helped me know Him better than ever before. G. Campbell Morgan was right, “Thirty minutes after Pentecost, the disciples knew more of Christ than they had learned through three years of following Him as Jesus of Nazareth.”
I have shared this account because it was a prelude to a next step I was enabled to take. In my continued quest to know the Holy Spirit better, I began a daily experiment of claiming Him as my Counselor. I had been through clinical training in counseling and knew what a human counselor should do. I had learned listening skills, how to draw out a person, and how to communicate unqualified acceptance. It hit me that this was exactly what the Holy Spirit did for me in an infinitely deeper way when I gave Him a chance by being completely honest with Him—allowing Him to lead me to deeper truth about my myself and my true thoughts and feelings.
Often when I remained in silent listening prayer after spreading out me needs and concerns before Him as my Counselor, insights came to me that were so far beyond my own understanding that I was simply amazed. Sometimes when I was stressed out, feeling jangled emotionally, quiet listening revealed a deeper cause that I would not have discovered on my own. When I asked for help with strained or broken relationships, often I shown more than I wanted to admit about what I had done or said to cause the problems. Added to that, it was revealed to me what I had to do or say as my part in bringing healing.
Intercessory prayer took on a whole different focus. I came to my Counselor with the needs of people and confessed I didn’t know how what was best or how to pray. Often in the silence of prayer, the Holy Spirit gave me empathy, love, and discernment I could not have produced myself. It was astounding—many times I was given a kind of X-ray penetration into what was really going on inside of people.
The same thing began to happen in my prayers for specific situations, problems, and decisions. In my times with MY COUNSELOR, THE HOLY SPIRIT, I started the practice of talking out what was confronting me. Slowly, but persistently, I was taught to surrender my concerns to Him. Sometimes the answer came quickly; other times I had to wait in patient trust. With His power, I was able to press on to do what He had convinced me was best, would glorify Christ, and bring ultimate good to everyone concerned. In it all, I discovered that if I made a less than creative decision or really goofed things up, I could seek forgiveness and make a fresh start. But even better than that, I found that if I admitted my mistakes, the Holy Spirit would bring good out of them that I never could have foreseen.
But most important of all, through the years as a counselee of the Holy Spirit, I have experienced a progressive character transplant. The Holy Spirit seeks to transform our character to be more like Christ. He not only brings to our remembrance what Christ said and did for us, but seeks to transform our personalities to express the Savior Himself. The fruit of the Spirit is really a delineation of the character of Christ implanted by the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. The fire of the Holy Spirit not only gives us burning passion for Christ and our calling as His disciples, but also burns out the chaff of self-centeredness and pride, along with all those proclivities of personality that limit our effectiveness.
Now as I look back over the years, I am profoundly thankful that when I was most lacking in strength and courage, the Holy Spirit found the boat of my life in irons. He filled the sails of my soul and got me moving. Little did I know then where He would take me, the authentic confidence in His power He would give me, and the freedom from fear and anxiety He would provide me. Just thinking about that, I sense the fresh winds of the Holy Spirit stirring, gusting and then blowing with mighty force inside my own spirit. I long for nothing less for everyone here this evening.
A portrait of the late Thomas F. Torrance, my esteemed professor at New College, University of Edinburgh, hangs on the wall of my study. Most every day, I pause, look up at the great Torrance, and remember what he taught me about how Christ and the Holy Spirit work together in our lives: “The Spirit is so intimately one with Christ in His being and activity as the incarnate Son of God that He is, as it were, Christ’s Other Self, through whose presence in us Christ is present to us. The Spirit seals our adoption in Christ as children of God and unites us to Christ in such a way that we are made by grace to share in His filial relation to the Father. The Holy Spirit is the living and life-giving Spirit of God who actualizes the self-giving of God to us in His Son, and resonates and makes fruitful within us the priestly, atoning and intercessory activity of Christ on our behalf…It is through the incarnation and atonement effected by the conjoint activity of Christ and the Holy Spirit that God has opened the door for us to enter into His holy presence and know Him as HE REALLY IS IN HIMSELF IN HIS TRIUNE BEING. In this two way movement of atoning propitiation whereby God draws near to us and draws us near to Himself, the access to the Father given to us through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the communion of the Holy Spirit is such that we are enabled, quite astonishingly and beyond any worth or capacity of own, to participate, creaturely beings though we are, in the eternal communion and inner relations of knowing and loving within God Himself, and know Him there as one God in three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”
VI Getting HIM All Together
During the hours of this time at the Cove, we can get it all together—or more precisely, the subsistencies of God together—when we are willingly drawn into the interaction of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We have the security of the Father’s authority with His ultimate demands for holiness, righteousness and justice constantly before us. At the same time, we have Christ our Lord interceding for us, claiming His righteousness for us. And we have the Holy Spirit our Counselor, advising, warning, alerting, and empowering us.
In addition to claiming the love of the Father, the grace of the Lord Jesus, have you ever accepted the communion of the Holy Spirit? Have you ever yielded your life to Him in consistent daily counseling sessions in which He could guide, transform and empower your life? He will help you know God’s will; how to love and glorify Christ; how to deal with times when you don’t know how or what to pray; how to handle your yesterdays with liberating forgiveness; how to receive faith, hope and love each new day; how to survive in spiritual warfare; and how to press on with supernatural power. Have you ever spent time alone with the Holy Spirit as your Counselor? Try it right now.
Begin by asking Him to give you a fresh infilling of His power, wisdom, peace, and joy. Then talk to Him about the deepest need you are feeling right at this moment.
Here is a prayer to help you pray that prayer. The assignment of the Holy Spirit as the Third Person of the Trinity is to be our Counselor. Two-thirds is not enough. When you trust Him, you will discover that He’s the greatest Counselor in the world!
VII Concluding Personal Prayer
“Holy Spirit, the greatest Counselor in the world, I confess that I need You. I want to be Your Counselee. Every morning and evening, and all through each day, I want to open myself completely to Your power and guidance, Your gift of faith, Your character transplant in the fruit of Your indwelling presence in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I want to keep on being filled with You. Mold me, challenge me, change me, use me. I yield my will so You can help me be willing to know and do the Father’s will. Help me to glorify and serve Christ, and be made like Him. I entrust my life to You. I spread out before You my deepest needs and most urgent questions. Give the day, show the way; replace any hurts with Your hope; ignite my heart with the fire of Your passion; set me free. Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me. Amen.
