The Person Of The Holy Spirit Series

The writers I like are Father Francis McNutt from the Roman Catholic church, Dennis Bennett from the Episcopalian church, Lloyd Ogilvie from the Presbyterian church, James Buskert from the Methodist church, and Siegfried Schatzmann who has since been thrown out of the Baptist church. If a pastor or a scholar gets the Holy Spirit in the Baptist church, they get kicked out. I don’t know why that is, but they do. It is unfortunate because the Holy Spirit operating in a person’s life is nothing to worry about.

We are going to talk about what the Holy Spirit is planning to do in our lives. First, let’s read the text for today:

TEXT

Who is the Holy Spirit? Quite simply, the Holy Spirit is the third person of the trinity. Verse 23 states: “My father will love him, and we (Jesus and the Father) will come to him and make our home with him.” So God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are three in one. If you look at the birth of Jesus, the baptism of Jesus, the transfiguration of Jesus, the cross of Jesus and the commission of Jesus in Matthew 28:20. Jesus instructs people to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. I don’t want to get lost in the trinity this morning, but the point is that the Holy Spirit is God, simply stated. In this passage, he is referred to as “another counselor.” The word is paraclete which means “one called alongside to help.” It is featured in Isaiah 9:6: “Unto you a child is born, unto you a son is given, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor...” Wonderful counselor means the prediction of a coming king who will carry out God’s purposes and programs in the world, and that’s exactly what Jesus did. He came and carried out God’s purposes and programs on the earth. This was to save everyone and open up a way so that everyone could have a personal, intimate relationship with God.

Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would come to them and do the same things that he did. He said it would be another king who would carry out God’s purposes and programs. He will continue the work that I started and will work not only through you, but will also be in you, which is a fundamental shift. Never had the Holy Spirit been in someone, simply upon someone. Now the Holy Spirit is given to someone. Jesus says in verse 18: “I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you.” What a relief it must have been for them to realize that although they would be separated from Jesus for a time, he would come back to them. They were not to be alone.

The simplest way to define the Holy Spirit is to simply say that the Holy Spirit is Jesus and God the Father in an unlimited spiritual form. No longer is God limited in time, space, dimension, person, location or history. He can be everywhere, in every person’s heart, in every time and culture and age. He can speak God’s word to every individual human heart and spirit and soul.

If you want more proofs about whether the Holy Spirit is God, all you have to do is look at the names of the Holy Spirit. He is referred to as the spirit of Christ, the spirit of Jesus, the spirit of God, the spirit of the Lord, the spirit of the Father. All the attributes of God are also descriptive of the Holy Spirit as well. There is absolute unanimity, absolute unity in God. When we talk about the Holy Spirit, God the Father and Jesus the Son we are not talking about three gods. We are not talking about one god with three functions or masks or faces. We are not talking about one god with lesser gods behind. We are talking about God in three persons, blessed trinity.