What Does The Holy Spirit Do?

Who is the Holy Spirit?

I think back to my days in Sunday School learning about the Trinity. For me, it was easier to understand the Father and Christ, his Son. They were easy to imagine. Afterall, how many pictures from the Renaissance depicted them. Just look at the Sistine Chapple. But where are the pictures of the Holy Spirit? That’s a little harder to depict. So what exactly does the Holy Spirit do?

When I first became a Lean Expert, or business process efficiency expert, I was sent to a number of different facilities as a trouble-shooter. I would usually walk the floor asking a lot about what people do. Everybody was very polite and helpful. Through the grapevine I found that most people were just terrified because they had all heard that when I came to town, people lost their jobs. When I told my wife what I did, she exclaimed “You’re one of the Bobs!” If you’ve ever seen the movie Office Space, there were two men named Bob, thus the “Bobs”, that were a pair of Lean consultants brought in to eliminate all the waste. They had everyone interview for their own jobs and laid off anyone they thought was excess.

As a Lean Expert, I got a little too into my job. I was always out to try and improve everything, even the things WAY out of my control. Even things as silly as rewriting every grocery list to the order of the isles at the store, just to name a few. My wife often said that after I passed, I would even try to Lean out Heaven. We often joked about me snarkily asking God questions like:

“A day of rest? Really? Think how much we could get done working all 7 days! My rule is if you don’t come to work on Saturday, don’t even bother coming in Sunday. And Jesus; Do you really need 12 Disciples? I mean, how many James do you need? You saw how two Judas’s worked out? And Holy Spirit, do we really need a Trinity? What is your job here?”

Then we wondered how long until one of the two of us is going to get struck by lightning for joking like that. But I am sure God has a sense of humor.

But still, I wanted to find out more about what the true role of the Holy Spirit is. So when I starting reading about the him, I found he was here from the beginning. And I mean the very beginning. Right in the very 1st chapter of the Bible. If fact, it is the third sentence of the bible, where in Genesis 1:1-2 it is says:

1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

So he was here, with God from the very start of creation. That shows the importance. The Holy Spirit has been there during the creation of the universe, and our creation as well.

But then I continued to read about who he is.

In Luke 3:21-22 we are told:

21 When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened 22 and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”

For the Holy Spirit to descend upon Jesus at the beginning of His ministry also says a lot about the power and importance. Since the first thing Christ did when he began his ministry is be baptized, He also needed to be filled with the Spirit as well.

I was also struck that it talked about his embodied form, that it may not be as specific as we would understand. What is his bodily form? Is it set or does it change? Was the Dove his shape or a representation of him descending onto Christ?

In my Lean Expert like investigation, I continued to look for exactly what the Spirit does. So, I did what I would have when I began my review of the people in the facilities. I looked for their job description. I found it summed up in John where it says:

John 14:15-17

15 "If you love me, keep my commands. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever- 17 the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.