Look at Jesus. To know Jesus is to know the Holy Spirit. More theologically, the Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity, the Spirit of the Father and the Son (Jesus).
The Holy Spirit exists as spirit. He is an immaterial being with intelligence, knowledge, feeling, and the ability to love. If you are a believer, you are probably aware of his presence. I am conscious of the Spirit as an ideal marriage to my spirit 1 Corinthians 6:17. Most commonly helping me to understand the Scriptures, pointing me at Christ, letting me know when I am flirting with sin, and when I need to repent.
Again, to get to know the Holy Spirit, look at immaterial aspects of Jesus as he taught, healed, and interacted with others.
Let’s briefly look at three of the immaterial aspects of Jesus to help understand the Holy Spirit.
The mind of Jesus. Jesus is easily the greatest teacher I have encountered, putting human breath into the Word of God. He was effective because he lived his subject matter, knew and loved his audience, and used a wide variety of teaching techniques. As Robert Stein summarizes, Jesus’ teaching techniques included parables (“stories with intent”), repetition, overstatement, hyperbole, pun, simile, metaphor, proverb, riddle, paradox, irony, questions, action, parallelism, chiasmic parallelism, and more. The central point of Jesus’ teaching was the Kingdom of God and what it means to be a member of this present Kingdom.
The Holy Spirit continues Jesus’ timeless teaching in the minds of believers.
The will of Jesus. Jesus came to us as a servant. In the garden of Gethsemane, before his arrest, torture, crucifixion, and death, Jesus prayed, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup [of suffering] pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.” In his book Jesus, Malcolm Muggeridge writes, “To be able to say these words and truly mean them is the highest point we can ever hope to attain. Then, indeed, we have broken out of time’s hard shell to breathe, not it’s stale air, but the fresh exhilarating atmosphere of eternity.”
The Holy Spirit helps believers align their will to the Father’s will for their lives as well. By aligning with God’s will for your life, you bear good fruit, laying up eternal treasure in heaven.
The emotion of Jesus. Jesus felt deeply and loved deeply.
Consider the excerpt from the death of Lazarus in John 11:33, “When Jesus saw her [Mary the sister of Martha] weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled.” Jesus, moved with sympathy and compassion for the others, wept.
Matthew 14:14 reads, “When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them and healed their sick.” Jesus cared for the physicality of others. After these healings, he went on to feed the men, women, and children who were following him.
The Holy Spirit, like Jesus, has feelings and emotions. For example, Ephesians 4:30 tells us that a believer can grieve the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit gives the believer passion for engaging with a world in need.
Most importantly, as David Watson writes in Called and Committed: World-Changing Discipleship, “And Jesus laid down his life for one reason: because he had compassion for people in need.”
By laying down his life for us, Jesus made it possible for the Holy Spirit to indwell believers.
In the next blogs, we will begin to look at sin and Jesus’ work on the Cross, which enables the Holy Spirit to dwell in believers.
The image shown below, entitled Jesus Wept, is by James Tissot.
*The gender of the Holy Spirit is debated. Here is an article for further reading.
