Holy Spirit Lesson 1 Companion Devotional

What if I told you the Lord wants to bring you someone who will comfort you when you are sad? He will bring guidance when you don’t know what to do. He will never deceive you. He will always bring you the truth. He will teach you and give you the very words you need to say. He is your advocate, your counselor, your helper. He prays for you and through you so that your prayers are effective. He initiates your salvation and then cleans you up and empowers you to live a life that pleases God. He discloses the future to you. He always glorifies Jesus. He strengthens your inner man. He is the One who floods your heart with God’s love, so that you know the God of the universe actually loves you and you can live out of that love. He will never leave you. He will go with you through all your life. Jesus said that it is good for us that He (Jesus) goes away so this person can come. Jesus said we would be like orphans and disadvantaged without this person whom we call the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, is often misunderstood and marginalized in Christian circles. I remember when I was growing up being frightened of the concept of the Holy Ghost. I didn’t really understand what we were talking about when we said in the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in the Holy Ghost…” If I were honest, I really didn’t want anything to do with a ghost. The idea seemed very nebulous, vague and frightening.

Later after I came to know the Lord late in high school and eventually found my way to a Bible study, I was taught that experiences with the Holy Spirit were not for today. I was taught that since we now have the completed Word of God, we do not need experiences with the Holy Spirit. I was told that we must not rely upon experiences but upon the settled Word of God. The implication was that if you did have any supernatural experiences you could pretty much know they were not from the Lord. That scared me so much that I determined that I would steer clear of the Holy Spirit.

I appreciated the excellent Bible teaching I was getting and knew my teachers were very knowledgable. I did not question them, except for every once in a while. I would read about an incredible supernatural experience of the Holy Spirit in a missionary newsletter or hear about a miracle, a healing or something that defied any other explanation than the Holy Spirit from a guest speaker who had been in Africa or China. A little question bubbled up inside of me, why do we hear about accounts of supernatural healings and wonderful miracles in foreign lands but not in our churches today?

I began to wonder what happened to the Holy Spirit. He was so active in the book of Acts, was He just taking a break today? Where is He? By this time I had been teaching Bible study for a while but I felt so dry inside. I felt like gears in a machine that were turning and grinding against one another and needed to be oiled. I wondered if there was more. My search began.

We are going to take the next several weeks to explore what I have learned about getting to know the Holy Spirit. We are going to look into the many different metaphors the Bible presents that give us insight into His nature. We are going to look at His different names. We’ll take some time to look into His job description. This will help us understand who He is.

We will look into the Old Testament to see how He interacted with man back then. We will see His role in the life of Christ and how He promised that the Spirit would be poured out in a new way after His ascension. Later we will look at the Holy Spirit in the life of the early church and see how He came upon believers at Pentecost. Finally we will track Him through the book of Acts and on into our lives today.

From the Bible we will learn that we have a personal choice about how we will respond to the activity of the Spirit in our lives. We can refuse to yield to Him. We can grieve and quench His activity. We can resist, even insult Him. On the other hand, we can yield to His promptings and walk in the Spirit, bearing fruit in our lives. We we can receive His gifts and use them to build up and encourage other believers. We will see how it is possible to stay in fellowship and cooperate with the Spirit of God. When we do that, we will see the fruit of the Spirit on display in our very lives.

You can read books on nutrition. You can buy the best, most nutritious food and prepare it properly, but you have to eat the food to do your body any good. You have to put it into your experience. Just knowing the facts about nutrition is not going to help you; the same is true of the Holy Spirit.

My goal as we approach this important topic is that we will experience the Holy Spirit in our lives —not just know facts about Him but know Him. So, buckle your seat belts! We are taking an important turn as we walk with the Lord on the ancient paths.

Dear Heavenly Father,

Thank you that you did not leave us as orphans but you sent your Holy Spirit to dwell within every believer. As we dig into the Scriptures teach us about who He is and how you want us to respond to Him. Help us to be like the Bereans in the book of Acts who “searched the Word to see if these things were so.” Give us the grace to respond by welcoming the Holy Spirit and yielding to His leading. May we get to know the Holy Spirit better and be people who walk by the Spirit.
In Jesus’ name,
Amen