Make friends with the Holy Spirit

The fourth thing you must do if you want God’s best, is to make friends with the Holy Spirit. I deliberately use a phrase that suggests the personality of the Holy Spirit. For many Christians, the Holy Spirit is a kind of theological abstraction. They accept that God the Father is a person, they accept that Jesus Christ is a person, but they have no concept that the Holy Spirit is a person. Yet, scripturally and theologically, this is a fact. The Holy Spirit is a person just as much as the Father and the Son.

He is also compared to a dove. One of the important features of a dove is that it is a timid creature, and if you do not respond in the right way to the presence of a dove, it will just fly off. I think that is true of the Holy Spirit. In a certain sense, He is timid. If we do not respond to Him the right way, He just withdraws.

In the following passage of Scripture, Jesus speaks to His disciples about the Holy Spirit as a person and what the Holy Spirit will do in our lives:

“I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you.” (John 16:12–15)

First, Jesus does everything that language permits to emphasize the personality of the Holy Spirit by saying, “But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes.” In the Greek language, in which these words were originally given to us, there are three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Neuter is the “it” gender. In Greek, the word for “Spirit,” pneuma, is neuter. In other words, the normal pro-noun to use with “spirit” would be “it.” But Jesus breaks the law of grammar and says not “when it,” but “when he, the Spirit of truth, comes.” In other words, He goes out of His way to emphasize that we are dealing with a person.

Jesus then speaks about various things the Holy Spirit will do. He will report on what He hears from heaven by bringing us the latest news from heaven; He will show us what is yet to come by unfolding the future to us.

Then Jesus says, “He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine” (John 16:14–15). That is extremely important. Everything the Father has belongs to the Son, and everything the Son has, the Spirit administers. If you put that together, the Holy Spirit is the administrator of the total wealth of the Godhead. All that the Father has and all that the Son has, they have in common. But it is the Holy Spirit who takes from the wealth of the Father and the Son and makes it available to us. Thus, you can be a child of God legally and doctrinally, and yet live a very poor and inadequate kind of life unless you relate rightly to the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit is the administrator of the total wealth of the Godhead.