CONTENTS Foreword viii Introduction x 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Worship the Spirit as God Almighty The Spirit is about Jesus with intensity You can be saved for eternity Christians are loved with security The Bible is speaking with clarity Ask God for things without timidity Tell others about Jesus with sincerity Go to church with unity Use your gifts to serve with humility Fight sin to reach maturity
1 12 23 34 44 59 70 86 96 105
Appendix 116 Blaspheming the Holy Spirit 116 Speaking in tongues 117 Prophecy and prophets 120 Full of the Spirit 123 Acknowledgements 125 Endnotes 126
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1 WORSHIP THE SPIRIT AS GOD ALMIGHTY ANOTHER FILLET OF SALMON, MY DEAR HAT? Once there was a guy who thought his wife was a hat. Not that she wore a hat or looked like a hat. But that his wife was actually a real life putit-on-your-head hat. He had what is called Visual Agnosia. It is when brain damage of some sort causes your mind to swap certain things around in your head. So when he looked at his wife, he saw a hat. When his eyes saw a tea cup his mind interpreted it as a fillet of salmon. It was pretty strange, which is why neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote it down with 23 other strange stories in his book The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. My sister gave it to me for my 17th birthday. That was nice of her. Let’s just say for the sake of this argument that God does exist. Upon seeing the word ‘God’, what pops into your brain? If he exists, what is he like? Who is God? Is he blue or round or water-based, or a boat of some sort? Is God a ‘he’, a ‘she’ or an ‘it’? What is God like? How do we complete the sentence ‘God is … ’?
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THE SPIRIT The image of God as an older gentleman with a beard might resonate with many people. It’s probably a mix of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Santa Claus. Most of us have a form of Visual Agnosia when it comes to God. Even when the Bible clearly says what God is like, we see something else entirely. There should be a book called The Christian Who Mistook his God for an Old Man. It is a very common problem. So who, or what, is God? The second half of the Bible is called the New Testament. Four times the New Testament starts a sentence ‘God is …’, so it’s probably helpful to start by looking at those verses.
GOD IS SPIRIT One time Jesus was discussing different religious viewpoints with a woman. They were seated by a well during lunchtime. She was drawing some water in the midday sun, while he was waiting for his friends to return with a picnic. It was just outside a town in Samaria, next door to where Jesus was from. Jesus got chatting to the lady from Samaria about one of the points of disagreement between them. The discussion was about where you should worship God. People from Samaria worshipped on a mountain nearby, but Jews worshipped in Jerusalem quite a distance from their location. This is how Jesus ended the discussion: God is spirit ... (John 4:24)
God is not blue, a boat, or even an old man. God is not restricted to one habitat. Worshipping God in one particular location is not necessary because God is so much bigger than that. God is not physical and made of flesh. God doesn’t live in a house, such that he needs a postman. God doesn’t need a roof in case it rains.1 God is not like us because God is spirit. The Russians went into space first. A guy called Yuri Gagarin was the first man to orbit the earth. People think that he famously said, ‘I don’t see God up here!’ There has been no official record of this. Instead a Russian politician a few years later said, ‘Gagarin flew into space, but didn’t see any god there’. Whoever said it, they hadn’t read what Jesus said in Samaria by the well as he waited for a picnic.
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Of course you can’t see God in space. God is not in any one place, ready to be seen. He’s not playing cosmic hide-and-seek with us. If God was physical, just like us, then he could be found and worshipped in a specific spot. This is what many of us tend to think God is like, when in truth we can worship God everywhere and anywhere because he is spirit. This also means that God is so different from us that human categories are limited in describing him; the tools of communication we have are not up for the task. It’s like two frogs trying to describe what humans are like using only the word ‘ribbit’. We might describe God using male or female ideas (for example, God is described as being a father or like a mother2). Or we might call God ‘him’ to remember he is personal. But because he is spirit, God has no gender. He’s not male or female like we are because he is not like us. There is a danger though. If ‘God is spirit’ was all we knew, we might think of God as a kind of eternal genie—there to service our ongoing needs. ‘He’s like a perfect wireless connection, ready to give me what I want.’ But we’d be wrong. There’s more to know about God than the fact that he is spirit.
GOD IS LIGHT Just because we can worship God anywhere does not mean we can worship God anyhow. Jesus is saying that God is so different from us that we have to approach and worship him on his terms, not ours. This is because God is holy. This is what the Bible means when it says: God is light … (1 John 1:5)
God is different from us in that he is spirit and not flesh, but more than that, he is different because he is light and not darkness. It’s not just that he is big and powerful and we’re small and weak. He is also light and perfect and good, and we’re not. That passage continues: … in him there is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5)
God is light; in him there is no darkness at all because of his holiness.
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THE SPIRIT Next Friday there’s a fancy dress party and you have to go as one of your heroes. And so you adopt their clothes, their hairstyle and their mannerisms. If you wanted to go as God, what appearance and mannerisms would you adopt? You wouldn’t just don big muscles and a big brain to show you’re all-powerful and almighty, you’d have to somehow go as holiness. Holy is the thing that God does—it’s how you would describe him. If Jess does something that is just like Jess, you might say ‘that’s so Jessly’. Well, when God does stuff, we can say ‘that’s so holy’. A long time ago Isaiah, a messenger from God, saw a bit of what God is like. God was seated on a throne and the robe he was wearing filled the enormous room he was in. (We’ve just said God can’t be properly described and so this is the best Isaiah could do.) There were incredible heavenly beings with six wings all around him. These heavenly beings called seraphim, called to one another to describe God and to worship him. What did they sing about? His power? His might? His size? This is what they called to one another: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ (Isaiah 6:3)
God is light; in him there is no darkness at all because of his holiness. Three times the seraphim say ‘holy’, just to get the point across. And God is not a little bit holy; his holiness fills the whole earth. The back of your clothes cupboard, which you haven’t seen or cleaned in years, still contains the glory of God because his holiness cannot be contained. God is spirit, but that doesn’t mean he is approachable. Instead God is holy; he is light. So when Isaiah saw this small part of God, this is what happened next: ‘Woe to me!’ I cried. ‘I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips … and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.’ (Isaiah 6:5)
To know that God is spirit means that you get that he is holy. To get that God is holy means that you know that you are not. Living in England meant that on family holidays we would often have to wake early to catch a ferry to France. We’d be woken by a parent
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abruptly turning on the bedroom lights. That flash of light into the darkness was blinding. We were so cosy tucked up in bed in the darkness, when suddenly we had to quickly exit the house and cram into the car. To ease the way, my parents very wisely had a little chocolate bar on offer to sweeten the deal. The impact of that bedroom light coming on was painful, but it meant the start of something great. Light changes everything about darkness. Light awakens and alarms; it changes and challenges. Darkness has no place when the light is there. And so un-holiness has no place when holiness is there. That is what Isaiah sensed when he said, ‘I am ruined’. That feeling of ruin is what all should feel when God is properly understood. In the light our darkness is seen; in God’s holiness our unholiness is magnified. We then should be in reverence and awe of God, and tremble at our ruin. And so we reach the third ‘God is …’ statement in the New Testament.
GOD IS A CONSUMING FIRE Being spirit and light means that there is nothing hidden from God’s sight. And so God brings justice; he gives people what they deserve. His holiness demands that un-holiness be punished. Darkness cannot survive in a world where God is light. With ourselves at the centre of our existence we cannot go on living where God is King. And so: ‘God is a consuming fire.’ (Hebrews 12:29)
Fire does two things when it encounters metal. Firstly fire burns away the impure, unwanted bits, often called the dross. This impure dross just cannot stand the heat of the furnace and so is burned away, unable to survive in the heat. Secondly fire purifies and perfects the metal that is good and will last forever. This is the metal that is so useful to us in our everyday lives. God being a consuming fire does this same thing to the human race. The danger with seeing God as a cosmic-sized Santa Claus is that we think we can just sit on his knee and get a present if we’ve been nice. But unless we see that God is spirit, and light, and a consuming fire then we
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THE SPIRIT have got him significantly wrong. It’s worse than seeing your wife and thinking she’s a hat. This is not a harmless mistake or misunderstanding. We are physical and he is spirit. We are full of darkness and he is light. We cannot be near him and live; he is a consuming fire. What hope is there then? Is God to remain only distant, only separate from us? Is God’s consuming fire the only way we are to interact with him? Thankfully, no. Without dirtying his holiness or dimming his light in any way, we see throughout the Bible the wonderful news that: God is love. (1 John 4:8)
GOD IS LOVE One of the brilliant things about speaking English is that it is used in so many countries. Lots of people speak English; it’s something they do. But communicating in English does not mean that they are English. Doing English is not the same as being English. Doing something does not necessarily define you. The same is true with love. You might love chocolate or rainy days or someone you know, but that doesn’t make you by definition ‘love’. It makes you a loving person, or even a lovely person. But you are not ‘love’ just because you do some loving, just like speaking English does not make you English. God, on the other hand, is the exception. God is love. He is the founder, foundation and fountain of all love. Love is something he does because love is something he is. It’s more like when I speak English; I speak English because I am English. I do something because I am something. In the same way God loves because he is love. If I’m English then you’d expect to see it somehow; it should be observable. So you might notice me getting sunburned on a cloudy day, complaining at the weather and drinking lots of tea. Then you will know that I’m English. Well, if God is love, we should expect to be able to observe it somehow too. That’s where the quote about love continues: This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. (1 John 4:9)
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We can see that God is love by the love that he shows. He sent his willing Son to die in our place. Our darkness deserves God’s consuming fire, but in his death Jesus took the fire on himself. The light of the world, Jesus, exchanged light for darkness, so that we can experience and know the God who is light. Trusting that Jesus did this for us means that we can be washed and cleansed. So we should no longer fear God or judgement because: In this world we are like Jesus. (1 John 4:17)
The reason this is all so incredible is that for God the Son to become darkness for us, he had to be separated from his Father who is light. Being love, they loved each other before the universe was a thing, before time was a thing. God the Father and the Son loved each other perfectly before there was a before. That is why the sending of the Son was such a sacrifice for God and so sweet for us. For God to be love, he must have had someone to love forever. And so the one God—Father, Son and Spirit—loved each other in eternity. This is why we can know God and be loved by God; he knows and loves within himself. This love spills over from eternity into history in the person of Jesus. That husband at the beginning of the chapter must have needed a significant adjustment to relearn what he should wear on his head and who he was married to. It would have taken hard work to reconfigure his mind. If we have just as big a problem with our view of God then we similarly need a significant adjustment. We need to reconfigure our minds to who God truly is. To summarise, what we have seen is that God is spirit and so he is completely different from us in every way. That difference is seen most clearly in his holiness because he is light. Our darkness means we should be struck down in God’s justice by the fact that he is a consuming fire. But the great news is that God is also love, a love that spills out from within himself to us. So we can now approach him, not in fear but awe, not with reservation but reverence.
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THE SPIRIT So far this has been hard work, perhaps not what was expected from a book on the Holy Spirit. The pay-off from the hard work is this: the Holy Spirit is not a surprise, because the big point we need to know is that the Spirit is God.
THE SPIRIT IS GOD When I think of God as a superior Santa, or the ultimate butler, the Holy Spirit comes as a massive shock! But once we’ve got a better idea of who God is, the Holy Spirit becomes more normal and necessary. Before, without examining the Bible, we could think that God was just a big human. We were able to think of him on our own terms and worship him how we saw fit. But when God is spirit we need to radically change how we worship him. We might think that God was just a bigger, better version of us, and we didn’t need help to follow him. But when God is light we need power to be like him. Before, God might have just been our buddy so there was no need for someone to act on our behalf. But when God is a consuming fire we need someone to go between us. God might have been thought of as only kind and loving, so there was no need to expect total intimacy with him. But when God is love we want him to live in us, and us in him. And so onto the stage walks the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God, just as the Father and the Son are God. They are not one third God each, but are all fully God. This is seen in the final words of Jesus, when he tells his followers to make disciples in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19). That is a direct claim by the Son of God that the Holy Spirit is God as much as he is. Because God is personal, the Spirit is a person. That’s why we describe the Spirit not as an ‘it’ but as a ‘he’. This reminds us not that he is male but that he is personal. One way this is seen is that to offend God is to grieve the Holy Spirit (Isaiah 63:10). The Holy Spirit is personal and so sin
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is against him. That’s why when someone rejects God, they blaspheme the Holy Spirit, and this is known as the unforgiveable sin. (See Appendix for more on this.) The most incredible aspect of this is that, when God gives us the Holy Spirit, he does not give us a thing, he gives us himself. If God were just a power, then when he saves us he would just give us power that could be lost or topped up. But because the Spirit is a person, God gives us his very self. So we can never have half the Spirit, or need more of him, because he is a person. The good news is that the person of the Spirit is powerful too, just as the Father and the Son are powerful. This power is seen everywhere. The Spirit was present and active in creating the world (Genesis 1:2; Psalm 104:30). The Spirit can bring life to dead bones (Ezekiel 37:14). The Spirit is the one who gives our lungs every breath and our minds understanding (Job 33:4; 32:8). The Spirit’s power is such that even Jesus does his work in the power of the Spirit (Luke 4:14)! To have the Spirit is described by Jesus as being clothed with power (Luke 24:49). The Spirit, then, is the person of God powerfully at work. This is true such that when the Spirit is there, God is there. The Spirit of God is the presence of God. Again, the Bible is drenched with this idea. When the Spirit speaks, it is God speaking (2 Samuel 23:2). God’s presence and the Spirit are the same thing (Psalm 139:7). To be away from God’s presence is to no longer have the Holy Spirit (Psalm 51:11). Twice in two sentences we are told that Jesus and the Spirit are so closely linked that Jesus ‘is the Spirit’ (2 Corinthians 3:17–18). So the presence of the Spirit means Jesus is there. It also means that the Father is there too, because the Spirit of Christ and the Spirit of God are the same person (Romans 8:9). So where have we got to? The Spirit is the God who is spirit, light, a consuming fire and love. This means that the Holy Spirit is God, his person, his power and his presence. People have not always thought this way, though.
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THE SPIRIT
SO WORSHIP GOD THE HOLY SPIRIT Early on in the history of the Christian church, people had to sort out what they believed. So all the officials from each area would get together in a big conference, called a council, to discuss what was true. They would then write down what they decided in a way that was easy to repeat, called a ‘Creed’. Everyone would take this creed home to teach and repeat in their churches. These councils were often fiery affairs. Father Christmas even got in a fist fight at the Council of Nicaea (325 AD)! Saint Nicholas (270–343 AD) was one of the officials who was so put off by what someone said about Jesus that he socked him right in the chops. He was put in jail but later freed. It was after this incident that he discreetly gave gifts to three young girls to help them, and hence was made the father of giving gifts at Christmas. At this Council of Nicaea, all the big details about God were written into the Nicene Creed. The officials wrote this statement, which is still recited in churches today: ‘I believe: In the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified. (Nicene Creed)3
So 1700 years ago the council wanted us to remember that the Holy Spirit is the Lord, he is God. The Holy Spirit gives us life, true life that lasts forever. This is because the Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Son. As a result we have one thing to do: worship and glorify the Holy Spirit. This means that as we embark on a whole book looking at the Holy Spirit, we’re not mucking around. We’re not talking about something obscure in the Christian life, something around the edges about which we can agree to disagree. Instead we hope to learn about the very centre of what we believe, the core of how to live. We are looking at God himself.
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BACK TO THE WIFE-HAT Remembering the bizarre neurological psychological problem presented at the beginning of this chapter about the man who mistook his wife for a hat, we have to ask, ‘What is the worst that could have happened?’ The worst he could do was walk out of the house with his wife on his head! It would be embarrassing for all involved, and potentially painful for his neck, but not of eternal consequence. However it is a lot more serious if we mistake the Holy Spirit as someone other than God. We must watch out for Spiritual Agnosia. There’s an interesting story in the book of Acts in which someone has not understood who the Holy Spirit is. He’s a magician called Simon, and he is used to paying for the latest trick to impress audiences. So when he sees some of Jesus’ followers doing incredible things in the power of God’s Spirit, Simon offers them money. ‘Give me also this ability.’ (Acts 8:19)
He has Spiritual Agnosia. He sees God at work in his Spirit, but instead he thinks the Spirit’s an ‘it’—a power, a trick, a thing to impress others with. Jesus’ friends know how serious this is, and they warn him of the consequences of misunderstanding the Holy Spirit. It’s pretty strong stuff. ‘May your money perish with you, because you thought you could buy the gift of God with money! You have no part or share in this ministry, because your heart is not right before God. Repent of this wickedness and pray to the Lord in the hope that he may forgive you for having such a thought in your heart.’ (Acts 8:20–22)
We must not be like Simon. Instead we must believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life. And worship and glorify him with our whole being.
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