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GIVEN PROMISE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

11/12/2020 01:11:00 The Editor

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Sir,

The dispensation in which we are now living is the dispensation of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is now working on earth in a special way. On the Passover night, just hours before His crucifixion, Christ promised His disciples that the Holy Spirit would come. “I will ask the father and He will give you another helper, that he may be with you forever: the spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive ...for he abides with you, and will be in you,” John 14:16-17. What an amazing passage!

Promised

Jesus promised to ask the Father for the Holy Spirit on our behalf. John 14 tells that He said He will send another helper. He didn’t say the Holy Spirit would merely be with us, as Jesus was with the disciples. Now the Spirit is to be in us. The Holy Spirit is someone like Jesus and He is with us forever. While Jesus serves as the second Adam, representing humanity in heaven, the Holy Spirit serves on earth as God with us.

Changes

Jesus didn’t just say the Holy Spirit would merely be with us, as He was with the disciples but the Spirit is to be in us. Jesus intends our reception of the Spirit to be so powerful, so concrete, so life transforming, that it is like going from having life with you to having life in you. The reception of the Holy Spirit changes us forever.

Time and again on that Passover night, Jesus brought up the subject of the Spirit. He told His disciples that the Spirit would teach them all things and bring to their memory what He taught them (John 14:26).

He said that the Spirit would bear witness of Him, and thus they would themselves bear witness (John 15:26-27). He assured them that the Spirit of Truth would guide them into all truth and that the divine helper would disclose to them what was to come (John 16:13).

He told them that His leaving was to their advantage because it meant that the Spirit could come (John 16:7). In fact looking to the day of the comforter’s arrival, the day of Pentecost, Jesus tenderly said to them, “I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you....In that day you shall know that I am in my Father and you in me and I in you (John 14:18, 20). Jesus expected to be closer to His disciples after His departure than He was while He was physically present with them. Dear reader, without a doubt our greatest need is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit into our hearts.

Bopoto Gwinyai