Can I Trust The Holy Spirit

In this second article about the Holy Spirit and His gifts, I want to briefly address the issue of trusting the Holy Spirit. It may seem like an odd question, “can I trust the Holy Spirit,” but I find that many people are very nervous about the whole topic of the Holy Spirit, spiritual gifts, and supernatural things in general. As I have ministered to people over the years, I have found that until they are ready to trust the Holy Spirit the same way they trusted Jesus, they will not receive Him or His ministry.

You might ask, why would someone that believes in a God that they can’t see, and has entrusted their eternal security to the Son of God whom they have never met in person or seen in the flesh, have an issue with the supernatural? Good question. I think it is because the work of Jesus is sometimes perceived as something that happened a long time ago, rather than something that is ongoing and spiritual. Of course, the Bible actually presents the work of Jesus, not as just what happened on the cross, or what He did historically during His time on earth, but as an “eternal” work. That means that the work of Jesus had no beginning and has no end. What He did on the cross is expressed in terms of an action that occurred, but that has an eternal, ongoing, effect. Actually, to get technical, the Bible teaches that the work of salvation was completed from God’s point of view before man ever sinned. But that is probably more than we need to get into here.

For the last few hundred years, since about the time of the French Revolution, Western Culture has embraced a way of thinking that defines truth as only that which can be measured, reproduced in a lab, and obeys the laws of math and physics. Anything that is unexplainable is deemed to be suspect at best, and probably false. This line of thinking, called “modernism,” has had a dramatic effect on the way people read the Bible. Many people simply discount the bible stories of the supernatural; like the miracles of Jesus and those that occurred continually through His followers as they were filled with the Holy Spirit. They write these recorded supernatural acts off as the perspective of people that didn’t understand science. Because of this trend, many streams of Christianity today simply do not expect God to do the things that we read about in the New Testament. They essentially live in the moral principles of the Bible, but ignore the possibility of the miraculous in a contemporary setting.

There is much we could say about this, but I will assume that if you are still reading, you are at least open to the idea of trusting the Holy Spirit and allowing Him to move in and through your life in a more powerful way than you may have experienced up to this point. Let me say again, with little comment, and a promise of dealing with it in the future, that if you have accepted Jesus as your Savior, you have already experienced some of the power of the Holy Spirit. All I am saying is that there is more for you.

As to trusting the Holy Spirit, here is one thing that helps me; Jesus said, “If you love me, you will obey what I command. And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Counselor to be with you forever (John 14:15, 16).” Jesus also said that even we human beings with all of our faults, give good gifts to our children, and that the Father will give the Holy Spirit as a good gift to those who ask Him (Luke 11:11-13).

The first reference above says a lot more in the original language than comes out in English. Jesus said that the Father was going to give us “another” counselor. That word “counselor” can also be translated as comforter, advocate, coach etc. In other words, He is not just a therapist, but one who walks through life with us daily. The word “another” comes from a Greek word that means another of the EXACT same kind. In Greek, there is an entirely different word that is used to describe something that is similar, but not exactly the same. Like if I gave you an apple, and you asked for another piece of fruit, so I gave you an orange, I would be giving you another piece of fruit, but a different kind.

Jesus did not use that word to describe the Holy Spirit. He used the word that tells us that the Holy Spirit is EXACTLY like Jesus. He has the same personality, and the same intent for your life, but He is another person. This fits with the rest of the Bible that tells us that God exists in three persons that are all one, but still three. I know, it makes my brain hurt too, but that’s what the Bible says.

So If you can trust Jesus with your life, you can trust the one He personally sent to you, right? If the Father only give good gifts to His kids, and He gives us the Holy Spirit, we can trust that He is a good gift from our Father, right?

And finally, Jesus says in John 16:7, that it is actually better for us that He goes away and sends the Holy Spirit. Wow! Imagine how hard that was for His disciples to believe. But, Jesus never lies to us, so it was true for them, and it is true for us. Jesus actually does everything He does in our lives today through the Holy Spirit.

So if you, for whatever reason, have been nervous about the subject of the Holy Spirit and spiritual gifts, please take time to read these passages and think about them deeply. Pray, ask Jesus what He would say to you about this subject. Begin by trusting Jesus, and be open to Him encouraging you to also trust the Holy Spirit.

If you have questions or comments, I would love to hear them. You can post comments below this article, or you can email them to me at pastor@rmcmchurch.org.