“He will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.” – Jesus Christ
Jesus was gone. They saw him ascend into heaven with their own eyes.
The Good Shepherd who had lived with them, tended them, loved and protected them for three years was gone. But he promised them his Father would send them another comforter.
That comforter is the Holy Spirit.
We live in the Age of the Spirit. That’s something I don’t know if we spend enough time really chewing over.
Before Jesus, the world was comfortless. Isaiah talked about the cloud covering the mountain with darkness. That cloud was the darkness of death that everyone lived under because everyone is a sinner and because our sin separates us from God.
Jesus scattered that comfortless cloud by paying for our sins on the cross and then being resurrected with power from the grave. And the light of life that he brought us is with us forever through the Spirit.
“God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.” Jesus is no longer physically present, but the love he demonstrated on the cross continues to be poured into our hearts, giving us hope.
This outpouring makes everything new. We who believe in Christ no longer live in darkness and fear. We live in the light-filled shower of his steadfast love. Everything has changed for us and our way of thinking.
In the Old Testament only a few were filled with the Spirit. Today, it is every believer. On a beautiful spring day we are filled with the radiance of God’s creation. But the Spirit is something more than this. The Spirit “leads us into all truth.”
The book of Acts is a testament to the power of the Spirit, which is mentioned 52 times. “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
The day when the Spirit was poured out on the believers in Jerusalem was the day the church began. They started speaking in “tongues” or languages they did not know. The gift of the Holy Spirit overcomes the cultural divide between believers and makes them brothers.
It was the same gift Peter saw poured out on the Gentiles in Cornelius’s household. It was the gift that overcame the previously impassable divide between Jew and Gentile, clean and unclean. Through the Spirit, “there is no Greek or Jew, no male or female, no slave or free.”
Only the Spirit has the power to produce this otherworldly effect. It gathers the church together through the ages and preserves it. Revivals do not come from revivalists. They come from the Holy Spirit moving in the midst of a troubled world.
“I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy; and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” Here’s a happy thought—we can wake up with the Spirit in our hearts, even when the sun is not shining. Every day can be a spiritual day, renewed with joy and hope from the dry bones of our broken lives
Written by Jay Trott
