Holy Spirit: Who Is the Holy Spirit?

If we've not met, my name's Josh, and I'm glad you're here. If you've been around for a little while. We have been studying through the Book of Mark over the last several months, getting to see Jesus as he truly is. Jesus then goes to the cross. We celebrated the resurrection a few weeks ago.

And then post resurrection, Jesus comes to his disciples and he gives them instructions and he says, listen, guys, I gotta go. I gotta go to heaven. And you want me to go because I'm going to send one that's going to be with you, and not just with you, is going to be in you. And he is the Holy Spirit. And through the Holy Spirit, you're going to do even greater things than I have done.

That's amazing. And so now we have access to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit is this kind of weird, kind of nebulous thing that we just don't know what to do with, if we're honest. Most of us.

A recent study, nationwide study surveyed thousands of Americans and those who identified as evangelical Christians. Among those, only 56% of those agreed with or strongly agreed with this statement. The Holy Spirit is a force, but is not a personal being. That means statistically, more than half of people who would say they follow Jesus don't actually believe. The Holy Spirit is someone who you can know.

And so you might think, yeah, I kind of agree with that, too. And you're not alone. If this room is even closer representative of that number, then more than half of us feel this way. And you might ask, well, why does that matter? What's the big deal?

Well, if this is all true, then it means many of us are carrying an understanding of the Holy Spirit that isn't actually shaped by Scripture. That should cause us to pause. One of the core convictions that we have here at Whitewater is that the Bible is the very word of God, that it's the highest authority in this world now, that it stands above every experience and every opinion and every other source of understanding. And while it doesn't answer every single question that we might ever have for it, we believe that God has given us everything through the Holy Scriptures, that we need to understand who he is and how he intends for us to live in this world. Which means when our beliefs do not align with scripture, we don't change scripture, we change our beliefs.

But that's the most important reason. Here's a second reason. If the Holy Spirit isn't just a force, like electricity, you flip on when you need it or wind that comes, but you don't know how and you don't know when. If the Holy Spirit is actually a person to be known and interacted with, and more than half of us don't believe that or don't understand it, then just imagine what we might be missing, not just individually, but in our families, in our homes, in every space we step into. What might we be missing?

What might be missing from our neighborhoods and our workplaces and our schools and our community if we're not relating to the Holy Spirit as He is? And when I look around here at Whitewater, some amazing things by God's grace are happening. A lot of really good things are happening. Attendance is growing, giving is strong. People are serving.

More and more people are stepping into disciple making communities and growing in communities with other believers. The Bible and prayer are becoming more and more a regular part of our lives. And all of that matters. All of that is incredible. But if more than half of us misunderstand a central part of where all that comes from, then we have to ask the honest question, what might we be missing here?

What are we settling for that God might have way more in mind? If we're experiencing all of this without truly knowing the Holy Spirit, how much of all of this are we doing in our own strength? And how long would it last? See, if the Christian life is meant to be led, empowered and transformed by. By the Holy Spirit, who is a personal being, then what does it look like when we try to live this life without actually knowing Him?

The truth is it's possible to build something that looks pretty impressive on the outside, but something that's essentially missing the whole of the center. And I just wonder, are we experiencing the fullness of what God has actually made available to us? Because if we're not, I don't want us to settle for that. I don't want us to be a church that's doing a lot of good for God while missing life with God through His Holy Spirit. In different terms, imagine all of us are on a team trying to win a game, and collectively we only know half the rules.

We'd be running to positions that we don't understand why they exist. We'd be running plays that we just kind of figured up on our own own. We would not understand the score. We would be really confused as to why the guy in the striped shirt is blowing whistles at us. And maybe we're athletic and maybe we could work really hard and figure some things out, but we would never be operating in the way that it was designed to be played or take sports out of it altogether.

Imagine an orchestra where only half of the musicians can read music, or a team at work where only half of the people actually understand the goal of the. Well, you don't even have to imagine that. It happens regularly, doesn't it? And yes, there might still be effort. There might be some good moments that look like progress.

But imagine the clarity and focus and power and impact that's missing in a situation like this. And so again, I have to ask, what might we be missing that God has already made available to us? It's right in front of us, but we've not engaged with it, We've not seen it, we don't know what to do with it. And beyond that, what might the kingdom be missing through us if we're not living with the understanding, guidance and power of the Holy Spirit? Well, today we start this new series that's all about the Holy Spirit.

And I'm just curious, please just be very honest. Raise your hand. How many of you feel like there is more that you don't know about the Holy Spirit than you do know about the Holy Spirit? Raise your hands high. Like, look around.

Come on, leave them up for a minute. You are not alone. The entire room feels this way.

Through this series, my hope is to kind of close some of the gap of misunderstanding. And because this is a huge, daunting task, I just want to ask for God's help. So will you pray with me?

Father Jesus, Holy Spirit, we ask for your guidance and understanding as we approach such a big topic. And I just ask that you would clear away all of the fog here, that you'd clear away all the misunderstanding and misinformation and any fear or hesitation we might have that you would teach us through your word what you want us to know and understand about your Spirit. It's in your powerful and mighty name we pray. Amen. Over the last 25 years in ministry, I've seen some pretty consistent camps when it comes to how church people engage with the Holy Spirit.

I like the way Gary Hamrick categorizes them. He calls them the uninformed, the misinformed and the well informed. The uninformed. The misinformed and the well informed. The uninformed are people who just simply don't know.

They've never really been taught. Maybe they've never studied it on their own. Maybe you grew up in a church that didn't really talk about the Holy Spirit. I know for me, that's the kind of church I grew up in. No one would have said this out loud, but the Trinity was like God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Scriptures.

We didn't really do much with the Holy Spirit. Or maybe you came from a church that actually discouraged engaging with the Holy Spirit, where anything supernatural felt a little suspect. Like if you leaned in too far, you might become a Pentecostal, which in some churches is just like one rung above pagan. Or maybe you're just new to faith. Maybe you're new to the Bible and no one's ever really explained the Holy Spirit to you.

You kind of understand the Father and the Son dynamic. That's the uninformed. It's not necessarily rejection, it's just not knowing. Then there's the misinformed. And typically the misinformed go into two divergent categories, two different extremes.

On one side, you have people who know what the Bible says about the Holy Spirit. They have read and seen the gifts and the power and the miracles and the activity of the spir throughout Scripture, but they believe all of that was limited to Bible times, that it was real then, but it's not now. So they don't deny the Holy Spirit. They just don't expect the Holy Spirit to do anything in our world today, to not be active. They see it more like a power outlet that was turned off at the breaker.

On the other side, you have the opposite extreme. There's an overemphasis on the Spirit, kind of a preoccupation with dramatic spiritual experiences, manifestations, supernatural moments. Maybe you came from a church or background like this. Maybe you've run into someone who pursues these things and you kind of feel a little uncomfortable around them. Sometimes in the pursuit of supernatural things, people begin to chase anything that feels spiritual, even if it's not biblical.

It may be spiritual, but without wisdom and discernment and without a solid biblical grounding. Sometimes people, people, some people can end up pursuing things that don't actually come from the Holy Spirit at all. But then there's the third category, the well informed. That's where I want us to be as a church, the well informed. Not people who avoid the Holy Spirit.

Not people who make things up about the Holy Spirit, not people who are shaped primarily by an experience or tradition or what someone else told us, but people who are grounded in a clear biblical understanding of the Holy Spirit, who he is, what he does, and how we're actually supposed to walk with him in daily life. So the aim of this series is very simple. We're not going to avoid the topic, we're not going to speculate. We're not going to build this on secondhand ideas or isolated experiences. We're going to open the Bible and just ask, what does the Bible teach about the Holy Spirit?

And I want to give us two guiding principles that will kind of help keep us anchored in this entire series. First, the Holy Spirit may be more than what we see in Scripture. In fact, he most certainly is more than what we see in Scripture. But he will never be less than what we see revealed in Scripture. He might be more, but he will never be less.

In other words, everything the Bible says about the Holy Spirit is true, trustworthy, and essential. And while we may not totally grasp the fullness of who he is, we don't need more than what the Bible has revealed to us to have a clear understanding of who the Holy Spirit is. Second, a very clear out of bounds with the Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit will never do anything or lead anyone to do anything that is contradictory to Scripture at large. I have actually heard of people who have justified an affair by saying that the Holy Spirit led them to their soulmate. No, no, he did not.

He did not lead you to have an affair. He did not. Let's be clear, that's out of bounds. So again, the Holy Spirit may be more than what we see revealed in Scripture, but He will never be less. And the Holy Spirit will never be anything that's contradictory to the whole of Scripture.

And I believe if we just simply take God at His word, if we believe what he said, if we build our understanding and doctrine of the Holy Spirit on Scripture, we will remain in bounds. We won't be uninformed. We won't be misinformed. We will be well informed. And I believe that the potential impact that this could make on our lives and our homes and our community and our church is immeasurable.

All right. With such a huge topic as the Holy Spirit, I can't possibly cover every question that all of us have about the Holy Spirit. And so I'm going to root this whole thing in three key questions that we'll be covering this week, next, and the following. First, this week, who is the Holy Spirit? Next week, what does the Holy Spirit do in the following week?

How do we live or walk in the Holy Spirit? And then we'll spend the eight weeks following looking at case studies from the Book of Acts where who the Holy Spirit is, what the Holy Spirit does, and how we're to walk in the Holy Spirit is on display with real people In a real time, in a real place. That's the aim of this series.

First this week, who is the Holy Spirit? Who is the Holy Spirit? As is often the case when we're trying to have a biblically rich doctrine or view of something, we need to go all the way back to the beginning, to the book of Genesis. The Holy Spirit shows up in verse two of the Bible, Genesis 1, starting in verse one. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Now, the earth was formless and empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep. Some trans translations have over the surface of the waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters right out of the gate. The Bible tells us the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God.

The Hebrew word for spirit is the word ruach. It's got that great clear your throat sound at the end of it. Let's say that together. Ruach. Ah, so good.

So good. Ruach means wind or breath or life. So just picture this. The wind, the breath, the very life of God hovering over the waters before anything in creation is formed, before anything is filled, before anything begins to function. And that gives us at least two foundational truths about who the Holy Spirit is.

First, the Holy Spirit is not separate from God. He is the very Spirit of God, the essence of God himself. He is present and active in the work of God. Second, the Holy Spirit preexists creation before anything is made. He already is.

He's not created. He's eternal. He is present at the very beginning and actively involved in what God is doing. So just from this one verse, at the very least, we can say this. From the very first pages of Scripture.

The Holy Spirit is not presented as an abstract idea or distant force, but as an active, present Spirit of God himself. He is, therefore, he is there before creation and moving in what God is doing. And as we keep looking at Scripture, it keeps expanding our view of who the Holy Spirit is. Let's hop ahead to verse 26. God has made light and land and animals and plants.

And then he says something really interesting. Verse 26. Then God said, let us make mankind in our image. Who is us? That's not singular language, that's plural language.

And the rest of Scripture helps us understand what's happening here. From the very first centuries of Christianity, Christians have understood this as a glimpse of the Trinity. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. Now, we don't have time to fully unpack the Trinity today. If I'm honest, I'm not even sure that I know how to fully Unpack the Trinity.

But here's the essential idea. We believe that God is one in essence and being, and yet three distinct. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Not three gods, one God and three persons eternally existing in perfect unity. And if this kind of blows your mind a little bit, there's a really good reason for that.

Because the Trinity is literally unlike anything else in the world. Anything that we compare the Trinity to will fall short. So it might get us part of the way there, but it will never get us the whole way there. Because there is nothing like the Trinity. But here's what this means for us in this pursuit today.

The Holy Spirit is not an add on to God, not a lesser part of God, not just the power and energy force that comes from God. He is fully divine, fully God. He is present at creation, involved in creation, and included in the very identity and image of God. Let us make man in our image. So when we ask who is the Holy Spirit, we can at least say that he is God.

He's co equal with the Father and the Son, a distinct person, the Trinity. And that matters because if the Holy Spirit is truly God, then he's not just something to understand. He is someone to know. Let's keep looking at what scripture tells us about the Holy Spirit. The Bible doesn't just tell us that the Holy Spirit is God.

It also shows us that he has personhood, the characteristics of a person. I'll quickly put an asterisk on this. If you've been around at all, you know that whenever I pull out scripture, I always pull a big chunk of scripture, always in context, pull it from all over scripture. This week I'm going to be just using one little chunk of these verses. And the reason is because I want to stay on task for what we're trying to accomplish today.

Who is the Holy Spirit? All of these verses also do our work for next week and the following week. And almost all of them we will use in full context. But today, to stay on the rails, because I'll preach forever, we're just going to just do small chunks. All right.

So with that in mind, when we look at scripture for evidence of the Holy Spirit as a distinct person with a personhood, we see that the Holy Spirit has a mind he thinks, knows and understands. Energy doesn't have a mind. Electricity doesn't know anything. But the Holy Spirit does. We see this in Romans 8:27.

It says, and he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit. This is one of those verses that the rest of it, it goes on to reveal part of what we're going to study next week. But we see this again in 1st Corinthians 2:11. For who knows a person's thoughts except their own Spirit within them? In the same way, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.

Do you see the logic here? Just like only a person can know their own thoughts, only the Spirit knows the thoughts of God because he is God. You can't say that about a force. You can't say that about energy. You can only say that about a person.

Now, the second characteristic that shows us that the Holy Spirit is a person, that the Holy Spirit has a will, a determinative will. He chooses and decides. In First Corinthians 12, Paul tells us that the Holy Spirit gives out gifts and that these gifts are for the building up of the church and for the kingdom. Again, we'll look at that more next week. But he says that the Holy Spirit determines who gets what gifts.

Chapter 12, verse 11. All these. All these gifts are the work of one in the same spirit, capital S. And he distributes them to each one, just as he determines he has a determinative will. Next, Ephesians 4 tells us the Holy Spirit has emotions he can feel. Ephesians 4:30.

And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God. A power or force cannot be grieved. Only a person can. Now, I also don't have time to fully unpack this idea. But what does it mean to grieve the Holy Spirit?

Well, for anyone to grieve anything, there has to be love first. You don't grieve what you don't love. You might feel sympathy if you hear that somebody distant from you passed away. But grief is different than that. Grief requires affection, proximity, and relationship.

See, the Holy Spirit doesn't just act in our lives. He is deeply invested in our lives. He has real love, real affection, real care for us. And when we look at Ephesians 4, Paul is talking about this new life that we have in Christ. We've been made new.

We've been sealed with the Holy Spirit, he says. And now we're called to put off that old dead self and walk in the newness of life, this new resurrected life. And so when we go back to the old ways, when we step into the patterns of sin that we just got freed from, when we ignore what we know is right. Another spot in the Bible says, when we are like dogs who go back to their vomit, when we live out of alignment with who we are now in Christ that grieves the Holy Spirit because he's close, because he cares. It's like a loving parent watching their child choose something destructive, or a mentor watching someone they believe in settle for far less than their worth or far less than they deserve.

There's love there, and there's care there. There's investment there. That's why it hurts. And grieving the Holy Spirit isn't just about big, egregious sins. It can be as simple as ignoring his prompting when he nudges us to speak, or dismissing conviction when he's trying to redirect us, or choosing distraction over time with him, or living an entire day aware of every other presence in our life except his.

And if the Holy Spirit can be grieved, he's not a force to be used. He's a person who loves you, who knows you, who is near you. Our relationship with him is not just about accessing power. It's about walking closely with a personal being who actually cares how we live, who actually cares who we're becoming. Only a personal being can be grieved.

Next we see the Holy Spirit speaks and communicates. We find this in several places. Acts 8:29 the Spirit told Philip, go to that chariot and stay near it. Acts 10:19 While Peter was still thinking about the vision, the Spirit said to him, simon, three men are looking for you. So get up and go downstairs.

Do not hesitate to go with them, for I have sent Then we hear Peter's response to this. In Acts 11:12 the Spirit told me to have no hesitation about going with them. We see the Spirit speak in several other places. The Bible doesn't describe the Holy Spirit as sending signals or feelings or vague energy. It says, the Holy Spirit speaks.

He gives direction. He warns. He sends. He even says, I have sent them. You don't talk like that if you're a force.

You talk like that if you're a person. Because he has personal pronouns, the Holy Spirit has personal pronouns. That same verse. So get up and go downstairs. Do not hesitate to go with them, for I have sent you.

When the Holy Spirit speaks, he says I. A force can't say I. That's the language of a person. And you may have noticed I keep referring to the Holy Spirit as he or Him. The Holy Spirit always has masculine pronouns in the Bible.

In recent years, there's been a growing idea. I think it was popularized in part at least by the movie and the book the Shack, that the Holy Spirit might be gender neutral or even feminine. And the argument is the Old Testament word for spirit. That word ruach, grammatically feminine. And in the New Testament, the New Testament word for the word spirit is pneuma, and it's grammatically neuter.

But grammatical gender is not the same thing as personal gender in both Hebrew and Greek. In lots of languages, actually, lots of things are assigned gender simply as a feature of the language. Tables and chairs, even doors, can be grammatically masculine or feminine. This does not mean that they're actually male or female. When the New Testament writers talk about the Holy Spirit, they always use a masculine pronoun.

Maybe the best example comes straight from Jesus. This is in John, chapter 16. But when he, the Holy Spirit of Truth, comes, he will guide you into all the 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 glorify me, because it is from me that he will receive what he will make note of. I think I'll just stop there.

According to Scripture, the Holy Spirit is a personal being with a mind, with emotions, with a determinative will. One who is present and active, one who speaks and can be spoken to. This doesn't describe a force, an energy. It describes a personal being who can be known, interacted with, spoken to. And if more than half of us in this room, if more than half of us in Christendom have misunderstood that the Holy Spirit isn't just a force, but an actual personal being, we haven't just misunderstood something.

We have misunderstood some one.

Imagine you live in a house full of stuff, but no people. And you have all of these things that you can control with your voice and with your own will. You just walk in and say, alexa, play music right. You adjust the thermostat to get the temperature exactly where you want it. You flip on a fan when you're hot.

You flip on a light switch when it's dark. And everything is utilitarian. Everything bends to your will. It responds to you. You don't owe any of these things attention.

You don't have conversations with these things. You don't relate to this stuff. It just does what you want it to do when you need it to do it. Now imagine you have actual people that live in your house, but you see or you use that same approach with people. Everything's utilitarian.

You walk in. You don't say hello to anyone. You never make eye contact. You never ask anyone how they're doing. You just make demands and requests into the air.

Heidi, fix me a sandwich. Garrett, turn the Light on. And then you move on. No listening, no conversation, no awareness, no relationship. It would be ridiculous and weird, right?

The people you live with wouldn't have relationship with you. They would just be a means to an end, a force to be used for utilitarian purposes rather than people to be known, loved, interacted with. And if we view the Holy Spirit as nothing more than a thing, then the fullness of our relationship with him at best might be utilitarian and transactional, but it will never be rich and meaningful and life giving.

What are we missing out on, Church?

What are we missing out on? And so the call today, the call to action, no matter what you have believed about the Holy Spirit up to this point this week, is to start to interact with the Holy Spirit as if he is who the Bible says he is. A present, active, personal. And as silly as it might sound for some of us to start our day before we get out of bed and say, good morning, Holy Spirit. Now, somebody asked me in the last service, well, I say, good morning, God.

Is that not good enough? And I said, well, it's not like the Holy Spirit's going, hey, what about me? You know, when we say good morning, God, we are saying good morning to the Holy Spirit. This is far more about us, we reframing our thinking than it is about the Holy Spirit receiving something from us. And so if you want to say, good morning, Father, good morning, Jesus, good morning, Holy Spirit.

Great, fantastic. That's good. And then say a simple prayer, something like, holy Spirit, help me to see you as you truly are and to interact with you as a present, active, personal being. And if you want to add to that, you want to get real crazy, you could do that 2, 3, 4, 10 times in a day when you hop in the car and you make a transition, when you step into your home after work, when you go to bed at night, good evening, Holy Spirit. Good night, Holy Spirit.

And if that is the greatest spiritual achievement that we made this week, I think it's going to be an awesome week.

Church. If we come anywhere close to representing that statistic and all that we have experienced in our faith life is a utilitarian interaction with a utilitarian power that only moves when we speak into the air. I could really use some peace today. Push the button. I need you to fix this.

Push the button. My kid's sick right now. Push the button.

Imagine if that's how we interacted with our children. Imagine if that's how we interacted with our best friend, with our spouse. What if that's all we ever did. Our relationships might exist, but they would be so cheap and so shallow and so lifeless and so loveless. They would not be intimate in any way.

Imagine, church, what we're missing out on. Imagine what we're missing out on. A real relationship with the God of the universe who is indwelled. Like, are you kidding me? The same power that resurrected Christ from the grave is in me.

This is the promise of scripture church. And we gotta stop acting like the Holy Spirit is nothing more than a nice button that's wired in some way on the backside that we don't really understand. We just know that it works. Works. What if he is who the Bible says he is?

That's the challenge this week. Just start to live that way. And I'm telling you, I believe that it is absolutely. You can't even imagine what the Holy Spirit can do. Like, if it.

If things are this good right now, if that many people got in the water, if worship is that inspiring, if the messages change your life that much, if this many people are coming in and getting to know Jesus, if this many dollars are going out into our community locally and globally, and impact being made for the kingdom. And we don't even know how to talk to the Holy Spirit. Imagine what God could do. Imagine what he's got in mind. And you don't have to go off on some crazy tangent to get there.

What if we just said, good morning, Holy Spirit? What if we just learned to figure out what it looks like to look him in the eye when we walk in the door? That's the challenge this week.

Will you pray with me?

Good morning, Holy Spirit. Good morning, Father. Good morning, Jesus, our God.

Would you break our preconceived ideas and teach us through your word, who you are, who you are? Teach us to engage with you. Forgive us, oh, forgive us for all the ways that we have neglected you, that we have just viewed you as a switch. Help us to know you. We will need your help.

Help us to know you as you truly are. It's by the power of the resurrection, in the mighty name of Jesus, that we pray. Amen.