Who is the Holy Spirit?

Greetings,

It is hard to believe that it is the end of October already. I have been blessed to be home for this last week of October, enjoying the bright sunshine, colored leaves, and fresh days of the season’s transition towards winter. Pastor Jonathan hit one out of the park yesterday. It was great to be home with my family and church family.

Very often, we think of God as the Mighty One. He is the Creator of all things. God is the source of life in all things, but God is also very personal. He is the Creator of all things, but He is the Father of humanity. We were created in His likeness and image, thus our attributes come from the source of who He is. He is passionate, creative, thoughtful, expressive, and strategic in His ways. The fruit of who His is manifests love, joy, peace, long suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. He is full of knowledge, wisdom, discernment, faith, miraculous abilities, healing testimonies, creative prophetic utterances, mysteries, and interpretation of mysteries.

God is the Father, He is the expression or Word, and He is the Spirit. This is often described as the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The word Trinity is not found in the Scripture, but you cannot look throughout Scripture and not find God as a Trinity. He is One, but He is three unique persons. I best understand this by thinking that God is a giver. It is impossible to be a giver without a plurality in the dynamic of who He is. He gives life to us, but the essence of who He is also manifests life. As those created in His image we are the same. Even in our individuality, we are spirit, soul, and body. When our spirits are healthy they come alive to give life to our souls. When our souls are alive they give life to our bodies. A prosperous soul produces a prosperous life. This is the nature of God in His being.

God gives life, breath, and all things. The Holy Spirit is the source of life in us all. When we willingly embrace God in our lives we become expressions of Him, just as God is also the Word, the Son, the expression of God made known to the world. God also gives us all things, just as God is the Father; the source of our inheritance and destiny in all things. He partners with us to reveal our lives as a posterity of His will. God as a Trinity is essential to His character, nature, way, power, and authority. He does not do love, He is love. The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father. The Spirit loves the Father and the Son and the Father and the Son love the Spirit. It is part of the being of God. God does not just do relationship, He is relationship. God in His Trinity is the essence of who He is in our lives as His children and who He is in relationship with all of creation.

Our connection with God can only be found Spirit to spirit. It can only be found through a connection of our spirits to God the Holy Spirit within. This can be described as the Spirit of God within us. When God created mankind, He spoke to Himself. It is in the Spirit of God that we find the source of our identity as human beings. Without a relationship with God from our spirits to His Spirit, we become confused in our identity. Human beings often think their identity is derived from who they are naturally, but it is only through a relationship with God in the Holy Spirit that we can discover who we are really meant to be. It is by the Spirit of God that our natural identity can be shaped to truth supernaturally. We are meant to be a testimony of who God is and without a supernatural connection with Him we become a testimony of the likeness and image of some natural influence in our lives.

Genesis 1:26-28 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

To live a life that expresses the likeness and image of God, we must have a personal and intimate connection to Him. This comes by being in a relationship with the Holy Spirit in our hearts. The Holy Spirit bears the name of Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit is the connection in our hearts that empowers our hearts to call out to God as our heavenly Father. The secret to our connection with God is found in our connection with His Spirit in our hearts. To know who we are, we must know who He is. Let’s all make ourselves aware of this relationship with the Holy Spirit that has been given to us through the gift of Jesus Christ the Son as the testimony of our reconciliation to our Father in heaven.

Blessings,

Ted J. Hanson