[This is the third in a series of six posts on the importance of Pentecost and the Holy Spirit. To catch up, here is the Introduction, Week 1, and Week 2.]
What does the Holy Spirit do? He ushers us into the life and love of the triune God.
It’s easy to think of the Holy Spirit as a ‘thing’—something God gives us—but the Spirit isn’t a thing; he’s a Person. In pouring out the Spirit upon us, then, God is giving us nothing less than his very self (John 14:15-31; 15:26).
This is critically important, for we do not (and cannot) naturally love God, and we cannot (and do not) naturally find our way back into the life of God. In a helpful image, Martin Luther says that as a result of sin we human beings are ‘curved in on ourselves’. We’re bent away from God. The intimate communion with him for which we were made has been lost. That communion itself, of course, still remains: the Father eternally loves the Son, and the Son eternally loves the Father (read John 13-17, and bask in the mutuality and beauty of the love of the Father and Son), but we are outside of it: cold, lifeless beings made for but separated from the warmth of the Divine Life.
No thing God could ever give us would change that. Things don’t alter relationships. No material gift brings the divorced ex-lover home. If we—cold, lifeless, and excluded—are to be welcomed back into the life of God, he will have to give us not something but Someone.
And then Pentecost happened, and the Fire of God fell and warmed our clammy souls. The Holy Spirit floods our hearts and warms our desires: he ‘unbends’ us—growing in us the love of the Father for the Son, and the love of the Son for the Father; he ‘untwists’ us—turning our self-love into neighbor-love; he ‘curves’ us back outwards—into life with him and with each other. In short, the Holy Spirit does what we could never do: he ushers us (catches us up) into the life for which we were made—the life of the triune God. William Tyndale is famous for saying, “Where the Spirit is, there it is always summer.”[1] That’s good, isn’t it? Where the Spirit is, we begin to enjoy the Father as his children; where the Spirit is, our desire for the Son—our Brother—is set aflame.
We could not love; we could not live, but then Pentecost happened. How marvelous that Pentecost signals the end of our tangled, inward-looking lives! How marvelous to be no longer excluded. How marvelous to be back, in Christ and by the Spirit, in the bosom of the Father—back in the life of God himself![2]
[1] William Tyndale, “A Prologue Upon the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans,” in The Works of William Tyndale (Edinburgh and Carlisle, Penn.: Banner of Truth, 2010), 1:499.
[2] If you want to read more about this aspect of the Spirit’s work, I would heartily recommend a short book by Michael Reeves entitled Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012), particularly chapters 3-4.