Understanding the Person and ministry of the Holy Spirit—His deity, personality, baptism, filling, gifts, fruit, and ongoing work in believers.
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 4091. The gift of mercy is one of the spiritual gifts listed by Paul in Romans 12, and it is perhaps the easiest to overlook and the hardest to imitate without possessing it. When Paul writes in Romans 12:8 of “the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness,” he is describing something that…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4138. “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Romans 8:16). This verse is one of the most personally assuring statements in all of Paul’s letters, and the Spirit bears witness in Romans 8:16 in a way that is worth examining both theologically and pastorally. It is the…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 4137. Three times in the farewell discourse of Jesus, recorded in John 14-16, the Holy Spirit is called “the Spirit of truth.” The first occurrence is in John 14:17, the second in 15:26, and the third in 16:13. Each appearance of the title adds something specific to our understanding of why this title belongs…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4136. “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper” (John 14:16). The phrase “another Helper in John 14” is one of the richest descriptions of the Holy Spirit in all of Scripture, and a single Greek word at its centre carries more theological weight than most readers realise. Jesus…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4135. “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” (John 7:38). The rivers of living water are Jesus’s own image for the Holy Spirit, and the setting in which He speaks these words adds considerable weight to them. This is not a quiet…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4134. The power of the Holy Spirit in Acts 1:8 is Jesus’s last commission before His ascension, and it is often misread. We tend to hear “power” and imagine a dramatic experience – something intense, overwhelming, perhaps visually or emotionally spectacular. But the word Jesus uses (Greek: dunamis) means effective enabling capacity: the ability…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4133. “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6). Of all the Spirit passages in the Old Testament prophets, this is perhaps the most frequently quoted in contemporary Christian contexts. It appears on banners, in sermons, in prayers – and the principle it expresses is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4132. The valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37 is one of the most dramatic and theologically charged visions in all of Scripture. Bones scattered across an open valley, a prophet commanded to preach to the dead, a vast army rising – the vision lodges in the imagination long before you have worked out…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4131. The new heart and new spirit in Ezekiel 36 stand at the very heart of what the new covenant promises and the Spirit accomplishes. “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4130. The Joel 2 Holy Spirit prophecy is one of the most significant in the entire Old Testament. “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see…