Can you give glory to the Holy Spirit?

Question 4005.

Giving glory to the Spirit is something many believers feel oddly uncertain about, and the question deserves a straight answer. We sing freely to the Father and to the Son, yet when it comes to the third Person of the Trinity a strange shyness sets in, as though praising Him might somehow be out of order. So can you give glory to the Holy Spirit? Yes, without hesitation, because He is fully and truly God.

I think the hesitation comes from a half-remembered idea that the Spirit prefers to stay in the background and point to Jesus. There is a grain of truth in that, and I will come to it. But it has been twisted into the notion that the Spirit is somehow less worthy of worship, and that idea cannot stand against what Scripture actually says about who He is.

The Spirit Is Fully God

The reason we may give glory to the Spirit is the same reason we give it to the Father and the Son. He is God. He is not a created being, not a divine influence, not an impersonal power that flows from the Father, but the third Person of the one true God, co-equal and co-eternal with the Father and the Son.

Scripture shows this at every turn. When Ananias lied to the Holy Spirit, Peter told him he had not lied to men but to God, setting the two terms side by side as one. The Spirit can be lied to, grieved, and insulted. He intercedes, He teaches, He wills, He distributes gifts as He chooses. Those are the actions of a divine Person, not the workings of a force. And if He is God, then worship is not just permitted towards Him, it is His due.

Giving Glory to the Spirit in Scripture and the Church

Once you see that the Spirit is God, giving glory to the Spirit is no innovation. The baptismal formula the Lord Jesus gave places the Spirit alongside the Father and the Son in the one name into which we are baptised. Paul’s benediction calls down the fellowship of the Holy Spirit upon the Corinthians in the same breath as the grace of the Lord Jesus and the love of God.

The historic church understood this instinctively. The ancient hymn the Gloria Patri ascribes glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, and the church has sung it for centuries without embarrassment. When we confess that the Spirit is to be worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son, we are not stretching Scripture. We are confessing what it plainly implies about a Person who is God.

Why the Shyness Then?

If giving glory to the Spirit is so clearly right, why the awkwardness? Part of it is simply that fewer hymns and prayers are addressed directly to Him, and habit shapes our instincts. But part of it is a misreading of the Spirit’s own ministry, the truth that He delights to glorify the Son. Jesus said the Spirit would not speak on His own authority but would take what is the Son’s and declare it to us.

Some have heard in that a kind of self-effacement that should make us cautious about praising Him. I read it differently. The Spirit’s joy in magnifying the Son is the overflow of love within the Trinity, not a sign that He is unworthy of love Himself. The Father glorifies the Son and the Son glorifies the Father, and none of them is diminished by it. The Spirit’s God-glorifying work is the very thing that reveals how fully divine He is.

I sometimes wonder whether our shyness also springs from a quiet fear of the strange. The Spirit is the member of the Trinity we find hardest to picture. We can imagine the Father on His throne and the Son in the manger and on the cross, but the Spirit resists our imagination, and what we cannot picture we tend to keep at a polite distance. Yet that is no reason to withhold from Him the glory He deserves. He is not vague and He is not impersonal. He has a will, a mind, and affections, and He is grieved when we treat Him as an afterthought. Giving glory to the Spirit means receiving Him as the Person He truly is, every bit as worthy of love and praise as the Father and the Son, and refusing to let our weak imaginations dictate our worship. The early Christians had no trouble naming Him in their prayers and praises, and neither should we, once we have settled in our hearts that He is fully God.

A Better Way to Frame Our Praise

So I would not set up a rule that we must always address a fixed share of our worship to the Spirit, nor a rule that we never may. The healthier instinct is to let our praise of Him flow naturally from gratitude for what He does. We thank the Spirit who convicted us, who gave us new birth, who indwells and seals us, who pours the love of God into our hearts.

When you understand that the Spirit applies to you everything the Son purchased, giving glory to the Spirit stops feeling strange and starts feeling obvious. I have written more about who He is in who the Holy Spirit is and about how He comes to live in us in when we receive the Holy Spirit, and the more you grasp His work, the more readily your heart will turn to thank Him.

Thanking the Spirit for His Quiet Work

If you are still unsure how giving glory to the Spirit looks in practice, let me make it concrete. Think back over your own conversion. Who was it that opened your blind eyes to your need of a Saviour? Who convinced you that the gospel was true when a hundred other voices called it foolish? Who gave you the new birth you could never have produced in yourself, and who now lives within you as the guarantee of your inheritance? Every step of it was the work of the Holy Spirit, and to recognise that is already to begin giving glory to the Spirit, even before a single word of praise is sung.

I find that gratitude is the surest road into worship of the Spirit. We can grow theological and abstract about the third Person of the Trinity, debating His procession and His attributes, and those things have their place. But the simplest believer gives glory to the Spirit best by thanking Him for what He plainly does. Thank You for showing me Jesus. Thank You for the strength to resist that sin yesterday. Thank You for the comfort that met me in my grief. Such prayers are pure worship, and they are owed to the One who does the work in us.

There is no rivalry in any of this, which is the point I keep returning to. When I give glory to the Spirit for leading me to the Father through the Son, the whole Trinity is honoured at once, for the Persons never compete for our praise. The Father is glorified when His Spirit is thanked, because it was the Father who sent Him. So let your worship be full and unembarrassed. The Spirit is God, He has done and is still doing everything that makes you a Christian at all, and He is worthy of every scrap of glory your heart can offer Him.

Worship That Honours the Whole Trinity

There is a real safeguard worth keeping in view. Some movements have made the Spirit into a sensation to be chased, an experience to be worked up, almost a power to be handled. That is not worship of the Spirit. It treats Him as a thing rather than a Person, and it usually drifts away from the Son He came to magnify.

True glory to the Spirit always honours the whole Trinity, because the Persons are never in competition. To worship the Spirit rightly is to thank Him precisely for leading us to the Father through the Son. When our praise of Him deepens our love for Jesus, we can be confident we are honouring Him as He wishes to be honoured.

So, now what?

If you have held back from thanking the Holy Spirit, you can lay that hesitation down. He is God, and He is worthy of all the love and praise your heart can bring. The next time you sense conviction of sin, comfort in sorrow, or strength to obey, turn and thank the One who is doing it in you.

Let your worship be Trinitarian and whole, addressed to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the one God who saved you. When did you last simply stop and thank the Spirit for the work He is doing in your life?

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

2 Corinthians 13:14 (ESV)