Thursday: Not aVague Power, but aVital Person
WEEK 5
THURSDAY
NOT A VAGUE POWER, BUT A VITAL PERSON
John 14:25-26
We meditated yesterday on the mastery of religious paraphernalia. It was all so immediate. And the immediacy was not that of a vague impersonal power. They had immediate contact with a person. And that contact deepened into a communion—they communed in the heart with a Divine Person. The Holy Spirit is not an it. “He will guide you in all truth” (John 16:13); the Holy Spirit is a he. And not a vague depersonalized person; he is a person with a very definite personalized content. And the content is the content of Jesus.
The fact is that the terms “Holy Spirit” and “Spirit of Jesus” are used interchangeably: “. . . the Holy Spirit kept them from speaking the word in the province of Asia. . . . They tried to enter the province of Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus wouldn’t let them” (Acts 16:6-7). The consciousness of the Holy Spirit was the consciousness of Jesus. And it was the consciousness of the Lord: “but the Spirit of my Father is doing the talking through you” (Matt 10:20). So the Holy Spirit deepens the consciousness of the Lord. The fact is that I cannot tell where one ends and the other begins in my experience. It all seems to melt into one, yet there is an experience of all three—a social experience and yet a separate experience. How rich a fellowship!
One who had just entered into the experience of the Holy Spirit said: “I used to say I love Jesus more than the Father. But since I’ve experienced the Holy Spirit, it is like saying no longer, ‘I love Mama more than Daddy,’ but ‘I love both.’ Now I love the Father, and I love the Son, and I love the Holy Spirit.” The Holy Spirit hadn’t absorbed the love of the Father and the Son in his coming—he had intensified the love of each. The communion with the Spirit is an intensely personalized experience and an intensely social experience, the richest experience a human being is capable of experiencing. So the Trinity, instead of being an insoluble puzzle to be explained, is an intimate experience to be realized and enjoyed. You feel your inner life socialized while doing the most solitary thing one can do—communing with God. It can’t be explained; it has to be experienced. And what an experience!
O Spirit, you make Father and Son inwardly real, and you make me real in the process. I thank you. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I am taking hold of and am being taken hold of by the Redeeming Spirit within.