And In The Holy Spirit

“Pentecost”: Luan Bautista Mayno, c. 1615

By Kurt Reinhardt

What does the Holy Spirit do?

“He calls me by the Gospel.”

Sin turns us away from God—separating us from Him which leaves us facing the world, death, and hell on our own. The Holy Spirit turns us back to Him—to live in communion with Him—where He is our God to rescue and save us, and we are His people to glorify and praise Him.  How does the Holy Spirit do this? He calls us by the Gospel.

Picture yourself for a moment walking away from someone. With your head, mind, and heart looking away from that person, the only way that you would turn around and come back to him would be if he called out to you.

The Father sent the Son into the World to bring us back to Him. The Holy Spirit is the breath of God that brings His Word to turn us around to the Son. The fact that we speak with our breath is not an accident. It was part of the intentional creative act of our Creator and reflects something about Himself. We speak with our breath and our breath comes with our words because God’s Spirit carries His Word and His Word carries His Spirit. This is why you can’t speak the Word of God without the Spirit and why you can’t have the Spirit without the Word. No one can say that Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit as true God is everywhere, as He gives the breath of life to all things, but He is personally found and does His special work with and only with God’s Word.

The Word is tied to the Spirit and the Spirit is tied to the Word. Again, this shouldn’t surprise us since the Spirit is tied to the Son and the Son is tied to the Spirit. This, again, is why no one in the Spirit can say that Jesus is accursed. And so you see, the Spirit always ties us to Jesus, as Jesus always connects us to the Spirit, and together they return us to the Father. You can’t have the Spirit apart from the Word of God. You can sit in your room or by the river or on the lake all you want, asking God to pour Him out upon you, but you will not receive Him without the Word. The Spirit as true God is everywhere, as He gives the breath of life to all things, but He is personally found and does His special work with and only with God’s Word.

The good news is though, that if you hear God’s Word, you’ve received the Spirit. If the Word was spoken over you in the waters of Holy Baptism, then you have received the Holy Spirit. If the Gospel has been proclaimed to you, then the Holy Spirit has come to you. If you have taken the very Word made flesh into your mouth in His body and blood at the altar, then you have received the Spirit who is always tied to that Word. God does not leave us in doubt about His love for us, and neither does He leave us in doubt about His work and presence in our lives. He doesn’t leave us looking inward to our own thoughts or feelings to find the Spirit, or leave us looking for evidence in special manifestations of His presence. The Spirit is with the Word. Receive the Word and you receive the Spirit. Period.

“He enlightens me with His gifts”

Detail from “The New Jerusalem” (Melk Abbey, Austria): Johann Michael Rottmayr, c. 1716. (Image credit: Uoaei1, Wikicommons).

The Holy Spirit brings me to the Light of the world—the true light that enlightens everyone. The gifts that He uses to enlighten me are the Ones that He uses to bring Christ to me and me to Christ. These are the Word gifts. There is the proclaimed Word of God, where the Spirit through the Law exposes my sin convicting me of it, and through the Gospel reveals my Saviour drawing me to Him. There is the Word in the Water, where the Spirit clothes me with Christ making me a child of God. There is the Word in the mouth of the pastor, where the Spirit removes my sins from me as far from me as the east is from the west, renewing me in my life in Christ with the Lord’s own Word of absolution. There is the Word in the bread and wine, where the Spirit confirms me in my life in Christ, as Jesus shares Himself with me by giving me His body and blood to eat and drink.

As the Spirit joins me to Christ and Christ to me, He takes all that is Christ’s and delivers it to me. As He binds me to Christ and deepens my life in Him, He conforms my life to Christ’s life, making Him manifest in me. This is where the Spirit brings about all the beautiful fruits in me that are truly Christ’s fruits: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. None of these things are things that I can bring about within myself. The branch cannot bear fruit apart from the life of the vine. The Spirit is the One who grafts me into Christ so that I can bear abundant fruit in Him. Apart from Him I can do nothing, but in Him, all things are possible even for a poor miserable sinner like me.

“He sanctifies and keeps me”

Detail of “Cupola of Creation” (St. Mark’s Basilica, Venice): c.13th century.

God alone is holy by nature—that is to say that He is the only One who is holy in Himself. He alone is the source of His own holiness. Every other created thing from angels down to you and me can only be holy as God shares His holiness with us. We cannot be the source of our own holiness because we are not holy by nature. We cannot create holiness in ourselves or make ourselves holy.

Some mistakenly believe that our holiness flows from our behaviour. Holiness is not a matter of behaviour; it is a state of being. Holy living flows from holiness, not holiness from holy living.  Although a good tree is recognized by its fruit, it produces good fruit because it is a good tree.  We receive holiness from God as He shares His own with us. Satan and the other angels who rebelled against God became evil and so acted accordingly because they cut themselves off from sharing in God’s holiness. The good angels who continue to gaze on the face of the Father are holy and act accordingly because they continue to share in His holiness.

Here lies the answer to the question of why I receive the Holy Spirit more than one time in my life. Some will ask, “If I received Him at Baptism do I need to receive Him again at Confirmation or for that matter week by week or even daily as He comes to me with God’s Word?” The Holy Spirit comes to us over and over again to share God’s holiness with us—to keep us holy. Like a piece of metal held in a flame—as long as the metal remains in the flame it shares in the fire’s heat and light. Remove it from the flame though and it will cool down, losing both the heat and light of the fire. The heat and light will linger for a time but kept away from the flame long enough it will go dark and grow cold. This is what happens with God’s holiness in us when we are deceived into thinking that we can get by without the Word of God.

As the Spirit joins me to Christ and Christ to me, He takes all that is Chris’s and delivers it to me.

The Holy Spirit makes us holy by connecting us to Jesus. He clothes us with Christ in Baptism so that Christ’s holiness becomes our holiness. He takes away our own unholiness, as He washes away our sin at the same time. What He begins there He carries on throughout our lives as He continually renews us in our life in Christ, as He deepens us in its truth through the Word and continues to wash away our sins in absolution. He confirms us in our baptismal reality as holy children of God every time He unites us to Christ at the altar, as He draws us there to receive Christ anew in His body and blood.

In all of these ways the Holy Spirit is at work to keep us in faith—that is, to keep us connected to Jesus. The early Lutherans were clear on the truth, that not only does the Holy Spirit create faith where and when He pleases, but He and He alone sustains it in us also. The beautiful thing about our salvation is that God does it all from A to Z. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is left in this poor miserable sinner’s hands. What I do will always end and fail but what God does endures forever. This truth is one that I must keep in mind as a pastor and encourage others to remember when it comes to the faith of others, whether it’s reaching out to the unchurched or restoring the wandering and lost. This is the Holy Spirit’s work and so we must look to Him, and Him alone, to be at work in and through us to do what He wills when and where it pleases Him.

Rev. Kurt Reinhardt is pastor of Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church in Kurtzville, Ontario.

Spirit of my faithful God

O Spirit of my faithful God
Come dwell within me by the Word;
For sin has left my heart so flawed,
I cannot choose Christ for my Lord.

O Spirit of the Holy One
Come purge me with your cleansing fire,
Lest I remain a wrath-doomed son,
Beset by sin’s unbound desire.

O Spirit of the Lord of Life
Come breathe in me your living breath,
Or gasping out my final strife
I’ll close my eyes in endless death.

O Spirit of the One in Three
Come bear me to the Father’s heart,
That in Your love-filled unity
By grace in Christ I share a part.

K. Reinhardt

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