Romans 15:13
Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Many of us have the idea that the Holy Spirit is something ‘out of this worldish’ and almost a bit eerie.
We can relate to God our Father in Heaven and Jesus our friend and savior who walked this very earth, but the Holy Spirit seems kind of arcaic and maybe even super-spiritual.
But that could not be further from the truth.
I have finally come to the end of reading ‘Beyond Ourselves’ by Catherine Marshall and I can honestly say that it is probably the one book that that most impacted my Christian life. Each and every chapter was a gem in itself as it was written out of her own life experiences and the experiences of those which she met along the way as she sought to find a deeper relationship and understanding with the Lord.
In her final chapter, she writes about the Holy Spirit and she puts it in such way that I just had to share with you.
Here are some of her thoughts and reasonings;
When Jesus walked the earth, he was a down to earth, easy to relate to, compassionate man. He spoke in the local dialect of those he mingled with, which would be very unlike the very ‘proper’ tones that are used in the King James version of the bible from the seventeenth century.
When Jesus spoke about the Holy Spirit, He use words like , ‘the Helper’, ‘the Spirit of Truth’, ‘the Teacher’, ‘the Comforter’, and ‘the Counsellor’.
The Holy Spirit was never meant to be something that we could not relate to or something we felt nervous or freaked out by.
On that last night that Jesus spent with His disciples, He explained that they were to continue in relationship with Himself, through the Spirit.
He went so far as to say to them “Do not be frightened that I am leaving you. In fact, it is to your advantage that I go away.”
He said ‘the Spirit will dwell within our bodies’.
He was offering the privilege of presenting our bodies to the Helper, so that He could not only be with us, but in us.
This would mean that God the father would be closer to man than He had ever been before.
Through the Spirit, we can have fellowship with the risen Christ.
Catherine Marshall shared the story of Marianne Brown, who was the wife of a Presbyterian minister in a small town in Pennsylvania. She was the mother of five children and the keeper of a rambling 11-roomed manse. She was kept exceptionally busy through all her duties of being a ministers wife, like attending church meetings, running a neighborhood kindergarten, continually hosting meals and being a support in the community. For her, life for a season was completely devoid of joy. It was busy …. even exhausting.
That was before her encounter with the Holy Spirit. it was not an eerie, super-spiritual encounter. It was a time when she opened up emotionally before the Lord, and He met her, exactly where she was at.
Her journey began with a simple prayer of support by a friend. One day, she off-loaded to a friend how she sometimes felt overcome by an incredibly dark mood. Her friend suggested they pray and afterwards she Marianne definitely felt lighter. So the two of them decided to get together regularly to pray. Soon the two of them turned into a small group. A family crisis brought this prayer group even closer together as they truly shouldered each other in prayer and the prayer brought startling results.
On one particular prayer night, Marianne found herself herself slipping to her knees as feelings of great gratitude for Gods goodness overwhelmed her. As she prayed, the words kept bubbling out of her mouth – and suddenly – right there, the Holy Spirit came.
These are her words of that beautiful experience;
“Gods Spirit took over and seemed to immerse my whole being – body, mind and spirit. The Spirit came like tidal waves of ‘joy, unspeakable and full of glory’ and inundated me. Torrents of Gods love swept over me for what seemed only a few minutes but lasted a long time. More than once, I wondered if my human body could bear the ecstasy and I both begged God to stop and feared that he would.
That night my emotions found perfect expression. I know now that my emotions had been starved. I had been only half-living because I had been half-feeling. In those minutes, God revealed more to me than I had learned in books. I knew that for the remainder of my life Jesus himself would be my first love. In Him, every desire I had ever had was fulfilled. And I knew that such communion with God is His will for every human being!”
Each person in that prayer group was stunned by what they had witnessed. They had all been weary of the emotionalism of Christianity, but here they had seen God move, first hand. They had seen God impact the life of someone they all knew and loved.
That night, reluctantly, they said goodnight to one another wondering about what had happened but also wanting the Holy Spirit and joy.
And in the weeks that followed, it was like a fire that started in Marianne and leaped from person to person. Each one was touched and each one receive the Holy Spirit.
Marianne Brown no longer needed to search for joy. she bubbled over with it. Her voice lilted with it. Life itself was joy to her.
The Holy Spirit gives us that joy. The world can bring us things that make us happy but the Holy Spirit gives us joy that comes from deep within and that cannot be contained.