The Melody of the Holy Spirit

I’ve found that a good spiritual exercise is to see myself standing before Jesus in heaven and listening to what He has to say to me. This particular episode occurred on December 21, 2021.

“I am standing before you, Jesus, in the City of Light, and You ask, ‘What did you do for Me in the places I put you?'”

I hesitate before realizing what He truly meant. The answer I’m to give is not that I did this and that for Him. “Lord, I did what You asked me to do in the places You led me. I was obedient. I did not look for things to do and then do them under my own power. I listened and I followed.” When I finished, He smiled.

This first of the beatitudes Jesus taught at the Sermon on the Mount had always been one of those verses that sounded good to me but that I really didn’t understand. In March of 2019, I decided to do a bit of research to try to get a grasp of what Jesus probably meant.

Spirit means breath in Greek (pneuma) and in Hebrew (ruah) and in Latin (spiritus). In Genesis 2:7, God breathed into Adam and gave him life, so spirit means life.

Now the verse made sense to me. Blessed are those who are poor in their own life and rich in God’s life. As John the Baptist said about himself, “He must become greater; I must become less.”

In the early afternoon of August 22, 2016, I prayed this wandering prayer on my way driving to Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis.

“Oh Lord, all the cars on the road, all the people in the city, who am I on my own? Only an insignificant identity, nobody, unknown except by a few, of no significance or status, of no great value to the world, a lonely soul in a vast sea of humanity.

“BUT, as a servant of our Lord Jesus Christ and as a warrior in His mighty army, I have status,  have personality, have importance, have places to go and people to meet as His messenger. I am known by God, loved by Him, of great significance as I help advance His kingdom here on earth, unafraid, unlonely, not a me but a we (with more of Him and less of me). Thank You Jesus for Your presence within me. Amen.”

Every now and again we need to confess what we believe in order to remind ourselves Whose we are and why we are here. This is a poem I wrote some years back that I read whenever I need my faith strengthened.

I believe in God my Father;
I believe in Christ His Son.
I believe in the Holy Spirit;
I believe that the three are One.

I believe in the love of Jesus;
I believe that He died for me.
I believe in the resurrection;
I believe in eternity.

I believe in the truth of Scripture;
I believe Jesus speaks to me.
I believe in grace abounding;
I believe what I cannot see.

The question is not what you believe about Jesus Christ – His virgin birth, His miracles, His death on the cross and resurrection, His ascension into heaven – but what you do with that belief. That is, how do you live out your life accepting what you accept and knowing what you know? How do you follow Jesus every minute of every day? That’s the essential question.

“The Holy Spirit does not perform His work in us in some disjointed, haphazard way. He does not exist to simply to help us cope with life, to get us through crises and to see us through lonely nights. He is not there just to pick us up and pump in a little more strength before putting everything back in place.

“Everything the Holy Spirit does is related to His reason for coming – to bring us home as a prepared bride. He acts only in keeping with that mission. Yes, He is our Guide, our Comforter, our Strength in time of need. But He uses every act of deliverance, every manifesting of Himself in us, to make us more suitable as a bride.”

David Wilkerson

To be continued next week.

The Apostle John, the mystic of old, was above all the rest, the one whom Jesus loved. Why do you think that was?

I believe John was more surrendered to Jesus than any of the other apostles, the one who was closer to him than all the rest, the one who leaned back into Jesus’ bosom at the Last Supper, and the one entrusted to be given the great revelation that ends the Bible.

How about you? Are you more like John or more like the impetuous Peter who ran hot and cold and denied Jesus three times. Yes, Peter was reinstated on the shore of the Sea of Galilee after the Resurrection, and he did mighty things to advance the gospel, but John was still the one who chose what was better, just like Mary did in spite of Martha’s bickering that she wasn’t doing enough to help with all the work.

Sitting on a white bench on the Khyber Road in the middle of Phoenix Park on the western edge of Dublin, Ireland, on a windy day. October 5, 2018

The wind blows from behind me, but I don’t know where it comes from. And it passes by me into the trees on the other side of the pass, but where it goes and if it stops someplace after that, I don’t know.

So it is with the Holy Spirit.

For it is the least among you all who is the greatest. Luke 9:48

The following took place at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, an Anglican church in Dublin, Ireland, on May 11, 2016.

This morning at 9:00 Matins, I sat two pews behind an old woman in a shawl who caught my attention. After the service, I approached her, at the guiding of the Holy Spirit, and gave her the golden Cross pen I had brought with me to give to the most humble person I could find in Ireland.

Her name was Audrey, and when I told her the Lord prompted me to give the most precious thing I had with me to her, tears came to her eyes, like glistening beads of water on a chalice.

She spoke to me for 20 minutes about the Holy Spirit, often putting her hands on mine. She said the 57th Psalm read that morning was for me.

Audrey is the most humble person I’ve ever met. I prayed with her this morning that the spirit of her humbleness would fall on me. She prayed a long prayer for me that the Lord would shower me with His favor. She also told me to walk the streets of Dublin aimlessly to experience the character of Ireland. It was a marvelous day I’ll never forget.

In the natural world, two persons can’t occupy the same space at the same time. In the Spiritual realm, three persons can occupy the same place at the same time. God is three distinct personalities and yet one God. That’s how things work in the heavenly dimension we’ll witness when we’re translated from earth to heaven. And we can get a taste of that dimension here on earth.

When I accepted Jesus as my Savior, then four persons could occupy the same place at the same time – the Father, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and me.

Christ brought that dimension with Him when He came to earth, the dimension we can live in if we are in Christ, but not in our natural sinful state. That’s why Jesus came – to take away our sins so we can live in God’s kingdom here on earth and in eternity to come. The three dimensional world has no place for Jesus.