Goodbook messages arrive every Tuesday and Friday with a Scripture
reading and ideas for how to apply the reading in our lives. We are reading
through the book of Acts. For additional Scripture reading, you can follow the
Advanced Track.Reading: Acts 19:1-2
While Apollos was at Corinth, Paul took the road through the interior and arrived at Ephesus. There he found some disciples and asked them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” They answered, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”
Application:
Have you heard about the Holy Spirit? Francis Chan recently released a book called the Forgotten God. It is all about the Holy Spirit. Apparently, people centuries later still need to hear and learn about the Holy Spirit.
I can completely understand the difficulty. We get the idea of God the Father, the Creator of all. And we get the idea of God the Son, Jesus Christ, who came to earth as a person. Both of those concepts are tangible. But then there is this other aspect of God that is not so tangible. When the biblical authors tried to describe this aspect of God, the best word they could come up with is a word like “wind” or “breath.” The Hebrew word for Spirit in the Old Testament is ruach, which means “wind, breath.” The Greek word for Spirit in the New Testament is pneuma, which also means a movement of air, like the wind or a breath.
The wind is a little harder to grasp … literally. You can’t see it. You cannot really touch it or hold it. But you can feel it. You can see its effects. God’s Spirit is like that. You might not be able to see it. You definitely will never be able to contain it or put it in a box. But it is all around us and moving through us. It is gentle and powerful. You can feel it and see its effects.
When Jesus described the Spirit, he used the same terminology. In John 3:8, Jesus says, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
The Spirit is harder to explain and understand, but the Spirit is worth getting to know. The Spirit was a part of creating the universe (Genesis 1:2-3). The Spirit raised Jesus from the dead (Romans 8:11). The Spirit gives us divine abilities and forms us together as the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:7-13). The Spirit is sent by the Father and the Son to be our Advocate and our Counselor – to guide us in all truth about sin, righteousness, judgment, and our future (John 15:26-16:15). The Spirit worked powerfully in and through the believers in Acts. I believe the Spirit longs to breathe a fresh, powerful breath of air through believers today.
1) Take a few moments to learn more about the Holy Spirit and how the Spirit desires to be active in your life. Look up some references for the Spirit in your Bible or do a search on Biblestudytools.com. Read a book about the Spirit. Let me know if you need any help.
Share your comments and application ideas…
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