The Role the Spirit - Part 2

This is picking up where The Part of the Spirit - Part 1 leaves off.  

Paul speaking here of what he’s been doing says, “…in mighty signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God, so that from Jerusalem and round about to Illyricum I have fully preached the gospel of Christ”  (Romans 15:19). Given, he’s Paul and an apostle, (tho apostle only means one sent by another and is not meant to be a title), having been sent by Yeshua after his experience on the road to Damascus and realizing he had been wrong about who He is, his life was about sharing Yeshua wherever he purposefully went to do so.  But the point right here is this:  “with mighty signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God…he fully preached the gospel of Messiah.” My underlines are to give cause to what’s being said here.   

Paul is bearing witness to Yeshua with mighty – how big and extraordinary is mighty? – signs – signs of what? Signs of Yeshua’s power and caring still being with them, and wonders, things that were beyond their ability and knowledge and way of life, letting them know there is so much more to life and God’s love for them. All accomplished, Paul well knew, not by himself, but by the power of the Spirit of God, who was there brooding upon the waters with God when He was building the world, that same power that had manifested God’s power throughout Israel’s history, and that same Spirit that was with Yeshua in power to bring those mighty signs and wonders to reality.

Ponder that it is the same Spirit that chooses to indwell us who are Yeshua’s.   Paul, confident that the Spirit’s power would be there as he preached Yeshua, as he shared what he knew of Yeshua, fully preached the gospel, the good news of Yeshua.  To many who lived in the religious world they knew, there was no hope. Paul’s message was new. The fullness of the words of hope, even eternal hope that Paul spoke of, were validated by the miracles and the power of the Spirit.  

I want that Lord. So many people all around us need to know what we have but we are largely without the unction to share it.  Why is there no unction? It surely isn’t about You. Why are people without the power that is available to us?  Is it that we are not being disciples in the true sense of the word? We say we follow you, but Lord, it seems that it is in following You, Adonai Yeshua (Lord Jesus), just reading Your Word to see how to get to know You, I need to really engage You, to allow Your words and Your experiences to permeate my soul, as must have been the case with Your disciples. It seems you would have us make being like You one of our highest goals in life, not just “being a good Christian” which could, by many church standards, actually be contrary to Your ways.  It will take the power of the Spirit to reveal Yeshua to me and to empower me to be as He was while on the earth.  

But I need to be in the word for it to take place. Not just to read it, but to allow it to penetrate into the division between my soul and my spirit. My soul may be damaged by life, but my spirit is pure and of God and holy.  I thank God for the word of God, in whatever way it comes to me, “For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Hebrew 4:12). Selah!  So that what’s the goal here? To allow the word of God to make me holy.  This can only happen as I become like Yeshua; to be holy as Yeshua was holy in the thoughts and intentions of my heart. Only the Spirit can do that work as I make myself available to Him.

To the extent I know Yeshua, I know the Father. To the extent I know Yeshua’s holiness, I know the Father’s holiness. This is worth a life time of pondering and I dare to say, that the more we become aware of the holiness of God, the more sensitized to holiness we become. It has nothing to do with religion; religion in fact gets in the way of knowing His holiness. It can and does come only from Him and through His Spirit (of) the Holiness.   How wonderful! We can be increasingly like Yeshua who was and still is…” declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:4).

Which brings up the issue of the “Spirit of Holiness”. Power or authority without holiness can be quite destructive.  In Hebrew the term Holy Spirit is rendered Ruakh haKodesh, which translates as Spirit the Holiness.  There is no verb to be in Hebrew so they wouldn’t say the “of” as we do. The ha, means the.  He is Spirit (of) the Holiness – the holiness of God. We are so used to saying the Holy Spirit that we can completely miss that we’re talking about holiness which cannot be compared to anything else in the world; it is only and entirely of God.  We can speak of the Spirit in many ways and manifestations, but we must remember that He is first and always the Spirit (of) the Holiness of God.   

We can think of the Spirit as power and of signs and wonders but first, He is the Holiness of God manifested to us through those ways.  Perhaps if we began to think of the gifts of the Spirit and the manifestations of the Spirit we experience as God’s expression of His holiness to us, we would be more impacted by His presence and consequently become more open to receiving His love, for His holiness is mutually inclusive with His love. One does, and cannot, exist without the other.  When we begin to grasp that His love is the expression of His holiness, and His holiness is the expression of His love, this reality is likely to open up a whole new revelation of what we have been granted by the Great Grace of our God.  

Notice we don’t say Miracle Spirit, or Power Spirit, but He has been made known to us as the Spirit of Holiness before anything else.  When healings and miracles take place, whether through Yeshua or one of us, it is meant to be wrapped in holiness and to make us happily aware of God’s love toward us. How much more would we be awed by His power on our behalf when we see His love as part of His expression of holiness toward us, toward wanting to make us whole and to lift us out of any darkness, whether it be sin, sickness, depression, poverty….   The list could go on and on.

There is, of course, no darkness in Him. What then is darkness? Awareness of God’s absolute goodness, which is a part of His holiness, is unhindered light. We don’t see such light on the earth, but as we become closer to God and know Him more, very often the light of God can be seen in the eyes of someone we recognize as one of Yeshua’s followers.  My experience is that often we can know one another by the light we see in that light in someone’s eyes.  I’ve experienced it myself and have asked them if they are believers, and the wonderful fellowship we have for a few minutes.  Also, we become aware of darkness for what it is, unholiness.  Yeshua certainly could see it far more than we do, but we have a tendency to shun the darkness and flee from it, meaning having little or nothing to do with people we see living in darkness.  (Sects of the believing community, attempting to set themselves apart unto holiness to please God, often led to isolating themselves so that they had no influence for the Lord on anyone else, beginning with the Essenes.)  Yeshua shocked many of the people who followed Him and especially the religious folks, by embracing those most in darkness and making them the very ones He sought to make whole, which is to say, to bring them into the light.  Dare we do the same?     

The Father’s ultimate character and nature is of holiness. He cannot be unholy. Nor can anything or anyone come near His holiness, which is why Yeshua is our mediator to make us holy in order to enable us one day to come before the Father. How grateful I am for His generous and courageous heart.  I expect by now some of my readers are thinking that this emphasis on holiness can make them weird and other-worldy. Quite the contrary. It will make us more loving, kinder, more helpful, and easier to live with. And it may make us more likely to be like the Samaritan who helped the man fallen on the road that the Pharisee wouldn’t touch. It will also likely make us much more peaceful. Like Yeshua.

To draw some final perspective here in this meditation (Is anyone still with me?), it would seem that our first priority in seeking the Holy Spirit’s power and presence, is to ask Him for the power to be holy and to ask Him to reveal to us through His word, just what He means by holiness.  This would be to know Him as He is.  Paul certainly desired to be holy unto God as His primary longing.  So did King David. So did so many and we can read through Scripture and see the correlation between trying to live  a holy life, according to the context of Torah and the prophets, the only books of the bible the new testament believers had. It proved sufficient.  So that it appears that Paul knew how to let the Spirit speak through Him without getting in His way, so that he could say, “my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Cor. 5:4). 

If you, dear readers, wish to pray with me, do so here:  Lord, I want that demonstration of the Spirit, and of power in my life. I want to know You more than I ever have. And I want to share it with others who are like minded and others as well, who don’t know you at all yet. Establish, Lord, a community of love and the power of the Holy Spirit such that you can add daily to our numbers. B’shem Yeshua, (In the name of Yeshua), Amen.