I BELIEVE IN THE HOLY SPIRIT

Stafford Greer, Lead Site Pastor

I had the privilege of growing up in a household with believing parents who loved the Lord and who served in the church in many areas. I went to church each Sunday, attended Sunday School, Youth Group, and Summer Camp. I heard many sermons, did sword drills (for the uninitiated in Christian culture, a sword drill is a competition you’d do in youth group or similar where you’d race to see who could first locate and read a passage of scripture that the leader called out… kind of fun really - maybe its a small group game to try this week?), and generally participated in the life of the church.

Even through all that teaching and exposure to scripture, there were elements of the faith that were under-emphasized, missing, or sometimes not talked about because it was unknown and even kind of scary.

Scripture was front and center (a good thing!), but there was an under-emphasis on the third person of the Trinity: Holy Spirit. It wasn’t that we didn’t believe in the Holy Spirit, it was more like we didn’t know how best to talk about him (yes, the Holy Spirit is a distinct person of the Godhead).

God as our Heavenly Father was an idea that we could wrap our minds around (we have fathers in our society). God as the Son in the person of Jesus was also more easily grasped (a historical figure who has forever shaped history and culture). But God as the Holy Spirit - or, if you were reading the King James Version (of which our church almost exclusively did), the Holy Ghost - was a concept that was much more challenging. As such, there was a joke in the tradition I was part of was that the Trinity was the Father, Son, and Holy Bible: something we could grasp much more concretely.

Even though Jesus taught about the Holy Spirit’s arrival and his role in the lives of believers (see chapters of the Gospel of John 14-16 for a quick primer), and the New Testament writers talked about the Holy Spirit in all of their writings, my church experience approached the Holy Spirit with reservation and even suspicion at times.

As we make our way through The Apostles Creed, we are getting to the line where we proclaim that we believe in the Holy Spirit. For some of us at RockPointe who might have an experience with the Holy Spirit anything like mine, you might be approaching this topic with your guard up, or even be a bit suspicious. Or perhaps you were part of a tradition that seemed to over-emphasize the Spirit and may have been hurt by others in the process and are wary about exploring this tenet of the faith.

No matter where you might be coming from, we want to take time to teach about the role of the Spirit in your life, what it means to encounter him, and, as Paul writes in Ephesians, to be filled with Holy Spirit (Ephesians 5:18b). We are also hosting a weekend seminar on Encountering the Holy Spirit where the concepts found in scripture will be further expounded on.

But like any relationship, it isn’t enough to know about someone - you have to meet them, encounter them, grow with them. This Encountering the Holy Spirit weekend will give you the opportunity to grow in your knowledge of and encounter Holy Spirit in new and fresh ways.

I look forward to us continuing to grow together in the faith, being filled with the Holy Spirit, so that we can be empowered to live out our purpose of seeing people near and far encounter and be transformed by Jesus.

Grace and peace to you.