“Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters” (Gen 1:2).
The Holy Spirit appears on the first and last pages of the Bible and very frequently in between, yet he has been called the forgotten God because non-charismatic evangelicals tend to overlook him. This is inappropriate not only because he is part of our triune God but also because he is a fundamental part of the Christian life.
When God acts, he acts through the working of the Holy Spirit. When he wants people to do something for him, he sends his Spirit. The Spirit is the power for the Christian life and the work of the Church. “Without Him, people operate in their own strength and only accomplish human-size results. ... But when believers live in the power of the Spirit, the evidence in their lives is supernatural. The church cannot help but be different, and the world cannot help but notice.”1
When we think about the Spirit, we need to keep in mind that everything we know about YHWH, the triune God, applies to him just as it applies to the Father and the Son. But he has roles that he alone plays, just like the Father and the Son. So we will look at those roles and see why the Nicene Creed calls the Spirit “the Lord, the giver of life.”
1 Francis Chan, Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit
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Part of Christianity 101
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