Who is the Holy Spirit?

Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Most in America have heard of the trinity and quite possibly could name the three persons that make up the one God. Some may picture the Father as a Zeus-like figure hiding in the clouds. Some may picture the Son as a 30-year old Caucasian male with blue eyes and a beard. But when it comes to the Holy Spirit...no one has a clue, so it seems.

Growing up in a church that taught the trinity over and over again, I began to notice a pattern. People would talk about God, the Father, being in charge of all things, creating the world and ordering it according to His Divine purposes. The Son was part of the Father's plan: when God came to humankind as a man because imperfect humans could not approach the perfect Father.

Oh yeah, and the Holy Spirit was there, too. He was hovering over the waters at the beginning of time in Genesis and came like a dove during Jesus' baptism. He was the one who filled everyone up at Pentecost so that they could speak many languages at once.

The Holy Spirit, however, is often shunted aside or not mentioned. I read a book once called Worship, Community, and the Triune God of Grace where James B. Torrance calls for worship in the church that involves the whole Trinity. The problem is, though some people may understand God is just, holy, and merciful, and think about Jesus as forgiving and kind, they don't know how to think about the Holy Spirit. They simply haven't been taught.

Some churches deal with this by over-emphasizing the Holy Spirit in His gift-giving ability, some churches are so afraid of doing that they do not teach the Holy Spirit at all.

The Holy Spirit is not some magic power we tap into. He is a person of God, part of the three in one. If Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, the Holy Spirit is God within us, as best as we can place it with English prepositions. The Holy Spirit is the one who comforts, who counsels, who directs our thoughts back to the Father and works to convict us of our sin.

We are reunited with God the Father through Jesus the Son and our connection to God is sealed with the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:13). We can never be separated from God because of the third person of the trinity. That is worth teaching in today's evangelical churches.