The Personal God as Holy Spirit

It matters that God as Holy Spirit is a personality rather than an object not merely for doctrinal reasons, but for practical ones too. In John 14 Jesus referred to the Holy Spirit with the personal pronoun and in doing so broke the rules of greek grammar - the 'spirit' in greek should be neuter - so it must matter!

When we treat the Spirit as an object we fall into some equal but opposite heresy. Either we fear the influence of the Holy Spirit or we concentrate too much on His benefits, loving the power instead of the Person. Both the fascination with the power of God in the charismatic church and the relegation of the Holy Spirit to less than God is in the conservative church are unhealthy and unbalanced. 

They arguably come from the same place too; a failure to recognise that the Holy Spirit is a Personality who is God Himself.

Interesting picture

Have a vision bigger than your life

I just read something which made me think about how I live my life. Here it is:

"These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth." Hebrews 11.13

'These all' refers to people like Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham and Sarah. In other words biblical heroes. These were people who acted on faith, which is here defined as the assurance of things unseen. What that means is that they lived their lives based on what they thought God was leading them into. They didn't know for sure but they followed their best instinct and relied on it for their lives. So often we describe faith as something we know, but it would seem that it actually has far more to do with what we don't know and how we live in that place of unknowing.

More than that though, these people had a big vision. In fact that vision for life was so big that none of them lived to see it happen. It says instead that they died 'not having received the things promised'. I live the majority of my life for such small things and with such small vision. How different it would be if I lived for something bigger than I could ever achieve within my lifetime. What would that something even be? I would certainly need a different perspective to even imagine it.

These people recognise in their lives more than their words that they are 'strangers and exiles in the earth'. That is to say that they're able to live for something bigger than themselves because they know that they were made for something bigger than they would ever be able to experience in their lifetime.

Jesus says that to live like this is to 'store up our treasure in heaven'.