24. What Is a Life-Giving Spirit?
The Holy Spirit is the least understood part of God revealing Himself through other Persons. Yet it is the Holy Spirit who comes to us as the first part of the knowledge of God, even before Word enters into our faith. And the Holy Spirit is the One who does all the doing of God.We do not define the Holy Spirit, indeed the verses on the Pneuma of God do not give us an adequate framework for any sort of definition. In complete contrast, the Holy Spirit is the One who defines us.
Yet John leaves out the Holy Spirit in his constant reference to our knowing of Father and Son. Knowing the Father and Jesus Sent is life eonian, it is by the Spirit that we know.
The New Testament does give us, however, a number of things that the Holy Spirit is to us. And first, the Holy Spirit is the One who gives life.
Life, the springing forth of life, the imparting of life, the reproduction of life, this is the primary quality of God's precious Holy Spirit.
Lesson 24.1 Defining Holy Spirit begins by addressing this inability to find any definition of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. The lesson continues with laying out those qualities of the Spirit as He defines us.
Lesson 24.2 Living IN the Spirit demonstrates the contiguous relationship between the Holy Spirit and what we call "heaven." The lesson then explores how you and I live every moment IN that same Holy Spirit and how we are one body of Christ by that Spirit.
Lesson 24.3 Christ By the Spirit investigates the reality that Christ is a many-membered body and that it is the Holy Spirit who not only forms Christ in us, but causes Christ to be among us as one body as we drink together of one Spirit.