The purpose for the power

In John 16:7, Jesus tells His disciples that He will be leaving them, alluding to His death, resurrection, then ascension to Heaven. But He tells them it is good that He is leaving them so He can send them the Advocate, otherwise known as the Holy Spirit.

There is much confusion about the purpose, person and power of the Holy Spirit. Many people have reduced Him to a feeling of warm fuzzies and chills. Others treat Him like a spiritual high, like a drug. Still others believe Him to be all about making us feel good about ourselves.

When we look at the Scripture, we see that Jesus taught, corrected, refined and empowered His disciples to do His will and build the Kingdom of Heaven. The role of the Holy Spirit is the same. The “better” that Jesus spoke about is the reality that with the physical presence of Jesus, we had God with us. Now with the presence of the Holy Spirit, we have God IN us.

His purpose is to empower, teach, refine, correct, and give understanding so that we may be effective witnesses to others for Christ, and to reproduce Him in others by discipling new believers to do the same (See Acts 1:8 and Matthew 28:18-20).

He does this by cleaning up our lives to make us more effective (Galatians 5:16 and Galatians 3:3). Also by producing fruit to cause our example to draw people to Him ( Galatians 5:22-23). He re-aligns our priorities with His so that our heart is all about building His Kingdom ( Galatians 5:24-25). If we let Him, He will even speak His words through our mouths, drawing others to Christ ( Acts 2:11 and 37).

In essence, the Holy Spirit’s purpose is to make us more effective “bait”, causing us to look more like Jesus, so we can be fishers of people. Bait is only effective if you put it in the water, so let’s get fishing!