I’m thinking of someone I love. Someone on one of the branches of our family tree. Because this person sort of intimidates me, I am friendly in person, yet don’t go out of my way to fully engage in conversation or in other social settings. We are polite, genial, and…not as comfortable with each other as I might wish.
I suspect this might be a reliable snapshot—or at least, analogy—of how many of us feel about the Holy Spirit. We know the Holy Spirit, the third member of the Godhead. But we’re sort of intimidated by Him. We’re polite, but definitely not comfortable with the Holy Spirit’s invisible, supernatural qualities. And so, rarely do we fully embrace or engage the Holy Spirit. As I said, we’re just not as comfortable with each other as we wish.
Maybe, like me, you grew up in a conservative evangelical church that –wary of excesses in some circles—all but ignored the Holy Spirit. Don’t get me wrong. We’re entirely comfortable with the Holy Spirit convicting the world of sin, judgment and the world to come. We’d just rather He not do what He does with too much supernatural flair. Frankly, anything that hints at the miraculous that’s outside the covers of our Bibles—we figure is fodder for snopes.com. We don’t trust it.
But the truth is, the Holy Spirit will not be boxed in by our beliefs of narrowness. And to largely dismiss the supernatural workings of the third member of the Trinity is to rob ourselves of a proper sense of the otherness of God.
Our discomfort notwithstanding, the Holy Spirit sometimes does do miraculous things. It’s time we embraced the Holy Spirit—and His supernatural workings. Not for the sake of “the show” or the wonders themselves…but for the sake of acknowledging the otherness of God.