Prayer and Spirit
Prayer and Spirit
Prayer is the pervasive activity of the Christian life. “Which father of you has a son who asks him for bread would give him a snake or if he asked him for an egg would give him a scorpion? If you then being evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit?” (Luke 11:13). He will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him. And he doesn’t mean the first time. He just means over and over again. We all need the Holy Spirit.
What do we need the Spirit for? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Think of those nine fruits. All those nine fruits are the kind of thing that make me act spontaneously better. For example, if I am deeply patient person because the Holy Spirit is at work in me and you say something that irritates me, I will spontaneously respond more kindly than if I am an impatient person.
So what are you praying for? For newness. I need the Holy Spirit. I need to be more loving, more joyful, more patient, more kind, more good, more self-controlled. Work on me, Holy Spirit. Take over and make me new. New so that I don’t just think right thoughts about the will of God, I love the will of God so deeply that I spontaneously respond to people in a godly way when I am not even thinking about it. That this how deeply we need to be renewed.
In closing is: How does the Holy Spirit do that? It is not magic. 2 Corinthians 3:18, “We all with unveiled face beholding the glory of the Lord are being changed.” You could translate that or paraphrase it: “Being renewed, we all with unveiled face beholding the glory of the Lord.” That happens here in the gospel especially. “We all with unveiled face beholding the glory, the beauty, the radiance of the Lord are being renewed from one degree of glory to another.”
That is how the Holy Spirit does it. The Holy Spirit was sent into the world to magnify Jesus Christ so that looking at Christ, at his glory and his beauty we would be changed into his likeness.