John 14:14-16 – And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever— the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you.
The third person of the Trinity, the blessed Holy Spirit, is the most mysterious of all the members of the Godhead. He exists in a supportive role, carrying out the Father’s plan and revealing and glorifying Christ. He is the One Who is working on the earth today. His great day of ministry began on the Day of Pentecost. He is actively building God’s kingdom through yielded vessels in this world. Jonathan Edwards had some incredible insight about the ministry of the Spirit. Here is a quote from his teaching on the Trinity, along with three points about the Holy Ghost, “This is very consonant to the office of the Holy Ghost, or His work with respect to creatures, which is threefold: quicken, enliven and beautify all things; to sanctify intelligent [creatures]; and to comfort and delight them.”
» He quickens and beautifies all things. So, we read that, “The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” [Genesis 1:2], or of the chaos, to bring it out of its confusion, into harmony and beauty. So we read, Job 26:13, that God “By His spirit garnished the heavens.”
» Tis He that sanctifies created spirits, that is, He gives them divine love: for the Scripture teaches us that all holiness and true grace and virtue is resolvable into that, as its universal spring and principle.
» The third and last office of the Holy Spirit is to comfort and delight the souls of God’s people. And thus one of His names is the Comforter, and thus we have the phrase of “joy in the Holy Ghost.” I love all of this. The Holy Spirit makes us alive and beautifies us. We were dead in our sins and our lives were anything but beautiful. He made us alive by coming to live in us and from that moment, He began His work of cleaning us up and beautifying our lives. Next, the Holy Spirit sanctifies us. He does this by filling our hearts with the love of God. We love the Lord now and hate the things that made our lives miserable. It is the love of God poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that sanctifies us, for this is the work of the Spirit. The Spirit is also called the Comforter. The misery of this life tends to fill our hearts with sadness, but the Holy Spirit comes and comforts us and fills our hearts with joy. This is the work of God, the blessed Holy Spirit. He has filled us with joy beyond words.
