The Holy Spirit
What role does the Holy Spirit play in your prayers?
Verse of the Day
‘So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.” ‘
Today’s Devotional
In Luke 11, when Jesus was asked by the disciples to teach them to pray, He gives them the Lord’s prayer, gives a lesson about persistence in prayer, reminds us to ask, seek, and knock, and then ends with a reminder that the Holy Spirit is a gift the Father is willing to give us.
Today’s prayer lesson comes from Andrew Murray’s With Christ in the School of Prayer. This is what he says about prayer and the Holy Spirit:
- The Holy Spirit is the first of the Father’s gifts and one the He delights in giving. The Holy Spirit is therefore the gift we should seek first.
- It is impossible to conceive of God bestowing any higher gift on His child than His own Spirit. God is what He is through His Spirit – the Spirit is the very life of God. Just think what it means for God to give His own Spirit to His child on earth.
- As the Spirit of the Father, He fills our hearts with the love with which the Father loved the Son, and teaches us to live in it.
- As the Spirit of the Son, He breathes into us the childlike liberty, devotion, and obedience in which the Son lived on earth.
- The one necessary element in the spiritual life is the Holy Spirit. The holy Spirit is the appointed intermediary whose special work is to convey Christ and everything there is in Him to us. He is the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.
- If we yield ourselves entirely to the will of the Spirit and let Him have His way with us, He will manifest the life of Christ within us.
- If there is one thing we should pray for that will draw us to the Father’s throne and keep us there, it is the Holy Spirit.
- The Spirit meets the believer’s every need in the variety of gifts that He has to dispense. Just look at the names He bears. He is the Spirit of Grace, Faith, Adoption, Assurance, Truth, Prayer, Judgment, Holiness, Power, and Glory.
- Surely the child of God needs only one thing to be able to really live as a child of God – to be filled with this Holy Spirit.
- As God’s children, we have already received the Spirit. But we still need to pray for His special gifts as we require them. We need to pray also for His complete possession and unceasing guidance.
- We are like a branch that is already filled with the sap of the vine and is crying for the continued and increasing flow of that sap. Just as the branch needs more sap to bring its fruit to perfection, the believer, rejoicing in the possession of the Spirit, still thirsts and cries for more.
- As we pray to be filled with the Spirit, we shouldn’t look for the answer in our feelings. All spiritual blessings must be received – that is, accepted or taken – in faith.
- Believe that the Father gives the Holy Spirit to His praying child. Even while I pray, I must say in faith, “I have what I ask, and the fullness of the Spirit is mine.”
I found this chapter from Andrew Murray’s book very convicting. I don’t pray often for a continued and increasing filling of the Holy Spirit. Well, I do now, but I didn’t before I read this. If my desire is to be transformed to live like Jesus, and I have His Spirit within me, why am I not asking the Father for MORE of the Spirit’s power to be released in my life? Why am I not asking for the Spirit’s help to be more fully submitted to the Father and His will? By my will, I cannot do any of these things. But we have been given the same Spirit within us that raised Jesus from the dead. Romans 8:11 says, “The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you. And just as God raised Christ Jesus from the dead, he will give life to your mortal bodies by this same Spirit living within you.”
My prayer today is for the Spirit to fill me to the point that my humanness has no room to stay, that I will be fully submitted to the working of the Spirit, that the Spirit will teach to come to the Father in prayer, and the Spirit will empower me to do whatever the Father asks.
Journal Prompts
Answer only the questions that seem relevant to you today.
Do you ever pray to be filled with the Holy Spirit? What has been the result?
How do you rely on your emotions instead of faith for the answers to your prayers?
What gifts or power of the Holy Spirit would you most like to receive? Are those gifts for God’s purposes in your life or to fulfill your own desires?
How can you be fully submitted to the Spirit and ask to be filled with the Spirit?