Holy Spirit Musings
This is the devotion I sent to the people of St. Timothy Lutheran Church.
With Pentecost approaching, our minds move to thoughts about that mysterious, hard to grasp Holy Spirit. We have a better handle on the Father and the Son, but that Spirit is something else again.
You just can’t pin the Holy Spirit down. Even gender associated with the Spirit can’t be understood as with the Father and Son. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the word for wind or spirit is feminine, so it’s completely proper to refer to the Holy Spirit as she and her, right? Ok, then we move to the Greek language in which the New Testament was written and what do we find? Feminine? No, neuter! In the New Testament, the Holy Spirit is an “It.” Hmm, as Luther wrote, “What does this mean?”
It means that the Holy Spirit has a nature that just refuses to be pinned down. When Jesus and Nicodemus were talking, Jesus put it this way, “’The wind [same word as spirit] blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit’” (John 3:8).
As I was praying this morning, a very old song went through my mind by the Medical Mission Sisters, “Spirit of God.” The chorus is “Blow, blow, blow till I be but breath of the Spirit blowing in me.”
And so my prayer today is that the Holy Spirit will blow through each of us, do some housecleaning and renew us. How about you?
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You just can’t pin the Holy Spirit down. Even gender associated with the Spirit can’t be understood as with the Father and Son. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the word for wind or spirit is feminine, so it’s completely proper to refer to the Holy Spirit as she and her, right? Ok, then we move to the Greek language in which the New Testament was written and what do we find? Feminine? No, neuter! In the New Testament, the Holy Spirit is an “It.” Hmm, as Luther wrote, “What does this mean?”
It means that the Holy Spirit has a nature that just refuses to be pinned down. When Jesus and Nicodemus were talking, Jesus put it this way, “’The wind [same word as spirit] blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit’” (John 3:8).
As I was praying this morning, a very old song went through my mind by the Medical Mission Sisters, “Spirit of God.” The chorus is “Blow, blow, blow till I be but breath of the Spirit blowing in me.”
And so my prayer today is that the Holy Spirit will blow through each of us, do some housecleaning and renew us. How about you?
Picture
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