Many people are quick to understand what is meant by “Father” or “Son” (i.e., Jesus Christ) yet seem uncomprehending when they hear “Holy Spirit.” In the earliest Christian congregations, however, the Spirit was identified with startlingly vivid experience. Paul asks one group, “Did you receive the Spirit through works of the law or through hearing with faith?” (Galatians 3:2). It’s as though he said, “That raging headache you have now: did you get it from having a brick fall on your head or from drinking ultra-cold ice water?” The one matter that is undeniable is the headache. In other words, the apostle was appealing to their experience of the Spirit and asking them to recall the means (believing the gospel) by which a reality had seized them that was as undeniable as it was glorious.

The experience of early Christians was nothing less than astonishing. The Spirit had brought the gospel to them “not only in word . . . but also in power and with full conviction” (1 Thessalonians 1:5). The Spirit had suffused them with joy when, harassed and discriminated against, there was no earthly reason for their rejoicing.

Week after week at their worship the Spirit vivified the preaching and rendered it the vehicle of Christ’s seizing them afresh. The Spirit inspired their worship, making their praise lively and life-giving. The Spirit collapsed walls within congregational life so that hostile stand-offs gave way to genuine fellowship.

The Spirit was the power by which they were fortified to resist—and more than resist, oppose by exemplifying something better—the lurid blandishments of a social environment whose sex ethic bore no resemblance to the command and claim of the Holy God. (The church in Corinth, it must be remembered, existed in a seaport that was as notorious for its sex trade as are certain cities in Southeast Asia today.)

“Spirit” is the English translation of “pneuma,” the Greek word meaning “wind,” “breath” or “air.” A pneumatic drill has power enough to crack reinforced concrete, overcoming all resistance. At the same time, the highest-speed dental drills, air-driven, facilitate ultra-delicate surgery even as they relieve pain and promote health. A car with an airless tire goes nowhere, and any animated creature without breath is dead. Everywhere in Scripture, pneuma is associated with power and life.

Yet the risen, ruling Lord Jesus Christ pours forth the Holy Spirit in order that His people—alive, alert, active in His name—might be rendered holy inwardly and display it outwardly. Such holiness must never be confused with religious knowledge. While the Hebrew word for “holy” means “separate” or “different,” the difference the Holy Spirit makes isn’t trivial. It has to do, rather, with what lies at the root or foundation of life.

Indeed, the “Root Commandment” of Scripture is God’s command in Leviticus 19:2, “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” In fact Scripture is so preoccupied with holiness, both God’s and ours, that variations of this commandment appear on virtually every page. God is clearly consumed with reaffirming His own holiness in the wake of sinners having denied it, and re-establishing our holiness in the wake of sinners having turned away from it.

The purpose of the cross, the centrepoint of Scripture, isn’t that we should be forgiven—it’s that we should be rendered holy, forgiveness being the first step toward our holiness. Obviously nothing is more important than the recovery of our holiness, not least because without it we shall not “see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14). In other words, Spirit-wrought holiness is the qualification for our ultimate blessedness, our apprehension of God in which we find ourselves “lost in wonder, love and praise,” to quote an old hymn.

If we are going to be “lost” in this sense, we must first become “lost” in a different sense now: the world must be crucified to us as we are crucified to the world (Galatians 6:14). In other words, the Holy Spirit empowers Christ’s people for holy living as there ceases to be anything in us that a fallen world can exploit and there ceases to be anything in a fallen world that we crave. Holiness means that we can’t be co-opted by sin’s agenda and we don’t long for what sin offers.

At this point holiness is synonymous with freedom. Christ’s people, being made holy through the power of the Spirit, are being freed from all that inhibits their full-flowering as children of God and at the same time are being freed for their vocation as servants of the Master Himself. Now there springs forth from them transparent love, uncontrived joy, peace patience, kindness, “gentle strength” (meekness) and self-control. Freed from the clutches of their depraved self, Christ’s people cease to live in themselves and live elsewhere—specifically, “in” two others: in Christ by faith, and in their neighbours through love as they assist the needy, suffer with the pained and share the shame of the disgraced (to paraphrase Martin Luther).

Yet the Holy Spirit renders God’s people holy not merely as an end in itself. The Spirit moves us to witness, vivifies our witness and guarantees its efficacy. To be sure, witness is always the responsibility of the Church. (In Acts, no one comes to faith in Jesus Christ apart from the community’s witness.) At the same time, only the Holy Spirit renders such witness effective. Testimony is our responsibility; success is God’s.

Whenever the Church forgets this (usually because we find the Spirit moving too slowly), it attempts to engineer the success of its own mission. The result is counter-productive, since the Church, in its impatience, coerces people psychologically or even physically. When it coerces, the Church advertises its unbelief, since it plainly doesn’t trust God to do what God alone can.

Genuinely to believe in the Holy Spirit, however, is to pursue our responsibility concerning witness while trusting God to honour His.

It is much the same with the Kingdom-work that Christians undertake. We must work as if everything depended on us, and pray as if everything depended on the Spirit. In fact there’s no “as if” about it. Everything does depend on us even as all effectiveness, all kingdom-success, depends on the Spirit alone.