Apparently, I am good for nothing but sleeping on the couch and making pitiful phone calls when I awake.  Taking Tylenol non-stop along with two types of cold medicine, I still am coughing, congested, achy, and  running a fever.  I certainly do not remember the last time I felt so crappy.  And I am being very, very, very childish for I am rather concerned at how fatigued I am.  Wet noodle to the nth degree.  SIGH.

Kashi doesn't not understand why I am not playing with him or taking him on his walks.

The bright spot of my day was that Pastor Skyped me from bible study so that I could participate a bit.  I wanted to ask a few more questions near the end, but he was racing through the last verses (my notes stink at that point), so I hope I can remember to bring it up next time.  It has to do with another common reference I find amongst the psalms with regard to where the psalmist stands...or his footing.  Perhaps I will work on framing the questions before next week by trying to write about them here....later, when I am not so tired!

For now, I thought I would try to articulate what I learned about the Holy Spirit, but I am, in fact, rather chicken to do so.  I still need to study more and ask more questions....

However, here goes nothing:

The Holy Spirit is not One about whom I've had many sermons or Sunday School lesson or bible study topic.  When I was a missionary, one of the subjects I ended up teaching was seventh and eighth grade bible class.  I had no curriculum, so I rather blithely decided to teach the Trinity.  Ambitious, I know.  However, things went fairly well until we got to the Holy Spirit.  I knew little.  The resources I had been using mentioned little.  In Protestantism, the role of the Holy Spirit is sort of relegated to being likened to a dove.  I am fairly certain I heard Him taught as our Helper, but helping how? 

So, John 16:8-11:

And He, when He comes, will convict the world concerning sin, and righteousness, and judgment; concerning sin, because they do not believe in Me, and concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father and you no longer behold Me; and concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world has been judged.

The work of the Holy Spirit is thus, to show us our Sin, to reveal Jesus as the Son of God, and to proclaim His work on the cross.  No small role, eh?  He brings us to the Truth...the truth about ourselves, the truth about Christ, and the truth about His work on the cross.

To help me better understand, Pastor had another one of his drawings for me, which I turned into a graphic so that I could post it here.  In short, the Father sends us the Son, who sends us the Holy Spirit, who takes us to the Son, who takes us to the Father.  That was perfectly clear, right?

As I have written before, it all comes down to original sin.  You either believe it or not.  If you do, then you must believe in Objective Grace, for being in sin prevents us, on our own, to fear God, to love Him, and to trust Him. Faith, then, is a gift in and of itself, its beginning and its increase.  Thus, praying for faith is actually praying for the Holy Spirit to work in our lives, to teach us, to reveal the Word to us, to help us in our every need.

One of my favorite verse snippets is in Acts 17:28:  for in Him we live and move and have our very being.  For me, that sums things up nicely.  Without Christ, we are dead.   Plain and simple.  Yet understanding the magnitude of this can take a lifetime.  And, as I know full well, the devil will spend that lifetime setting obstacle after obstacle in your path as you do so.  Thus, Christ sends a Helper, that we, even in our sin, even in a sinful world, may walk in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior.

Pastor also had a very interesting lesson on why we do not see the extraordinary gifts of the Holy Spirit that the apostles bestowed this day.

We read together Acts 8:4-15, where Philip was teaching the Samaritans.  He had those extraordinary gifts and used them as he taught them.  The Samaritans believed and they were baptized.  Then Peter and John came and lay hands upon them so that they might receive the Holy Spirit.  The Samaritans couldn't believe without faith, without the Holy Spirit working in their lives, so their baptism was real.  What Peter and John did was to bring the visible signs of the Holy Spirit so that people might know the Holy Spirit was working in their lives.  Those visible signs were important among the Gentiles, signs to show that Christ had come for all men, not just the children of Israel.

If you notice, Philip was given those extraordinary gifts but could not give them himself.  Pastor believes that on the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came and rested upon them, the "them" was not the 120 gathered but the twelve, bestowing upon them those extraordinary gifts and the ability to give them to others, so that the visible testimony might be evident as the church was being established.  Those signs were evidence of the apostles' authority. Thus, as the apostles died, the ability to give the gifts died with them; then as the first generation of the church died out, those extraordinary gifts died out altogether.  They were no longer needed as the church had been established among all men. The writings of the early church fathers point to this

An interesting note Pastor added was that the Greek of the New Testament, a common sort of Greek, Koine, also died out around that time, with classical Greek becoming the vernacular.

The speaking in tongues was not the gibberish that some speak today, claiming they are speaking in tongues, but rather the Holy Spirit giving the teachers the tongue of the people gathered, each heard in his own language so that language was no barrier to the Truth. 

Finally, we also talked about the main difference between Protestants and Lutherans was how the Holy Spirit comes to us.  Lutherans believe that the means by which the Holy Spirit comes to us are those outlined in the bible as promises of where He will be:  in baptism and the body and blood of Jesus Christ (the Lord's Supper) and the Living Word.  Translation:  He comes to us in Word and Sacrament.

Hmm...did you follow all that?

Time for another nap....