Well, I brought this up about four weeks ago now that we're going to spend a few weeks on the Holy Spirit. And today we're going to start with the question, what is the Holy Spirit? And the first question is, why did you use the word what? The Holy Spirit is a who, so maybe we should say, who is the Holy Spirit? We refer to him as he, because he's a person. The Spirit is not a thing, but a person. But when we ask the question, what is the Spirit? What we're asking is, well, like, what is it made of? In the same way that we might ask, what is a person? Who is he is not quite the same as, what is he? So we're asking what exactly makes the Spirit the Spirit? What is the Holy Spirit? That's what we're gonna talk about today. And this is what these men here in their pointy hats, these bishops in Nicaea, at the Council of Nicaea, all these bishops were gathered around asking this question, what is the Spirit? And they answered that the Spirit is the Lord and giver of life who proceeds from the Father and the Son. And so this is where we're going in the next four weeks. Lord willing, uh, today, what is the spirit? And then next week, what is the spirit's procession? What does it mean that he proceeds from the father and the son? And then the week after that, how he proceeds from the father, the week after that, how he proceeds from the son. So what is the spirit? Well first, think about that name. Think about the name that comes up many times in the Bible. So I'm not gonna get you to turn to a verse because I think you know there are many verses where this person is referred to as the Holy Spirit. And that's the main way that we're supposed to refer to the third person of the Trinity. So think about that name. What does the mean? Why is he called the Holy Spirit? Well, it tells us that there's something definite about this. That's what the means. He's not just a spirit. There are lots of spirits in the world. The angels are spirits. We all have spirits. So there are lots of spirits, but this is the spirit. He is the one spirit of God. And although the word the, it doesn't tell us that he's a person, it's pointing us in that direction, pointing to the fact there is this one thing, this one person, we would say, the Spirit. We can also think about the word holy. He's called the Holy Spirit. So is the Father holy? Is the Son holy? Yes, of course they are, but as far as I know, there's only one place in the Bible where the Father is directly called Holy Father, John 17. Jesus prays, Holy Father. And I don't think we see anywhere the phrase holy son in the Bible. There's Luke 1.35, the angel says, this child will be called holy, the son of God. So that's telling us the son of God is holy, but he's not called holy son, but we call this person holy spirit. So again, it's telling us, it's pointing us to the fact that this is not just any spirit, but this is a pure, uncreated, set apart, unique spirit, the spirit of God, and that's why he's holy, because he's of God. So he's the Holy Spirit. But now let's think about the word spirit. He's the Holy Spirit. Now, All of God is Spirit. John 4.24 says, God is Spirit. So the Father is Spirit, the Father has no body, the Son is Spirit, and that gets a little complicated there, because the Son is divine from eternity, and He takes on flesh, But when he takes on flesh, remember that he doesn't stop being fully God, he doesn't stop being divine. So the divine nature of the Son of God is spirit, and is always spirit before the foundation of the world. So we have the Father who's spirit, the Son is spirit, but then we get to the spirit, and the spirit is spirit. So you see, why does the Bible point to this fact, singling out this one as the Spirit, if the other two are also Spirit? So to keep it simple, we'll keep the Son out of it for now, but let's talk about the Father and the Spirit. If the Father and the Holy Spirit are Spirit, What makes the Holy Spirit different from the Father? Now, we'll talk about this more next week, but one of the answers is He's not a father. The Spirit doesn't father. The Spirit is not a son. the Spirit's the Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son. We'll talk about that next week. But the point is that based on the name, the Holy Spirit, God in the Word wants us to focus on this aspect of the Trinity, of this third person, sorry, the third person, It's a focus on his, if we could say it, spirituality, his spiritness. That's what makes him uniquely the third person of the Holy Spirit, is that he is a spirit. Now, we'll explain that a little bit more. Okay, but before we get there, There are some other names for the Holy Spirit in the Bible, and notice that these all have the word of in them. So, he is called the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, and there are many more variations, like the Spirit of the Son, all these kinds of things. And then in 1 Corinthians 2.12, this is a very important verse, he is the Spirit who is from God. the spirit who is from God. And so he's not just this space out there, he's not just this air floating around the universe filling the world, he's not just air or space or something, but he is a specific, definite, person, thing, who is coming from God and has a relationship to God, the Father and the Son. He is the Spirit of God. And so his being comes from God. That's what we'll talk more about next week. Okay. So what is a spirit? What's a spirit? So can you think of words, I'm trying to hope this question makes sense, but can you think of words that have the word or the letters S-P-I-R? Can you think of a word related to the word spirit in English? So, Chris, you can start. Inspiration, okay. I think that was my first example. So, inspire. Inspire, okay. Can you think of any others? What? Aspiration? That's to do with? Oh, okay. I was thinking the medical. There's a medical use of it. Yeah, so aspire to want to achieve something. There are more. What? Okay, I'll just run through my list. Expire. So when your milk expires, it's not good anymore, so this is related to being out of life. Being out of life is for a person, a person expires, and so we use that with milk and food. Inspire, okay, so inspire is you get a second wind, you get new life, you're inspired to write a song. Okay, so it's life that comes in, expire is life that goes out, perspire, I'm no expert on why they came up this word for sweat, but I'm guessing that the sweat is breathing through your skin, that's probably the idea. The sweat is breathing through your skin and these pores, so they call it perspire, it's going through something. So here's this idea again of life, I think is the point of the word, spire. Respiration, that's Obviously, you know, redoing your breath, going in and out. Aspire. Conspire is two or more spirits coming together to do something. That's to conspire and then transpire. Okay, so I think that was all of them. So all of these have to do with life or breath. And so when we think of the word spirit, we think about breath or sometimes in the Bible wind. Now you see this all over the Bible that this idea of spirit is related to the words life and especially breath. So let's look at Job 33 verse four. Job 33 verse 4, the Spirit of God has made me and the breath of the Almighty gives me life. So the Spirit of God has made me and the breath of the Almighty gives me life. And so I think it's rights that the S there is capitalized, it's the Spirit, it's not just some thing coming out of God, but it's the Spirit of God, the third person of the Trinity has made me. And then the parallel, so here's another way of describing the Spirit of God. He is the breath of the Almighty. So in a sense, we can say everyone is inspired. If you understand what that means, it means the breath of God has been put into every person to give them life. So the point here is that this spirit is the breath that comes from God, the breath of God. This is the way the Bible is talking about the spirit. In the New Testament, we have 2 Timothy 3.16. The New Testament, you know, doesn't give us a verse as clear as Job, but 2 Timothy 3.16 says all scripture is breathed out by God. So that word pneuma, pneustos, is breathed out by God. Well, how does the Scripture come about? The rest of the Bible tells us the Spirit carried the writers along, and the Spirit guided the disciples into the truth. So the Spirit getting the writers to write the Bible is the Spirit breathing out from God the Scriptures. So the Spirit is the breath of God. The Greek word there is pneuma, which you probably know from English words. English words like pneumatic, pneumatic tires, and pneumatic tools. Pneumatic tools are the ones you hook up to those air pumps, and the air makes the tool work. The air shoots out the nails from the nail gun. It's a pneumatic tool. And even the word pneuma in Greek, so I think you're supposed to pronounce it, the P, you're supposed to pronounce the P, and so when you say the word pneuma, the word itself is showing you that there's breath coming out. And so this is how we're supposed to think about the spirit of God, the breath that's coming out of God. So. I want you to breathe. So breathe. Think about your breathing. Now we're not going to do, I had to go to a college class once and this counselor, psychiatrist, he came and he made everybody do breathing exercises all together in the class. We all had to close our eyes and breathe. It was very, very awkward. So we're not going to do that. But I want you to think about You're breathing. Were you breathing before I told you to breathe? You were. You were all breathing. You're breathing now, and you were breathing 20 seconds ago. But you weren't noticing, probably, that you were breathing. You weren't thinking about your breath. So you had life. from your breath, your oxygen, your air, but you weren't thinking about breathing. And so the Holy Spirit is like that, the breath of God, but the Holy Spirit doesn't draw attention, usually, to the breath, doesn't draw attention to himself. What the Spirit does is he draws the attention to the Father and the Son. And that's the way he wants it. That's the way it should be. Most of the attention should be especially on the Son. John 16, verse 14, Jesus says, he will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. And J.I. Packer, he says, there is the Holy Spirit's job description. He will glorify me. And so the Spirit's job is not to get us to think so much about Him, but to get us to glorify especially the Son, and to think about the Father and the Son. And so, this is one of the reasons it's hard for us to pin down what is the Spirit, because when we start to think about the Spirit, what the Spirit wants us to do is not think about Him, but think about Father and Son. What the Spirit is doing is giving you breath when you didn't even think about it. He gave you your physical life, your living and moving and having your being with the breath of the Almighty. And the same thing is true spiritually. When you come to Christ and you have faith in Christ, It's like your eyes are open. Or it's like you were asleep and now you're awake. Or it's like you were dead and now you're alive. But what happens? You just wake up one day and you're alive. And you didn't think about or make yourself come alive. You just came alive. And then later you realize you came alive because the spirit. The Spirit breathed spiritual life into you. So that's what the Spirit does. He's sort of in the background. He is the one who comes before, who draws our attention to Father and Son, and then we realize that was from God, giving us a life. Okay, so here's, Let's keep thinking about the Spirit as God's breath. So just like you were breathing and weren't aware of it or thinking about you, and yet your breath was giving you life, your breath was coming from your environment, from outside of you. So you breathe in, you take in oxygen, oxygen fills your lungs, that gets into your blood, and that's what gives you life. So you breathe in, and then you exhale, and air comes out. So with human beings, You and me, we are products of our environment. You wouldn't be alive if you had no oxygen in this room, right? We're depending on the oxygen. So when you go to outer space, you need a space suit. And when you go scuba diving, you need a tank. You need oxygen to survive. You depend on the outside. So, now here's where it gets very deep. We depend on the outside breathing in air. And yet the Bible tells us that God has a breath, a spirit. But God doesn't depend on the outside because he existed eternally without creating anything, without creating any air or oxygen. There was no time and there was no space and yet God existed eternally with his own breath because he had an eternal spirit. So God doesn't depend on an environment, but he has this thing called the breath or a spirit that is not made out of the element of the universe called oxygen. So what is God trying to tell us then by telling us that he has a spirit? Well, you see on the slide there, it means that God is his own environment. God depends on himself for life. God's breath is God. So Gregory of Nyssa, he says, We must not imagine that in the way of our own breath, something alien and extraneous to God flows into him and becomes the divine spirit in him. So it's not something outside flowing into God. On the contrary, we think of it as a power really existing by itself. It is not able to be separated from God in whom it exists. So the breath of God exists by itself and can't be separated from God, from the God in whom it exists. So God's spirit is God, whereas we need something outside of us to live, God needs nothing because he has his own spirit, his own breath. Here's Edward Polehill. He says it this way, God all-sufficient must needs be his own happiness. He hath his being from himself, and his happiness is no other than his being radiant with all excellencies. He needed not the pleasure of a world who hath an eternal sun in his bosom to joy in, nor the breath of angels or men who hath an eternal spirit of his own. Okay, so the way that God is all-sufficient, doesn't depend upon anything, doesn't need anything to be happy is because he exists from his self, his own being. And so he gives the example of the son. God doesn't need anything to love because he eternally has a son. And God doesn't need anything to live because he eternally has his own spirit. So when God says in Exodus 3.14, I am who I am, he is saying that he's able to be self-existent as God because he has a spirit. So this is a paradox. The paradox is this, that The Bible tells us the Almighty has breath. God has breath. But the problem then for us is that in our minds we would take that to say, well, to breathe means you depend on something outside of you. That's what we think because we're creatures. But for God, the reason that God has breath is because he depends on nothing. He depends upon himself, his own spirit. We could even say, take it one step further, why did God make us to have breath? We could say that God gave us breath to teach us about who he is. This is what Gerhardus Voss says. He says, breath as a sign of life in living beings is an image in what is created of the particular way in which the Holy Spirit, who is the supervisor of life, receives his personal existence from the Father and the Son. So breath is in created beings given to us as an image so that we might understand something about who God is, that God has a spirit. Would we have any conception or idea of what that means for God to have his own Holy Spirit if we had no idea what a spirit was or air or breath? God, the Almighty has breath, and so he gave us breath to try to at least get close to try to comprehend what it means that the Almighty has breath. Okay. Well, we're not gonna stop there. There's still more that we can explore. Not only does God have breath, Not only does God give us oxygen, he makes us breathing creatures, but God gives his people his spirit. The Holy Spirit comes to dwell in his people. He gives us new life. He gives us the first life of physical breath and he gives us a new life by giving us of his own spirit. His own breath is breathed into us. Here's how one man puts it. His name is Fred Sanders. Our breath is in us and God's breath is in God. But the purpose of salvation is for God's breath to be in us. The essence of spiritual life is life in or from the Spirit of God. This is how we have life, is that God would give His own Spirit, the breath of the Almighty would give us life. Let's turn to 1 Corinthians chapter two. Chapter 2, verse 10. So speaking about the wisdom of God revealed in the cross, that's what these things in verse 10 is. Paul says in verse 10, these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. So, the creaturely analogy of our breath is that we take in our breath. We could say that, for lack of a better word, it circulates in us. It is going through us. What is the Spirit of God doing in verse 10? The Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. So just like in an analogy, our breath is filling us, the Spirit of God is searching through, filling up all of the being of God, even the depths of God. I'd say that the depths of God are pretty unfathomably deep, infinitely deep. And so you need an infinite spirit to be infinitely searching through all these depths of God to filling all of God's being. That's, I don't know how else to describe it with English words, but this is the idea of what verse 10 is saying. The spirit is searching the depths of God. But then he says, we have received the spirit of God. We've received not the spirit of the world in verse 12, but the spirit who is from God. He searches all the depths of God, and then he fills you the way that your breath fills you. He fills your depths, we could say, He comes into you and He breathes the life of God into you. A Scottish pastor in the late 1500s, so soon after the Reformation, his name is Robert Rollock. I don't know much about him, but this is the way that he described it. He says about the Spirit, he is not content to take the veil from thy heart. And he's explaining verse 10 here. He's not content to take the veil from thy heart, but he takes thy soul by the hand, as it were, and leads it in through the deepness of God. He will ravish it out of the body, as it were, and lead it into that inaccessible light. That's God. God dwells in inaccessible light. But how do you know God? Because the Spirit, out of the depths of God, is in your spirit, and He takes you into the depths of God, into inaccessible light, and he will say, lo, there is the mercy, lo, there is the righteousness, lo, there is the everlasting life that is spoken of. Thus, he will point out everything in God. So, as far as we can take in and comprehend everything in God, the spirit searches the depths of God but Paul says he reveals those things to us. So we could call it double depth of the spirit. The spirit is within the depths of God and then the spirit comes within our depths, our inner being and shows God to us. There's one more way we can think about this and an application of this. that we can see that the Holy Spirit is closer to us than we are to ourselves. Let's look at some verses in Romans chapter eight. And I know that many of these in Romans eight are familiar to us. But think about this truth. The Holy Spirit is closer to us than we are to ourselves. Romans 8, 26. Likewise, the spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the spirit. because the spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. So you have groanings too deep for words. You just feel this burden, this pain, this longing and desire that you yourself don't even know how to pinpoint or far less explain with words. but the Spirit intercedes for you because He knows those groanings better than you do. He understands them, and He searches hearts because He is the breath, the Spirit who is within us, filling us the way our breath fills us. He can search our hearts, and so He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. Now, go back a few verses to verse 15 of Romans 8. Romans 8, 15 says, for you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry, Abba, Father. I want you to notice verse 15, Who cries? Abba Father. He says, we cry. So in our hearts, when we're children of God, we cry out to God as our Father, Abba Father. Now he says, we do this by the Spirit. because we've received the spirit of adoption as sons. Okay, now turn to Galatians chapter four. Galatians four, verse six. Galatians 4.6, and because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Now, who's crying in verse six? Most directly, he says, the spirit. God sent the Spirit into our hearts crying. So it means, as the Spirit is being sent, He's the one crying, Abba, Father. Now, indirectly, yes, it's in our hearts, so that from our hearts, the Spirit is crying. But notice Romans 8.15 and Galatians 4.6, when you put them together. We cry, Abba, Father, by the Spirit of adoption. Galatians 4, the Spirit of the Son cries, Abba, Father. So here's what's happening. 1 Corinthians 2, verse 10 is happening. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Son of God. And the Spirit is searching the deep things of God, the depths of the Son. So the Son of God is crying out, Abba, Father. Because it is the Son, it's His Father. And the Spirit can search the depths of God, and this is why He's the Spirit of His Son. The Holy Spirit who comes from the Son then comes into our hearts, as Romans 8 is saying. He is filling us with the breath of the Almighty, and He searches our hearts. So He searches the depths of the Son of God, and then He searches our hearts, and He says that we are gonna be united to the Son and to the Father. so that we now can cry out Abba Father. So Romans 8.15, you cry Abba Father because the Son cries Abba Father and the Son has a spirit and you have the spirit of His Son. And that spirit is in you. And that spirit knows both the depths of God and knows the depths of your heart to help you cry out Abba Father. Fred Sanders again, he says, when the Father sends his spirit into us, the cry Abba sounds forth from our innermost depths as a human word spoken from our deepest hearts and simultaneously the same word from the heart of God. It's from the heart of the Son. He cries Abba Father. And so the spirit in us cries in the same word. So there's, I guess, a more negative way we could look at this whole thing. And we could say that this means that the spirit searches everything about you. And he searches your heart. And nothing is hidden from his sight. And that's one negative way to look at it, or negative to us. But the positive way to also look at it is that the Spirit fills and searches your depths. But if you belong to the Son of God, He is still the Spirit of adoption, the Spirit who enables you to cry, Abba, Father, who helps you to go to the Father for help in your time of need. who assures you of God's love in Christ. The spirit searches the deep things of God. May we allow him to also search the depths of our heart and unite us to God in Christ. Let's pray. Our Lord, we thank you and praise you for who you are. This great mystery of unity of one God and three persons. We thank you that you are Father, Son, and Spirit. We thank you for the Spirit that has given us life for each one of us who is in Christ. We thank you for the Spirit who is deep within us. We pray that you would give us this help of the Spirit to draw us near to the Father, help us to praise, And we pray even in the rest of this day, and as we worship you in this coming service, that we would know in a special way the help of the Spirit crying out within our hearts. And we ask all these things through the Son of God, Jesus Christ, amen.