This is the title of a recent post by Ian Paul. What follows is based on that article.
We might well think that prayer, if it is to be regarded as distinctively Christian prayer, should be Trinitarian.
But what, then, are we to make of the Christian’s model prayer, which does not mention the Holy Spirit at all.
Ian Paul suggests that the Holy Spirit is indeed ‘present’ in the Lord’s Prayer, even though not mentioned.…
John 15:26 “When the Advocate comes, whom I will send you from the Father—the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father—he will testify about me.”
A long doctrinal debate about the ‘procession of the Holy Spirit’ has centred on this expression. The idea of the Holy .Spirit’s ‘procession’ from the Father was understood in ontological terms. To the basic formula the Western church added the ‘filioque’ (‘and the Son’) clause, and this was a point of division between the Eastern and Western branches of the church. …
Tim Chester writes:
…‘I remember hearing the story of a Christian couple in Iran. They were making a long journey, so they committed to share the gospel with someone each day. Towards the end of one day they went to buy petrol, and at the petrol station there was a man with a full beard and a gun, a sign that he was a radical Muslim. The wife said, ‘I think you should tell that man the gospel.’
1. The Holy Spirit directs the mission of God’s people
Acts 1:8 – “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the farthest parts of the earth.”
…‘We don’t need a call to mission. We already have one – the Great Commission. But sometimes the Spirit prompts a church, as he does in Acts 13:1–3, to send their best people.
John 20:22 And after he said this, he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
The relationship between this gift of the Spirit and the Pentecostal outpouring is debated (Klink outlines seven different interpretations).
Some, such as Barrett, think that the two accounts cannot be harmonised.
Among those who do look for harmonisation, the following interpretations have been proposed.
1. Two versions of the same event?
Many modern commentators argue that there is one gift of the Holy Spirit, independently witnessed to by Luke and John. …
Mt 12:31f “People will be forgiven for every sin and blasphemy, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. 12:32 Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven. But whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.”
Mk 3:29 “Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven, but is guilty of an eternal sin”
Lk 12:10 “The person who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.”…
For a long time, I have thought that the biblical case for cessationism (the belief that miraculous gifts ceased at the end of the apostolic age) was rather weak. B.B. Warfield, whose name is so often associated with this belief, made his case (in Counterfeit Miracles) on historical, not scriptural grounds.
I was interested, then to read this essay by Thomas Schreiner in which he sets out the biblical-theological reasons for thinking that miraculous gifts have ceased.…
This may seem rather a pointless question, until we consider that it admits of two (if not more) possible answers:
Certainly, the first of these reflects what many Christians believe and say. They talk about ‘accepting Christ’, or ‘receiving Jesus into the heart’.
As the old chorus would have us sing:
You ask me how I know he lives –
He lives within my heart!
The idea that Jesus resides ‘in the heart’ of the believer is not without some plausibility.…
‘Do not quench the Spirit’, writes Paul in 1 Thessalonians 5:19. What are some of the ways we do this?
Sam Storms:
1. We quench the Holy Spirit when we rely decisively on any resource other than the Holy Spirit for anything we do in life and ministry.
