Monday, May 23, 2005
1 Corinthians 12:3 Therefore I make known to you that no one speaking by the Spirit of God calls Jesus accursed, and no one can say that Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit.
THE WORK OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
Imagine if you will being very sick and about to die. You sit in a wheelchair and are not able to do anything for yourself. In front of you is a locked door and on the other side of that door is the cure for your illness. Then someone comes along and unlocks the door for you, but you are still not able to get the cure because you are not able to move yourself. The door is open, but you can do nothing to reach that cure. Then someone else comes up and pushes you through the unlocked door and gives you the cure. Without either of those two people, you would have died.
God's grace is the cure on the other side of that door. Jesus was the one who unlocked that door for us through His death, but without the Holy Spirit we still would not be able to gain hold of this gift of grace. It is the Holy Spirit that pushes us through the opened door and gives us God's Grace.
We have been brought to faith by the working of the Holy Spirit, brought to know Jesus as our Savior and to trust in Him as the only way to heaven. The Holy Spirit has taken the love of God, that is the message of His Son Jesus, and has poured it out into our hearts. The Holy Spirit has used that good news, the message of salvation, to create faith in our hearts, and has brought us believe and trust in Jesus as our Savior from sin and death. This is the Work of the Holy Spirit: He brings us to faith through the preaching of the Word and preserves us in this faith through the continual hearing and reading of His Word. He continues to make our actions and words holy in the sight of God through faith in Christ Jesus. May the Comforter, whom Jesus sent to this earth, through the use of the Gospel continue to preserve us in the true faith unto life everlasting!
