It’s a great thing to look at and understand the Holy Spirit. He is the third person of the Trinity, which makes him equal with the Father and the Son. But he can be the hardest to understand. We can easily relate to the idea of Father and Son, because they are a part of our everyday lives and vocabulary. But the Holy Spirit is somehow more mysterious.

I’m not going to launch into an exhaustive examination of the Holy Spirit here – that would take a book! But there are a couple of things that will help with the idea of being renewed in the Spirit.

He’s a He!

Firstly, and maybe obviously, as the third person of the Trinity, he is a person. Not a thing or an object. The bible only ever refers to the Holy Spirit in personal terms – never as ‘it’. He does things that are associated with personality – he teaches, he guides, he grieves, he convicts us of sin and so on. As a person and part of the Trinity, he is as involved in our salvation as the other persons in the Trinity. The Father decreed salvation for mankind and sent the Son; the Son performed all the work necessary for our salvation – living a perfect life and dying for our ins; and the Holy Spirit applies the Son’s work into the lives of believers.

This is really important. If the Father had said to us ‘Jesus has died in your place so now you can come to me – take it or leave it’, we’d leave it. Because naturally our hearts are not inclined to seek God, rather the opposite. For sure, we’d like the benefits that God might offer – peace, purpose etc. – but not God himself. That’s what Paul spends the first chapters of Romans explaining. E.g. Rom 3:9-18.

Whether or not you get the theology behind this, the outworking is really simple! If you have any desire for God, any affection for him, then that’s a work of the Holy Spirit in your life. He has changed the inclination of our hearts to want to move towards God, rather than away from him.

The focus is Jesus

Secondly, look at how Jesus described the Holy Spirit, particularly in John 14-16. Again, there’s not time or space to look at everything there, just a couple of key thoughts.

John 16:14 – ‘He will glorify me’. The Holy Spirit’s work is to apply Christ’s work to us, so he does not draw attention to himself. There’s a great illustration of this – imagine a church building that is lit up at night.

In the same way that the lights draw our attention is drawn to the church rather than the spotlights, so the Holy Spirit directs our attention to Jesus and away from himself. ‘Illuminating Jesus’ is a work of the Holy Spirit.

In John 16, Jesus describes the Holy Spirit as ‘another Helper’. The word translated ‘Helper’ is ‘paraclete’ meaning one who is called alongside. It was a word used to describe the family lawyer, who could be called upon to help in times of trouble. Older translations use the word Comforter. Nowadays that word is associated with softness and consolation, but originally it would have meant ‘with strength’. In other words, the Holy Spirit is one who support and strengthens us in battle, rather than patching up our wounds afterwards. (He does do that, but that’s not the sense in this passage).

The Holy Spirit is a gift from God. He is the ‘driving-force’, the ‘powerhouse’ who enables us to become and live as Christians.

To be renewed in the Spirit is ongoing. This is the sense of Eph 5:18 which could read ‘be continually being filled with the Spirit’.

Word and Spirit

A final point. Look at these two verses.

Ephesians 5:18-19: “but be filled with the Spirit, ¹⁹ addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, ²⁰ giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ“.

And Colossians 3:16: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.”

Very similar verses – the key difference being that one says ‘be filled with the Spirit, while the other says ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly‘. The two things are two sides of the same coin. Being filled with the Spirit and letting the Word dwell in us. We can’t have one without the other.

The one who is filled with the Spirit is filled with Christ, God, and His Word.