In a previous article we looked at three characteristics of personality displayed by the Holy Spirit—knowledge, will and emotion. These are characteristics of a person, not an inanimate object. Is…
“It is a fundamental revelation of Scripture that the Holy Spirit is a person in the same sense that God the Father is a person and the Lord Jesus Christ is a person. The Holy Spirit is presented in Scripture as having the same essential deity as the Father and the Son and is to be worshipped and adored, loved and obeyed in the same way as God.”[1] Personality, John Walvoord explains, “is commonly defined as containing the essential elements of intellect, sensibility, and will.”[2] We shall briefly look at each of those elements.
In the Introduction to her book Jesus in Me, Anne Graham Lotz says, “I’ve heard the Holy Spirit spoken of as an ‘it,’ a feeling, a dove, a flame, a…
In his excellent book Forgotten God, Francis Chan makes this statement: “As I thought about this chapter, I realized how ludicrous it would be for anyone to say they were going to explain the Holy Spirit. The Bible says we cannot fully understand God, and I am certainly not the exception to that rule. There are things about God that are mysterious and secret, things we will never know about Him. But there also are things revealed, and those belong to us…
I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently reading and researching for my upcoming series on the Personality and Deity of the Holy Spirit. One of the books I’m reading is Elmer Towns’ excellent book, The Ultimate Guide to the Names of God. It is chock full of great thoughts. Three of Dr. Towns books have been combined into this Ultimate Guide: My Father’s Name, The Names of Jesus, and The Names of The Holy Spirit.
In his book A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23, Phillip Keller talks about the day he bought the first sheep for his own flock. He recounts how his neighbor handed him a knife and said, “Well, Philip, they’re yours. Now you’ll have to put your mark on them.”[1]
During her last few years, my mother suffered from some very debilitating health issues. After more than six decades of serving God first as a missionary in Africa, then in home-based missions, the day came when she was pretty much confined to a chair or to her bed.
Have you ever been tempted to do something wrong? Do you feel in those times like God is testing you? Or maybe you realize your temptation comes because of something…
I must admit, somewhat ashamedly, that when I began this series several weeks ago, I thought I’d find that I had broken a few of the Ten Commandments, but overall, I felt I was doing pretty good.
Oh, how sadly I was mistaken! Again and again as I read what others had said about the Commandments, and then added Jesus’ own thoughts in the Sermon on the Mount, I found that I have been unable to fully keep even a single one of these commandments. Not even one.
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor” (Exodus 20:17; Deuteronomy 5:21). Let’s start with a definition. Kevin DeYoung explains, “We covet when we want for ourselves what belongs to someone else…. Coveting longs for someone else’s stuff to be your stuff.”[1]