Insight for Living

Bill Meyer: Is there a member of the Trinity that you find yourself a little fuzzy on? Most of us can wrap our minds around God the Father and God the Son. But the Holy Spirit, that's where things get a little harder to grasp. After all, he's invisible, and for a lot of us, the word ghost doesn't exactly help.

Today, on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll begins a message that will demystify the Spirit of God. And Chuck will start exactly where most of us live, with honest questions about the one we least understand. But first, we'll begin with prayer.

Chuck Swindoll: Jesus said, you will receive power when the Spirit is upon you, and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in Judea, and in Samaria, and to the remotest part of the earth. Put in today's language, it would be you shall be my witnesses in Frisco, and in Texas, and in Kansas, and Kentucky, and Illinois, and Ohio, and even into Canada, and Mexico, and Europe, and Africa, and Russia. Into distant islands that you have never seen before, your witness will reach them because of the Spirit.

Someone told me years ago that if you were to check the cornerstones of the great churches, you will see that many of them, if not most, were built during the depression. People turn to God when times are hard. With him you can entrust your treasure and always receive a return.

And so our Father, we pause to thank you for your redemptive work. Finding us when we weren't looking, loving us when we weren't very likeable or loving. Caring for us when we were careless. Giving to us when we were so selfish, preoccupied with our own ego needs and demands, even a spirit of entitlement.

And dying for us, when had we been living in that day, we would have spit on your son. We would have rejected him with everything in our being. But you have redeemed us. By your grace you found us, by your grace you've saved us. Because of your grace we in turn are learning to be unselfish, and giving, and gracious, and merciful, and forgiving.

Know all of this, our Father, as our gifts come to you, they come from a heart full of gratitude. We love you because you first loved us. And we give because you have taught us to do that. In the name of Jesus, our model, our master, we pray. Everyone said, amen.

Bill Meyer: You're listening to Insight for Living. To dig deeper into today's topic on your own, be sure to purchase our searching the scriptures Bible study workbook by going to insight.org/offer. Chuck titled today's message Getting Reacquainted with the Spirit of Power.

Chuck Swindoll: Isn't it hard to get your mind around something that is invisible? Especially when some people call that invisible thing a ghost. A ghost. Weren't you raised as I was raised to watch out for ghosts, or stay away from ghosts, or the other side, don't even believe in ghosts. Or if you do believe in them, remember they represent an evil source and you don't want to have anything to do with them. And all of a sudden, as you grow up and become serious about spiritual things or at least about church, you begin to talk about believing in the ghost.

Anne Ortlund in her penetrating little book *Up with Worship* tells this wonderful story that a lot of us who were reared in the church can identify with. When I was little I used to play church with my friends. We'd get the chairs into rows, fight over who'd be the preacher, vigorously lead the hymn singing and generally have a great carnal time. The aggressive kids naturally wanted to be upfront directing or preaching. The quieter ones were content to sit and be entertained by the up-fronters. Occasionally we'd get mesmerized by some true sensationalist crowd swayer, like the little girl who said, "Boo, I'm the Holy Ghost."

But in general, if the up-fronters were pretty good they could hold their audience quite a while. But if they weren't so good eventually the kids would drift off to play something else, like jump rope or jacks. That generation of children is now grown up. But most of them haven't changed too much. Every Sunday they still play church. They line up in rows for the entertainment. If it's pretty good, their church may grow. If it's not too hot, eventually they'll drift off to play something else, like yachting or wife swapping.

I've discovered when you get serious about spiritual things, you not only get serious about church, you get serious about God. Like, who is he? Who is he? We get that pretty well because we all have fathers and he's called our heavenly Father. And except for a few fathers who haven't been too hot and aren't worth remembering, for the most part dads are a pretty good lot. Faithful, caring, loving. They're the leaders, the planners in the home. They're the ones who sacrifice for the good of the family. So Father God, we can get that. And so we get to understanding more about God the Father and the Son.

Well, a lot of us are sons. And as sons we've learned to obey our father. And growing up, we carried out the desires of our dads because he wanted good things for us and loved us and led us correctly. As sons we wanted to do his will. So getting to know the Son has not been a real leap of difficulty. We understand. The Father plans our salvation and God the Son implements the plan by going to the cross and dying for us. We spent some time on both, looked at four attributes of God the Father and spent some time addressing Christ on the cross.

But now, now we come to the tough part. I remember growing up because our family didn't have a car. My dad took the car to work. It was during the Second World War and for those four, four and a half years, we would walk to the end of the block and attend the church most convenient. Happened to be a Methodist church. And I remember while attending that church learning something I'd never done before in the church we usually would attend or had earlier attended. And we would repeat the Apostles' Creed. Sound familiar to any of you?

In the Apostles' Creed, which if you do it enough you memorize it, "I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost." Wait. I remember as a little kid because my mom had taught watch out for ghosts, stay away from ghosts. First of all, there's nothing to it. Then she would say, "But if there is anything to it, it's evil." Conceived of the Holy Ghost. But it's holy.

So I would go on. "Born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried, descended into hell." That one hung me up. "The third day he rose from the dead and ascended to heaven and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead." The "thence" part I never got, and the "quick" part never made a lot of sense. And then I said, "I believe in the Holy Ghost." I remember thinking, I don't. I don't want to do this.

And the next line always threw me. "I believe in the holy catholic church," which means universal church but I didn't know that. My dad didn't either. He leaned over and said, "Don't say that part." So I'm kind of picking and choosing my way through the Apostles' Creed. Between the Holy Ghost and the catholic church and conceived by the Holy- how in the world could a ghost cause Mary to get pregnant? And oh, I'm telling you, I was years figuring that out. And you know what, honestly, I say this and we chuckle about those funny things as children, there are a lot of folks hung up on stuff like that. What in the world does this stuff mean?

So it seems to me if we're going to get serious about church, which is plan A for anybody that really gets serious about Jesus. And don't ever sell that part short. Don't let anybody ever tell you the church isn't important. They don't know what they're talking about. That's adolescent talk. That's stupid counsel. Those who say that are cynical, or they've been burned, or they're under toxic religion and they're now free of it so they want nothing to do with it. They throw the baby out with the bathwater. Wait. Wait. Jesus said, "I will build my church." Sounds pretty important to me. And he's the one who said the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. That sounds pretty powerful.

So we get serious about church. And then along while we're at church before we get serious about the Trinity. Uh oh. There's another tough one. God is three and one. That's hard to figure out. Miss Williams, a Christian school teacher in the second grade, decided she would teach her kids about the Trinity and she used a great big pretzel. It twisted all around, had three big holes in it. They were about the same size. So she said, "All right children, this represents the Father." That's a hole. "And this represents the Son. And this represents the Holy Ghost." Okay?

So let's see if everybody got it. So she hands it over to Tommy and Tommy goes, "Uh oh. This hole is the Father, and this hole is the Son, and this hole is the holy smoke." Or whatever it's supposed to be. What is this about? Why on earth do we have an invisible member of the Trinity? See what I'm getting at? Of course you do. Some of you have been in the family of God so long that unfortunately you've disconnected from those who don't get it. It's just tough stuff. It's hard enough to believe in a Father when you didn't have a father worth believing in. And it's tough enough to believe that Jesus could die for the sins of the whole world in one act of sacrifice.

But you get to the Holy Spirit, ghost. First of all, he's known as a ghost because the word Spirit is the same word as breath. Breath. Breathing out. God breathed out his word and that came to be translated in one of the earlier translations as ghost. Unfortunately. He isn't a ghost. He's a Spirit. And he isn't an "it," he's a "he." He has personality, mind, will, emotions. He knows. He can be grieved. He directs. He instructs. So he has the characteristics of a personality. I won't take the time to turn to passages that reveal him as personality.

He is God and I will look at that. Acts chapter five. This is helpful to see in a rather interesting section of scripture that the Holy Spirit is in fact deity. Not the Father, not the Son, but in fact the third member of the Godhead. A man named Ananias with his wife Sapphira sold a piece of property, Acts five begins, and kept back some of the price for himself with his wife's full knowledge. And bringing a portion of it, he laid it at the apostles' feet.

Peter said, "Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart?" Watch closely. "To lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back some of the price of the land." It wasn't wrong that he kept back some of the price of the land. Rarely do people give the entire amount to the church having sold a piece of land, but they will give a portion of the profit to God's work. Nothing wrong with it. Everything right about it, unless you make it appear as though you are giving it all. So that's the lie. "You have lied to the Holy Spirit."

Now that that's understood, look at the verse that follows. "While it remained unsold did it not remain your own? And after it was sold was it not under your control? Why is it that you have conceived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to men, but to God." Get the connection? I have a little red line in my Bible between verses three and four. Lie to the Holy Spirit, verse three. You have lied to God, verse four. There are other passages we could look at, but that one will suffice.

Never refer to the Holy Spirit as an "it" anymore than you would God as an "it" or Jesus as an "it." A ghost is an "it." Spirit, he's the comforter. He's the one called alongside to help, as we shall see. Being God, he has all the attributes of the Father and the Son. Listen closely. Those attributes are coequal, coeternal, coexistent. They go on forever. They are all the same. One doesn't have more than the other. And they exist faithfully together, but separate. It's a mystery you can never fully grasp, but they are there nevertheless. That Godhead Father, Son, Spirit. God the Father planned our salvation, God the Son has implemented our salvation, and God the Holy Spirit is empowering it, as we shall see.

He operates in a realm where only God is present. The very mind of deity. Let me show you. First Corinthians chapter two. And you'll be ready to let your fingers do the walking through these white pages as we work our way from one passage to another. First Corinthians two, verse six. Yet we do speak wisdom among those who are mature, a wisdom however not of this age nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away. By the way, it happens every Sunday. The wisdom we speak when we gather, the teaching you receive, the instruction whether it's from music or from God's word or some preacher, it's a wisdom that is not from this passing away world. It is a divine wisdom that comes from his word.

We speak, look at verse seven, "God's wisdom. It's in a mystery. The hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory." Is that great or what? Before there ever was the beginning of time, God planned the wisdom, the knowledge, the truth to live by. All of that arranged in the Godhead, all put together, all known, all ready to be delivered. And then man falls in the garden and his whole mind is changed, his heart is changed, his will is changed. And now you've got to permeate all of that. A mind that's blinded, a heart that's cold and like stone as we just sang. And a will that's in resistance to the things of God.

But the wisdom is there nevertheless. So we need divine help. Verse 10. "For to us God revealed them," that's the truths of his word, the truths of his mind. "God revealed them through the Spirit," capital S, that's the Holy Spirit. "For the Spirit searches all things, even the bathos of God." Years ago, a Dr. Beebe did that early investigation below the surface of the water and went deep, deep into the bowels of the sea and saw things never seen before. Sort of the Jacques Cousteau of that era. He called that round submarine, if you will, he was in with its quartz window, a bathosphere for the depth and the sphere of the depths. That's the same Greek word translated here "depths." He searches even the depths of God.

Can you imagine what that's like? We hit the surface. We learn a little. Every once in a while we're around someone highly intelligent and we listen and we realize how much that person knows. Someone said that an education is going from an unawareness to awareness of your own ignorance. You become aware of the depth of information you don't know. Happens in seminary all the time. As the truths of scripture begin to be taught by these professors, these individuals, men and women with great minds and understanding the truths of God. You sit as a student and you think, will I ever grasp this? Will I ever get this?

And then along with that come the original languages of Greek and Hebrew. I remember looking at Hebrew for the first time thinking that is like a rag rug. How does anybody ever get that? You know what helped? When I finally turned it upside down the other way. I'd had it upside down for a day. So I turned it over so I could read it. The depth of God's truths in our own language. The Spirit of God knows it all. Remember that. When you relate to the Spirit of God you're relating to one who has it all known. Has it all understood. And his major role is to communicate that truth to you in bite-sized chunks that you can take and apply. That's his role.

He reveals them to you. Look at verse 11. We cannot identify with this. "Who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him?" You know, right now I have thoughts that you don't know. And you have thoughts that I don't know. Because they're only known by each one of us individually. No one else can know our own thoughts. Right now I'm going to think of something. What was I just thinking of? You have no idea. I was thinking of a purple submarine. I don't know why, but it was just in my mind. It was a thought in my mind, silly, unrelated to this, but it illustrates the fact that you don't know what's in my mind.

Now look closely. "Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God." How good is that? And he's not keeping it to himself. His role is to unveil that truth and to let you get a corner on it and begin to see it. It's called spiritual insight. Discernment. It becomes a filter system in this wicked, deceptive world where you're hit on all sides by the media and you have to filter through that and come up with truth in the midst of a pile of error. That's the role of the Spirit.

Verse 12. "Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God." Why? "So that we may know the things freely given to us by God." You know what? I have had people say to me, "It doesn't matter that I know that much." If you're ever tempted to say that, zip it. Zip it. Don't say that. If you really mean that, you're a prey to every cult that comes to your door. You don't care about knowing what you believe? You're ready for a fall. The enemy loves to hear you say that. The adversary feeds on that kind of thinking.

If the Spirit of God exists for the single purpose of revealing God's truth, doesn't it make sense we need to know that truth? That's why you were bored in previous churches where the truth wasn't taught. That's why you came out of that false religion where you realized this is not doing good. This is toxic. This is hurting me. You weren't getting truth. Let me say at this moment, if you are grasping any of this information, it's because of the Spirit of God.

I would add this. If you do not know the Lord, this information is dull and boring to you. Because you haven't the Spirit of God to make it meaningful to you. You can't see the Spirit because he's invisible. You can't know the work of the Spirit except in deep inner feelings, sometimes through conviction, sometimes through divine guilt that he may bring over sin in our lives. Occasionally our conscience is troubled because we have grieved God in something we have done or said or even thought. That's the work of the Spirit within us, but we cannot see with these eyes because the Spirit of God, his work is not a tangible work.

Bill Meyer: The Holy Spirit works in ways your eyes will never see, but your heart will always know. That quiet conviction when something isn't right, that inner stirring when truth lands deeply, that's not coincidence, that's him. You're listening to Insight for Living. Chuck Swindoll is just getting started with the message titled Getting Reacquainted with the Spirit of Power.

Keep listening because Chuck will explore the specific ways the Spirit works in the life of every believer. This is message number nine in a 12-part series Chuck titled How Great is Our God. We invite you to take advantage of the Searching the Scriptures Bible study workbook I mentioned earlier. All the details for requesting this spiral-bound resource can be found at insight.org/offer. If you have any questions about it or you'd like to purchase a copy over the phone, just call us at 800-772-8888.

I'd also like to tell you about a new resource created exclusively by Insight for Living. It's designed to answer your questions about heaven. You probably have more questions about heaven than you realize, like what happens the moment we die? Will we recognize each other? Is purgatory real? What about infants or someone lost to suicide? These are questions real people ask, and they deserve real answers rooted in scripture, not speculation.

Insight for Living's Understanding Heaven passport tackles every one of them with the clarity and warmth you've come to expect. This isn't a mystical pie-in-the-sky view of eternity. It's a practical, biblically grounded guide that will strengthen your faith, quiet your fears, and give you confident answers to share with the people you love. The Understanding Heaven passport is our gift to you just for getting in touch with us today.

You can go to our website and download the PDF file for the Understanding Heaven passport at insight.org/heaven. That's insight.org/heaven. I'm Bill Meyer. Chuck Swindoll continues his message called Getting Reacquainted with the Spirit of Power, Friday on Insight for Living.

The preceding message, Getting Reacquainted with the Spirit of Power, was copyrighted in 2008, 2009, 2016, 2019, and 2026, and the sound recording was copyrighted in 2026 by Charles R. Swindoll Incorporated. All rights are reserved worldwide. Duplication of copyrighted material for commercial use is strictly prohibited.