A gift for you.

Have you ever had someone refuse your gift?

It’s a strange feeling. It’s so inexplicable and baffling one doesn’t know what to do. 

On two different occasions, my husband and I gave extravagant gifts, only to have them unappreciated and rejected.  Our emotions bounced between anger, hurt, and confusion. Why would anyone turn down something of great value? It doesn’t make sense.

A generous gift means more than the thing in the box or the envelope. A gift is personal. A gift means you present part of yourself to someone else. It’s valuable..

Imagine, someone has just given you an envelope with $50,000 cash in it. Do you go home, open your messiest closet, and stash it somewhere randomly in the piles of stuff, hoping to not have to think about it ever again? Or even worse, on your drive home, do you roll down the window, open the envelope, and just let the bills flutter away?

Would you ever do that?

What if I told you I’m afraid we’ve all done just that.

The unappreciated gift?

The Holy Spirit.

We should understand as Christians that once we have trusted Jesus as our Lord that we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.  But what do we do with that gift?  What do we do with Him?  I am afraid more often than not we tuck Him away somewhere forgettable and go on with our lives.

Because what do we really need Him for?  After all, we can have a nice house, a great career, a lovely wedding, and two cars in our three-car-garage without the Holy Spirit. We can even squeak by with a decent marriage and good kids without the Holy Spirit. And we can serve in pretty much any capacity at church without the Holy Spirit.

So what do we need Him for? 

Well we find out how bad we need Him when our lives crack or crumble. Once our own strength fails to hold together our tidy little lives. We find out, often too late, that we needed His strength in our marriages, our parenting, our careers, our private lives.  We needed Him in order to be able to forgive our spouse–again. We needed Him to give us patience instead of angry outbursts with our kids–again. We needed Him to give us integrity instead of cooking the books at work–again. We needed Him to make us turn our phone off instead of watching filth–again. 

All those “again” moments. All those spiritual failures. All that powerlessness that ultimately defines our lives. Ruins our lives.

We need Him in order to stop the things we’re too weak to stop. 
We need Him in order to do the things we’re too weak to do.

And that’s just the beginning. 

He is also a gift of incredible power. Is your life characterized by supernatural comfort, counsel, guidance, deliverance, insight, revelation, and wisdom?

The Holy Spirit also is a source of unbelievable spiritual gifts meant to advance the gospel. 

He also gives you spiritual fruit in your life. Is your life characterized by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and self-control?  If not, maybe you’ve tucked Him away somewhere forgettable.

If you are in Christ, you have been given the greatest gift in the universe. The third person of the Trinity, fully God, at home in you.  Don’t you wonder what He’s capable of doing in, through and for you?

I hope you will choose to take another look at this incredible gift. If you want to know more, please take the following steps:

1. Pray every day to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
2. Search your scriptures to get to know the Spirit better. John 14-16, Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 12 are a good place to start.
3. Find a good book to help you get to know the person of the Holy Spirit.  I would recommend Forgotten God by Francis Chan.

““Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38).