Who is the Holy Spirit?
The Holy Spirit is like the Breath of God.
When a person trusts in Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit enters into the human spirit of that person. But Who is the Holy Spirit?
The Holy Spirit is like the Breath of God. When God speaks, the Holy Spirit is the Breath Who carries the expression. And this Breath carries the expression to us.
When God speaks to us, it is the Holy Spirit Who is speaking, and the part of us that He speaks to is our human spirit. The Holy Spirit speaks to our human spirit initially to teach us of our need for Jesus, and then the Holy Spirit enters the human spirit when we trust in Jesus.
But the Holy Spirit is HOLY, and He enters into a human spirit that is damaged and blocked with sin and disease. The Holy Spirit is HOLY, but His home in the human spirit is partially defiled. This creates a stress—a disharmony—between the energy of the Holy Spirit and the energy of the human spirit.
The Holy Spirit completes the process of salvation within us. Salvation begins the moment we trust in Jesus and the Holy Spirit enters into our spirit. But salvation is a process, and the process of salvation continues for the rest of our life. In this process, the Holy Spirit cleanses and heals the energy of our human spirit and turns our energy into a quality more like His.
The process of salvation is the process of change—a shift from disobeying God to obeying Him. The Holy Spirit will give us the grace and strength to obey God—to obey His commands.
If we want to go to Heaven when we die, we do not have the option to continue to disobey God after the Holy Spirit enters into our spirit. We must yield to Him and let Him help us to obey. We will not do this perfectly, but over time we should grow in our faith and obey Him more and more. If we continue to refuse to obey, the stress and disharmony between our defiled human spirit and the pure Holy Spirit will become too great. The human spirit will become more hardened and dysfunctional from this stress, and the Holy Spirit will become more and more irritated. And at some point, the Holy Spirit will leave.
If the Holy Spirit leaves, the process of salvation stops within that person. If the process of salvation stops, that person will not go to Heaven when he/she dies. To go to Heaven, the process of salvation must continue and culminate at the person’s entry into Heaven. Salvation is a work of grace—the grace of Jesus Christ and the gift of his death and resurrection, and also the grace of the Holy Spirit and the gift of His strength to obey. We always retain our free will. We must choose to let this grace come into our life initially, and we must choose to let it continue there, to grow and to blossom until the day of our death.
We are “called” to salvation when we hear the message of Jesus Christ and put our trust in Him. But we are “chosen” for salvation at the end of our life—based upon whether we have yielded to the Holy Spirit throughout our life and allowed Him to help us to obey.