Comforter?

 "And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with you forever;" John 14:16

....."The Holy Spirit is the most uncomfortable Comforter I know." Anne Graham Lotz....."There are times we feel Jesus is out to destroy us....and He is." Mark Galli

In His book, "Jesus Mean And Wild," Mark Galli says, "Too often, we don't want the true God as much as we want the God of our imaginations." This is especially true as concerns God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. The proof is how we see both. Our favorite "picture" of Christ seems to be centered on His love, particularly how much He loves us, how much He loves ME! The center of it all becomes us, me. Jesus and His life revolves around mine. It may be unconscious, but we end up thinking He exists for us, not we for Him. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit all have our well-being at heart and all their efforts go towards bringing about good things for us. This is true, but not in ways that our flesh likes or even wants to accept.

Besides Comforter, the Bible refers to the Holy Spirit as our Helper. Our flesh sees that as Him being here to see to our needs and make hard places easier, or to avoid all the hard places completely. Jesus said that He had come to seek and save that which was lost. We're very eager to enter into His offered salvation, but we want Him to leave us undisturbed in the process. We're not looking for Him to bring change within us, just around us. This is not His ministry. It has never been His ministry and never will be. Galli is right. There are definitely going to be times, many of them, when it seems like the Lord is working, either directly or through what He allows, to destroy us. But He only seeks to destroy that part of us that is killing us. Buried anger, resentments, bitterness, impure desires and habits, and addictions of every sort. We are born in captivity to sin, and Christ came to break its power over us. He will work to see what is destructive in our lives fall, so that we might stand in Him. As someone put it, He comes to do a complete makeover of our inner life, except that we don't get to move out while He does it. The process will be painful.

In the same way, the Holy Spirit, our Comforter, will move in ways that will be decidedly uncomfortable for our flesh. He will pursue and convict, speaking into real problem areas in our hearts, and He will be relentless about it. He will use every means possible to do so. Through His Word, through His church, through the lives of others, and by directly speaking into our hearts. Like the inner remodel, it will be painful, sometimes very painful, but with all of it being aimed at bringing about our greatest good. Jesus will only seem mean and wild in the process. When He brings us out on the other side, we will know just how much His love covered us through all of it.

The fingers of the Lord, through His Holy Spirit, will hold us, keep us, and shape us. In the shaping, there will be pressing, squeezing, and stretching. Just as a master violinist stretches the strings of his instrument, stretching them to the near breaking point in order to bring out the richest and sweetest tones, so will He stretch and shape us. At times we will be very "uncomfortable," and at times, we may think He deals with us too harshly, but if we will yield to the shaping, He will bring us into the depths of real life that He created us for. And in the end, we will know and say, as the old hymn goes, that it really was worth it all.

Blessings,

Pastor O