The Holy Spirit

This week, our DTS class traveled to Lausanne (which I still can't seem to pronounce correctly...) to team up with their DTS and listen to Maureen Menard speak about the Holy Spirit. Of all the big topics we discuss in Christianity, this is probably the one that I was the least familiar with. We talk about Him in church sometimes and He's come up in a few books that I have read but honestly, I haven't taken the time (or really cared) to do much more research than that. Isn't that terrible?

On a kind-of-related note, I've been listening to A.W. Tozier's Pursuit of God on my iPod during work duties and car rides, and have been really impressed with some of his insight and quotes. This is from another of his books, The Divine Conquest, but I thought it was a really great image of the Holy Spirit (emphasis added).

…The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of life and light and love. In His uncreated nature He is a boundless sea of fire, flowing, moving ever, performing as He moves the eternal purposes of God. Toward nature He performs one sort of work, toward the world another and toward the Church still another. And every act of His accords with the will of the Triune God. Never does He act on impulse nor move after a quick or arbitrary decision. Since He is the Spirit of the Father He feels toward His people exactly as the Father feels, so there need be on our part no sense of strangeness in His presence. He will always act like Jesus, toward sinners in compassion, toward saints in warm affection, toward human suffering in tenderest pity and love.

Beautiful, right?  Maureen also made a lot of great points throughout class and was able to show us a lot of scripture about the Holy Spirit.

"Now the Lord is the Spirit and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. and we...are being transformed into His likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit." -2 Corinthians 3:17-18


We spent a lot of time talking about the freedom that we have in the Holy Spirit, and how the Spirit  gives us al the power and strength of Jesus, who came and lived faithfully so that we could learn to live the way God intended Adam and Eve to, is literally seated at the right hand of the Father. How overwhelming to think that I have the power and authority of Jesus!

Another interesting point that Maureen brought up was that the enemy can only attack if we let him, which can happen when our hearts get hard through unconfessed sin and unforgiveness of others and ourselves. Even when we feel powerless or like victims, we can use the ministry of the Holy Spirit to fend off and fight an attack. Even though our DTS class is pretty diverse in our backgrounds, adding the Lausanne class gave us even more opportunity to hear from students of different backgrounds and I learned a lot from questions like these.

I love the way Romans 8:9-11 is explained in The Message version of the Bible and I think it really sums up Maureen's teaching for the week and the way I now understand the way the Holy Spirit works within the Trinity:

"But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than Him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won't know what we're talking about. But for you who welcome Him, in whom He dwells - even though you still experience all the limitations of sin - you yourself experience life on God's terms. It stands to reason, doesn't it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, He'll do the same thing in you that He did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and He does, as surely as He did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With His Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ's!"

Although we spent quite a bit of time talking about some of the more controversial ideas of the Holy Spirit, like gifts (mostly tongues), I was disappointed that we never got around to talking about the fruit of the spirit. Gifts are something that tend to stand out every once in a while but the fruit of the spirit is something that we, as believers, should be experiencing every day. As I have worked through a lot of sin and bitterness in my life over the past week, I have begun to see more of the fruit of the spirit in my life and would be interested in hearing what Maureen has to say about it.

All in all, I thought this week was really informative and it was great to get out of Burtigny and join up with the Lausanne DTS for the week. I am definitely inspired to do more research and learn more about the Holy Spirit and His role in my life.

My CHEER for the week is everything outreach-related! Although I love the lecture phase of DTS and am definitely learning and growing, I am most excited about outreach. After a lot of discussion and prayer, David and I feel like we are being called to South Africa and I am excited about getting together in our teams next week to begin discussing what our outreach phase will look like. It is crazy to me that we will be in Africa by Christmas and that we will be there almost as long as we'll be in Burtigny (and we haven't even been here for 2 months yet. Amazing!). I'm really excited about outreach and hearing the final decisions this week was definitely my highlight!

My JEER for the week was the night activities that we did as a group. I love our DTS class and spending time with everyone but we are together a lot during the day and don't have a lot of downtime - especially this week since we were in Lausanne for the better part of the day. I understand the point of community and team building, and I think the idea behind Holy Spirit night was great but the movie night was unnecessary, especially since we couldn't really even talk during the movie. I love any excuse to try a new recipe, though, so I made Vintage Victuals' chocolate chip cookies and I think they are my new favorite.

The YWAM VALUE I want to explore this week is to "be broad-structured and decentralized." Being in Lausanne at their base made me really see and value the differences in the various bases around the world, and I am thankful that YWAM encourages individuality and creativity while maintaining relationships and core values. Even within the same country, different bases need to cater to different students and communities, and I'm glad that there is literally something for everyone within the organization. I am also glad that I ended up at Burtigny instead of Lausanne :) The people there were great, but visiting made me appreciate our little village and the homey feeling of our little base.