She Asked Me What He Is Like

The girl was fifteen and she was not being clever.

That is the part worth saying first, because a question like that from a fifteen year old is usually a test and this one was not. She had been coming on Wednesdays for about a year. She listened. She asked things nobody else asked and she asked them plainly and she waited for the answer.

They were at the kitchen table. The others had gone. And the girl was putting her coat on and stopped with one arm in it and said:

What is He like?

And the woman said: what is who like?

And the girl said: the Holy Spirit. You have told us what He does. What is He like?

Now understand who is being asked. This woman has taught that material for thirty years. She could give you the biblical case for the personhood of the Holy Spirit off the top of her head with references. She has taught it to adults and to children and once to a room of ministers who were not easy. She is not a woman who fumbles.

And she sat there at her own kitchen table with a tea towel in her hand and nothing came.

She said something in the end. She said He is gentle. And it was true and she meant it, and she could hear as she said it that it was the sort of thing a person says when they have run out.

The girl said thanks and went home.

That was in March, and it is August now, and the woman has thought about it most days since. Not because she failed a teenager. Because of what the blank told her.

Thirty years of accurate teaching. Every proposition correct. And she could not describe Him, because you cannot describe somebody you have only ever defined.

And that is you with the tea towel, or you would not have read this far.

Luke leaves one word lying about, and it is the answer

Here is what I want to put in front of you, and it is a small verse that nobody preaches.

Luke is summarizing. The churches have come through a bad stretch, the persecution has eased, and he writes one of those quick sentences that historians write when they are getting from one place to the next.

So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was being built up. And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied.Acts 9:31

In the comfort of the Holy Spirit.

Not by the power of. Not through the gifts of. Luke is not making a doctrinal point and he is not defending anything, which is precisely why the sentence is so useful: it is what the man reached for when he was not being careful.

He describes a whole region of Christians as living in His comfort, the way you would say a family lives in a warm house.

You are living inside something that Scripture names as comfort, and you have been living inside it for the whole thirty years. It is written that the church walked in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit (Acts 9:31), and in is a word about where a person is standing. The Holy Spirit is the One that comfort belongs to, and it was around you at that table in March while you had nothing to say.

Now here is why the blank happened, and it is not what you think.

You have been given a vocabulary of function. What He does. Conviction, guidance, gifts, sealing, witness. Every word of it true, and none of it is the sort of word a person uses about somebody they know.

Think how you would answer if the girl had asked you what your sister is like.

You would not list her functions. You would say something small and specific. You would say she is the person who notices when a room has gone quiet. You would say she is funny about queues.

That is describing. And you cannot do it from a syllabus, only from company.

You are not short of doctrine and you were never the problem in that conversation. It is written that the Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit (Romans 8:16), which means the knowing has been running in you underneath the teaching the whole time. The Holy Spirit was not withholding Himself from a woman who taught accurately for three decades.

And let me say the thing that most needs saying to somebody like you.

You are not being told that thirty years were the wrong half. It is written that Jesus called Him the Spirit of truth (John 14:17), so the accuracy you have given people all these years is His own character and not a substitute for it. The Holy Spirit is not more pleased with a vague description than with a true definition.

You do not have less than you thought. You have more than you had words for.