Welcome to this week's Things Unseen. On this podcast, we actually do talk about things

that are very visible as well as unseen, but not this week. This week I want to reflect

with you on something invisible. I should have said not something invisible, but someone

invisible. We're going to think together about the ministry of the Holy Spirit. And you'll

remember Jesus' famous words to Nicodemus, recorded in John chapter 3. The work of the

Spirit is like the wind. As it happens both in Hebrew and Greek, the same words are used

for wind and spirit. And Jesus is saying that the Spirit's work is like the wind in the

sense, you can't actually see it, but you know he's there because of his effects on people.

In my early days as a Christian, people who spoke on the subject of the Holy Spirit sounded

as though they had all read the same book, because they usually began by saying the Holy Spirit

is the forgotten person of the Godhead. When that was said often enough, it actually began

to sound believable. I'm not sure whether I believed it, but certainly in my teens, I was too

young to know any better. And then the more I heard it, the more I realized that what they were

really talking about was the so-called charismatic gifts of the Spirit. And slowly it became clear to

me that so much of this kind of talk was actually about power, about unusual gifts, and not really

about the person of the Holy Spirit himself. It was about having powers, not about knowing a person.

I've come to think that this isn't surprising because often the same happens with both the Father

and the Son. We focus attention on what they can give us and what we can get from them, and much

less attention on who they are and how we can come to know them. And so, as I've said before in

these podcasts, it's easy for us to focus on the blessings God gives to us without actually

growing in the knowledge of our benefactor. And it maybe seems more relevant to talk about these

blessings. Yes, an easier to than to talk about the one divine person in two natures when we're

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