I'm not sure I've ever felt like the Holy Spirit is in me. My friends in church usually describe their experiences but I've not had any electrifying one like them. Please is a believer supposed to be able to feel the Holy Spirit?
— Anonymous
Yes. A believer is supposed to feel the presence or manifestation of the Holy Spirit. However, many believers have totally attached special feelings with the Manifestation, Presence and indwelling of the Holy Spirit. They have used these as metrics to tell they have a functional relationship with the Holy Spirit.
In contrast, Scripture does not instruct us to base our relationship with the Holy Spirit on how or what we feel.
Every born again believer has the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. When Jesus told His disciples of the coming Comforter, He said that the Spirit will be with us and in us.
“And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in
you” (John 14:16–17).
In other words, Jesus sent one like Himself to be with us and in us. We know the Holy Spirit is with us because God’s Word tells us that it is so.
The Holy Spirit indwells every born-again believer. We are not filled with the Spirit because we feel we are, but because it is the privilege of and promise for believers. Being filled or controlled by the Spirit is the result of walking in obedience to the Lord. This is a gift of grace and not an emotional feeling. Emotions can and will deceive us, and we can work ourselves up into an emotional frenzy that is purely from the flesh and not of the Holy Spirit.
“So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature … since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:16, 25).
We cannot deny that there are times when we can be emotionally overwhelmed, electrified by the presence and the power of the Spirit. When that happens, it is a joy like no other. We experience joy by the Spirit when we understand that, as children of God, we are blessed by His grace.
So the manifestation of the Holy Spirit can involve our feelings and emotions. But we are not to base the assurance of our possession of the Holy Spirit on how we feel.
Post a Comment