sermon quotes on the holy spirit
Augustine of Hippo
O Holy Spirit, descend plentifully into my heart. Enlighten the dark corners of this neglected dwelling and scatter there Thy cheerful beams.
Mark Batterson
In my experience, take the Holy Spirit out of the equation of your life and it spells boring. Add it into the equation of your life and you never know where you are going to go, what you are going to do, or who you are going to meet.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Fruit is always the miraculous, the created; it is never the result of willing, but always a growth. The fruit of the Spirit is a gift of God, and only He can produce it. They who bear it know as little about it as the tree knows of its fruit. They know only the power of Him on whom their life depends
Samuel Chadwick
The Christian religion begins in a New Birth in the power of the Spirit. It is developed under His guidance, and sustained by His presence; but ignoring the Spirit, it becomes a matter of education and evolution.
John Ortberg
The Holy Spirit says: You are it. You are God’s plan. In a thirsty world, people need to be refreshed. It is a broken world, and people need to be healed. Now get out there and do it!
John Owen
Every time we say we believe in the Holy Spirit, we mean we believe that there is a living God able and willing to enter human personality and change it.
AW Tozer
If the Holy Spirit was withdrawn from the church today, 95 percent of what we do would go on and no one would know the difference. If the Holy Spirit had been withdrawn from the New Testament church, 95 percent of what they did would stop, and everybody would know the difference.
N. T. Wright
Those in whom the Spirit comes to live are God’s new Temple. They are, individually and corporately, places where heaven and earth meet.
N.T. Wright
Without God’s Spirit, there is nothing we can do that will count for God’s kingdom.
Leo Roberts (For Humor)
I talked to the Holy Spirit last night and he didn’t look all well. He was pale as a ghost.
J.I. Packer
The Christian’s life in all its aspects—intellectual and ethical, devotional and relational, upsurging in worship and outgoing in witness—is supernatural; only the Spirit can initiate and sustain it.
Oswald Chambers
The voice of the Spirit is as gentle as a zephyr…So gentle that unless you are living in perfect communion with God, you never hear it.
Meister Eckhart
The seed of God is in us. Given an intelligent and hard-working farmer, it will thrive and grow up to God, whose seed it is; and accordingly its fruits will be God-nature. Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God seeds into God.
Henri Nouwen
The vision that Jesus gives us is this: That I am unconditionally loved, that I belong to God, and that I am a person who can really trust that. When I meet another person who also is rooted in the heart of God, then the spirit of God in me can recognize the spirit of God in the other person, and then we can start building a new space, a new home, a house, a community. Whether we speak about friendship, community, family, marriage, in the spiritual world we are talking about spirit recognizing Spirit, solitude embracing Solitude, heart speaking to Heart. And where this happens, there is an immense space.
Lecture at Scarritt-Bennett Center
Christian Wiman
The immortal Spirit . . . is forever tugging us toward him.
Mark McIntosh
The Spirit of truth guides Jesus’s followers by conducting them farther and farther, beyond their present capacities, into the fullness of the Father’s life, which is given away to Jesus and through Jesus to the world, all by the power of this same Spirit. In all this lies the origin of both Christian faith in God as Trinity and of Christian spirituality as a participation in that trinitarian life.
“Trinitarian Perspectives on Christian Spirituality,” in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Spirituality, ed. Arthur Holder (Sussex, UK: Wiley, 2011), 177.
Edith Humphrey
The great pattern of life is the ecstasy and intimacy of God, who went out of the self to the extreme point, and so dwells among us in an intimacy we can hardly imagine.
D.L. Moody
A holy life will make the deepest impression. Lighthouses blow no horns, they just shine.
Shirley Guthrie Jr.
We have a tendency to think of the Spirit as an impersonal divine power or energy that somehow gets into people…. The Spirit is not some magical ‘something’ that gets into us but Someone who comes to dwell in and among us.
Addison D. Bevere
When he died, he sent his Spirit to teach us the intricacies of the art of living. That’s why his Spirit is the only One who can fill our spiritual vacuum, helping us become truly human.
Andrew Murray
Memory is one of the highest powers in our nature. By it day is linked to day, the unity of life through all our years is kept up, and we know that we are still ourselves. In the spiritual life, recollection is of infinite value. For the sanctifying of our memory, in the service of our spiritual life, God has provided most beautifully. The Holy Spirit is the remembrancer, the Spirit of recollection. Jesus said, “He shall bring all things to your remembrance.”
Abide in Christ, p.85.
Dorothy Sayers
The Power—the Spirit—is thus a social power, working to bring all minds into its own unity, sometimes by similarity and at other times by contrast. There is a diversity of gifts, but the same spirit.
The Mind of the Maker, Harper Collins 1941, 1987, 121.
Peter J. Leithart
Follow the Spirit. Walk in the rhythm of the Spirit. Sing in the Spirit. Pray with the Spirit. Be filled with the Spirit. Sow to the Spirit. Reap from the Spirit. Preserve the unity of the Spirit. Be borne by the Spirit. Cling to the Spirit. Breathe in the Spirit, and breathe…out (the Spirit). Drench yourself in the Spirit. Drink the Spirit, and be drunk by him.”
“Seven Spirits of God: A Pentecost Exhortation,” in First Things, May 22, 2015.
Tim Downs
Watches, cars, and Christians can all look chromed and shiny. But watches don’t tick, cars don’t go, and Christians don’t make a difference without insides. For a Christian, that’s the Holy Spirit.
Abraham Kuyper
Of Him nothing appears in visible form; He never steps out from the intangible void. Hovering, undefined, incomprehensible, He remains a mystery. He is as the wind! We hear its sound, but can not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth. Eye can not see Him, ear can not hear Him, much less the hand handle Him.
There are, indeed, symbolic signs and appearances: a dove, tongues of fire, the sound of a rushing, mighty wind, a breathing from the holy lips of Jesus, a laying on of hands, a speaking with foreign tongues. But of all this nothing remains; nothing lingers behind, not even the trace of a footprint. And after the signs have disappeared, His being remains just as puzzling, mysterious, and distant as ever.
The Work of the Holy Spirit, trans. Henri de Vries (Funk & Wagnalls, 1900).
Abraham Kuyper
Christ has fully revealed Himself. It was the love and divine compassion of the Son. But the Holy Spirit has not done so. It is His saving faithfulness to meet us only in the secret place of His love.
The Work of the Holy Spirit, trans. Henri de Vries (Funk & Wagnalls, 1900).
J. I. Packer
It is as if the Spirit stands behind us, throwing light over our shoulder, on Jesus, who stands facing us. The Spirit’s message is never, “Look at me; listen to me; come to me; get to know me,” but always “Look at him, and see his glory; listen to him, and hear his word; go to him, and have life; get to know him, and taste his gift of joy and peace.”
Keep in Step with the Spirit: Finding Fullness in Our Walk with God, 2nd ed. (Baker, 2005).
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