Holy Spirit – What Does This Mean?

Sunday School: Baptism of Jesus

Encore Post: On the First Sunday after Epiphany, the Church celebrates the day that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan River.(Matthew 3:13-17) The baptism that John performed was for the forgiveness of sins, so it puzzled John. Why would the sinless Son of God need to be baptized? Jesus told him it was “fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” (Matthew 3:15) Like the scapegoat and the Passover Lamb of the Old Testament, John called him “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. “(John 1:29)

So, when we go into the waters of Holy Baptism, Jesus washes away our sins (Ephesians 5:26-27) These sins he took upon himself at his baptism and carried them to the cross. When he died, we died to our old life. When he rose, we rose with him to new life. Our sins were forgiven and we need sin no more. (Romans 6:3-11)

When Jesus came out of the water, God the Father spoke from heaven and said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:17) The Holy Spirit also appeared in the form of a dove that landed on Jesus. An appearance of God in this world is called a theophany. At the Baptism of Jesus, all three persons on the Trinity appear in our world. In the readings for the Church Year, the season of Epiphany begins with this theophany and concludes by celebrating another — the Transfiguration.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Pastor Emeritus

Fort Wayne, Indiana

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Salvation Guaranteed

Encore Post: When we hear God’s Word, the Holy Spirit creates faith in our hearts. He also comes to live within us. This faith clings to God’s grace and his promise to save us for the sake of Jesus. In Holy Baptism, he places God’s seal on us. We belong to God as his heirs. The presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives is God’s down payment on the resurrection of the dead and eternal life with God in paradise.

What this means is we do not need to worry about whether we will go to Heaven when we die. We do not need to worry whether we did enough to earn a second chance from God. We do not need to worry about whether God chose to send us to hell before we were born. We do not need to worry whether we were sincere when we accepted Jesus as our savior or if we cannot remember whether we ever made a decision for Jesus at all. God has done everything to save us even before we were born.

God the Father loved us before he made the world. He chose us then to be His children and set things in motion to adopt us as his heirs. He sent God the Son to die for us. God the Son was born of the Virgin Mary, becoming God with us. Jesus lived a perfect life for our sake, obeying God’s Law and fulfilling it. Jesus then went to the cross, bearing our sins and paying the full penalty for our guilt. He suffered, died and rose again so that We might be declared “not guilty,” forgiven of our sins, and rise from the dead on the last day. God the Holy Spirit comes to us through the Gospel, Holy Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Through these Means of Grace, He created faith in our hearts, so that we trust in God’s promises and the sacrifice of Jesus to save us. He seals us with the name of the Holy Trinity and enters our hearts as a down payment on our salvation. So our salvation is guaranteed by God Himself, because everything depends on him.

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Rev. Robert E. Smith

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Faith

Encore Post: Faith is one of those “church words” that everyone knows and uses, but finds hard to pin down. We use it to mean everything from a family of church bodies, to a system of things people believe, to trust in God, to accepting something is true, but that we cannot prove. The Greek language uses one word for both faith and belief. (πιστεύω — pisteoo — to believe, πίστις; pistis; Faith) When the New Testament uses the word, it uses it for both what we believe in and our trust in God to keep his promises to save us.

When the Bible talks about faith in God, (Saving Faith, Justifying Faith) it means a trust in God to keep his promises, especially his promise to save us. This trust is not something we create by things we do. It is created in us when the Holy Spirit comes to us through the Gospel, Baptism or the Lord’s Supper. (Romans 1:17, John 20:30-31, Ephesians 1:13, Romans 1:16-17) Our faith clings to Jesus, believing that his sufferings and death on the cross forgives our sins and gives us everlasting life. This faith responds to the Grace given to us in God’s Word and the Sacraments. It thanks God for his mercy, praises him and gives us the desire to serve God and our neighbors. (much more on this later. For now, see Ephesians 2:10)

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Rev. Robert E. Smith

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Means of Grace

Encore Post: Now and then, the news is filled with excitement over lottery jackpots worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Long lines form at convenience stores as everyone wants to buy a ticket. For all but a handful of people, the only value of the ticket is entertainment. Yet the very lucky winner is very happy indeed. She has won a fortune! Yet her bank account hasn’t changed a penny. Until the money is deposited, nothing has changed — other than she discovers she has more cousins than she ever knew she had!

Because of the death and resurrection of Jesus, we have amazing riches in heaven. God loves us, gives us his grace. We are his children. Our sins are forgiven and we will live forever. Yet without a way of these things coming to us, it is not yet applied to us. To give these gifts to us, God uses the Means of Grace.

The Means of Grace are visible means by which God the Holy Spirit gives the gifts Jesus earned by his death on the cross. He uses these to plant faith in our hearts, strengthen and preserve it. Through them, we receive the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation. He uses this to enter our hearts and live there.

These means are the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Holy Baptism, the Lord’s Supper and perhaps Absolution. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper and sometimes absolution are called sacraments.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Fort Wayne, Indiana

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Pentecost

Encore Post: The feast of Pentecost was one of the celebrations established by God at Mount Sinai. Also called the Feast of Weeks, it was a kind of Thanksgiving in which people brought a sacrifice for the harvest of grain. It was fifty days after Passover and known by the Greek word for fifty days — Pentecost. Since many Jews and Godfearers traveled to Jerusalem from great distances to be there for Passover, many stayed for this feast as well.

On Pentecost, the wind got the attention of the crowd. Wind and tongues of fire witnessed to the presence of the Holy Spirit. God kept his promise on that day when he gave himself — the third person of the Trinity — to the whole Church. No longer would the Holy Spirit come to just prophets, but to all believers, young and old, Jew and Gentile, of all nations and languages. They all spoke in the languages of the people gathered in Jerusalem, singing the praises of God. The church celebrates this day as a kind of birthday. It was that day the gospel began to spread to the ends of the earth.

Both the Hebrew and Greek words for Spirit mean “Wind.” The Holy Spirit hovered over the chaos before God created the Heavens and the Earth. When Solomon built the temple in Jerusalem, the Holy Spirit settled into the Holy of Holies in the form of a cloud. When the Prophet Elijah fled to Mount Sinai, God sent a mighty wind, an earthquake, and a fire to get his attention. At the baptism of Jesus, the Holy Spirit appeared in the form of a dove.

The pouring out of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost fulfilled prophecy in Old Testament (Joel 2:28-32), by John the Baptist (Matthew 3:11) and by Jesus (Acts 1:5). By baptizing His people with the Holy Spirit, Jesus gave them the power to witness to God’s love. He provided them with a counselor to lead and guide them. Just like the prophets of the Old Testament, every one of God’s children now can proclaim His praises to everyone.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Kept in the True Faith

Encore Post: Military planners labor long hours to plan every detail of a campaign before the first soldier or sailor even receives their orders. They consider carefully all of the strengths and weaknesses of their enemy and their own troops. They weigh every possible variation and the effects unforeseen weather might have on the battle. Yet the moment the battle begins, all of that goes away. “The fog of war” sets in. You can’t see clearly. Sometimes you mistake enemies for friends. The battle might be won everywhere but where you are.

In this sin-filled world, you are at war and in the middle of a battle. The old and new man compete for control of your life. The world and the devil try to bend you to their will. Sin, sickness, grief and death explode all around you. In the middle of this chaos, the Holy Spirit fights to keep you in the true faith. The good news is that he will. Nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus. (Romans 8:38-39) The Holy Spirit who began a good work in you will complete it on the day Christ returns. (Philippians 1:6)

We can be sure that we will be with Jesus when we die because he promises we will. (John 12:26) It does not depend on how many good works we do, whether we confessed and repented of all of our sins, whether we really accepted Jesus as our Lord or not. It all depends on God, who does it all for us and promised we would be with him forever. He guarantees it. After all, he gave us the Holy Spirit.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Indiana

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Enlightened with His Gifts

Encore Post: Everyone loves receiving gifts. They show us that we are appreciated and that someone was thinking about us. This is true even when it comes from someone you love. Of course a young woman loves to receive an engagement ring. It not only shows her that her boyfriend cares about her, but it carries with it a promise. The day soon will come when he will make her his bride. It is filled with visions of a happy life, children and the hope that she will not be alone as long as they both live. It is likely the ring is not the first gift that she received from him or gave to him. And it will not be the last. Yet she would never consider returning a gift from her beloved. Each new gift comes with the same reminded that she is loved.

God the Holy Spirit gives to us many gifts. The Means of Grace are the most precious of them. While they are simple in form — written words on a page or said by a man, water poured on your head, bread and wine eaten with other very ordinary people — they are precious gifts. All of them come with the power of the Holy Spirit to create faith in our hearts, make a new Adam or Eve within us who loves God and wants to serve him and gives us the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation. In the waters of baptism, we are adopted as God’s children. With the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, with eat the body of our Lord broken on the cross to pay for our sins and drink the blood of the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. In Absolution, we hear the words of Jesus that our sins are forgiven in the voice of the one sent to say them to us.

These are gifts that produce more gifts. love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. These gifts serve God and our neighbors and testify that God is indeed good. (Galatians 5:22-23)

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Indiana

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Called by the Gospel

Encore Post: God’s grace knows no limit. He loves us so much that all three persons work for our salvation. The Father chose us to be his before the world was made. He sent the Son to die for us. The Son became a flesh-and-blood man, lived a perfect life for us, suffered and died to pay the price for our sins and rose from the dead so that we might rise to live forever.

The Holy Spirit makes us holy — sanctifies us. In theology, we use the word sanctification in two ways. The first is everything the Spirit does from placing faith in our hearts to maintaining it to the day of our death. The second way we use it is for everything the Spirit does after he saves us. Martin Luther describes the first definition in this way: “the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, sanctified and kept me in the one, true Faith…” (Small Catechism, Creed, 2.3)

The Holy Spirit calls us through the preaching of God’s Word.(2 Thessalonians 2:13-14) He inspired Moses, David, the prophets, evangelists, apostles and the other human authors of the Scriptures to record his words. In the Word of God we find the law, which condemns us all as sinners, worthy of eternal death, and the gospel, which reveals that God is gracious to us for the sake of Jesus’ death on the cross and will forgive all those who believe this. This gospel is preached to us by those God sends to do so, read in the Bible and when put together with water in Baptism. In this way the Holy Spirit calls us to faith in Jesus. (Romans 10:14-17, Titus 3:5-7)

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Indiana

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The Holy Spirit seeks the Lost

Encore Post: Evangelicals are looking for seekers. These are people without Christ, who are looking for someone or something to fill the God-shaped hole in their hearts. Evangelicals believe that when they hear the gospel, they are won over by the preacher and accept Jesus as their savior. Or perhaps they responded to an altar call and prayed the sinner’s prayer. This decision theology maintains that it is something we decide that saves us. Lutherans believe they are mistaken. Why?

Because the Holy Scripture describes people without faith in Christ as dead in their sins, unable to accept the things of the Spirit. (Ephesians 2:1-3, 1 Corinthians 2:14) Nowhere in the Bible do we find a passage commanding us to accept Jesus as Savior. In fact, if you review in your mind all the Sunday school lessons about people God used in his plan to save us, you will discover God came looking for them, they didn’t seek him. Faith is not accepting a series of facts as true or choosing to follow Jesus.

We are saved because God seeks and saves the lost. The Holy Spirit used the Gospel, shared by parents, friends and love ones with us, read in the pages of the Bible and preached to us, and when we are baptized. He used it to create faith our hearts which trusts in Jesus to save us. He calls us by the Gospel, enlightens us with his gifts, sanctifies and keeps us in the faith. We can be confident of our salvation because it depends on God and not on our own strength.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Indiana

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The Three Ways God Cares for Us

Encore Post: When we baptize a new Christian, we ask him to promise several things and to confess several things. Following the ancient tradition of the Church, we ask the candidate if they believe what the creed proclaims. But we do this with three questions: “Do you believe in God the Father…?” “Do you believe in Jesus Christ…?” and “Do you believe in the Holy Spirit…? We do this because each person of the Holy Trinity has His own role in our life and salvation.

This is a bit of a mystery, since all three persons are involved in all these acts of love for us, yet the Scripture speaks of each having these roles. Rather than try to puzzle out how this is so, we rejoice that each person loves us in his own way.

Martin Luther in his Small Catechism calls each person’s work an article and speaks about them separately. So, he talks about the good news that God the Father created and provides for us, God the Son redeems us with his own blood and the Holy Spirit makes us holy. This good news gives us joy, especially since we just considered his law in the Ten Commandments. We have been confronted by the fact of our sinfulness. Now we can have peace in the gospel of the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation.

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