You Were Entrusted With a Person, Not a Power

← Leadership Thoughts

Before Jesus left, He made His followers a promise that sounds, at first, like a downgrade. He told them it was to their advantage that He go away. To their advantage. The man who had healed their sick and stilled their storms was saying they would be better off without His physical presence in the room (John 16:7).

The reason was the Holy Spirit. And there is something in that I do not want you to miss. God's plan was never to leave us with a memory and a manual. It was to put His own Spirit inside ordinary people and trust them to carry Him into the world.

Power Is What He Gives. Presence Is Who He Is.

In Acts 1:8 Jesus says, "You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you." We love that verse, and we tend to stop at the word power. But read what the power actually arrives in. It comes wrapped in a Person. The promise is not a battery. It is a relationship.

This is where a lot of us quietly go wrong. We want the power and we are happy to skip the Person. We treat the Spirit like a resource to draw on when we are stuck, rather than Someone who moved in. But you cannot have the gifts of the Spirit the way they were meant to be had while ignoring the Spirit Himself. The river is not separate from its source.

"It seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us."

Acts 15:28

He Is Not an "It"

Notice how the early church spoke about Him. When the leaders in Jerusalem made one of the most important decisions in church history, they wrote, "It seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us." They were not consulting a force. They were in the room with a Person, making the decision together.

The Holy Spirit has a will. He chooses (1 Corinthians 12:11). He speaks: "the Holy Spirit said, set apart for me Barnabas and Saul" (Acts 13:2). He can be grieved (Ephesians 4:30). None of those things are true of a power. They are only true of a Person. The Spirit is God Himself, here, with you, and He came to be known, not just used.

You Do Not Hand Your Spirit to Someone You Distrust

Here is the line I keep coming back to. God trusts us with what He has entrusted us with. And what He entrusted us with, first and most staggering of all, is Himself. Think about what that means. You do not put your own Spirit inside someone you are keeping at arm's length. The indwelling is an act of trust so extravagant it should reorder how you see yourself.

You are not a servant standing outside the house hoping for instructions. You are a son or daughter with the Owner living inside. That is the New Covenant. The veil tore, the distance closed, and God moved in.

This Changes Your Monday

If you build anything, a business, a team, a church, a family, this is not abstract. The same Spirit who filled that upstairs room at Pentecost lives in you at your desk on a Tuesday afternoon. You are not carrying your work alone, drawing on your own wisdom until it runs out. You have a Partner who knows things you do not, sees around corners you cannot, and was entrusted to you on purpose.

Most people are trying to do a God-sized assignment with only their own resources, and wondering why they are exhausted. The invitation of Acts is simpler and harder than that. Stop treating Him as power on tap. Start treating Him as the Person He is. Everything else in this series flows from that one shift.