He Who Rests, Helps, OverShadows and Leads

Scripture

Read: Luke 1:1-38

And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God.

Luke 1:35

Observe

The New Testament is awash with references to the Holy Spirit and what he did and how he assisted Jesus and enabled the church. We’re going to be following the thread of the Spirit’s activity through the writings of Luke. Luke was a companion of Paul, an educated man and an avid compiler of information and research about Jesus; he wrote two of the books in the New Testament documenting what Jesus said and did and how the church obeyed the instructions he gave them. One of the things that quickly becomes clear as you read Luke & Acts is the emphasis that Luke gives to the work and role of the  Holy Spirit in everything that took place. We start here in chapter 1 with the account of Mary conceiving her son.

God the 3-in-1 God is once again described as being fully involved in the coming of the Son into the world. Note: the Holy Spirit ‘will come upon you’, the ‘Most High’ or Father ‘will overshadow you’ and the child will be ‘the Son of God’.

The Holy Spirit is not an optional ‘bit’ of God. He is not simply someone who makes Christian meetings lively or the ‘ecstatic’ or ‘weird’ aspect of God’s activity. He is not a ‘thing’ or an ‘it’ but a person.

Notice that in the angel’s prophecy it is the Most High’s power that will ‘overshadow’ Mary, not the Holy Spirit’s. Sometimes, if you were to listen to a lot of the way Christians speak about the Holy Spirit, you would think that he was not a ‘he’ at all but a force like electricity. Sometimes too, Christians are spooked out by what they attribute to be ‘weird’ dealings with the Holy Spirit. But here at the conception of the Son in Mary, the Holy Spirit is described (in terms familiar to us from Isaiah) as ‘coming upon’ Mary. We might say that he rested on Mary. 

What’s clear is the Spirit’s involvement in the awesome moment that the Son of God entered history. He’s intimately bound up with what the Father was doing in bringing his rescue plan to fruition. 

Apply

The Holy Spirit rested on Mary and now also lives in each one of us. If you’re a Christian then the Holy Spirit has caused you to be born again. He helped conceive the Son in the womb of Mary and he caused you to be reborn into the kingdom of God.

Knowing that he began your Christian life, it’s true as well that he will continue it. He is your constant helper and companion through the Christian life and he is precisely that - a ‘he’ - not a force like electricity but a person to be known and loved.

Prayer

Jesus thank you for sending your Spirit to be with me. Thank you that when I put my trust in you, it was him in me that made it possible in the first place and thank you that you are with me always. Please help me today to love you and trust you more. Amen.