Overemphasizing the Holy Spirit

It is a bit like walking on a tightrope when you study the gifts of the Holy Spirit. There is a very great danger of falling off and hurting yourself. One of the dangers in this study—it is a paradoxical thing—is that we emphasise the Spirit too much, and that we take away from the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.

In the last thirty or forty years of the writing of this article, there has been a huge amount of teaching in the Christian church on the Holy Spirit (who he is, what his gifts are, what he does in the church). And in many respects that emphasis has been welcomed, for before that he tended to be rather neglected. But we have reached a point now where we are in danger of toppling over to the other extreme: overstressing the person of the Spirit, overemphasising his activity and his gifts.

The New Testament tells us that there is nothing that could grieve him more than overemphasising him. He is like an essentially modest person. There are not many of them around, and I wished there were more. But the person who may be gifted but does not like to have attention drawn to themselves, prefers to be in the background and for the spotlight to be on others. We always admire such people, at least I hope we do. We think highly of them, their very reticence, their standing in the background does them more honour in fact, than the person who always has to be centre stage. Now, no persons of the Godhead need to be centre stage, but one of the great characteristics of the Holy Spirit is that he never draws attention to himself. He always draws attention to the Son of God, Jesus Christ. The Spirit is never saying, Look at me! He is always saying, Look at him! In John 16:14, our Lord himself said of the Spirit, He will glorify me. There you have encapsulated what the Holy Spirit is about and what he likes to do. He will glorify me, Jesus said.

The following illustration is the best I have ever come across which is about this work of the Holy Spirit. It is J.I. Packer’s famous illustration of the floodlight. He was going to preach at some ancient church in an English town on a winter evening. He was not sure where the church building was, because he had never been there before. He was slightly lost, but then suddenly he turned the corner and there it was. Shining in the darkness, in every detail of its architecture so clear in its beauty and grandeur that you could not miss it. There it was! And it was there, Dr Packer says, because of a set of floodlights placed around it in the church grounds. Those beams were all focused in one direction, on that building. When you walked around the corner, you did not say, What marvellous floodlights! You said, There is the building. That is what I have been looking for. How beautiful it is!

Packer says those floodlights represent the Holy Spirit. That is his task: cast a whole flood of light on Jesus so that we do not talk so much about the Spirit, but we talk about Christ, the Saviour. Incidentally, that is a very good way of assessing all so-called spiritual experiences and spiritual movements: are they all about the Holy Spirit? If yes, well, then I doubt if they are very spiritual. But is the Lord Jesus at the centre? Then that does bear the hallmark of the Spirit’s delight and the Spirit’s work.

So, when we are studying the gifts of the Spirit, we have to be sure that Christ is central. How are they related to him?¹

Edward Donnelly