What Does the Holy Spirit Do?

Maybe you think of communing with the Spirit as hearing whispered messages or getting overtaken by waves of warm fuzzies. There are certainly places in the Bible where the Spirit manifests himself in demonstrative ways. In the book of Romans, however, Paul’s focus is on how the Spirit assists us in our growth toward Christ-likeness. Here are a few things Paul identifies. 

The Spirit Enables Us to Believe in Jesus. 

Paul says, “Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you … the Spirit is life” (Romans 8:9-10). For someone to truly trust in Jesus, the Spirit has to be present. Paul told the Corinthians, “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3). Without transformation by the Spirit, our hearts resist and suppress the truth that Jesus is Lord. The Spirit has to open the eyes of our hearts so that we see Jesus for who he is and feel our deep need of him. 

The Spirit Produces the Life of Christ in Us.

Paul says repeatedly in Romans 8 that the Spirit in us is life. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul lists out “spiritual fruit” (evidences of spiritual life) that the Spirit produces in the lives of those whom he indwells: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). These things only grow in us through the Spirit. 

Trying to work these things up without the Spirit is like trying to get a dead rosebush to produce living roses. Some years ago, my wife asked me to beautify the flowerbeds in our front yard—specifically by killing the weeds. I soaked the ground around the rose bushes in herbicides, and in the process killed all the rose bushes. Wife not happy. 

Now imagine I had run out to the florist, bought a few dozen roses, and stapled the fresh buds onto the dead limbs. Then every couple of weeks I’d repeated the process. From a distance, the rosebushes would have looked alive and healthy, covered with beautiful, colorful rosebuds. But it would’ve just been an illusion, and a tiring one to maintain. 

Trying to live the Christian life apart from the Spirit is as exhausting as continually stapling fresh rosebuds onto a dead rosebush. When the Spirit of God is at work in you, however, he produces this spiritual fruit as naturally as beautiful flowers grow on a living rosebush. 

The Spirit “Sheds Abroad” Christ’s Love in Our Hearts. 

This is a phrase that Paul uses in Romans 5:5 and expounds in chapter 8. “Sheds abroad” means more than “to convince you propositionally about the facts of God’s love.” Paul is pointing to a felt experience of being overwhelmed by God’s love. In doing this the Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. 

Paul says, “You have received the spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba, Father’” (Romans 8:15-16). He is referring to a sense of intimacy we feel with the Father, welling up deep from within. Virtually every language in the world has two words for father. There’s the more formal one—“father.” Then there’s a far less formal one: one that implies tenderness and closeness—like Daddy (English), Papa (Spanish), Bapa (Indonesian), Baba (Turkish), and so on. Abba is that word in Aramaic. The Spirit of God makes God feel like a tender Father. 

Deep down, I think we live with the fear of being on our own, without someone to love and care for us, exposed to everything life throws at us. But every Christian has a heavenly Father who will never leave them. The Spirit makes us aware of that truth, reminds us of it, and helps us feel it. 

Maybe you find it difficult to get your mind around the presence of a never-leaving heavenly Father because your earthly dad did exactly that—he left you, ignored you, or abused you. It can be very tough for people to warm to the idea of God as Father if their earthly fathers let them down. But when we look at how God treats his people, we learn what fathers are supposed to be like. In God we experience a welcoming, kind, gentle, protecting, loving Dad. Instead of seeing our heavenly Father through the lens of our earthly one, we should try to evaluate our earthly dads through the lens of our heavenly one. 

The Spirit wants to produce in you these feelings of intimacy with the Father. Truly, this is the essence of what it means to be filled with the Spirit! He sheds abroad—some translations say “pours out”—God’s love in the believer’s heart, so that we overflow with it. These feelings don’t happen every time we pray, but the still, small voice of the Spirit is there, quietly directing us to God’s promises in times of need and assuring us of our place in his heart. 

The Spirit Prays for Us. 

Paul points out one more important thing the Spirit does in our day-to-day lives. He says, “We do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (v 26). There are times when a Christian feels so weak, so confused, and so overwhelmed that we don’t even know what to say. In those moments, the Spirit speaks for us. “Groanings too deep for words” is a mysterious phrase, and we probably don’t know the half of what it means. But two things are for sure. 

First, the Spirit feels our emotions. “Groaning” is an emotional term. In John 11, Jesus showed up at the tomb of Lazarus, a recently deceased friend. He was there to raise him back to life, but first he stood at his friend’s tomb with Martha and Mary, Lazarus’ grieving sisters, and in the shortest verse in the Bible, we read this: “Jesus wept” (v 35). Didn’t Jesus know that within an hour, he’d have raised Lazarus back to life? Yes, but still he wept. Why? Because his friends were weeping, and that’s what you do when someone you love has their heart broken. You weep with them. 

The Spirit of God does in a Christian now what the Son of God did with his friends then. He groans with you in your time of pain. Sometimes, during deep suffering, I find great comfort in knowing the Spirit is right there with me, feeling my pain. Sharing it. Bearing it. Groaning with me. 

Second, “groaning too deep for words” means he’s praying with wisdom that is impossible for me to grasp or express in human nouns and verbs. There are times when we don’t know what to pray—when all we can say to God is “I don’t know why this is happening, I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, and I don’t even know what to say to you right now.” At that moment, the Spirit of God prays for us. He takes our groans and translates them into specific requests for God to accomplish good in and through our life. 

My first pastor was one of the godliest men I’ve ever known, and a great man of prayer. When someone asked him for prayer, he would say, “Of course, I will pray for you—but more importantly, the Spirit will, too. And when I say ‘Amen,’ he continues.”

Excerpted from Essential Christianity by J.D. Greear. Copyright 2023. Published by The Good Book Company.

J.D. Greear
J.D. Greear

J.D. Greear is the pastor of The Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, and is currently serving as the 62nd president of the Southern Baptist Convention. He is the author of several books, including most recently Essential Christianity: The Heart of the Gospel in Ten Words (The Good Book Company).

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