The Holy Spirit Is Not A Pill

Anyone else ever try to do some last minute “spiritual cramming” late Saturday night or early Sunday morning in an effort to “ready your heart” for the service?

I get it.

There’s a deep part of us that honors the weight of what we do on Sundays and we’d like to approach it with the proper heart and attitude. 

So we jump into the Bible at 10:30p on Saturday or for 10min as we wake up on Sunday to try to get a dose of the Holy Spirit before we take the stage.

We don't intend to do this lightly.

We genuinely want the Lord to use us, to move powerfully in the room through our worship, to speak into our minds so we say and sing what He would have us say and sing.

So we invite Him in...

on Saturday night...

as we’re drifting off to sleep...

You already know the problem with this.

The Holy Spirit is not a pill.

The Holy Spirit is a person.

I do not personally believe we can have regular access to the true heart and activity of the Holy Spirit through brief and infrequent contact.

Sure, the Holy Spirit can choose to use us despite our unreadiness. He has that right. But we cannot expect His power to flow through us without steady and routine interaction with Him. 

Since the Holy Spirit is a person, He is relational. He longs for communion with us—for fellowship and partnership. 

And this must be developed over time, through regular invitation and willing obedience to follow His voice when He does speak.

Jesus’ words in John highlight the reality of this truth:

John 14:15-17 | NIV

“If you love me, keep my commands. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.”

For Jesus, a loving relationship begets obedience—a life patterned, disciplined and lived out in the likeness of His life out of an overflow of connection and intimacy. 

And to those who love Jesus, the Holy Spirit will be given. 

And even after He is given, He can be known more fully in a way that the world around us never will.

My encouragement to you, for those who want to experience the power of the Holy Spirit in your lives and in your churches on Sundays, is to seek after Him in small ways much more regularly rather than in larger moments more rarely.

The bottom line is that we simply cannot expect to be well connected with Him on Sunday without being with Him relationally the rest of the week…month…year…season.

So start small and start now.