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Abstract

The individualistic culture of the 21st Century has seeped into the fabric of God’s people and Christianity has been reduced to an abstract mechanism whereby individuals can plug into God’s grace whenever they want God to make them feel better about their own lives. As such, Christianity has been privatized to individual renewal and, in the same way, the Holy Spirit has been restricted to the same privatization and is thus merely seen as the means by which this renewal takes place in the individual alone. Unfortunately, this privatization of Christianity results in a watered-down Biblical message that is viewed as sufficient for the Christian, leaving the rest of God’s Word to be set off to the side. Ultimately, taking apart God’s Word to fit the individual greatly restricts the illuminating power of the Spirit and thus hinders the purposes of God from being properly carried out as the Spirit’s activity through the Church is held captive by the individualistic confines of the surrounding culture.

Though there are many Scriptural references to the Holy Spirit illuminating the truth of God to believers, the passages of 1 Corinthians 2:7,10 and Ephesians 1:17-23 are viewed in this study as the basis upon which the entirety of God’s Word is crucial for the illuminating power of the Holy Spirit to be properly given and are thus analyzed throughout the paper. God does not merely expect the Church to produce well behaved Christians. Rather, through the Holy Spirit, the Church is expected to produce agents of God who fully understand the implications of Jesus’ victory over the powers of darkness and sin and should thus accept the task of putting into action that which was laid out in front of them: the task of implementing the victory of Jesus into the world. The purpose of this research, then, is to survey the power of the Holy Spirit throughout the Biblical narrative in order to remind the audience of the Spirit’s proper role throughout Biblical history so that the confines surrounding the Spirit might begin to fall away and God’s expectations for the Church can be rediscovered by the illuminating power of the Holy Spirit.

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