ABIDE || September 12

The Spirit of God - “ruach”

The world will spend all week telling you who you need to become. Every Saturday morning, we’ll remember who you already are in Christ. Friends, welcome back to Abide.

God the Father — we typically have categories for Him.

Jesus the Son — we can picture Him walking dusty roads, sitting at tables with sinners, touching lepers, teaching crowds, weeping outside of Lazarus’ tomb, hanging from a cross.

But the Holy Spirit??

For many Christians, He can become the somewhat mysterious, maybe forgotten, member of the Trinity. We may know He is there. We may know we believe in Him. We say His name every time we reference the Trinity. But if someone asked us to explain who He is, what He does, and why the Christian life is completely impossible without Him, there is a decent chance most of our responses would get vague fairly quickly.

Part of the difficulty may be that Scripture describes His work with images that are difficult to contain — Wind, Breath, Fire, Water, Dove. None of those things exactly sits still for a portrait.

That is rather fitting, because one of the primary Hebrew words Scripture uses for spirit is ruach—רוּחַ (roo-akh)—a word whose meaning can include wind, breath, or spirit.

Strong’s concordance begins its definition with wind and breath, even describing breath as a perceptible—and sometimes violent—exhalation. The word can describe the wind moving through the world, the breath associated with life, the inner spirit of a person, or, depending upon the context, the Spirit of God Himself.

Which means ruach carries an image Scripture will return to again and again: something invisible, but certainly not inactive. Wind and breath are both invisible, but neither is powerless.

You cannot see the wind itself—but you can see branches bending beneath it, leaves moving because of it, you feel it against your skin, and you can watch an entire landscape respond to something your eyes cannot actually locate.

Breath is much the same. For most of the day we give almost no thought to it, but remove it for a few moments and suddenly it becomes pretty difficult to think about anything else!

Invisible does not mean insignificant.

When Scripture speaks of the ruach of God, it speaks of His active, life-giving presence. Throughout Scripture, ruach carries a sense of movement, life, and unseen power. Depending on the context, it can describe an ordinary wind, the breath of a living creature, the human spirit, or the Spirit of God. And when Scripture speaks specifically of God’s Spirit, we are not talking about some vague divine energy floating around the universe…The Holy Spirit is a Person—and the Holy Spirit is God.

He speaks, He teaches, He guides, He can be grieved, He has a will. Jesus calls Him our Advocate and says that He will be with us and in us (John 14:15-17). Later, Jesus tells the disciples that the Spirit will teach them and remind them of everything He has said (John 14:25-26).

In other words, the Holy Spirit is not God’s electricity… He is God present with His people.

And He has been present from the beginning. Before creation had shape, the ruach of God hovered over the waters (Genesis 1:2). Then God spoke, and what was formless began to take form. Light broke into darkness, waters separated, land appeared, and life filled the earth. The Spirit is there at creation because the Spirit gives life.

The same image appears again centuries later in one of the strangest, and best, visions in the Old Testament. In Ezekiel 37, God brings the prophet into a valley filled with bones. Ezekiel makes sure we understand that these are NOT people who might possibly recover—the bones are “very dry.” Whatever life had once been there is long gone.

God asks Ezekiel, “Son of man, can these bones live?” to which Ezekiel wisely replies, “Sovereign LORD, you alone know” (Ezekiel 37:3, NIV).

(A very good answer when God asks you a question to which the obvious answer appears to be absolutely not.)

“Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’” So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them” (Ezekiel 37:4-8, NIV, emphasis added).

Ezekiel prophesies as commanded, and the bones begin to come together—tendons form, flesh appears, skin covers them—they look alive…but they are not. Because there is no ruach in them.

But God then tells Ezekiel to call for the breath. The ruach enters them, and they live. At the end of the vision, God explains what He has been showing him: “I will put my Spirit in you and you will live” (Ezekiel 37:14, NIV).

Breath—Wind—Spirit. The Hebrew word moves throughout this passage almost like the wind itself. And the point is impossible to miss: God gives life where there is no life.

Jesus picked up this same imagery when He speaks with Nicodemus in John 3. He tells him that a person must be born of the Spirit, then says:

“The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8, NIV).

John’s Gospel is written in Greek, so the word here is pneuma rather than ruach, but remarkably, pneuma can also mean wind, breath, or spirit. You cannot see the wind itself—you hear it, you feel it, you see what moves because it passed through. "

“So its is,” Jesus says, “with everyone born of the Spirit.”

Wind is notoriously difficult to manage. You do not tell it where to blow (I mean, you could, but it would be pretty pointless). Jesus apparently did not choose this metaphor because He wanted us to imagine the Spirit as exceptionally cooperative with our carefully drawn out five-year plans—We cannot control the Holy Spirit any more than we can control the wind. We can, however, become responsive to Him.

Sometimes we ask the Spirit to lead us while quietly hoping He will lead us precisely where we already intended to go. Sounds a little something like this: Holy Spirit, guide‍ ‍me—except not there. Holy Spirit, convict me—except about that. Holy Spirit, make me more like Jesus—although preferably without changing anything that would be too inconvenient or uncomfortable…

We want His comfort, peace, wisdom, and power—and rightly so! But the Spirit does not simply make us feel better. He makes us holy.

He convicts us of sin (John 16:8). He guides us into truth (John 16:13). He helps us in our weakness (Romans 8:26). He assures us that we belong to God (Romans 8:16). And He produces within us the character of Christ: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).

Paul calls those last things the fruit of the Spirit. Not the fruit of trying harder. Not the fruit of finally perfecting your devotional routine. Not the fruit of owning enough highlighters to make your journaling Bible look like an expertly organized rainbow. The Spirit produces the fruit. Our role is not to manufacture His work—it is to walk with Him.

“Since we live by the Spirit,” Paul writes, “let us keep in step with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25, NIV).

Keep in step. There is movement in that phrase. And that is what the image of ruach has been showing us all along. The Spirit of God is not passive. From Genesis onward, He is moving, giving life, sustaining, speaking, empowering, transforming. At Pentecost, He comes upon the Church with the sound of a violent wind, empowering ordinary people to carry the Gospel beyond Jerusalem and eventually to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8; 2:1-4).

The Spirit who hovered over the waters in Genesis is the same Spirit who breathed life into the bones in Ezekiel, the Spirit Jesus promised to His disciples, the Spirit who filled the Church at Pentecost—and the Spirit who now dwells in those who belong to Christ.

Think about that for a moment…the presence of God is not merely somewhere around you. If you are in Christ, the Spirit of God dwells within you. Paul writes that “the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you” (Romans 8:11, NIV). That is an almost absurd sentence when you stop long enough to consider it. The Christian life is not God handing us a set of instructions, wishing us the very best, and waiting to see how we do. The God who calls us to follow Him gives us His own Spirit to make us alive, to remain with us, and to transform us as we go.

We are dependent on Him for everything.

Like breath. Breath is not something you take once and then continue living on indefinitely—life requires breath after breath after breath. Much like our dependence on the Spirit.

Our dependence on the Spirit is not reserved for particularly dramatic moments of faith. We need Him in the ordinary ones too. In the conversation where patience would be easier to preach than practice. In the decision where obedience costs more than we expected. In the slow work of becoming loving, joyful, peaceful, kind, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled.

We never graduate from dependence on God. We need the Spirit to show us what is true. We need Him to expose the places where we have learned to excuse our sin. We need Him to strengthen us when obedience costs something. We need Him to produce fruit in places where our own efforts keep coming up empty.

If you are honest, there may even be places in your life right now that feel a little like Ezekiel’s valley—dry, lifeless, beyond fixing. Maybe you have been trying desperately to rearrange those bones. But bones don’t need better organization. They need breath.

Life comes from God. And so does the life of faith.

The Spirit is not a distant force to understand, nor a power we learn to control. He is God with us and God within us—the ruach who gives life, the Spirit who leads, and the One by whom we learn, day after day, to walk with Jesus.

“Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25, NIV).

This Week’s Reflection

Spend some time this week tracing the Spirit through Scripture. Read Genesis 1:1–2, Ezekiel 37:1–14, John 3:5–8, John 14:15–17, John 14:25–26, Acts 1:8, Acts 2:1–4, Romans 8:9–17, and Galatians 5:16–25. Notice the themes that repeat: the Spirit gives life, makes God’s presence known, speaks and guides, empowers God’s people, dwells within believers, and produces what we cannot produce on our own.

Then pay attention to the places where you say you want the Spirit to lead you—but only so long as He leads where you already wanted to go.

Where are you asking for guidance while resisting obedience? Where are you asking for peace while refusing surrender? Where are you trying to manufacture patience, joy, self-control, or faithfulness through sheer effort instead of depending on the Spirit to form those things in you?

Ask the Lord to expose any place where you have treated the Holy Spirit as a resource to access rather than God to obey—where you want His power without His direction, His comfort without His conviction, or His presence without His authority.

Listen when He convicts. Obey when He leads. Stop trying to produce in your own strength what Scripture says is the fruit of His work.

You cannot control the wind.

But you can keep in step with the Spirit.

Keep walking with Jesus, friends.

bytaylormcgee