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The Holy Spirit Is My Friend: He Is Always With Me

By Barbara Rainey

First posted on EverThineHome.com


Today’s blog post is an excerpt from my new ebook, Who Is the Holy Spirit: How You Can Hear From Him. In this ebook I talk about the Spirit’s role as our Friend, Helper, Purifier, Teacher, and Guide. Be sure to download the entire ebook!


For many summers, Dennis and I attended annual training events in Colorado as part of our work with Campus Crusade for Christ (now called Cru). We took our entire family, and we usually tacked on a week of vacation in the mountains.


This conference supplied childcare and youth camps for all the kids, so I was usually able to attend all the adult meetings. It was a great gift to me as a mom of six. But normal family challenges followed us west every summer. I learned that vacations or trips away from home are never free from selfishness, sin, or childhood sickness.


One summer all our kids got chicken pox; every two weeks another one or two developed the tell-tale rash. It was a long summer for me.


On one of these days in the summer of 1985 I wrote in my journal:


“I really wanted to go to the meetings today especially because this is the day of praise and worship. But here I am in the apartment being a mother to a sick child. Mothering doesn’t stop. Their needs don’t stop. Once again I am isolated and my husband is not. I’m not feeling sorry for myself … this time. I know I can worship anywhere. I’m sorting out my feelings about how to know closeness with God as a mom.”


I was always inspired by speakers and missionaries who told stories of God’s work around the world. But on that day I began to wonder why I never heard a woman—specifically a mother—stand on stage and share how she experienced God in her life with her children, in her home. It seemed to be a void.


I asked, “If the Holy Spirit dwells in and with me and other Christian mothers I know, how do I see Him work in my life, in my sometimes very little unexciting world?” That question lodged itself in my thinking, and it began an ongoing quest to learn more about the Holy Spirit.


Throughout the Bible there are verses which mention the plurality of God—that He is One yet three persons. In the first chapter of Genesis it is written, “Let Us make man in Our image, in Our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). His unity and oneness is again evident in the very next verse: “So God created man in his own image … male and female he created them.” The Spirit is a member of the Trinity … eternal and fully God, as is the Son and the Father.


The Holy Spirit was equally involved in creation, for it says in Genesis 1:2, “And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” His presence in the workings of God from these first pages to the end of the Bible is evident in many other verses.


But we learn specific details about Him when Jesus explained to His disciples what the Spirit would do for them after Jesus departed to go back to the Father. Many of those descriptors are found in the book of John in chapters 14 and 16.


Did you know that having the Holy Spirit is better than having the physical person of Jesus? That may sound strange to say, but Jesus said it Himself:


“Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7).


Jesus was confined to a body when He lived on earth. He could only be in a single place at a time. But the Spirit is in every place around the globe where a believer is found, because when you receive Christ as your Lord and Savior, the Spirit comes to dwell with you and in you (John 14:16-17). I find that truth amazing, stunning actually, that the Spirit of God who is eternal, perfect, holy, all-powerful, and all-knowing (among many other attributes) actually lives within me! Do you?


Because the Spirit is with us and in us, if we know Jesus as Savior He helps us walk with Jesus Christ and gives us the power or strength to choose His ways, to follow Him, and to serve Him. One of the ways he does this—one that is particularly meaningful to me as a woman, a mother, and a grandmother—is through is role as Friend.


My best friend on earth is my husband. We have shared life together for five decades. In that journey we have talked about everything together, suffered losses together, and loved each other in sickness and in health, in good and in bad times. We have proven we are committed to each other forever. We promised to never leave or forsake each other, and we have never wavered from those vows, even when our marriage felt impossible at times.


But even a great marriage is temporary. There is always the reality that one of us will die before the other.


But the Spirit is always with me.


What a delight to know I have a friend even closer than my husband! In John 15:15 Jesus says, “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.”


When I received Christ as my Savior, Jesus came to dwell in me by His Spirit. Romans 8:9 tells me, “Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to Him.” Because I have the Holy Spirit Jesus sent living in me, and because He will never leave me, I know He is my dearest Friend!


Pause and think about this for a second: the Holy Spirit, present at creation with God the Father and God the Son, who is Himself fully God and is one with Jesus, desires a friend relationship with you. A real heart-to-heart relationship where you talk to Him and He to you. Does that stun you with wonder?



Quite honestly, I felt a little odd at first calling the Spirit my Friend. It sounded presumptuous. But over the years I’ve talked to Him more and more, asked Him to guide me and reveal Himself to me, shared my life with Him, and asked Him almost everything. I’ve become increasingly comfortable calling Him Friend.


He is not offended at all by my familiarity with Him because God is the One who initiated a relationship with us. He pursues us. He invites and desires a relationship. God called Moses and David His friend and Jesus called His disciples friends; so too the Spirit is our Friend.


The Holy Spirit whom Jesus sent on Pentecost can be your best Friend because He i