Part 1: The Truth about the Holy Spirit
God had a much greater plan for us than just to wash away our sins. The deeper purpose of Jesus's earthly mission is so that we can become one with a God we cannot equal.
In a previous article, “What is the essence of our existence?” I wrote about the fact that God created us for His glory. His will for us is to glorify Him in everything we do. In this article, I ask why Jesus came to earth. And we know the answer: He came from heaven to earth to die on the cross for our sins, but then He went back to heaven. In her book called "God Within Us: Experiencing the Person of the Holy Spirit," Gaye Lisby tells us why Jesus really came. Even though we know that Jesus came to save us and wash away our sins, that's not the only truth about why he came to earth. In the next couple of weeks, I'll try to show you why Jesus came to earth and died on the cross for our sins.
God’s ultimate plan
Jesus came to earth so that we could be one with God as we had been in the beginning. He had to come to earth and baptize us with the Holy Spirit in order to accomplish this. Our salvation is not enough. Saving us from our sins is one of the outcomes, but not the ultimate purpose, of why Jesus came to earth. God had a much greater plan for us than just to wash away our sins.
In John 17:11, Jesus prayed for us to become one with Him, who is one with God, and who is one with us when we are one with Him.
This may appear to be very complicated, but let us take it one step at a time.
Reuniting us with God
To become one with Jesus means to become one with God. Then God will be one with us. To become one with Jesus, we must first know Him, and knowing Jesus necessitates a relationship with Him. He gave us the Holy Spirit to aid us in the process of living in relationship with Jesus (becoming one with Him). We have no vivid sense of God's presence without the Spirit. We lack direction, wisdom, peace, joy, and any effective witness to others.
Jesus came to cleanse us of our sins, but He also came to baptize us in the Holy Spirit and reconcile us to our Heavenly Father. But it was not only to save us from sin and ourselves but also to transform us into His own image, the only image capable of uniting us with a Father we cannot match. We can only become one with the Father through Jesus by being anointed with His Holy Spirit, which represents being set apart or empowered by God for a specific purpose. The anointing with the Holy Spirit therefore fulfils God's original purpose, "I in them, and You in Me" (John 17:23).
The truth is that since Jesus rose from the dead, went to heaven, and was glorified, and until He comes back to earth, we are living in the era of the Holy Spirit. And if the essence of our existence is to glorify God, we cannot do that without the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The question is, did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed? Did you take God into your mind only, or did you also embrace Him with your heart? Did He get inside of you?