Lesson 23: The All-Comprehensive Gift part 1
Luke 11:13 – “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!”
In the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord had already spoken of His wonderful “HOW MUCH MORE?” Here in Luke, where He repeats the question, there is a difference. Instead of speaking, as then of giving good gifts, He says, “How much more shall your heavenly Father give THE HOLY SPIRIT?” He teaches us that the chief and the best of these gifts is the Holy Spirit, or rather, that in this gift all others are comprised. The Holy Spirit is the first of the Father’s gifts, and the one He delights most to bestow. The Holy Spirit is therefore the gift we ought first and chiefly to seek.
The unspeakable worth of this gift we can easily understand. Jesus spoke of the Spirit as “THE promise of the Father,” the one promise in which God’s Fatherhood revealed itself. The best gift a good and wise father can bestow on a child on earth is his own spirit. This is the great object of a father in education—to reproduce in his child his own disposition and character. If the child is to know and understand his father; if, as he grows up, he is to enter into all his will and plans; if he is to have his highest joy in the father, and the father in him, he must be of one mind and spirit with him. So it is impossible to conceive of God bestowing any higher gift on His child than this, His own Spirit. God is what He is through His Spirit; the Spirit is the very life of God. Just think what it means: God giving His own Spirit to His child on earth.
Or was not this the glory of Jesus as a Son upon earth, that the Spirit of the Father was in Him? At His baptism in Jordan the two things were united—the voice, proclaiming Him the Beloved Son, and the Spirit, descending upon Him. The apostle says of us, “Because you are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.” A king seeks in the whole education of his son to call forth in him a kingly spirit. Our Father in heaven desires to educate us as His children for the holy, heavenly life in which He dwells, and for this gives us, from the depths of His heart, His own Spirit. It was this which was the whole aim of Jesus when, after having made atonement with His own blood, He entered for us into God’s presence, that He might obtain for us, and send down to dwell in us, the Holy Spirit. As the Spirit of the Father, and of the Son, the whole life and love of the Father and the Son are in Him and, coming down into us, He lifts us up into their fellowship. As Spirit of the Father, He sheds abroad the Father’s love, with which He loved the Son, in our hearts, and teaches us to live in it. As Spirit of the Son, He breathes in us the childlike liberty, and devotion, and obedience in which the Son lived upon earth. The Father can bestow no higher or more wonderful gift than this: His own Holy Spirit, the Spirit of sonship.
Prayer: Father in heaven, You sent Your Son to reveal Yourself to us, Your Father-love, and all that that love has for us. And He has taught us that the gift above all gifts which You would bestow in answer to prayer is the Holy Spirit.