What does the Holy Spirit do?

Walk past a large building at night and you see the stonework, the arches, the whole height of it standing out against the dark. What you do not see is the row of floodlights set into the ground near your feet. They are doing all the work, and they are aimed away from themselves. Nobody stands in the street admiring a floodlight.

That is the closest picture we have of the Holy Spirit's ministry, and Jesus gave it Himself on the night before He died.

John 16:14 (NKJV)

He will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you.

Everything else the Spirit does runs through that one sentence. He does not gather a crowd around Himself. He takes what belongs to Christ and makes it real to us. So the short answer to the question is this: the Holy Spirit glorifies Christ by applying to us everything Christ has accomplished for us. Christ won our salvation. The Spirit brings it home.

Scripture does not describe a person outside of Christ as weak, or as needing encouragement. It describes him as dead. Dead men do not improve, and they do not begin the work of coming back to life.

Titus 3:5 (NKJV)

not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit,

Regeneration means new birth. Nobody arranges his own birth, and nobody arranges this one either. The Spirit gives life to a heart that had none, and the first thing that new heart does is see Christ as worth having. This is why arguments and evidence, however sound, never convert anyone by themselves. A man can be persuaded that Christianity is true and still hate it. Only the Spirit gives him the new life that finds Christ beautiful.

Having given that life, the Spirit then guarantees it.

Ephesians 1:13–14 (NKJV)

In Him you also trusted, after you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation; in whom also, having believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, to the praise of His glory.

In the ancient world a seal did two things. It marked ownership, and it secured a package so that whatever was sealed arrived intact. Paul says the Spirit is that seal. He also calls Him the guarantee — a deposit paid now that commits the payer to the full amount later. God has put Himself down as the deposit on your inheritance. That is why a Christian's assurance does not rest on the strength of his feelings on a given morning. It rests on the fact that the Spirit Himself, given at the moment of belief, is God's pledge that He will finish what He started.

From there the Spirit begins the long work of changing us.

2 Corinthians 3:18 (NKJV)

But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.

Notice how the change happens. We are transformed while looking at Christ, not while looking at ourselves and trying harder. And notice the pace: from glory to glory, one stage to the next, not one leap. His work in a believer is usually quiet and gradual, more like the growth of fruit than the flash of a spectacle.

Part of that work is the killing of sin.

Romans 8:13–14 (NKJV)

For if you live according to the flesh you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.

“Led by the Spirit” has come to mean receiving inner promptings about which job to take or whom to marry. Read the verse before it and you see Paul means something else entirely. To be led by the Spirit is to be given the power to put sin to death — a power you did not have before and cannot generate now. The passages where the Spirit directs the apostles by name are describing how He founded the church and completed the Scriptures, not offering a method for making everyday decisions. The Spirit does not run a private message service. He speaks in the Bible He wrote, and He presses that Bible home when it is faithfully preached. A Christian looking for the Spirit's leading should open the Word and sit under sound teaching, and he will find Him there.

The Spirit also carries our prayers when we cannot.

Romans 8:26 (NKJV)

Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.

Every Christian eventually reaches a grief he cannot put into words. Paul's answer is not that we should try harder to find them. It is that the Spirit takes those wordless prayers and presents them perfectly, in line with the Father's will. Your worst prayer, offered in your worst week, arrives before God better than you sent it.

And He will finish the work on our bodies as well as our souls.

Romans 8:11 (NKJV)

But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.

The same power that emptied Christ's tomb is already living in the believer. The grave will not be the end of the story for anyone in whom He dwells.

All of this explains why some modern teaching about the Spirit goes wrong. It is not wrong because it expects too much of Him. It is wrong because it turns our attention towards the Spirit Himself, treating His work as a set of experiences to be collected, when the whole purpose of that work is to turn our attention towards Christ. Being “filled with the Spirit,” in Paul's usage, is not an emotional state; it is a life so saturated with the Word of Christ that His character starts showing in ordinary things — patience, honesty, self-control, love for difficult people. So the question to put to any meeting, teaching, or experience that claims the Spirit is not whether it moved you. It is whether it left you seeing more of Christ.