I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit. – Romans 15:13

Over the past few weeks Rebekah has preached a powerful series of messages on The Holy Spirit here at Wake Forest Presbyterian Church. This is a congregation that is very much alive and moving forward. The work of God is excitingly evident at WFPC, through the lives of disciples of Jesus, in the power of the Spirit.

This morning, deep in a spiritual conversation with my Saturday morning men’s Bible-study, we found ourselves talking about how God helps us to find our way.

That’s when I had an epiphany (at least, to me, it felt like an epiphany!).

It occurred to me that the many names the Bible employs to describe the work of the Spirit all add up to one modern word that probably wasn’t in the Greek lexicon two thousand years ago. That word is “facilitator.”

Rather than dropping specific answers into our laps, maybe a huge part of the Spirit’s role is to ask better questions?

PARTNERSHIP: I went on to talk about how creativity honors the image of God in us, and how God works in partnership with us – through the work of the Spirit – to continue doing new, creative, imaginative, and often challenging things in our role as Followers of the Living Way.

The Holy Spirit acts as facilitator in much the same way that a small-group leader will ask, challenge, coax, prod, re-state, clarify, and otherwise help to keep the channels of creativity and listening open.

This is an epiphany for me because it is helping to expand my “thought in process” idea that the ongoing work of the Creator is always more wide, and out-of-the-box, and expansive than our own tendencies; that we tend to hem God in via our own limited capacity to move forward.

We want to always put God in a box we can manage, and God seems always to be tugging hard to get us out of ours.

LIMITLESS: Maybe the “Superhero for Jesus” moniker I’m looking for is “Limitless Potential.” I’m beginning to see – more and more – that the role of the Spirit in my life is to untangle me from so much that holds me back. God wants more than all of me; God wants all of the Derek that engaging with the power of the Spirit makes possible.

It’s what God wants for/from all of us.

– DEREK