Very truly I tell you, it is for your advantage that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Advocate (Holy Spirit) will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. John 16:7

In today’s verse, Jesus predicts the events of Pentecost and the arrival of the Holy Spirit. None-the-less, many Christians believe in the Spirit that came at Pentecost, but they relate to Him the same way they might relate to their pituitary gland: Undoubtedly grateful it’s in there; remember from health classes that it’s essential for something; wouldn’t want to lose it…but they don’t really interact with it.

For these Christians, the Holy Spirit is not a moving, dynamic Person. He’s more of a theory than an experience.

Yet Jesus said the most shocking thing about the Holy Spirit in today’s verse; one so familiar, however, that many of us just gloss over it without considering its significance. He said it was to our ADVANTAGE that He leave us and sit at the Father’s right hand in heaven because it meant we could receive the Holy Spirit.

If you asked Christians whether they would rather have Jesus beside them or the Spirit inside them, which do you think most would choose? The answer might just show us how far apart we are from grasping what Jesus offered us when He sent the Spirit to us.

I mean, come on! What could be better than Jesus’ physical presence with each of us? Well, Jesus, Himself, thought having the Holy Spirit was better.

The late Vance Havner once wrote, “The average one of us is so afraid of getting out on a limb that we never even bother to climb up the tree.” That sums up many Christians’ experience of the Holy Spirit.

Or maybe it’s more like John Newton put it: “Is it really true that that which the early church so depended on—the leadership of the Spirit—is irrelevant to us today?”