Ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost…Ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you.
—Acts 1:5, 8
The third mark of the church is the power for service through the Holy Spirit. Since the time of Adam’s fall, when he lost the spirit that God had breathed into him, God’s Spirit had striven with men and had worked in some with power, but He had never been able to find His permanent home in them. Only when Christ had come, had broken the power of sin by His death, and had won, through resurrection, a new life for men to live in Himself, could the Spirit of God come and take possession of the whole heart and make it a dwelling place for Christ and for God.
Nothing less than this is the power in us by which sin can be overcome and the prisoners be set free. This power is the Holy Spirit. In the Old Testament He was called “the Spirit of God” (Genesis 1:2). But now that the holiness of God has been magnified in the cross of Christ, and now that Christ has sanctified us so that we might be like Him, the Spirit of God’s holiness descends to dwell in men and take possession of them as God’s holy temple.
He is also the Spirit of the Son. On earth He led the Son first into the desert to be tempted by Satan, then to the synagogue in Nazareth to proclaim Himself as the fulfillment of what the prophet had spoken in Isaiah 61:1. (See Luke 4:18.) And later on the cross, Christ yielded Himself implicitly to the leading of the Spirit.
The Spirit now reveals Christ in us as our Life, our Strength for a perfect obedience, and the Word that is preached in the power of God.
Amazing mystery—the Spirit of God, our Life; the Spirit of Christ, our Light and Strength! As we become men and women who are led by this Spirit of the first disciples, we will have the power to pray “the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man [that] availeth much” (James 5:16).