Teach Me to Pray - Week #11: The All-Comprehensive Gift

After looking at the infinite fatherliness of God from Matthew 7:9-11, Murray goes to Luke 11:13 where Jesus says some similar words as those from Matthew, "If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!"

The best of all of the Father's "good gifts" is the gift of His very own Spirit, and so Murray says that the "Holy Spirit is therefore the gift we ought to seek first."

"If the child is to know and understand his father and enter into all his plans for him, if he is to have his highest joy in the father and the father in him, the child must be of one mind and spirit with his father. So it is impossible to conceive of God bestowing any higher gift on His child than His own Spirit."

This was the glory of Jesus as a Man on earth, that the Spirit of His Father was in Him, and it is this Spirit who will educate and prepare us for the holy and heavenly life that God dwells in. "As the Spirit of the Father, He sheds abroad the Father's love with which He loved the Son into our hearts and teaches us to live in that love. As the Spirit of the Son, He breathes into us the childlike liberty, devotion, and obedience in which the Son lived on earth."

This gift of the Holy Spirit must be the first and main object of all prayer, Murray says. I have developed the habit of regularly asking Jesus to fill me with His Spirit anew, because I increasingly recognize my desperate need of His power and grace to live fully each day in the mundane and uneventful days as much as in the out-of-the-ordinary days. I also regularly fellowship with the Spirit of God who dwells in me. I do this through praying both in the spirit (tongues) and with my understanding. Communing/fellowshipping with the One Who is the power of God within me to overcome sin and live the day fully is vital for my ongoing maturing in God. I must hear His voice and sense His nudges throughout the day and to do this, I need to know Him more and more.

The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Son, the Spirit of adoption, and so by continually receiving His grace and communing with Him, I begin to gain more understanding of what it means to be a daughter of the Father. He shows me what sonship is because He is the very Spirit of Jesus, the Son, Who lived and moved in the confidence and joy of the awareness of His Father's unchanging love and affection for Him.

Lord, thank You for Your Spirit, the best-of-all Gifts that You tell us to ask for freely. What extravagance on Your part to give an "all-comprehensive" Gift in Whom are hidden all other good gifts. I want to know You more, Holy Spirit of God, so that I better understand the Father and Jesus the Son. Thank You for indwelling me today. In Jesus' name, Amen.