The Holy Spirit

The questions that would not let me go

I began with a handful of questions that simply would not let me go. Who is the Holy Spirit? Where does He come from, and what is He really like? What does He actually do, and why? And perhaps the question that gripped me most of all: how does He deal with ordinary people — and has the way He deals with us changed over the long centuries of recorded history?

These are some of the oldest and deepest questions in the Christian faith. What surprised me is how rarely anyone tries to answer them carefully, step by step, from the ground up. So that is what I set out to do. I decided to look at every single place the Bible speaks about the Spirit of God, and then to follow the trail of evidence for His work all the way from the very first book, Genesis, down to our own day.

How large the search turned out to be

The search was large. I examined 515 places in the Bible where the word “spirit” appears. In the original languages — Hebrew in the Old Testament, Greek in the New — the word for “spirit” was the very same word used for breath and for wind, which tells you something about how the writers pictured it: invisible, alive, and always on the move. Of those 515 mentions, 422 of them — that is eighty-two out of every hundred — are talking about the Spirit of God Himself.

But I did not want to stop at the Bible. I also worked through the historical record, age by age, across six great stretches of time, which I will walk through in a moment. And I made a deliberate choice about how to do it: rather than leaning on other people’s summaries of what the Spirit does, I went back to the original records themselves and built up my own picture from them, writing up what I found in my own words.

Why this is only half the story

This piece of work is really one half of a larger project. This half is about the Holy Spirit — where He comes from, what He is like, what He does, His character, and how He meets people across time. The other half asks a different but closely related question: what exactly is a human being?

In that companion study I looked at every time the Bible uses the words “soul” and “spirit” to describe human nature, and I tested four ideas against the evidence. First: is it the soul that sins, while the spirit does not? Second: do animals have souls but not spirits — is the spirit the part that sets people apart? Third: is the soul the part of us that faces inward, toward ourselves, while the spirit is the part made to face God? And fourth: even though the two words are sometimes swapped for one another, do they still point to two genuinely different things? The evidence came down firmly on one side: a human being is made of three real parts — spirit, soul, and body — not two, and not one.

The two halves of the project meet at a single point. The human spirit, I came to see, is the part of us God designed to connect with Him. When sin damaged that part, something had to be done to repair it — and that repair is exactly the Holy Spirit’s work. He brings the dead human spirit back to life, comes to live inside a person, and slowly changes them from the inside out, mending the broken connection with God. The cross of Christ made that repair possible; the Holy Spirit is the One who makes it real in actual lives.

The one big idea

Out of all of this, one main idea rose to the surface — and I want to be clear that it rose out of the evidence, rather than being something I decided in advance and then went hunting for. Put simply, it is this: the work of Christ is the hinge that joins two things together — the way we were made, and the great outpouring of God’s Spirit.

God made human beings as spirit, soul, and body. Sin damaged all three. On the cross, Christ dealt with the damage to all three. And the Holy Spirit was then sent to carry that rescue through — starting with the human spirit, reaching on into the soul, and finally, one day, taking in the body too, when the dead are raised.

An old promise, and the moment everything turned

From the very beginning, God made two promises that belong together: that He would rescue the human race, and that He would pour out His Spirit. The old prophets looked forward to it. Joel said God would pour out His Spirit “on all flesh” — on everyone (Joel 2:28–29). Ezekiel said God would put His Spirit inside His people and move them to live His way (Ezekiel 36:27). Isaiah pictured the Spirit poured out “from on high” until a desert turned green and fruitful (Isaiah 32:15).

The cross was the moment everything turned. When Jesus said “It is finished” (John 19:30), He meant that the whole legal basis for putting humanity right had been completed and paid in full. And He had already told His friends something that sounds strange until you see what it means: “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7). In other words, His leaving was not a loss; it was the very thing that made the Spirit’s coming possible.

So what does this Helper actually do? He brings the human spirit, dead because of sin, back to life (John 3:5–6). He comes to live inside the believer as God’s own personal presence (1 Corinthians 6:19). He reshapes a person’s character, little by little, until it begins to look like Christ’s own (2 Corinthians 3:18). He gives ordinary people courage and ability to speak for God and to serve others (Acts 1:8). He hands out different gifts to different people so that the whole community is built up (1 Corinthians 12:4–11). And He acts as God’s guarantee that everything promised will one day be fully received (Ephesians 1:13–14).

Following the Spirit through six ages

Then I set out to follow the Spirit’s footprints through history, one age at a time.

The age of the Old Testament (about 3000–500 BC)

In the earliest age — the world of the Old Testament, stretching from around three thousand years before Christ down to about five hundred years before Him — the Spirit worked on one person at a time, and usually for one specific job. He would come over a man so that he suddenly began to prophesy (“the Spirit rushed upon him and he prophesied,” 1 Samuel 10:6, 10). He gave ordinary leaders the strength to rescue their people in battle, as the book of Judges records again and again (Judges 3:10; 6:34; 11:29; 14:6). He gave wisdom and even artistic skill to the craftsmen who built the place of worship (Exodus 31:3). And He marked out and equipped those chosen to lead, as when the young David was anointed king (1 Samuel 16:13). Records from the wider ancient world of the time — from cities such as Mari and Nineveh — describe much the same kind of thing: people speaking under what they believed was a divine prompting. So this pattern of one inspired individual was recognised well beyond Israel.

But here is what I did not find anywhere in that whole long age: a single occasion when the Spirit came upon a whole crowd at once. In those days His work was always picked and particular — given to this person for that task — and it often did not last.

The quiet centuries before Jesus (about 500 BC–30 AD)

The next age — the roughly five centuries between the last Old Testament prophets and the birth of Jesus — was strangely quiet. The prophetic voice simply fell silent. A later Jewish record put it plainly: when the last of the prophets died, the Holy Spirit went quiet in Israel (recorded in the Tosefta, Sotah 13:2). The books of the Maccabees confirm the gap (First Maccabees 4:46), recording decisions being left unsettled, to wait “until a prophet should come,” because no one with that authority was around. The famous scrolls discovered near the Dead Sea show individuals claiming flashes of inspired insight, but nothing on the scale of God moving among a whole people. Other Jewish books of the period kept looking ahead, longing for a future age when the Spirit would be poured out again — but always as a hope still to come, never as something happening now. If I had to sum up that age in two words, they would be longing and absence.

The age of the first Christians (about 30–500 AD)

And then came the age of the first Christians, from the time of Jesus to about five hundred years after Him — and everything the prophets had hoped for finally arrived.

It began at an event called Pentecost. This was the first time in all of history that the Spirit fell not on one person but on a whole group at once. There was a sound like a rushing wind, what looked like little flames of fire resting on each of the roughly one hundred and twenty followers gathered there, and suddenly every one of them was speaking in real human languages they had never learned. Visitors who had come from all over the known world heard their own native tongues being spoken (Acts 2:1–11). And from there it spread outward, step by step, to wider and wider circles of people — first to the Samaritans, a people the Jews of that day looked down on (Acts 8:15–17); then to the household of a man named Cornelius, the first non-Jew to receive the Spirit (Acts 10:44–46); then to a small band of disciples in the distant city of Ephesus (Acts 19:6). Each time, the doorway opened a little further, until it was clear this gift was for everyone, not just for one nation.

After the first generation died, the early Christian writers let me watch what happened next, and it tells a consistent story. In the years that followed, leaders still reported real gifts — a teacher named Justin Martyr spoke of prophecy, the casting out of evil, and healing; Irenaeus reported believers who spoke languages they had not learned; Tertullian mentioned prophecy, visions, and tongues. But increasingly these were described as gifts given to individuals here and there, not as the Spirit falling on whole crowds. As the decades passed the reports thinned out. A third-century scholar named Origen noted that “these signs have diminished.” A breakaway group known as the Montanists, who insisted the old prophecy was still flowing, was rejected — partly for going to wild extremes, partly because its predictions failed, and partly for its air of superiority. Tellingly, people treated this group as something new and abnormal, which only shows that the Spirit moving on the masses was no longer considered normal. By the fourth century, the respected preacher Chrysostom was stating openly that speaking in tongues and prophesying “now no longer take place,” and the great Augustine called such things “signs adapted to the time” that had since “passed away.” The line of the story is clear: from a flood poured out on everyone, to scattered gifts in individuals, to a slow fading, to a recognised stop.

The long middle age (about 500–1500 AD)

The long middle stretch of history — roughly a thousand years — carried on with that quiet. The dramatic public signs stayed absent. But something else took their place: a deep, private, inward kind of spiritual experience. Hildegard of Bingen reported a lifetime of visions. Francis of Assisi was said to have received, on his own body, wounds matching those of the crucified Christ — what is called the stigmata. And others, among them Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena, and Angela of Foligno, described inner words from God and a kind of total absorption in prayer. There are also admiring accounts of saints performing healings and casting out evil, though these were written more to inspire devotion than to record fact, and they are hard to check. What is completely missing from this whole age is the Spirit falling on a gathered crowd, the unlearned languages, or prophecy of the kind seen in the first Christians.

And here I noticed a pattern that would prove important. During these centuries, ordinary people could neither get hold of the Bible nor read it. Where the written Word was out of reach, the Spirit’s visible, public work seemed to dry up, surviving only as the private inner experience of a few.

The reforming age (about 1500–1700)

Then came the great reforming age, the time when the Bible was put back into ordinary people’s hands and their own languages. With the Word restored, the conditions were set for the Spirit to move again, though not yet in the dramatic style of the first Christians. The leading reformers were cautious. Martin Luther taught that speaking in tongues had ended; John Calvin allowed that God could bring back extraordinary gifts “as need demands,” but did not expect it as the normal pattern. There were scattered reports — several Scottish preachers, among them Knox, Wishart, Peden, and Rutherford, were credited with prophetic insight; a missionary named Louis Bertrand was said to have spoken languages he had not learned in order to reach foreign peoples; and out on the edges a group in France known as the Camisards were given to fervent, trance-like prophecy, though always one by one rather than as a crowd. The reformers’ lasting gift, though, was not dramatic at all. It was an idea: that the Spirit works hand in hand with the Bible. And that idea laid the foundation for the great revivals that were coming.

Our own age (about 1700 to today)

And then we reach our own age, and suddenly the evidence becomes richer than in any age before it, because so much of it was written down.

It opened with the great waves of revival of the seventeen-hundreds and early eighteen-hundreds. Here the Spirit worked mainly by pressing the reality of sin onto people’s hearts and turning them, in huge numbers, to God. The signs were inward and raw: a crushing sense of personal guilt, weeping, trembling, people crying out, some even collapsing. At one enormous gathering in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801 — where somewhere between ten and twenty-five thousand people came — onlookers saw men and women fall unconscious, jerk uncontrollably, break into spontaneous dancing, and shout aloud. But, strikingly, there was no speaking in unlearned languages, no prophecy, and none of the fire and wind of that first great outpouring. The Spirit’s chosen method here was conviction and conversion through the preached Word.

A little over a century later, in Wales, a revival in 1904 and 1905 swept up a hundred thousand new believers out of a population of just two million. The change ran so deep that the public houses emptied and the courts found themselves with no cases to try — yet even here the experience was not of the dramatic, sign-filled kind.

That kind arrived in 1906, at a humble address — 312 Azusa Street, in Los Angeles. There a preacher named William Seymour led a revival that put speaking in tongues at its very centre, alongside prophecy, reports of healing, and people falling under the Spirit’s power. Remarkably, in an America still rigidly divided by race, black and white worshipped together and the colour line was broken. The early claim that the tongues were real foreign languages was never actually confirmed, and over time people came to understand the experience instead as a personal prayer language of sounds rather than a known human tongue. From that single revival, whole new church families were born — the Assemblies of God, founded in 1914 and now numbering sixty-nine million members; the Church of God in Christ; and the Foursquare Gospel, begun in 1927 and today running ninety thousand congregations across a hundred and forty-six countries. After the Second World War, a wave of healing meetings led by well-known figures such as Oral Roberts and Kathryn Kuhlman brought the whole movement into the public eye — though that same era also threw up financial scandals and claims that could not be backed up.

From the nineteen-sixties on, something new happened: this kind of experience spilled across every denominational fence. It began in 1960 when an Episcopal clergyman named Dennis Bennett stood up and told his congregation that he had received the Spirit in this way. By 1967 the same renewal had reached Roman Catholics, starting at two universities, Duquesne and Notre Dame, and eventually touching a hundred and twenty million Catholics, with the blessing of the Pope himself. Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Methodists were all caught up in it too. A youth movement, later called the Jesus Movement, turned a generation of counter-culture young people into worshippers and, in the process, gave birth to the modern style of worship music and to new church networks such as Calvary Chapel. And the Vineyard movement, begun by John Wimber in 1982, taught people to expect the supernatural as a natural part of everyday faith.

But the truly staggering growth was happening far from the West. In Korea, a revival that began in 1907 helped take the country from less than one Christian in a hundred to nearly one in three; a single congregation there, the Yoido Full Gospel Church, swelled to eight hundred thousand members, and the nation became one of the greatest senders of missionaries in the world. In China, despite decades of harsh state opposition, the underground house-church movement grew from roughly one million believers in 1949 to somewhere between seventy and a hundred million by 2020. In Africa, the number of Christians leapt from ten million in 1900 to six hundred and eighty-five million by 2020, with single churches in Nigeria seating fifty thousand people, and Ghanaian and Nigerian churches now sending their own missionaries back to Europe. In Brazil, the movement grew to around fifty million people.

Put it all together and, by 2020, this combined family of believers numbered six hundred and forty-four million people — more than a quarter of all Christians on earth — with over seven in every ten of them living in the global south, the developing nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Step back far enough and the shift is breathtaking. In 1900, eighty out of every hundred Christians lived in Europe and North America. By 2020 the centre of the faith had moved completely. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that this is the single greatest change in where, and among whom, the Christian faith lives in its entire two-thousand-year history.

What I saw when I lined it all up

When I laid all of this evidence side by side and looked for patterns, a kind of ranking appeared on its own.

Some things showed up in almost every movement, from the early revivals right through to the global south today. People became deeply aware of their wrongdoing; truth was preached with boldness; lives were turned around; there were tears; characters were changed; churches grew; people prayed; and a passion to carry the message to others sprang up. These eight things form the solid, unshakeable core of the Spirit’s work — and they match what I had found in all six ages of history. One experience, and only one, turned up in every single age without exception: visions and dreams, from the ancient prophets, through the medieval mystics, right down to people from Muslim backgrounds becoming Christians in our own time.

A second group of experiences appeared often, but not everywhere: speaking in a prayer language, prophecy, falling under the Spirit’s power, trembling, physical weakness, joy, and healing — strong in some movements, absent or minor in others. A third group was rarer still and tied to particular occasions: the uncontrolled jerking seen at Cane Ridge, spontaneous dancing, and various other bodily reactions. Healing in particular came and went: front and centre in the healing meetings of the nineteen-forties and fifties, central in the global south where it often took the form of a direct contest with older spiritual practices, but present in a much quieter key during the earlier revivals.

The strange, and the missing

Our own age has also thrown up some experiences that have no clear example anywhere in the Bible: outbreaks of uncontrollable laughter (the so-called Toronto Blessing of 1994), people making barking and other animal sounds, rolling and running about, behaving as though drunk, and claims of gold dust appearing, shimmering clouds of glory, and feathers said to come from angels, associated with one church in particular, Bethel. These are hotly disputed, and in my research I have simply recorded them without either endorsing or condemning them. I would put it this way: the fact that something has no model in Scripture does not automatically prove it false — but it does place the weight of proof firmly on the shoulders of those who claim that it is the work of God.

The reverse is just as interesting. There are six things the Bible plainly says the Spirit once did, for which I found no solid modern evidence at all: genuinely speaking real foreign languages that listeners recognised; granting supernatural skill in a craft or trade; giving strength for warfare; physically carrying a person from one place to another; bringing immediate divine judgement; and steering a whole missionary effort away from one region and toward another. I want to be careful here. Finding no record of these in my research does not mean they never happen — only that the sources I worked through did not turn up clear evidence of them.

The evidence I trust most

If you ask me which evidence I trust most, it is none of the dramatic signs. It is the change in people’s character.

Most people know the one famous Bible passage that lists the qualities the Spirit produces in a person (Galatians 5:22–23). What fewer people realise is that there are actually six such lists scattered through the New Testament — in Galatians 5, Colossians 3, Second Peter 1, Ephesians 5, Second Corinthians 6, and Romans 14 — and between them they name at least twenty-seven distinct qualities. Some are about how we treat others: love, compassion, forgiveness, kindness, generosity. Some are about our own inner life: joy, peace, self-control, patience, humility, and the strength to keep going. And some are about how we relate to God: faithfulness, devotion, hope, doing what is right, truthfulness, and courage. Of all of them, love appears on more of the lists than any other single quality.

And here is the thing that struck me: these very qualities show up in the records of every genuine move of the Spirit across history. Welsh miners whose foul language simply changed overnight. Black and white Christians reconciled at Azusa Street. Chinese believers giving away everything they had while under persecution. And the missionaries of every era who gave up safety, comfort, and often their lives to carry the message across the world. This — not the spectacular and the strange — is the most consistent, the most checkable, and the most lasting evidence of the Spirit’s work across five thousand years.

Word and Spirit, never apart

One more pattern pressed itself on me with real force: the Word of God and the work of the Spirit cannot be separated. Wherever the Bible flourished — in the early church, in the reforming age, in the great revivals — the Spirit moved with power. Wherever the Bible was suppressed or simply out of reach — in the long medieval centuries, in the silent years before Jesus — the Spirit’s visible work shrank back to the private experience of a few individuals. That pattern held true in every single age I examined.

Pentecost, and the seven things that come first

So Pentecost stands as the great turning point — the first time the Spirit was poured out not on one chosen person but on a whole gathered community, making good at last on those ancient promises of Joel, Ezekiel, and Isaiah. After that, He never stopped working — in groups and in individuals, across nations and centuries, on every continent. But His working came with conditions.

Looking across the whole record, I found that seven things consistently come before every genuine move of the Spirit: humility, prayer, a hunger for God’s presence, turning from wrongdoing, unity among believers, obedience, and a hopeful, expectant faith. These line up exactly with an ancient promise in the Old Testament, in Second Chronicles 7:14, about what God’s people must do if they want Him to act — and I found them present, without a single exception, in every documented revival, from a small praying community in 1727, to Korea in 1907, to the movements sweeping the developing world today. Where those seven things were present, the Spirit moved with power. Where they were missing — crowded out by pride, by neglect of prayer, by division, by worldliness, or by plain unbelief — His visible work faded, even though He never withdrew entirely.

So who is the Holy Spirit?

What, then, is the Holy Spirit? After all of this, one thing is certain: He is not a vague force, and He is not a theological abstraction. He is God Himself — the third person of the Trinity — personal in who He is, purposeful in what He does, and tireless in His one great work of making Christ’s rescue real in life after life, in generation after generation, on continent after continent. He gave strength to the prophets of ancient Israel. He fell as fire at Pentecost. He pierced the consciences of sinners in the great revivals. He tore down the racial wall at Azusa Street. He held believers steady through persecution in China and Korea. And at this very moment He is building the church among the nations of the developing world. He convicts, He transforms, He gives power, He sends people out. His methods change from age to age; His purpose never does.

The sheer scale of what He has done in our own time — six hundred and forty-four million people swept in, a faith carried from the West to the global south, the fastest growth of believers in the whole story of Christianity, and at least twenty-seven qualities of changed character springing up on every continent — has no equal anywhere outside the days of the first apostles. He exists for one reason: to take the finished work of Christ and make it real, felt, and alive in the people who trust Him. And the evidence — across six ages and five thousand years of recorded history — says that He has never once stopped doing it.

What this study cannot claim

A word, finally, about what this study cannot claim. I want to be honest about its limits. The historical records are patchy in places, and some periods left far thinner evidence than others. I generally gathered enough examples to show the pattern clearly, rather than tracking down every last piece of evidence in existence. And the work leaned partly on analysis done with the help of artificial intelligence, working alongside the more traditional methods of Bible scholarship. What I have found is substantial and, I believe, sound — but I offer it as solid ground to build on, not as the final word.

Companion document: Work of the Holy Spirit — Complete Study (full evidence and biblical references).