“I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever—the Spirit of truth … You know him, for he lives with you and will be in you” (John 14:16-17).
God is the giver of amazing, wonderful gifts. But there is such a thing as our not knowing how to receive them. That was the case for me when my firstborn child, Alicia, arrived. I was still trying to figure out how to be a decent husband to my beautiful bride, Gloria, and suddenly I found myself faced with the task of being a father to a precious little girl.
Just a few years earlier a court-appointed psychologist had told me that I would never be normal because of my terrible past. He also told me, “You have a dark side … and you don’t know how to love or be loved.” Those words haunted me.
From the moment we brought Alicia home from the hospital, Gloria could tell something was wrong in my responses to her. I would bend over our daughter’s crib and brush her face with my hands but I never picked her up. When Alicia was about four weeks old, Gloria asked me why I didn’t want to hold the baby and I told her, “I don’t know how.”` “Then let me show you,” she said.
As I held my daughter and felt overwhelming tenderness and love running through my heart, for the first time in my life I understood what it meant to be a father. And also in that moment I finally understood what it means to receive an irrevocable, irreplaceable gift from the Savior.
As a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, you have been given an incomparable gift by God — the gift of the Holy Spirit. God has entrusted to each one of his followers a measure of his power, a small piece of himself. It is a gift that none of us deserve, and one that we can never repay, yet he gives it freely and willingly to all who put their trust in him. This gift should not be taken lightly and he wants you to learn to receive it fully.
Nicky Cruz, internationally known evangelist and prolific author, turned to Jesus Christ from a life of violence and crime after meeting David Wilkerson in New York City in 1958. The story of his dramatic conversion was told first in The Cross and the Switchblade by David Wilkerson and then later in his own best-selling book Run, Baby, Run.