As we continue our new series on going deeper in your spiritual life, here’s a question for you; what about the Holy Spirit? Do you feel like the Holy Spirit is part of your day-to-day walk? Or does it feel like a mysterious concept with all kinds of wild and different opinions throughout faith communities? Becky Thompson, founder of the Midnight Mom Facebook group with over 1.7 million members, joins AllMomDoes host Julie Lyles Carr for an insightful conversation about how you can become more aware of the Holy Spirit in your own life.
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Transcription:
Julie Lyles Carr: Today on the AllMomDoes Podcast, I’m Julie Lyles Carr and we are exploring growth in our spiritual lives. How to really lean into taking our walk with God, our relationship with God. Can I say take it to the next level? Does that sound a little too bespoke? I don’t know, but I know what the heart behind this is.
We really wanna help resource you for thinking about how you’re being intentional in your time with God and how you’re modeling that for your kids. And this is not all predicated on just making sure you’re getting to church all the time. This is about that inner work that you’re doing in your walk with God.
And so as we were kicking off ideas for this series, I knew there was somebody I wanted to have back. You got to hear her in episode 150 and I’ll ask Rebecca to put that link in the show notes so you can go listen to that episode as well when you’re done with this one. But Becky Thompson is with me today.
She is a wealth of wisdom and insight. She’s a deep thinker on these things, and yet she’s able to take sometimes things that feel a little complex or maybe something we’re not all that familiar with, and break it down for us in a way that we can apply it to our hearts and to our walks and to our lives.
So Becky, thank you so much for coming back and being on the show.
Becky Thompson: Well, thanks for having me back on. I’m looking forward to our next conversation.
Julie Lyles Carr: I am too. So give the listener a little update on where you live in the world, family, and let’s see. Tell me your favorite hobby you had as a kid growing up.
So gimme a little bit of bio and then gimme a little bit of Becky trivia.
Becky Thompson: Ooh, I like this. Okay, so I currently live in northwest Oklahoma, which is just flat, red dirt. Everything you might think of when you think of Oklahoma. Every picture you have in your head there is what it looks like out my window.
I’ve got three kids. My oldest is in seventh grade and then a sixth grader and a second grader. I’ve been married to my husband, Jared, for 16 years now. And yeah, we are just passionate about following the Lord in all seasons and circumstances of life, and that has led me to the opportunity to write books and share online and start an online community.
So that’s kind of the Becky in a nutshell buttoned up if you kind of, you know, take that term. But it, let’s see, my trivia. When I was younger, I liked starting projects. That was my hobby. I would start, I would come up with an idea and I’d get all the materials together, and I’d be convinced that I could X, Y, or Z.
You know, so I’d get all the little girls in my neighborhood gathered up and we’d have like a stuffed animal parade down our, down our neighborhood street. And so my mom had this old coat rack on wheels and it was for garage sales. And we’d put all of our stuffed animals on it and hang them from it and just sing songs and march up and down the street. So I guess I just sort of loved coming up with creative, you know, projects for me and my friends. Yeah, that was, that was my favorite hobby.
Julie Lyles Carr: You are an elementary school event planner. That’s, that’s what I hear. And Becky. We share in common a love for Oklahoma. My husband and I lived there for many years, had several of our kids there, so I was on the northeastern side of the state, which actually is more like, toward the Ozarks and not the necessarily flat area, but
Becky Thompson: little greener
Julie Lyles Carr: little greener called green country, actually. But I absolutely love Oklahoma. Love when I get to go back and we had a little bonding on off mic before we started the interview because your son’s just been through a foot surgery and I remembered the name Becky. This is why I have to bring it up. My daughter had a similar surgery. It was for Tasral coalition.
I could not remember the name of the condition, but now I do at any time that rolodex flips and I can come up with a phrase like that, I’m gonna use it. So now it’s commemorated on your episode that I could remember.
Becky Thompson: Congratulations.
Julie Lyles Carr: Thank you. I feel really good about that. I feel really good. So, well, Becky, you have long been about the business of walking alongside women helping guide their hearts.
And because we’re in this series on spiritual growth, on spiritual development, I just knew that you would be a welcome and wise voice into this space, and we’re gonna tackle something today together that I think is one of those topics that when we take a look at New Testament writings, it shouldn’t necessarily be all that controversial or confusing, and yet I think in a lot of our church experiences, in our denominational backgrounds, depending on the pastors or teachers that we’ve had, this is a topic that I do think gets a little mired sometimes, and that is, on The Holy Spirit.
You’ve written a book called God So Close Experience, a Life Awakened To His Spirit. How did you decide you wanted to write about the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives? What was the thing that you went, that’s the next topic I need to tackle?
Becky Thompson: Well, I will be completely honest. When I started writing books in 2014 and put fingers to keys and started typing out really the message that was on my heart for moms, for women in all seasons of life, this is the underlying truth of all of my books, that God is with you, that God loves you, that His presence is for you and not against you.
That he wants to have a personal relationship with you and that impacts your motherhood, your marriage, all walks of all, all aspects of your life. And I really feel like it’s because of this truth that has been so prominent in my life and in really how I’ve, I’ve not just lived, but made decisions and followed the Lord that the Holy Spirit has been so real to me in my, in my everyday life that I wanted throughout all of my books to make, to help not make, to help women understand that this was the purpose of the cross, this was the purpose of Jesus coming, that he would come so that he could be close to his his children again. That this is the outcome that he wanted for us to be together. And we are together through the power of the Holy Spirit.
And so, honestly, this is the message that I’ve, I’ve tried to weave through plenty of my other books, but really is the, is the heartbeat behind everything I do. And so when I was talking with editors and agents and, and all the people that are behind the scenes in the book writing process, I said, I just wanna say what I’ve been trying to say.
I just wanna put it all in one place where she, with all of her questions or all of her doubts, or all of her know one, explain this to me, can flip to the chapter and say, what does scripture say about that? What does that mean for my walk with the Lord? And who is the Holy Spirit to me as a woman of God?
And so I, it’s really the book I’ve been looking the most forward to in all of my, in all of my writing and planning. But yeah, it really wasn’t a, this is a topic that I think needs to be said. It’s the, I think they trust me enough to say this now, I think I’ve developed a relationship with them enough that they’re gonna go, you know what I, I know that she knows the word.
I know that she knows the Lord and I wanna know the word and the Lord the way she does. And this is how.
Julie Lyles Carr: Wow. So powerful. And you have this really unique, earpiece to the heartbeat, if you will, because you founded the Midnight Mom devotional community on Facebook. You guys have over a million women who tap in, who are together as a community, who are asking questions, who are showing you exactly what is on the hearts of women.
What do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions about the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives as you look at these women that you’re ministering to every day and who you’re in contact with every day?
Becky Thompson: Well, I think that, I wanna take this from two angles; two aspects because our community online, The Midnight Mom Devotional community over 1.7 million moms gathering their nightly to pray. Which is amazing. You know, a lot of these women have grown up in church, so they have preconceived ideas about who God is because they’ve been in the Word and they’ve learned.
And you know, the lens through which they were presented the Gospel and presented scripture has impacted how they view God now. And then there’s a whole other group of women that you know, when we get online to pray, we’ll message us and say, will you say a poem for or will you, I really appreciate these sayings because they don’t even understand the concept yet of it being a conversation with the Lord.
And so as we look out at our community and they come from all different backgrounds, and experiences, our heart is to remind them through each nightly prayer that God is close, that he hears them, that his heart is turned toward them. But the aspect that we want, we really want them to see is that he is engaged in their everyday lives.
And so I think one of the biggest misconceptions about the Holy Spirit from maybe women who have been in church, who have had teaching, is that somehow the Holy Spirit is a lesser form of God than Jesus or the father, that he is just an extra help that he is like almost like an angel, you know?
Like on the level of an angel that might come and, and be a messenger from the Lord. But seems as if a many denominations or many backgrounds have really in essence, stripped the deity, stripped the Godness away from their conversations around the Holy Spirit and my heart, not just in God So Close, but through, through most of my doings and writings and beings, is to help women see that it’s not an idea of God that comes close.
It’s not just a thought of God that comes close. When we say that the Holy Spirit comes into the room with you, that he fills the heart of believers. It means that it’s the same spirit that was within Jesus, the same spirit that is called God for God is spirit and must be worship in spirit and in truth, the word says.
And so this is the spirit that comes into the room present practically just as real as the old pickles in the back of your fridge. You know, just as real as the phone in your hand, just as real, as more real than those things is this spirit of God, fully God, yet unseen. And so my heart is to help women see.
Use that word see, to help women understand that God is with them even if they can’t perceive him. And in the same way that Jesus was fully God and fully man, and he possessed a, you know, he was in a body as he walked the Earth. The Holy Spirit is fully God, just without the confines of the body to keep him in one place.
Julie Lyles Carr: I love that distinction that you’re making, that you’re right, I do feel often that we either relegate the presence of the Holy Spirit to be sort of this little guardian angel kind of presence. The other thing that I’ve seen too is I’ve seen people question themselves if they have experienced the presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives because demonstratively, they’re not doing it like other groups they’ve seen do it and they may have even been told, well, if you don’t show this sign or you don’t have this kind of an experience, you are not filled with the Holy Spirit. How do you navigate that? When you look at scripture, when it comes to our access to the Holy Spirit and sometimes what can feel like a gauntlet run, you know, of proving that we’ve experienced the Holy Spirit in our lives. How do you unpack all that?
Becky Thompson: So scripture is really clear about how we can continue to be filled. The way that verb sort of plays out is it’s a continual process. I like to think of it like a pitcher. You know, when we are, when we become believers in Jesus, right? When we go with the term that everybody’s comfortable with, when we get saved, right?
And Jesus becomes the Lord of our lives. What happens is we aren’t just born of flesh, we are born of spirit. We aren’t like Jesus in, you know, John 3:16 and his conversation with Nicodemus, he says, you know, you have to be born of flesh and of spirit. And so when we become born again, when we become spiritual, awakened alive beings, is the best way of putting that. I’m sure there’s a better way of putting that, but when we become spiritually alive, it is the regeneration. It’s the awakening. Resurrection, if you wanna put that, put it that way, or the birth of the Holy Spirit doing that work inside of us. That is the moment that the Holy Spirit makes us alive because of Jesus’s accomplished work on the cross.
And it gets so theological and the conversations that surround it gets so tricky. But in the most basic terms, it’s the Holy Spirit that that brings you into a relationship with Jesus. It is because of the work of the Holy Spirit on the earth today and the completed work of Jesus, that we can have access to God again.
And so there are, there are denominations that focus on well, it has to look like this when the Holy Spirit comes and he fills you. And while we, we could spend the rest of this episode discussing all of the different, you know, positions of that. I think one, one place where we can all land is that it is the work of the Holy Spirit that has drawn you into a relationship with God himself.
That no man comes to the Father unless he is drawn. And so we have come into a relationship with God, all of us who know the Lord because of the prompting of the Holy Spirit in our lives that draw into a deeper relationship with him was because God first drew us.
And so there are women right now that are probably listening, going, I don’t know that I felt him. I don’t know that I’ve heard him, but your spirit has heard him. Whether or not your mind has recognized that it was Him. Because you could not have come to the father unless the Holy Spirit had begun that work. And so when we say that we can continue to be filled, that ongoing verb, what we’re looking at is like a picture of a pitcher and the pitcher is full of water.
And yet it can be not, it doesn’t, it’s not the water goes down. It’s not like the Holy Spirit disappears out of our life or slowly leaks away through some weird valve of sin. We are given the gift of the Holy Spirit when we become spiritual, alive beings, and yet we also have this ongoing infilling of the Holy Spirit, that, that essentially makes us overflow.
It’s like the pitcher with under a spigot of water with living water flowing into it and then out of it. So lots of denominations talk about what it looks like for the spirit to flow out of you, but I want to, I really want to help women understand, first of all, that the spirit is present with now. We don’t have to, we don’t have to spend time discussing all the different ways, you know what I mean, of, of what it looks like for other denominations.
The first thing we have to resolve is the question of, do I have the gift of the Holy Spirit given to me? And my answer is, Jesus said you do in scripture.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right. And it’s as simple as that. Tell me why you think of having done this deep dive into scripture, into looking at all of it and looking at original language and verbiage and all of it.
What did the purpose of the Holy Spirit, what was that for us? Because it feels like, to me there was a bit of a shift, I’m gonna get a little, a little scriptural here, but we know in the Old Testament, there were times that the spirit of God came and there were times that the spirit of God left with some of the people in the Old Testament that we learn about. And we know in the New Testament that when Christ came, it brought us into a different relationship with the spirit of God. What do you see from your study, we are to gain from having the Holy Spirit in our lives, active and present in our lives?
Becky Thompson: So there’s a list. I mean, scripture calls him ,comforter, helper. I mean, the Holy Spirit is our constant, is our constant teacher.
He’s our leader. But let’s, let’s do this. Let’s, let’s kind of back up just, just for a second. What, what does it mean to have the gift of the Holy Spirit in our lives? It is through the Holy Spirit that we have a relationship with God at all. And so any gift from the Father is available to us because of the Holy Spirit.
You know, we often think about, okay, Jesus walked to the earth and he modeled what it looks like to live following the Father in a human body. He modeled what it looks like to have disciples and people that you teach and raise up. He modeled what it looks like to trust God in all circumstances, even while being God himself.
He modeled what it looked like to pray. He modeled what it looked like to interact. He modeled all of these things and we see, we see what it, what is possible as a human in relationship with God, led by the spirit through what we read of Jesus in scripture. But Jesus said it is better. He said this to his friends right before he went to the cross.
He said, it is better for you that I go, because if I don’t go to my father in heaven, if I don’t return to heaven, then I can’t pour out the Holy Spirit because we’ll remember that Jesus had the Holy Spirit working with him. In all of his, in all of his ministry work on the earth, scripture unpacks all the things that the Holy Spirit did in alongside Jesus.
And Jesus says to his friends, you will know him because he has been with you. Essentially in me, Jesus is saying in me, working with me, he has been with you, but he will also now be in you. And so while the Holy Spirit was fully involved in the work of Jesus on the earth, he could not come and be poured out for all of us until Jesus went to heaven and then released the Holy Spirit onto the earth.
And so we have this story in Acts 2 about the Holy Spirit being poured out for the first time now, not just in certain situations, like you said in the Old Testament now, not just on certain people like we discussed, and not just with the disciples, but he says this give just for you. For those who are far off, for all those whom the Lord God will call.
The gift of the Spirit is for all of us. And so it’s through this Holy Spirit. It’s through the gift of the spirit of God that we can understand Scripture. It’s through the gift of the Holy Spirit that we can communicate with God. It’s through the gift of the Holy Spirit that we can have what feels in our hearts and our spirits like a relationship with God at all.
And I think, I think Christians and I even wrote about this in the book, we think of the Holy Spirit as like some bonus, like just a bonus to our Christian walk, when in reality the Holy Spirit is intricately involved in every single aspect from our birth, our spiritual birth, when we become born again, Christians that are alive now because of the work of Jesus.
And as we walk out our days on the earth. And I love this, this thought, this shift. I love this shift from women who believe that God saved me for some day. To understanding that God saved me and my aliveness in him began the day I said yes to him, and so I don’t have to wait until the end of my physical life to begin a relationship with God.
I don’t have to wait until the end of my days to know his voice, to experience what it’s like to be with him. I don’t have to wait to die to get to heaven when God said pray, Our father who are in heaven, holy is your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth just like it is in heaven. And so God says in scripture that we are ambassadors of heaven, people who have dual citizenships of heaven and of earth.
And this is a big concept, but when we, when we break it down for the mama, when we break it down for the woman and we say, what does the Holy Spirit do in your spiritual life? Well, he does everything. He does everything. He is the one that makes Jesus real to you. And that’s, that’s really what it comes down to.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right, right. Becky, help me untangle because I have people in my world, I’ve probably lived in seasons like this, where it can be pretty easy sometimes to confuse the leading of the Holy Spirit, the wisdom and knowledge of the Holy Spirit with what we might say, well, I’m listening to my gut, or I’m listening to my heart.
And that’s not to say that we don’t have some wisdom and experience hard one through life, , that we get baked into ourselves at a certain point, but I have experienced myself and have seen it when somebody is going a certain direction and maybe someone is issuing some concern, or maybe someone is saying, Ooh have you really sought God on that?
And there can seem to be this confusion between the things that we know just because we’ve lived a while, we’ve had some experiences, we’ve gained some miles, and what is truly the voice of the Holy Spirit in our lives? How do you talk to women about how to distinguish that? Because sometimes I’ve heard it to the extreme of telling people, you should never trust your instinct or your gut, or whatever.
But that doesn’t really seem to align with the kind of wisdom that we gain through living. At the same time, I’ve seen people put God’s signature on something because they said they were being led by the spirit, that was not a God led enterprise . So, and I’m not even talking about a moral thing. I’m talking about sometimes a decision someone makes, they step out into a business situation or a ministry situation and they’re saying, yes, the Holy Spirit is leading the way.
And then ultimately I’ve seen people circle back around five, 10 years later and go, you know what? I actually think I missed God on that one. So not just from a moral context, but also from an experiential context. How do we know, how do we know when something can be a good thing, but our own desire gets involved in it.
And maybe we aren’t hearing him, but we’re saying, oh yeah, this feels like a God thing. How do we separate all that out?
Becky Thompson: You know, I think that’s part of the ongoing process of learning his voice and distinguishing his voice from our own thoughts, from our own feelings, which can be tricky because often God speaks to me personally through my thoughts, through my feelings.
I think the first thing we do when we have to decide is this, something that I’m going to discern as the Lord’s leading or Becky’s thinking is say, well, how, how do I hear the Lord? How do I recognize his voice? That’s really the first step that we begin. With what did God sound like when he led me in the past?
What did he sound like when he led me in the past? And so there are, there are scriptural I guess fail safes or scriptural guides or bumpers that we can put up to help us get further down the discernment path. And one of those spiritual bumpers is, does this, what I’m hearing in my heart, and maybe not just about the decision, but let’s go back to the voice or the, the impression we have in our heart when we feel like we’re being led, does this, voice sound like God in scripture, and I’m not talking about the translation of God in scripture.
I’m not talking about is he speaking in King James or NLT? I’m saying, does this sound like the heart of the father? Is there condemnation here or is there just a conviction of the Lord bringing me back into alignment with him? God always speaks and returns us into himself. He never speaks to push us away or point out separation unless it’s to restore relationship with himself.
And so, is God bringing me closer to him? Is he leading me to trust him with something? Is he leading me into learning something here that is scripturally sound? And so, you know what? That doesn’t work in every con in every decision we’re trying to make. You know, sometimes things can look morally good and it can seem like it draws us to the father.
But we have to ask the next, we have to ask the next thing is, is there peace in my heart? When I’m being led in this direction, does the Holy Spirit bring peace to my heart when I begin to step forward? And Julie, that can be really tricky cuz some of the things God has asked me to do in the past, they cause my body, they cause my mind to race and go, I, I can’t trust God with that.
That’s too big. I don’t have peace about that at all. You know, I, I, this sounds crazy. But you know what? There is a difference, which we learned through relationship with God, ongoing relationship with him, that we can have physical, we can have physical stress, physical uncertainty, mental uncertainty, and spiritual soundness.
I always like to point to Jesus in scripture when he was about to go to the cross and he was praying in the garden, and there was a moment that scripture says that he sweat blood. And if you look at, at sweating blood, I know this is a sidetrack, but I kind of feel like there might be a mama who needs to hear this?
So when, when scientists have looked at that later, when Jesus sweat blood, it, it, it is a, where the, the vascular system is actually responding to intense physical stress. Intense physical stress can actually cause a person to sweat blood. And so Jesus in the garden, right before he goes to the crosses, praying to the father, and he is having a moment of physical stress, and yet he’s fully God, fully man, having physical stress, but his spirit is sound and he says to the Father, nevertheless, your will not mine.
And I think of that moment when my own body is having stressful uncertainty when my own body is going. I’m kind of, I’m, I’m feeling. My heart is racing. My mind is racing. I’m feeling scared, but I have never felt more certain that my spirit is making the right decision. My spirit knows, and this is why scripture is clear about how, how spiritual things sound foolish to unspiritual people.
Because we, it, they require the discernment of the spirit of God to learn these things. And so I wish, I really wish that I could give you a list of all the, the checks and fail safes and bumpers that get us, you know, all the way down that path of this is how you know, for certain that God has said to do it or not do it.
But the reality is, it is the personal relationship that you have with the spirit of God, that helps, you know, and so I, if someone says, you know, miss Becky, God told me to tell you this, the first thing I do is I, I thank you very much for the boldness to share whatever it is that you felt like you needed to share.
I look at scripture. Does this sound something like God says in his word? Is this something that Jesus would say to my face if he stood in front of me? Man, there are a lot of people that say words that I don’t think Jesus would ever say out loud to us. So if Jesus wouldn’t say it to my face, then I’m not sure that your, you know, the spirit that’s speaking to me right now is, is necessarily the Holy Spirit, you know, in this word that someone says they wanted to share with me and the, and the last thing I do is a two part thing .
Does this line up with what scripture says is true about God and about me because God will never contradict himself. He will never say something to a person to us that he would not, that he has not confirmed in scripture. And that can be really tricky with things like, you know, changing jobs because God, you know, I wish I could flip to, you know, Romans 13 and it would tell me exactly if I was supposed to move across the country or not.
But I, but I can, I can know the word of God that tells me that the Lord will lead me and make my path straight and not easy, not free from trial, but straight. And when the word of God says that he will make it straight, but this feels like something in my spirit that isn’t settling right, that doesn’t feel like it aligns with what he’s already said to me, then those are the steps that I personally take.
But ultimately, Julie, I know I’m speaking a long time. I wanna, I wanna move on with our conversation here, but ultimately it comes down to is that the voice of my father or not? Which begins as we spend time listening in prayer.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right, right. I think that that familiarity and priming ourselves to have familiarity with that voice is so key to what you are saying and I know that for myself, and you’ve probably had this experience too in your house, one of your kids can say something and you know which kid it is because you’re so familiar with their voice. To me, for us to be able to discern well what the Holy Spirit is asking of us, what may be our own desires, what may be a voice in our head that comes from our past or from someone we’re trying to please, is really making sure that we have been in God’s word.
We have been seeking his nature. We have been seeking the way that he communicates so that we can recognize it when it’s the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking to our spirits, and I don’t want a listener to think that it’s some kind of, you know, which, which cup is the Holy Spirit hiding under? Right? Like some kinda right, some kind of grifter game out on the sidewalk.
Like where, where did it go? Where is it? I don’t think it’s that kind of a thing. I think that we gain our ability, if you will, or we work on our ability, or we grow in our knowledge of God simply by continuing to expose ourselves to his word through prayer. Through seeing how others have walked out their faith without thinking that’s how we have to do it too.
But getting that counsel and wisdom from others who have walked before Becky, for the listener who’s saying, you know, I, I love God. I’m learning more about Jesus, this Holy Spirit thing feels really different. I don’t really know what step to take next, or for someone who may have been in church for a very long time, but the focus of the theology where they’ve been attending just hasn’t had a lot to do with the Holy Spirit because of concerns about sometimes the things that we see that might be considered excesses of the Holy Spirit that seem to take us outta that realm of God being with us and more being in a place where it’s sort of a group event. What is that listener to do when it comes to beginning to seek the Holy Spirit in her own life? What are some things that she can take away from this conversation to with confidence and with excitement?
Learn about the presence of the Holy Spirit in her life right now, today.
Becky Thompson: So the first thing I’d have her do is start in John 14, chapter 14 of the Book of John, his gospel, and begin reading about what Jesus says about the Holy Spirit, about his work, about his purpose, about his, how he will speak and how he will guide and how he will lead.
And then I want her to imagine in her own heart, really imagine, I say just see with her heart. Just imagine with her heart. I love the idea of imagining, I just have to say this, I love that God gave us the ability to dream and look towards something that might not be with him. It’s how he created the world.
He saw and did nothing and he pulled out everything and he gave us this ability to imagine. And so, in her heart’s imagining that God placed her, I want to I want her to imagine what it would be like if Jesus himself were to walk into the room with her right now. If Jesus were to walk in and she were to see his face and feel his peace, and feel his love and the joy on his face just to be with her, she would have a peace and an assurance that whatever was coming, whatever was coming, that he was with her because she would’ve had a revelation of Jesus himself in the room.
And Jesus says in John 14, and, and that conversation continues. He talks about how he talks about how when the Holy Spirit comes, it’s as if he Himself is coming. When the Holy Spirit is poured out, when the Holy Spirit is with her, it will be just like Jesus is in the room because there is no difference among them.
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are perfectly one. They are perfectly one Scripture says, hero, Israel, the Lord your God is one. And so when the Holy Spirit comes, he feels like Jesus. He speaks like Jesus. He comforts like you would imagine, Jesus comforting. He brings joy, like Jesus would bring joy into the room, and so when your heart can get a revelation of what it would be like, the holiness you would feel, the reverence you would feel, all of all of your heart, mind, body, soul, spirit, all of the response you would have if Jesus were to walk into the room. This is the same response you could have when you understand that the Holy Spirit is with you right now, this moment. So as you begin reading John 14 and you read the next couple of chapters, where Jesus is unpacking the spirit of truth.
Jesus calls the Holy Spirit the spirit of truth. I want you to see if Jesus says it’s, it’s good, if Jesus, if Jesus says the Holy Spirit is good, then it does not matter what anyone else has said. We can trust him, we can love him, and he is just really waiting for you to discover his goodness.
Julie Lyles Carr: Becky, I can’t thank you enough for helping us walk through what again, it sometimes feels like a complex topic.
Certainly one that in a lot of our faith communities, there sometimes doesn’t tend to be some of the agreement that we would hope on something that is so crucial and central to walking out our Christian lives, the presence of the Holy Spirit. I wanna encourage you, listener, there’s a book on this from Becky that you can go and check out more details, called God So Close Experience a Life Awakened to His Spirit. And Becky, where can listeners go to learn more about you, to engage with the Facebook community? You’ve got so much out there and I wanna make sure that they have access to all of those incredible resources.
Becky Thompson: Thank you Julie. So over on Facebook, you can search for Becky Thompson and my profile will come up.
My author profile will come up. And you can also connect with the millions of Praying mamas over on Midnight Mom Devotional and we pray nightly there. We post lots of great links from those two Facebook pages. You can also find us on Instagram and if you’re not a social media gal, I understand it.
You can find me at beckythompson.com.
Julie Lyles Carr: Awesome. Becky, thank you so much for taking time out of what I know has been a busy week for you with kiddos and all the things going on over there in Oklahoma. And Listener, I would love it if you would send out this link for this episode to a friend of yours who you know could use some encouragement in this way and for yourself to go back and listen to this again, to get into John 14, to consider the work of the Holy Spirit in your life in this series that we’re doing on spiritual growth.
Be sure and check out allmomdoes.com and All Mom Does on the socials. We’ve got all kinds of great resources for you and the show notes that Rebecca puts together each and every week for you, and I’ll see you next time on The AllMomDoes podcast.
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