It’s your birthday, and you get to choose where to go for dinner! You consider your options and, of course, settle on your favorite restaurant. You know where you want to go; you know what you want to eat. You can’t wait for the celebratory experience of sitting with your family around a table you don’t have to clean that is full of food you didn’t have to prepare. But upon arriving at your chosen destination, the parking lot is full, and people are standing outside. The signs aren’t looking good. And when you enter to put your name in for a table, your worst fears are confirmed. The wait time is too long, way past your children’s bedtime. Plus, you are already starving, having anticipated a fine dinner meal all day. So decisions must now be made: order take-out from the restaurant to eat in the car? To eat at home? Or perhaps that will take too long, so now you settle on a fast-food restaurant. Whatever your choice, it’s not what you had hoped for, it’s not what you had planned. Given the circumstances, it’s the next best thing.
The next best thing is something you settle for. It’s not your ideal plan or experience, but it’ll do in a pinch. Still, it’s not the best.
Have you ever thought about the Holy Spirit in this way? “He’s not Jesus standing beside me or walking with me, but if I can’t have Jesus in person, then I guess the Holy Spirit is the next best thing.” We may not have put words to this sentiment, but I imagine the general consensus amongst believers, in the West, surely, is that of settling for having the Holy Spirit, if we even make it a point to think about Him at all.
The Spirit must not be viewed as “the next best thing,” but His coming and presence within believers is, in fact, “the next best thing.”
We Don’t Settle for the Spirit
The Holy Spirit doesn’t enter believers’ lives as a second-best scenario. He’s not a downgrade from Jesus Christ. In fact, Jesus said: “Nevertheless, I am telling you the truth. It is for your benefit that I go away, because if I don’t go away the Counselor will not come to you. If I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7).
Jesus, of course, was foretelling His ascension after His resurrection, but this was also pre-crucifixion. The disciples struggled to make sense of Jesus’s words about His going away and the persecutions that would fall upon them (John 13–16). They believed the Messiah would soon set up God’s eternal kingdom by restoring the scattered people of Israel and ruling over them as King. But God’s plans and ways and timing are so much higher than ours. So to comfort His friends, Jesus told them about the Counselor—the Holy Spirit—who would be with them after He left (John 14:25-26). And amazingly, this would be for their benefit! Jesus did not view the Spirit as second best, and neither should we.
On top of this, we must not fall into the trap of viewing the Holy Spirit as a “thing.” He’s not an ethereal force without agency or intent. He’s a Person, whom we know as the Third Person of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit is God, just as the Father and the Son are God. He’s not less than Jesus but fully equal with God the Son. And being one with the Father and the Son, the Spirit is the fulfillment of Jesus’s promise to be with His disciples to the end of the age (Matt. 28:20).
By virtue of having the Spirit in us as believers, we have Jesus with us, and because we have Jesus as our Lord and Savior by faith, we receive the benefit of the Spirit to counsel, convict, and comfort us (John 14:26; 15:26; 16:8-15). God the Holy Spirit strengthens and empowers us for our fight against temptation and sin and for our mission of taking Jesus’s gospel to the ends of the earth. By the Spirit we know that we belong to the Father as His children and are coheirs with Christ (Rom. 8:14-17). Truly we are blessed to receive the Spirit into our lives through faith in Jesus.
We Rejoice for the Spirit
The Spirit is not “the next best thing.” We don’t settle for the Spirit. He is a benefit and a blessing in His own right—the fullness of God dwelling in us for our good. Rather, we rejoice because the Spirit’s presence in us is “the next best thing” in a string of best things from God (Jas. 1:17).
God’s ways are higher, and His will is good and perfect. As fallen sinners, we struggle to see how the Spirit’s presence in us could compete with the Son’s physical presence with us. And to be clear, we should look forward to Jesus’s second coming; we do look forward to seeing Him as He is because then we will be like Him in purity and glory (1 John 3:2-3). We are to set our minds on things above, where Jesus Christ is seated at the right hand of God the Father (Col. 3:1-2). Yet we also are to live now by the Spirit, being filled with the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-25).
The ministry of the Holy Spirit is not God’s Plan B but the next step in God’s Plan A. The creation was not a failed project. The crucifixion was not a failed rescue attempt. And the coming of the Spirit is not a stopgap measure. Jesus was crucified, He was raised, He ascended, and He will come again. These are the glorious foundation of our faith, God’s best laid plan beyond our wisdom to question and our strength to frustrate (1 Cor. 1:18-25). And God’s next best thing in His perfect plan was to send the Holy Spirit to point sinners like us to the glory of God in Jesus (John 15:26). The Spirit gives us our needed new birth to see the kingdom of God (John 3:3-8). The Spirit justifies and sanctifies sinners in Christ (1 Cor. 6:11). And the Spirit cleanses and renews us so we may be saved and fit for eternal life with God (Titus 3:4-7).
May we rejoice in God’s gift of the Holy Spirit and “keep in step” with Him all our days (Gal. 5:25).
