Christ is risen!
But this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel: ‘And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, that I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions, your old men shall dream dreams. And on My menservants and on My maidservants I will pour out My Spirit in those days; and they shall prophesy. . . . And it shall come to pass that whoever calls on the Name of the LORD shall be saved.’ (Acts 2:16-18, 21)
When the Apostle Peter preached the above sermon he referenced the prophecy of Joel promising the coming of the Holy Spirit upon all people. Below are four comments on the Holy Spirit. In the first quote St Silouan the Athonite says we know God’s love through the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives:
Likewise, not everyone perceives the Holy Spirit but all those who will be saved who fear God and keep his commandments, for the Lord loves us without stint, and I could not have known this love had not the Holy Spirit taught me Who teaches every good thing. (ST SILOUAN THE ANTHONITE, p 283)
In the 2nd quote, St Silouan tells us how the Holy Spirit works in us when we repent of our sins:
The Lord does not desire the death of a sinner, and on him who repents He bestows the grace of the Holy Spirit, which gives peace to the soul and freedom for the mind and heart to dwell in God. When the Holy Spirit forgives us our sins we receive freedom to pray to God with an undistracted mind. Then the soul can freely contemplate God and live serene and joyous in him. And this is true freedom. But without God there can be no freedom, for the enemy agitates the soul with evil thoughts. (ST SILOUAN THE ANTHONITE, p 342)
The 3rd quote says both Christ’s incarnation and the existence of the Church, the Body of Christ, are signs of the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives and in the world.
It is important to bear in mind that the Body of Christ, both in the Christological (incarnational) and in the ecclesiological sense, became a historical reality. Through the Holy Spirit… For creation to lend itself to the Logos of God in order to bring about the incarnation would have been impossible without the intervention of the Holy Spirit. (John Zizioulas, ASPECTS OF ORTHODOX WORSHIP, p 1)
Finally, related to the above quote from Zizioulas, we are reminded that we are to bear witness to the Holy Spirit in our lives
As Orthodox Christians, we are called to witness to the presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church, the Spirit who leads us to show in our lives that Christ is in our midst. (John Garvey, SEEDS OF THE WORD, p 107)
Fraternized 