This year at the Christmas Eve service, I was stricken with something. I had a new understanding of the Holy Spirit within each of us who knows Christ. What does it look like to have the Holy Spirit in you? Think of it this way:

If you had the spirit of LeBron James inside you, you would have constant urges to shoot jumpshots, slam dunk, work out, and sell out.

If you had the spirit of Steve Jobs inside you, you would have the urge to create things no one has thought of before. You would have creative instincts, and you would have an eye for turtlenecks and dad jeans.

If you had the spirit of Bono inside you, you would have the urge to sing and create. You would have an interest in Africa and sunglasses.

So the question remains: what would it look like to have God's Spirit inside you?

Well, as theory would have it, your urges and interests would change. You would notice different things. You would desire different things.

So the problem is that we DO have this Spirit inside us if we have come to know and accept Jesus Christ. We do know the Immanuel who became tangible and was left in Spirit to be present even now. The problem is, though we have that Spirit within us, it does not seem to make much of a change in some of our urges, interests, desires.

The challenge after the Spirit is within you is to increase your ability to listen. You have to increase the connection between your spirit and the Holy Spirit within you. We have to increase the ability to listen more to the Spirit of Jesus within us than we do to our own spirit.

The more we listen and obey the Holy Spirit within us, the more our urges, interests, and desires will change. The more those change, the more our actions and lives begin to change.