“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. However, when He, the Spirit of truth has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and
He will tell you things to come.”     John 16:12-13 NKJV

Doesn’t it seem strange that Jesus would tell his disciples they would be in a better position to receive His own message after He was gone?! The era of the Holy Spirit’s ministry within the church is so important because it allows Jesus to be everywhere all the time, distributing His message on a much larger scale than when He originally spoke it. On top of that is the timing factor. After the Spirit was poured out upon those first disciples you can immediately see the growth in them. Peter sounds like a new man in Acts 2 delivering his first sermon, not to mention the results were Jesus-like with 3000 converts!

What those guys could not understand when Jesus first said it to them, they later were able to move in with God’s guiding Spirit feeding them the right messages at the needed moments.

The Holy Spirit is a master distributor. Notice the text says He “guides” us into the truth. He often reveals things as they are about to unfold. He illustrates outcomes before they come, for the purpose of keeping us “flowing” with God. This is very different than the way we are used to operating and it takes a little getting used to on our part!

Think of Jesus as He went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed of the devil (Acts 10:38), under the anointing of the Holy Spirit. Peter mentions this as he is preaching to the first non-Hebrews that converted to Christianity. Why? Because this is what it takes to move with the Holy Spirit, and as long as the disciples were with Jesus they would never completely learn how to rely on the Lord’s secret source of power.

Revelation means you know now by the light of the Spirit that which you could not comprehend before. It means learning to listen and feel for the wind and then moving with it. Jesus pointed this out to Nicodemus in John 3:8. It is what those early believers and preachers did, and the book of Acts evidences the results. They replicated Jesus’ acts because they had the same Spirit revealing God’s will to them that He had while on earth.

We have the same Spirit today, working in us to touch the world the same way…until Jesus comes again!