How good of God!

“Inspired with joy by the Holy Spirit, I prayed” (Jesus, as recorded in Luke 10:21). This has to be one of the shorter but more insightful theological statements in the Gospels. We could arrange it for a sermon somewhat like this:
              The Holy Spirit is the
                      (1) The One who inspires,
                      (2) The One who is the source of all joy, and
                      (3) The One who encourages prayer.
There is so much theology tied up in so few words.
       It is interesting that the Spirit is usually thought of as holding a less central role in the trinity. God as Father is obviously in charge; Jesus as Son carries out the Father’s will; but the Spirit seems not quite the same — he is often thought of as the spirit of the other two, rather than as an equal. One writer refers to the Spirit as “the shy member of the trinity,” but that is hardly correct because he is anything but shy. At Pentecost he came with fire; in last century revivals he would often bring congregations to their knees, weeping; and in personal contact he seems always to be the One who is right here with us right now.
       “Inspired with joy by the Spirit,” Jesus praised the Father (it’s a corporate venture, isn’t it!) that while he had “hidden truths from the wise and discerning” he had  “made them known to the childlike.” You can be sure that “wise and discerning” was a self-description created by the religious aspirants themselves. It was clear to them that they were the professionals and that once they had expressed an opinion, it somehow had morphed into fact. God, however, had decided that it would be “to the childlike” that he would make known those truths that he had “hidden from the “wise” (Matt. 11:25). I don’t think God got any personal pleasure in hiding truth, but when you and I look at it, it’s hard to suppress a sort of gottacha-on-that-one response. It’s crystal clear that self-appointed intellectuals sometimes look like they were caught in a revolving door because they can’t decide whether they are coming or going.
       On the other-hand, truth can be revealed to the child-like because no resistance has been created against it. Learning is a lifetime affair and a block of unsustainable error early along the way can cancel out genuine learning for good.  E.g., Even a tentative position that God does not exist can develop so that a person disables himself from ever accepting that divine truth. When it comes to world-views, and we all have one, the rerouting is more difficult than arriving at an unknown destination with a broken GPS. How very good of God to take care of the childlike (and that term expresses genuine maturity in Christ) and reveal precious truth such as He loves us, He died for us, He wants us back in Eden. Unfortunately, if you know “that isn’t so” he can never reveal to you that it is.