At teacher's meeting, we got into a heated discussion about the Holy Spirit.  I made a statement that everyone jumped on and disagreed with me.  I said, "You don't get the Holy Spirit to become a child of God."  Which I was going to explain--but everyone was giving me such a hard time, I never got to finish my thought.  So I will finish it here.  You may not agree.

All of the people in the Old Testament were saved exactly like we are.  "For by grace are you saved, through faith..."  That passage is in Ephesians 2:8.  The Old Testament believers never got the Holy Spirit within, because the Holy Spirit didn't come until Christ rose from the dead.  But they were just as saved as we are.  They were saved by faith.  The 11th chapter of Hebrews is a list of all the Old Testament characters that were saved by faith--not by getting the Holy Spirit.   We are saved by faith.  But what is "faith?"  Saving faith is the belief that God is going to do what he said he was going to do.  And that was to send a sacrifice for our sin.  A substitute.  Before Christ came,  they believed that God would forgive their sin with a sacrifice to come.  We now know that sacrifice is Jesus.

We first believe that there is a God.  We then must acknowledge our sin and repent. (That's not just being sorry.)  Then we accept that there is nothing we can do to earn forgiveness, that Jesus took all our sin on himself.  We believe that Jesus died in our place, then rose again to intercede for us at the throne of God.  That's it.  We give him our life and ask him--God the son--to intercede for us.

The Holy Spirit's role in this is to draw us, to convict us to repent.  Yes, the Holy Spirit is God, and God does the saving, but the Holy Spirit is not what "makes" you a Christian.  The Holy Spirit is a gift from God, putting His Spirit back into man to direct us from the inside.

He--God, the Holy Spirit--is a down payment of things to come.  The earnest of our salvation.  In the Old Testament, God says he will take away our hearts of stone and put his Spirit in us.  Back then, the people did not have that.  Jesus came to put His Spirit back into man.  The way God intended it from the beginning.  God made man and breathed his Spirit--His breath--into him.  2 Corinthians 1:22, "He has identified us as his own by placing the Holy Spirit in our hearts as the first installment that guarantees everything He has promised us."  The role of the Spirit of God is not salvation.  The blood of Christ does that.  The Spirit is a gift because we have trusted Christ.  They didn't get that in the Old Testament because Jesus had not yet come.  But they were saved.  God the Father sent the sacrifice.  God the Son's blood was the sacrifice.  God the Holy Spirit does the reassuring and gives us power.