Miraculous Gifts
What Does the Holy Spirit Do? What the Bible Actually Says
What does the Holy Spirit do according to the Bible? Follow the Spirit's work in revelation, conversion, Christian life, spiritual gifts, and the apostolic church.
Start With Scripture
The Bible describes several different works of the Holy Spirit.
Questions about the Holy Spirit often become difficult because several biblical subjects are blended together. Revelation, miraculous gifts, conversion, indwelling, sanctification, guidance, and Christian character are related to the Spirit, but the New Testament does not describe them as though they were all the same thing.
A careful study therefore begins by asking what each passage actually attributes to the Spirit and who is being addressed. That distinction becomes especially important when Jesus speaks directly to the apostles about the revelation they would receive.
Who Changed the Church? follows that method closely. Wood's argument about the cessation of miraculous gifts is not an argument that the Holy Spirit ceased to exist, ceased to dwell in Christians, or ceased to work. His claim concerns the purpose and duration of particular miraculous and revelatory gifts.
Revelation
Jesus promised the apostles that the Spirit would guide them into truth.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus prepares his apostles for his departure. Within that setting he promises the coming Helper and says the Spirit will teach, remind, testify, and guide them into all truth.
Those promises matter to the book's larger argument about apostolic authority. Christianity was not left without an authoritative message when Jesus ascended. The apostles were commissioned as witnesses, and the Spirit's work equipped them to deliver that message.
Wood therefore treats the apostolic revelation as foundational. The later historical question is whether Christians should expect an indefinitely expanding body of revelation or whether the Spirit completed the apostolic deposit through those chosen witnesses.
Jesus tells the apostles that the Helper will teach them and bring to remembrance what he had told them.
Jesus says the Spirit of truth will guide them into all truth and disclose what is to come.
Paul connects the apostolic message with what God revealed through the Spirit and with words taught by the Spirit.
Confirmation
The Spirit also empowered signs and gifts in the apostolic church.
Acts and the New Testament letters describe extraordinary manifestations of the Spirit: tongues, prophecy, healing, miracles, revelatory knowledge, and other gifts.
First Corinthians 12 emphasizes that these gifts came from the same Spirit while differing in function. They were not badges proving that one Christian was more spiritual than another. Paul says they were distributed for the common good.
This is where Who Changed the Church? asks a more specific question. If miraculous gifts helped reveal and confirm the apostolic message while the church's foundation was being laid, what happened when that revelatory task reached its intended completion?
Paul describes varieties of gifts but the same Spirit and says the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.
The message of salvation is described as confirmed by witnesses while God also bore witness through signs, wonders, miracles, and distributions of the Holy Spirit.
Conversion and New Life
The Spirit's work is not limited to miraculous manifestations.
The New Testament also connects the Spirit with becoming God's people and living the new life that follows. Acts 2 joins repentance, baptism, forgiveness, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Paul tells Christians that they belong to Christ because the Spirit of God dwells in them.
That means the question 'Does the Holy Spirit still work?' cannot be answered simply by debating whether miraculous gifts continue. The New Testament's teaching about the Spirit is much broader than tongues, prophecy, or healing.
This distinction protects the discussion from a false choice. A person can argue that particular miraculous gifts belonged to the foundational age without arguing that Christians today have no relationship with the Holy Spirit.
Peter connects repentance and baptism in the name of Jesus Christ with forgiveness and the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Paul describes belonging to Christ in connection with the Spirit of God dwelling in the believer.
Salvation is described with the language of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit.
Christian Life
The Spirit produces a transformed way of life.
Galatians contrasts the works of the flesh with the fruit of the Spirit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control belong to the Spirit-shaped life.
Paul also says the Spirit helps believers in weakness and intercedes when they do not know how to pray as they ought. These passages concern the Christian's ongoing life with God rather than the public exercise of a miraculous sign.
The Holy Spirit therefore cannot be reduced to spectacular manifestations. In the New Testament, the Spirit is bound up with revelation, God's presence among his people, prayer, holiness, unity, transformation, and the hope of final redemption.
Paul describes the fruit of the Spirit and calls Christians who live by the Spirit to keep in step with the Spirit.
Paul says the Spirit helps believers in their weakness and intercedes when they do not know what to pray.
The Question the Book Asks
Which works of the Spirit were foundational, and which belong to Christian life itself?
This distinction becomes one of the major investigations in Who Changed the Church? Wood does not treat every reference to the Spirit as proof that every first-century manifestation must continue unchanged forever.
Instead, he traces what the New Testament says particular gifts were doing, how those gifts were transmitted, what Paul says about partial revelation and completeness, and what the apostles expected the church to possess after the foundational period.
That leads directly into the book's treatment of tongues, prophecy, miraculous knowledge, apostolic signs, 1 Corinthians 13, Ephesians 4, and the completeness of the apostolic message.
Why It Matters
The Holy Spirit's work in the Bible is much larger than any single debate about miracles. The Spirit revealed truth through the apostles, confirmed the gospel, gave gifts to the early church, is associated with conversion and new life, dwells in God's people, helps believers in weakness, and produces transformed character. The harder question is whether every manifestation described during the church's foundation was intended to continue in the same form. Who Changed the Church? follows that question through the apostolic evidence—and the answer affects far more than the debate over spiritual gifts.