In the midst of Paul’s closing remarks to the Thessalonians, he likens the Holy Spirit to a fire that dwells within us:
1 Thessalonians 5:19
Do not put out the Spirit’s fire
It’s easy to read this and say, “Oh, I get it. The Spirit is like a fire and we’re supposed to always have the Spirit in us, like not letting a fire go out” (this was my first thought, anyway). But then I remembered something from the Old Testament. God gave the Old Covenant law for very deliberate and specific reasons. Every sacrifice in Leviticus reveals something special about Christ. Every article of the tabernacle in Exodus reveals something about how we are to live, since we are now the temple of God. Recall one of the Lessons from Psalm 1: we should delight in God’s law, but we cannot delight in the law if we do not know the law. When we read that the Spirit is a fire that we must not put out, then we should remember what is written in the law: