Asher's Blog

One of my team members recently asked me a question: What is your superpower?

For me, the answer was easy. My superpower is that God loves me deeply, and I know that He loves me. And more precisely, the evidence that God loves me is that He made me righteous and allows His Spirit to live in me. My greatest advantage is the Holy Spirit—the Spirit of God living within me.

I could have answered with qualities people normally associate with leadership. Perhaps focus, resilience, possibility thinking, creativity or the ability to remain calm around difficult decisions. Those qualities matter, and I recognize that God has helped me develop them. But when I trace them back to their deepest source, I arrive at the same place: I know that I am loved by God, I have peace with Him through Jesus Christ, and His Spirit dwells in me.

That knowledge changes how I see difficulty. It changes how I recover when I am wrong. It changes what I believe is possible and where I go when I do not know what to do.

There is nothing I can experience that does not eventually make me trace my way back to Him.

The superpower begins with being loved

The foundation is not that I love God perfectly. The foundation is that He loved me first.

First John 4:19 says, “We love him, because he first loved us.” My response begins with His initiative. Before my discipline, achievement, service or obedience, there is the love of God revealed in Christ.

This matters because a person can spend their entire life trying to earn a love that the gospel invites them to receive. They perform, impress, compete and hide their weaknesses because they are afraid that failure will make them unworthy of belonging. Even spiritual activity can become another attempt to persuade God to accept us.

But the gospel begins elsewhere. Romans 5:8 says that God demonstrated His love towards us while we were still sinners, through the death of Christ. His love did not wait for us to become impressive.

When I know that God loves me, I do not have to turn every business outcome into a verdict on my identity. A failed idea can be painful without proving that I am abandoned. A successful season can be celebrated without becoming the source of my worth. Correction can make me wiser without making me unloved.

Security in God’s love does not remove ambition; it purifies ambition. I can pursue great assignments without requiring the achievement to tell me whether my life matters.

Knowing the dimensions of His love

Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3 has become important to how I understand this. He prays that believers may be able to comprehend “what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height” and to know the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge, so that they may be filled with all the fullness of God.

There is a beautiful tension in that prayer: to know a love that surpasses knowledge. This is not information mastered once. It is a reality into which we continually grow.

The width of His love means I cannot exhaust its reach. The length means it is not limited to my best season. The depth means it meets me in places where human approval cannot follow. The height means His purpose for me is not confined to the smallness of my present imagination.

The more deeply I understand this love, the less power fear has to organize my decisions. I do not become careless. I become rooted.

Paul does not present the knowledge of Christ’s love as an abstract theological achievement. It produces fullness. What I believe about God’s love shapes the kind of person I become—how I treat people, how I carry responsibility, how I respond to setbacks and how freely I can love without manipulating others for reassurance.

I have peace with God

One of the greatest truths in the Christian life is that, through Christ, I am not trying to negotiate peace with God every morning.

Romans 5:1 says, “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” The peace rests on what Christ has done, received by faith. Jesus did everything necessary for reconciliation. I do not have to approach God as though the cross was insufficient and my performance must complete it.

This does not make sin unimportant. Grace does not remove repentance; it makes honest repentance possible. Because my relationship with God rests on Christ, I can come into the light instead of hiding behind self-justification. I can acknowledge failure, receive forgiveness and return to obedience.

Peace with God is deeper than a calm emotion. Feelings change. Some days are anxious, confusing or heavy. Peace with God is an objective reconciliation that can support me even when my emotions have not caught up with the truth.

That is why I can count on His Word. I am not reading promises as an outsider trying to steal another family’s inheritance. In Christ, I have been brought near.

Adopted into God’s family

The illustration that often comes to my mind is that of being the child of a powerful president. Such a child would possess a particular confidence because of relationship, access and identity.

Yet every human comparison becomes too small. Through Christ, believers have received adoption from the Creator and Lord of the universe.

Romans 8 says that we have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear, but the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.

J. I. Packer writes in Knowing God, “Adoption is the highest privilege that the gospel offers.” Justification declares us right with God; adoption brings us into the family. God is not only Judge who has acquitted us through Christ. He is Father who has welcomed us.

This gives me confidence, but not arrogance. I am not God’s only child, and His love for me is not permission to regard other people as less valuable. Adoption should make me secure enough to serve. The Father who receives me also teaches me to recognize His image in others and to love His family.

Biblical sonship is not a claim that I control God’s authority. It means I belong to Him, receive from Him, submit to His formation and inherit through grace what I could never earn.

Sealed with the Holy Spirit

God does not leave His love as a distant concept. Ephesians 1 says that believers who hear and believe the gospel are “sealed with that holy Spirit of promise,” who is the guarantee of our inheritance.

The Holy Spirit is God’s personal presence within the believer. He is not merely near me as an external adviser. He dwells in me.

This is one reason the Christian life cannot be reduced to copying Jesus through human determination. God gives His own Spirit. The Spirit illuminates truth, produces fruit, distributes gifts, strengthens prayer, convicts, comforts and empowers witness.

The indwelling Spirit is not a reward for exceptional Christians. He belongs to the gift of salvation. The New Testament’s language is astonishing: our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit.

The One who hovered over the waters in Genesis, who spoke through the prophets, who empowered Jesus’ earthly ministry and raised Him from the dead dwells in believers. Romans 8:11 says that the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead lives in us. That is not a small advantage.

The Holy Spirit is a Person, not a tool

When trying to express the Holy Spirit’s relationship to divine wisdom and power, we may reach for modern metaphors. We might call Him the “software” or “intelligence” of God. I understand the instinct behind the language: we are trying to describe the One through whom God’s wisdom and power are active.

But the metaphor is too small and can become misleading. Software is impersonal. It is owned, controlled and deployed by a user. The Holy Spirit is not an object, force or divine technology in our possession. He is the eternal Spirit, fully God, one with the Father and the Son. He speaks, teaches, guides, wills and can be grieved.

I do not “have” the Holy Spirit in the sense that I control Him. I have received Him, and He has made me His dwelling. The relationship is not about using divine power for my plans; it is about being led and transformed for God’s purposes.

This distinction protects worship. If I treat the Spirit only as an advantage, I may seek His power without His holiness, His gifts without His fruit or His wisdom without His lordship. But He is not a shortcut around character. The Spirit who gives power also produces love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

The greatest evidence of His work is not merely that I can do impressive things. It is that I increasingly become like Christ.

Why Jesus called His coming an advantage

In John 16:7, Jesus told His disciples that it was expedient—or to their advantage—that He should go away, because if He did not go, the Comforter would not come to them. Through His death, resurrection and exaltation, Jesus would send the Spirit to His people.

This does not mean the Holy Spirit is better than Jesus or that the persons of the Trinity compete. The Son’s departure in the flesh opened the next stage of God’s redemptive purpose: the Spirit would indwell and empower believers across the world.

The disciples had known Jesus beside them. Through the Spirit, they would know God’s presence within them.

The Holy Spirit glorifies Jesus. He does not draw us away from Christ or invent a separate message. He brings Christ’s words to remembrance, guides into truth and makes the life of Jesus real within His people.

So when I call the Holy Spirit my greatest advantage, I am not describing a competitive advantage that makes me superior to another person. I am confessing dependence. Whatever wisdom, courage or spiritual fruit appears in my life has a source beyond my natural ability.

The Spirit of wisdom and understanding

Isaiah 11 describes the Spirit resting upon the promised Messiah: “the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.” This passage speaks first about Christ, but it reveals the character of the Spirit whom believers have received.

He is the Spirit of wisdom. He helps us apply truth to real circumstances.

He is the Spirit of understanding. He helps us perceive beneath appearances. He is the Spirit of counsel and might. He gives direction and strength for obedience.

He is the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. His wisdom does not produce self-worship; it produces reverence.

First Corinthians 12 explains that the Spirit distributes gifts according to His will. Wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing and other gifts are manifestations of the same Spirit for the common good. Gifts are not trophies proving one believer is more loved than another. They are graces entrusted for service.

This matters to me as a leader. I need more than information. I need wisdom to know which facts matter, when to move, whom to trust, what to stop and how to carry people through change. I need strength to make difficult decisions without becoming hard. I need discernment to recognize when fear is disguising itself as prudence and when recklessness is disguising itself as faith.

I ask the Holy Spirit for help because leadership repeatedly brings me to the edge of what I know.

I am never stranded

One conviction I return to is this: I am never stranded. That does not mean I always know the answer immediately. It does not mean every door opens, every plan succeeds or every season feels easy. Paul, who was filled with the Spirit, still experienced weakness, persecution, uncertainty and unanswered questions.

To say I am never stranded means that I am never abandoned to my own resources. I can ask for wisdom. I can pray. I can search Scripture, sit quietly, seek counsel and remain attentive. I can trust that God is present even when the next step has not yet become obvious.

Possibility thinking grows from that place. When something appears impossible, I do not have to accept panic as the final interpretation. I can ask, “Holy Spirit, what am I not seeing? What is the wise next step? What must change in me? Who should I speak to? Is this a door to push, a wall to respect or a direction to reconsider?”

Sometimes His help arrives as a creative idea. Sometimes it arrives through another person’s expertise. Sometimes it is the courage to make a decision I already know is necessary. Sometimes His wisdom is to wait.

Being led by the Spirit does not remove thinking. It redeems thinking from the illusion of independence.

Meditation renews my inner world

Recently, I have spent time meditating on these truths and listening repeatedly to Scripture. Elevation Worship and Steven Furtick released Promise & Presence: Guided Scripture in 2026, a project that places spoken Scripture over instrumental music. It has given me another way to remain with the Word rather than rushing past it.

Biblical meditation is not emptying the mind into nothingness. It is filling the mind with God’s truth, turning it over, speaking it, praying it and allowing it to examine us.

Psalm 1 describes the blessed person whose delight is in the law of the Lord and who meditates on it day and night. That person is “like a tree planted by the rivers of water,” bringing forth fruit in season, with a leaf that does not wither.

I love that picture: planted, nourished, fruitful and evergreen. The tree does not manufacture the river. Its strength comes from where it is planted. In the same way, spiritual fruitfulness does not come from frantic self-sufficiency. It comes from remaining rooted in God’s Word and responsive to His Spirit.

The psalm says that whatever such a person does shall prosper. This should not be turned into a promise that every venture will produce immediate financial success. Biblical prosperity is first the fruitfulness of a life ordered around God. Sometimes obedience includes pruning, waiting or a result the world would not call impressive.

But I can confidently say that life rooted in God is not wasted. He forms fruit in its season.

The Word and the Spirit belong together

Some people seek the Spirit while neglecting Scripture. Others study Scripture while behaving as though communion with the living God is unnecessary. The Christian life should not force a separation God has not made.

The Spirit inspired the Scriptures and illuminates their truth. He will not guide us in a way that contradicts the character and revelation of Christ. Scripture gives language and boundaries to discernment; the Spirit makes the written Word living and formative within us.

This is why I return to the Word when my thoughts become noisy. I do not merely look for a sentence that confirms what I already want. I allow the wider witness of Scripture to correct my desires, reveal God’s character and reshape my definition of success. The Word anchors possibility in truth; the Spirit leads possibility into obedience.

Living from this advantage

If the Holy Spirit is my greatest advantage, the practical response is not simply to repeat the phrase. I must cultivate awareness, surrender and obedience.

I make room for prayer that includes listening rather than only presenting requests. I meditate on Scripture until truth becomes more influential than anxiety. I pay attention to conviction instead of explaining it away. I test impressions against Scripture, wisdom, character and responsible counsel. I remain willing to admit that my preferred idea may not be God’s direction.

I also take action. Depending on the Holy Spirit is not passivity. In Acts, Spirit-filled believers prayed, spoke, travelled, served, organized, endured and made decisions. Divine help did not replace human responsibility; it empowered faithful participation.

At work, this means preparing carefully and still asking for wisdom. It means reading the data without worshipping it, listening to people without surrendering judgment, and making decisions without pretending I control every outcome.

It means treating people as souls, not merely resources. If the Spirit produces love, then a supposedly Spirit-led ambition that repeatedly destroys people deserves examination.

It means remaining teachable. The Holy Spirit may answer my prayer through a colleague who sees something I missed.

Love is the deepest advantage

The world often defines power as the ability to control circumstances and people. The gospel reveals another kind of power: the security of being loved, the freedom of reconciliation, the dignity of adoption and the presence of God within ordinary human beings.

Knowing that God loves me does not make me immune to fear, but it gives me somewhere to take fear. It does not make every decision obvious, but it assures me that confusion is not abandonment. It does not make me incapable of failure, but it prevents failure from having the final word over my identity.

The Holy Spirit gives wisdom, but He also gives the humility to receive wisdom. He gives power, but He also forms self-control. He gives gifts, but He directs those gifts towards service. He gives possibility, but He keeps possibility submitted to the will and character of God.

That is why this answer is so easy for me. What is my superpower?

God loves me. Through Christ, I have peace with Him. He has adopted me as His child. He has sealed me with His Spirit. The Holy Spirit does not merely visit me; He lives in me.

I have help. I have counsel. I have access to wisdom beyond my natural understanding. I can return to God, listen, think and take the next faithful step. I may not always see the way immediately, but I am never abandoned and never left entirely to myself.

I am never stranded. My superpower is the Holy Spirit.

References and further reading

• J. I. Packer, Knowing God, particularly the chapter “Sons of God.”
• Gordon D. Fee, God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul.
• A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God.
• BibleProject, “Who Is the Holy Spirit?”.
• Elevation Worship and Steven Furtick, Promise & Presence: Guided Scripture (2026).
• Key passages: Ephesians 1:13–14; Ephesians 3:16–19; Romans 5:1–8; Romans 8:11–17; John 16:7–15; 1 Corinthians 6:19; 1 Corinthians 12; Galatians 5:22–23; Isaiah 11:2; and Psalm 1.