I am an Episcopalian. From where I am today, I would say this.

First, we all have spirit. It is created in us and given to us freely. Like our minds and our actions, it is controlled by our free will. We can direct how and in what direction it is developed, and this can be affected by how we are treated and raised as children, and other life experience.

The experience of choosing Christ as Lord and Savior, and deciding to follow Him, is a transforming experience. One thing that is transformed (initially and then also over time) is our spirit.

One way this transformation happens is through the grace of the Holy Spirit.... grace in this sense being an outpoured sacred love that envelops us and draws us closer. Each time this occurs-- each time we accept it-- there is more transformation, more closeness, more response from us. Over time, with continual yielding into this, we become more like Christ. We start to want to give up anything in us that does not conform to Him.... we start to see things from a view of loving Him more than anything else, and this changes so much about our lives, I can't even describe it.   What is good is strengthened, what is not good (for us or anyone else) is redeemed into something else that IS good.

So in one sense, part of the gift to the believer is "holy-spirit"... a continually-transformed spirit, increasingly conforming to the full stature of Christ, the new person created in us....

THE "Holy Spirit" is in us but it is not of us, and is not we ourselves... it is one way we view and interact with God, but it comes from God, and we respond to it, and can be immersed in it. It is given to us for many reasons, perhaps most importantly for the building up of the body of the faithful. THAT Holy Spirit is a gift to believers only.... it follows an act or decision of faith that indicates we are willing to accept it as the unearned gift it is. Once accepted, it enkindles in us an increasingly accurate hearing and response to God's will for us.

Without that gift, there is much about Christianity and God's Word that isn't going to make sense or fully resonate. This is one reason nonbelievers have so much trouble understanding whatever people of faith say we know as a certainty, and why conversation about some of these matters of the heart can be so frustating and so unproductive of understanding.

This Holy Spirit is part of God, not part of us. As such it has all the power you would expect a Supreme Being to have, not one-third of it. :~) It is a means of giving us MORE gifts-- Spiritual Gifts to know things we could not know in ourselves, gifts of leadership beyond what we could otherwise do, and so forth. These are supernaturally-powered Gifts that we do not power ourselves, over and far above our natural talents, skills, or personality traits, but working in concert with our developed talents and skills and traits..... if you are yielded to this, you receive a lot, and the more you receive and use as God would have you use it, the more often and more deeply this happens.

We are encouraged to test our perception of the work of the Holy Spirit in us and through us and around us, to avoid being fooled by our only-human senses and desires. We test these experiences and the conclusions we reach by comparing them with Scripture and the life of Jesus as it has been revealed to us.

Some Bible translations have merged these two different concepts-- holy-spirit and THE Holy Spirit-- into one translated term, "Holy Spirit," in several passages. The Bible does this a lot-- translation that limits concepts or mixes them up. This is because the original languages, and especially the Greek of the NT, were rich in meanings to the people of their time, that are not easily boiled down into a few starkly-printed words. We have a current-day parallel that can help make this clearer-- how many words are there for SNOW in some languages? Each word, to a speaker of that language, evokes a picture, a smell, a touch, maybe a sound. But in English, it's ALL just "snow," and we struggle in prose or poetry to be accurate about what we might have experienced or meant to evoke.

All I can really tell you that I think is observable from outside my experience or my words is this-- it works for me, and I get smarter and more effecive in the world, not less. It opens me to life, doesn't close me off from the world. It's the only thing I have ever found that is bigger than I am, that I have to keep up with instead of it keeping up with me. I don't mind that it is stuff that I will never fully understand in my "lifetime." Since to me, "liftime" includes the eternity I'll enjoy in Jesus' lap, I hope to understand more while caring less that I do not understand ALL.

~Susan