Sarah Bowling - Your Friendship with Holy Spirit: An Interactive Guide to Growing Your Relationship with God

OTHER BOOKS BY SARAH BOWLING

Hey God, Can We Talk?

How to Keep Your Faith
in an Upside Down World

In Step with the SpiritInfusing Your Life
With Gods Presence and Power

Heavenly HelpExperiencing the
Holy Spirit in Everyday Life

Jesus Chicks

Jesus is Gods Selfie

Save Your ForkTheres More!

30 Meditations on Healing (with Marilyn Hickey)

30 Meditations on the Names of God (with Marilyn Hickey)

Hanging by a ThreadThe Saving Moses Journey (with Sheila Walsh)

Copyright 2021Sarah Bowling

All rights reserved. This book is protected by the copyright laws of the United States of America. This book may not be copied or reprinted for commercial gain or profit. The use of short quotations or occasional page copying for personal or group study is permitted and encouraged. Permission will be granted upon request. Unless otherwise identified, Scripture quotations are taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE, Copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All emphasis within Scripture quotations is the authors own. Please note that Destiny Images publishing style capitalizes certain pronouns in Scripture that refer to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and may differ from some publishers styles. Take note that the name satan and related names are not capitalized. We choose not to acknowledge him, even to the point of violating grammatical rules.

DESTINY IMAGE PUBLISHERS, INC.
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Promoting Inspired Lives.

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ISBN 13 TP: 978-0-7684-5931-9
ISBN 13 eBook: 978-0-7684-5932-6

For Worldwide Distribution, Printed in the U.S.A.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 / 25 24 23 22 21

DEDICATION

I dedicate this book to anyone who struggles with relationships. I pray that your journey to grow closer with Holy Spirit will also help your relationships with humans. May Holy Spirit be your Helper in all relational contexts!

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Sarah Heaton who read my initial thoughts for this guide and encouraged me to Go big! Thank you, Sarah, for being so encouraging and compelling me to make this guide available to everyone and not only a qualified minority.

I also thank Encounter Church, my spiritual family, for being supportive and connected with me in this journey. Thank you more than I can express for being community!

Finally and most importantly, I thank Holy Spirit for being my relationship anchor, life jacket, sun on the horizon, EMT, steady friend, wise counsel, parent of all parents, and continual companion. Im alive because of Your genuine love!

FOREWORD

Living and loving like Jesus in a broken world should be the desire of every disciple of Christ. One of the most radical revelations is that Christ lives within you. The Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you!

If the Holy Spirit dwells in and with me, His Spirit has made His home in my spirit. The Son of God is on the inside. He has clothed Himself with my flesh. What would the world look like if the average believer lived in this wayHis presence in us, not just filling a space but in us?

The Holy Spirit is God and is a person. My wife is a person with a name, Jennifer; she is my friend, companion, lover, advisor, comforter, and mother to our children. After 32 years of sharing life together, we know each other very well.

The Holy Spirit is also a person, friend, life coach, counselor, and God. The Spirit lives in me and for the last 36 years, the Spirit has given me strength, power, joy, wisdom, peace and freedom. In the last year I have had a deep desire to build a more meaningful relationship with Holy Spirit. My prayer has been: Jesus, step into me and live through me as fully as You want to. Let me truly be Your hands, feet, eyes and mouth. Holy Spirit, let the world experience a God like Jesus through my life, Amen.

In my journey of longing for more, God connected me to Sarah and Reece Bowling. For the last three years, I have observed their intimate friendship and relationship with Holy Spirit.

On my last trip to Denver, I experienced a desire to befriend the Holy Spirit in a more meaningful way. After a day with Sarah and her mom Marilyn, my heart burned for more. Sarah shared that she was writing a relationship guide for connecting with Holy Spirit and she felt in the Spirit to ask me to do the foreword. It was easy for me to say yes because I knew Holy Spirit was her dearest friend!

The first time I read through the guide, I was overwhelmed by the presence and person of Holy Spirit. The second time, I allowed the guide to read me! So far, I have repented for times when I valued Holy Spirit for what the Spirit would do rather than valuing the relationship itself. It has refreshed my spiritual passion, personal revival, and given me transformation that will lead to reformation.

Your Friendship with Holy Spirit is timely, practical, and God inspired. Jesus calls His bride to arise and shine in a world looking for Jesusto those who are searching, to those who are hungry, to those who are eager to grow, and to those who are looking for more of Him!

Jesus said, I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly (John 10:10 King James Version). Many believers have a portion of this verse but not all of it. Your Friendship with Holy Spirit will help you in the rest!

Leif Hetland
President and Founder Global Mission Awareness
Author, Called to Reign and Healing the Orphan Spirit

Introduction

WELCOME!

Im so very happy you have this resource in your hand, regardless of how you came to this moment. And Im quite excited for you to begin what could be the best adventure of your entire life! I can make that statement with confidence because of my own journey with Holy Spirit that has included lots of surprises, discoveries, blind curves, gifts, lessons, and heaps more.

This book is written as a relationship guide, so its intended to be more interactive than informational. If youre keen to have more information about Holy Spirit, please grab my books Heavenly Help and In Step With the Spirit. They will give you some helpful content and insightful applications.

This interactive relationship guide includes building blocks for cultivating an ever-deepening connection with Holy Spirit. Each chapter has several interactive components, such as assessments, activities, connection exercises, and more. At the end of each chapter, youll also find discussion questions that could be helpful for either small group conversations or individual exploration.

If you approach this resource solely as a study guide for acquiring information, or if you are endeavoring to use Holy Spirit for more power or to gain supernatural demonstrations in your life, there is a good chance this guide will not meet your expectations. To be sure, more information, power, and demonstration could definitely be by-products of cultivating a greater connection and intimacy with Holy Spirit. But lets keep the main thingconnection with Holy Spiritthe main thing, with lots of freedom and flexibility for expression, consequences, demonstrations, supernatural evidence, and character growth as possible results of deepening intimacy with Holy Spirit.