Trusting God means acting on the knowledge that he knows what he’s talking about, even when his commands don’t make sense to me. Even before I see God’s provision. Even when provision looks impossible. Even when obedience is costly. Even if God doesn’t provide in the ways I think he should. Trusting God means being willing to get my feet wet, knowing that God’s promises will hold, and that in his own way, God’s hand will provide what is needed for the next step.

In 1998, Eva Cassidy recorded an old spiritual called “Wade in the water”. I was listening to her sing it in my car just recently:
Wade in the waterWade in the water, childrenWade in the waterGod’s gonna trouble the water
The lyrics are simple, but this water runs deep. As you’d expect from a spiritual, the reference is biblical. The rest of the song speaks of the children of Israel on the banks of the Jordan river, ready to cross into the promised land. In Joshua chapter 3, God tells the priests of Israel to carry the ark of the covenant, the symbol of his relationship with his people and presence with them, to the edge of the flooded river and stand in the water. They obeyed, and as soon as their feet got wet, God began to stop the flow of a mighty river and clear a path for his people to walk across on dry land.
Dry land—but the feet of the priests were still wet. They were wet because they had to “wade in the water” before God “troubled the water” for them. They had to obey before they saw the provision. They had to take a very literal step of faith into what was entirely impossible for them, trusting that God would keep his promise to take them across. It would have looked pretty silly for them to stand on the edge of the river if God never parted it. But he did.
The same dynamic plays out over and over again in the life of God’s people: we are often faced with situations where we must choose if we will trust God’s promises of provision, or turn away from where he is leading us in order to blaze our own path, by our own means. We like the sound of God’s promises for his children.
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When we experience the joy of the Holy Spirit, we taste the joy that is at the core of ultimate reality. For when we are born again by the Spirit (John 3:6–7), we receive the astounding, incredible, empowering, priceless gift of the Holy Spirit who resides in us, just as Jesus promised.

As we read through the New Testament, we encounter a unique connection between the Holy Spirit and joy. I’ll give you a few examples. Luke tells us how at one point Jesus “rejoiced in the Holy Spirit” (Luke 10:21) and Paul tells us how the Thessalonian Christians had “received the word in much affliction, with the joy of the Holy Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 1:6–7). In Romans, Paul instructs us that “the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17).
I call this connection unique (and worthy of further reflection) because the New Testament pairs joy with the Holy Spirit in a way it doesn’t with other affections. For instance, we don’t read of people experiencing the “sorrow of (or in) the Holy Spirit” or the “anger of (or in) the Holy Spirit,” even though it’s clear the Spirit can be grieved (Ephesians 4:30) and angered (Romans 1:18).
So, why does the New Testament uniquely tie joy to the Holy Spirit? To explore this question, we’ll briefly look at who (and what) the Holy Spirit is, what it means for us to experience this Spirit-empowered joy, and what difference it makes in the Christian life.
Spirit of Joy
Two qualifications before I delve in further. First, the few words I’m about to share on the nature of the Holy Spirit are, I believe, foundationally helpful to understanding the joy that the Holy Spirit produces in us. I don’t have space here, however, to offer a full treatment of that complex reality, so if you’d like to explore this further, this sermon by John Piper and this article by Scott Swain are good places to start.
Second, it’s helpful to keep in mind that while Scripture describes the Holy Spirit as a divine person distinct from the Father and the Son (John 15:26), it also describes him as the Spirit of the Father (Matthew 10:20) and the Spirit of the Son (1 Peter 1:11). In one place, Paul refers to the Spirit in all three Trinitarian ways in the space of three verses (Romans 8:9–11). As we talk about the joy of the Holy Spirit, we need to remember the oneness of God.
Now, let’s probe deeper into the nature of the Trinity as it relates to joy. Citing New Testament texts such as 1 John 4:16 — “God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” — theologians at least as far back as Augustine have understood the Holy Spirit to be the living, personified love flowing between the Father and the Son (John 17:26). John Piper says it this way — and note the connection between the love of God and the joy of God:
God the Holy Spirit is the divine person who “originates” (eternally!) from the Father and the Son in their loving each other. And this love is not a “merciful” love as if they needed pity. It is an admiring, delighting, exulting love. It is Joy. The Holy Spirit is God’s Joy in God. To be sure, he is so full of all that the Father and Son are, that he is a divine person in his own right. But that means he is more, not less, than the Joy of God. (“Can We Explain the Trinity?”)
Piper goes on to say, “This means that Joy is at the heart of reality. God is Love, means most deeply, God is Joy in God.” If an essential dimension of the Spirit’s nature is that he is “God’s Joy in God” personified, that helps us understand what makes the joy he produces in us a distinctive joy.
God’s Joy in Us
When we experience the joy of the Holy Spirit, we taste the joy that is at the core of ultimate reality.
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In the earliest days of the PCA, college ministry was not uniformly viewed as a crucial pillar of outreach for the young denomination: parachurch organizations such as InterVarsity Fellowship and Campus Crusade already occupied much of that sphere. Yet recognizing the need for sound biblical teaching on campus, Lowrey put forth a vision of ordained ministers whose primary concerns were the discipleship of believing students, the evangelism of seekers and skeptics, and the sustained spiritual care of covenant children. It was not enough to simply bring students to church, Lowrey believed: the church should seek the students out itself.

Mark Lowrey, founder of Reformed University Fellowship and former head of Great Commission Publications, has died. He was 78. For several months he had battled an aggressive cancer that had spread to several abdominal organs.
Lowrey was a minister whose flock was never just one congregation, but was instead countless numbers of students in a lasting network of campus ministries that stretches from coast to coast and beyond. He was the quiet yet driving force behind one of the most visible and effective Christian fellowships today.
Born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 1945, Mark Lowrey came of age during the Vietnam era, and served one tour overseas in Saigon with the Army before returning home and enrolling at RTS in Jackson, graduating and becoming ordained in 1978. After only his first year of coursework, however, Lowrey was called by the PCA churches in his hometown to lead the campus fellowship at the University of Southern Mississippi. From this mustard seed of faith would eventually sprout a national network known as Reformed University Fellowship (RUF).
In the earliest days of the PCA, college ministry was not uniformly viewed as a crucial pillar of outreach for the young denomination: parachurch organizations such as InterVarsity Fellowship and Campus Crusade already occupied much of that sphere. Yet recognizing the need for sound biblical teaching on campus, Lowrey put forth a vision of ordained ministers whose primary concerns were the discipleship of believing students, the evangelism of seekers and skeptics, and the sustained spiritual care of covenant children. It was not enough to simply bring students to church, Lowrey believed: the church should seek the students out itself.
This vision proved both persuasive and successful, partly due to Lowrey’s gifts as a strategist. “Mark was equal parts a vision person and a detail person,” recalled Ruling Elder James (‘Bebo’) Elkin, who served alongside Lowrey in Mississippi in its earliest years. “He was skilled at putting together a coalition: he wasn’t just a master of facts and figures, he also prioritized relationships with people, and could get them involved in key ways.”
After a decade serving in his home state, Lowrey and his family moved to Atlanta in 1983, to PCA headquarters. From there Lowrey could better facilitate the growth of RUF, overseeing the training of new campus ministers and interns not just across the South but across the country. Lowrey describes this growth elsewhere in this volume; but worth noting here are four main factors: (1) establishing a firm financial footing for presbyteries to call new ministers, ensuring greater longevity at their posts; (2) a focus on training both men and women in ministry, raising up a generation of servant-leaders who could respond to the unique spiritual needs of different students; and (3) an ambitious national and international vision, inspired by Lowrey’s own overseas service; and (4) the harmonious integration of RUF with the other arms of the PCA, such as Mission to North America, under which it stood in the early days.
After 25 years at the helm of RUF, a new chapter for Lowrey began in 1996. In need of new resources for K-12 students, Great Commission Publishing, a joint venture of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the PCA, recruited Lowrey to use the skills he had developed working on behalf of college students for a younger demographic, primarily elementary and middle-school students. Central to this new curriculum would be its Christocentric focus: drawing on the work of scholars such as Edmund Clowney, whom seminarians had been reading and preaching from for decades, GCP updated its materials to show even the youngest believers from the earliest possible opportunity how all of Scripture points to the hope of and fulfillment in Christ.
Today, as the denominational curriculum of record, GCP serves over one thousand churches in the PCA and other denominations, but the need for fresh approaches to ancient verities remains. Lowrey served GCP in different capacities over his 30 years with the company; he became its executive director in 2021.
He is survived by his wife Priscilla, whom he met and married while she was working for InterVarsity Fellowship in the early 1970s; two children: Leonard and Elizabeth.
He was a faithful, committed servant whose work seldom bore his name, but whose fifty-year career is a direct fulfillment of Moses’ plea in Psalm 90:
“Let your work be shown to your servants,and your glorious power to their children.Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,and establish the work of our hands upon us;yes, establish the work of our hands!”
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