Spirits: Holy and Unholy

by Jack Cottrell

"Along the way I have also spoken much on the Holy Spirit in local churches, and occasionally written for publication short pieces on various aspects of this topic. Many of the oral presentations and most of the written pieces are included in this volume. At the very beginning is a series of talks that I was invited to give for the Michigan Christian Convention in 2012. The suggested theme was “God’s Power in You—the Holy Spirit.” You can see how I developed that theme in Section One of this book. This is the first time they have been published; study them carefully!Section Two has twelve miscellaneous studies on various aspects of the Spirit’s person and work, many of which were written in answer to questions from my Facebook friends. These are the shorter ones. I would especially recommend a couple of the longer ones. One is called “The Promise of the Father.”

The last section is on a different kind of spiritual being—not “Holy Spirit,” but evil spirits. This latter is one of the Biblical names for demons. Somewhere along the way in my teaching career I came to realize that we really needed a course on this subject at CBS. Until the early 1970s I had not given much thought to this subject; I had been taught that demons are not active today. So why worry about them? Then in the early 70s we were hit with a serious cultural change: the occult came out of the closet. Witchcraft, sorcery, spiritism, and all sorts of sinister practices became “respectable” and acceptable in our relativist culture. Many books were being published on the subject, both pro and con. In reading such material I came to see that I and many others had been deceived: demons are very active in our world today. " (Adapted from the Preface)

225 Pages