The Holy Spirit - What is it?

I love provocative post titles. The Holy Spirit is not an 'it' but a 'He'. He is not an impersonal force but a person. Many people (including those who no doubt rubbed their hands with glee upon reading the title post and hopefully have not gone straight to the comments to make a goose of yourself) love to jump down your throat if you slip up occasionally and call the Holy Spirit an 'it' rather than 'He'. I'm convinced you should call him 'he', but it's not as simple as that. In fact, it would be great to insist you must always refer to the Holy Spirit as 'he'. But if you slip up once in a while you have an ally. And perhaps not the person you'd expect. According to John, Jesus called the Holy Spirit 'it'. Unfortunately though you won't find this in your Bible as the translators have let us down by trying to cover for Jesus 'mistake', but I'm reliably informed (via Phillip Jensen) that in the original Greek it is clearly 'it'.

According to Phillip, even though it's not good practice, this proves you can occasionally make the mistake of calling the Holy Spirit an 'it'. Gordon Cheng however has a different interpretation and suggests all this proves is that you can call the Holy Spirit 'it' just once in your ministry.