Knowing the Spirit: Who He Is, What He Does, and How He Can Transform Your Christian Life is by Costi Hinn, published by Zondervan (ISBN 978-0-310-36677-6).
Who is writing, and why it shapes the book
Costi Hinn is Benny Hinn’s nephew. He grew up inside the family ministry, travelling with the crusades and seeing the operation from the inside, and he left it. He has written elsewhere about that break and about the cost of it.
That history is the lens for this book. Hinn is writing about the Holy Spirit as a man who watched the Spirit’s name attached to things he came to believe were false, and much of the book is concerned with separating what Scripture actually says from what he saw sold. He is direct about the abuses and names them.
Where we should be straight with you
Called to Better holds that the gifts of the Spirit remain active today, and we do not flag a book for assuming so. Hinn’s position is more restrained than that. He is writing against the excesses of the charismatic movement, and a continuationist reader will find places where he draws the line tighter than they would.
We are not going to pretend that difference away, and we are also not going to treat it as a reason to skip the book. This is a live disagreement among Christians who all take Scripture as authoritative, and Hinn has earned the right to be heard on it. Read him knowing where he stands.
What the book does well
It treats the Spirit as a person rather than a force or an experience, which is the correction most needed by men who either ignore the Spirit entirely or think of him only in terms of sensation. The teaching is clear and it stays anchored to texts.
It is also a rare thing: a book on this subject that is neither breathless nor dismissive. Hinn has good reason to be cynical and is not.
What we removed
Two unverifiable reader quotes and an invented FAQ.
Where we land
Worth reading, particularly if the Holy Spirit is the part of the Trinity you have quietly never thought about. Go in aware that Hinn’s boundaries are drawn more narrowly than ours, and that his caution was bought at a real price.
Knowing the Spirit by Costi Hinn on Amazon