John 14 12 thru 21


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“Another Advocate,” John 14:12-21 (April 3, 2016) 12

“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father. 13 Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14 If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it. 15

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, 17 even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you. 18

“I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. 19 Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. 20 In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. 21 Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” PRAY As some of you know, our scheme of teaching on Sunday mornings at Grace is to work our way through the Bible every year on a modified church year schedule. The idea is that we want to give you a balanced diet of biblical teaching over the course of a year. So pretty much every summer we study a New Testament epistle, like Philippians or Ephesians. Each fall we study an Old Testament book – last fall we looked at 1 Samuel. And every spring we walk through a gospel. And every spring since 2012 we’ve been studying the gospel of John. We began in chapter one four years ago, we made it to chapter twelve earlier this spring, and I do plan for us to remain in John every spring until we finish it. It might take us a couple or three more springs to do that. But we are going to skip ahead the rest of this spring and spend four Sundays in John 1416, where we will look at the subject of the Holy Spirit. In these three chapters of John’s gospel, we get more of Jesus’ teaching on the Holy Spirit than you can find in just about the rest of the four gospels combined. And to our great shame in the church today we’ve made the Holy Spirit into a subject of controversy, confusion, and divisiveness among Christians. People join churches or stay away from other Christians because of their views on the Holy Spirit, and it’s a shame. It does not have to be that way. So, who is the Holy Spirit? That’s the name of the series – who is the Holy Spirit? Three points: first, the identity of the Holy Spirit. Second, the work of the Holy Spirit. Third, experiencing the Holy Spirit. First, the identity of the Holy Spirit. Let’s read verses 16-17a: Jesus says, “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, 17 even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him.” © 2016 J.D. Shaw

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The first thing to notice is that when Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit, he does not say, “It.” Jesus says, “Him.” The Holy Spirit is a person. I was very deliberate in how I titled the sermon series. I did not title it, “What is the Holy Spirit?” but “Who is the Holy Spirit?” The Holy Spirit is not like The Force from Star Wars. He’s not an electrical charge or gravitational field that you try to access in a mechanical way. He is a person. At various times in the Scriptures he is said to hear, speak, witness, convince, lead, guide, teach, command, forbid, desire, and give help. Only a person could do all those things. And the Holy Spirit is God. The Trinitarian statements in the New Testament certainly assume the Holy Spirit is God, such as this one in the Great Commission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit …” Matthew 28:19. And in Acts 5, we read how Peter accused Ananias of lying to the Holy Spirit. And then as he sums up his denunciation of Ananias Peter says this: “You have not lied to man but to God.” Acts 5:4. The Holy Spirit is God – just as much God as the Father or Jesus. But the key phrase we must understand to grasp the identity of the Holy Spirit is in verse 16, where Jesus calls him “another Helper” in verse 16. The Greek word translated as “Helper” is parakletos, from two Greek words para, which means to come along side someone, and kaleo, which means to call or declare. Sometimes this word is just translated as “paraclete,” and so often you’ll hear the Holy Spirit called “The Paraclete.” This word is so important in understanding who the Holy Spirit is. But what does it mean? If you have five different translations, you might get five different words for paraclete. No one English word really works to translate it. Some of the newer translations have “Helper” or “Counselor” or “Friend.” But those don’t do paraclete justice, because they make the Holy Spirit sound like your assistant or a school counselor or just someone you might want to hang out with. The older translations like the King James Version translates it as “Comforter.” Unfortunately that word isn’t much help to us today either, because when we use the word “comforter,” we think of a quilt. But that’s not what “comforter” meant in Old English, when John Wycliffe first used it in his translation of the Bible back in the 1300s. “Comforter” comes from two Latin words, “con,” which means “with”, and “forte,” which means “power.” You’ll still hear people from time to time, when describing a strength or a talent someone else has, say something like this: “That really is her forte,” meaning strength or power. That’s getting closer to what paraclete means, he does come “with power,” but it still doesn’t tell us what he does with that power. The best word I know of to translate paraclete (and I can’t figure out why more translations don’t use it) is “advocate,” or “lawyer.” That’s literally what the word meant in ancient Greek. Think about it: a lawyer is someone who comes along side you in a time of need and declares, or argues, on your behalf.

© 2016 J.D. Shaw

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Jesus says that he will ask the Father, and he will send us the Paraclete, and he will come along side us and argue powerfully on our behalf. But when he comes, what will he say? What kind of argument will he make? Second, the work of the Holy Spirit. Notice again in verse 16 Jesus says, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper …” Another paraclete. To understand the the Holy Spirit, you must understand he is the second paraclete. But who is the first? The only occurrence of parakletos outside the John 14-16 is in 1 John 2. 1 John 2:1: “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate (parakletos) with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” John says that Jesus Christ is the first paraclete, first advocate. What does Jesus do as our advocate? Every single one of us, everyone on the planet, walks around feeling, to some degree, guilty. Some of us feel guilty because we’ve actually done bad things – we’ve actually hurt people or stolen from people or cheated on people or abused people. Or maybe we didn’t do anything wrong, but we constantly feel like we don’t measure up. I’m not funny enough, smart enough, I’m not attractive enough. We look in the mirror and we don’t like what we see. We say, “I’ll never measure up to my parents’ expectations, I don’t compare to my sister. I just can’t do what I need to do in my career, at school. I’m not the spouse I should be.” We all feel guilty. We may hide it well, we may actually be arrogant and prideful, but that’s just a facade to cover how weak and scared we really are. Have you ever wondered why we feel guilty? There’s actually a good reason: it’s because we are guilty! The whole human race is guilty. Genesis 2-3: there read about life for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and life was perfect. In the Garden, Adam and Eve had companionship – they enjoyed one another’s company in the first marriage on earth. They had work that was satisfying – Adam tended to the garden and it yielded its produce to him. They walked around naked, so you know the weather had to be perfect. They had great food to eat – every tree that was good and pleasing to the eye was theirs to eat. I happen to think their favorite was Kiwi. Plus, God would come down to the garden in the cool of the day and go for a walk with Adam and Eve. Now, I don’t know what your prayer life is like, but it’s probably not as intense and meaningful as theirs was. Adam and Eve walked around feeling good about themselves all the time, feeling complete secure about their place in the world. No existential angst whatsoever. They never felt guilty … until they sinned. They broke the one rule God had in the garden: you may eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:17). And immediately upon eating from the tree, what did they feel the need to do? “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. 8 And they heard the sound of the LORD

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God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.” Genesis 3:7-8. They no longer felt good about themselves, but they felt guilty. We were made, friends, for perfect, unbroken fellowship with our Creator. We were made to glorify God and enjoy him forever. But our hearts condemn us and make us feel guilty. We may not consciously believe we are condemned before God, but the unconscious sense of our guilt bubbles up into our conscious minds all the time in a thousand different ways. We feel guilty because we are guilty before God. But Jesus Christ is our Advocate, our Lawyer. What does that mean? It means that in the case of God vs. J.D. Shaw, Jesus Christ argues on my behalf with power. But you know if Jesus Christ were just like a regular lawyer, that wouldn’t be arguing with power. If Jesus is just presenting the facts in the best possible light the way a regular lawyer would do, trying to win me a verdict that way, I would take no comfort in that. See, I’m guilty. I know I’m guilty. I know I deserve condemnation. There’s no comfort, no power, in that. Now, I’m sure Jesus would make an excellent lawyer, but if he only tries to spin the facts in my favor that’s not arguing with power. Nor would it be any comfort to me if Jesus just begs on my behalf. Tim Keller puts it like this: what if every time I sinned, Jesus went up to God and said, “Father, J.D. Shaw did it again. I know, I know. He sinned again. Even after he swore he wouldn’t do it, he did it again. But please, Father, I’m begging you, for me, please don’t condemn him. I know he deserves it, I know he has it coming, but please, for me, Father, let him go.” And the Father says, “Well, ok, for you, Jesus, I’ll forgive J.D more time.” What if Jesus argued my case like that? Well, that wouldn’t be comforting, either. Because how much longer could Jesus keep that up? At some point, the Father’s going to say, “Jesus, this has been going on with J.D. for twenty years now. I mean, really, enough is enough.” If Jesus were like any other advocate, trying to spin the facts of my life the best he can or even begging the Father to let me go, that would be no comfort at all. There would be no power to his advocacy. But that’s not how Jesus acts as our advocate. Jesus does not ask God for mercy but for justice on our behalf. And this is what Jesus says: “Father, J.D. Shaw is a sinner, and he deserves condemnation. He is guilty. He has broken your law, and he has not loved you or his neighbor with all his heart, soul, strength, and mind. His sin must be paid for. But, Father, look at my body. Look at the nail prints in my hands, the nail prints on my feet, the hole in my side. He’s broken your law, and for that my body was broken. I paid for his sins, Father. And since you are a just God, you cannot demand two payments for the same debt. I demand justice for J.D. Shaw, Father. Because I have paid his debt in full, you cannot condemn him. You must acquit.” And the Father will say, “Jesus, you are absolutely right. J.D. Shaw, because Jesus Christ, the righteous one, is your Advocate, I declare you innocent.”

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And how do we get Jesus to argue on our behalf? What kind of fee does this lawyer charge? And the answer is: nothing. It’s all by grace. Jesus lived the perfect life you should have lived and he died the horrible death on the cross you deserved to die. He satisfied the demands of God’s justice for you and he did it for free. You only must believe that Jesus did it for you. “Arise, my soul, arise, shake off your guilty fears. The bleeding sacrifice on my behalf appears. His blood atones for every race, and sprinkles now the throne of grace.” Our First Advocate does not ask for mercy from God on our behalf, but demands justice – and guess what, friends? He will get it. That’s how Jesus is the first Paraclete. Now, what does the Holy Spirit do, our other Paraclete? He’s also our lawyer, and his job is still to argue our case, only he doesn’t do it in front of God – he argues to our hearts. Our hearts don’t want to believe that God loves us by grace, that because of Jesus God now completely loves and accepts us and we are his. Our hearts reject that notion. Our hearts say, “You have to earn it. You’ve got to go out find your place in the world and build a life for yourself and get significance and meaning on your own. It’s all up to you, pal.” And in suffering, our hearts tell us, “You know what, God doesn’t love you. No way – how could he, if you’re going through this?” But the Holy Spirit’s job is to come in and argue to our hearts. How? 15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God …” Romans 8:15-16. The way the Spirit argues with your heart is by being a spotlight. A spotlight does not draw attention to itself, but to the building or the person to which it points. The Holy Spirit comes alongside you and with power shines a spotlight on Jesus. That’s John 14:19: “Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me.” The Holy Spirit shines his light on Jesus and says, “Look at Jesus. Look at what he did for you. Look at his beauty. Look at him hanging on the cross. Look at him now, in heaven, interceding for you with the Father. Don’t you see? If Jesus Christ has done all that for you, and if right now in heaven he is your advocate, then you don’t need to do anything to be accepted by God – it’s all done. And there’s no way God is punishing you, because on the cross Jesus took all the punishment.” That’s the work of the Holy Spirit in your heart. 1 John 3:19-20: “By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him; 20 for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart …” Third, experiencing the Holy Spirit. Now, this is the big divide in modern-day Christianity. There are an awful lot of churches and Christians in the world that talk about nothing but having some kind of powerful spiritual experience, as if that’s really all they care about, and if you aren’t having these experiences every time you gather for worship then something’s wrong. On the other hand it seems there are a lot of Christians

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who are afraid of experience and view any kind of powerful emotion in Christianity with suspicion. They are frightened of the excesses they see in churches that emphasize experience, and so all they want to do is talk doctrine and exegesis. And of course if you’re familiar at all with Grace, then I think it’s fair to say if anything we’ve tended toward the second error as opposed to the first. So what does Jesus say about experiencing the Holy Spirit? And how can we experience him in a way that unifies, not divides? Three things: first, we must listen to the Spirit. When the Holy Spirit argues with our hearts, we must learn to listen and trust him when he tells us what Jesus has done for us. Because if we don’t, we will do all kinds of destructive things in our lives. The reason we do so many of the dumb things we do with our money, jobs, and relationship is we don’t really believe God loves us the way the Holy Spirit says he does. Last year Jessica Knoll’s book Luckiest Girl Alive was published. It’s been on the New York Times bestseller list, Reese Witherspoon has purchased the rights to make it into a movie. Everyone is saying it’s going to be the next Gone Girl. Last week, Ms. Knoll, in an essay posted online, revealed that at least part of her novel was autobiographical, the part where the main character was the victim of a sexual assault. She said it happened when she was fifteen years old. I won’t read the details of the assault itself, but the events leading up to it. “I know that before I was old enough to drive, I liked A Boy. I know that I went to a party at which the ratio of guys to girls was not in my favor, where I drank, flirted with A Boy, was dazzled by A Boy, drank some more, and slipped away from the waking world.” The assault followed soon thereafter. Now, praise God, we don’t all know what it feels like to be the victim of sexual assault. But we all know what it’s like to want a boy or a girl to like us, and to do all kinds of foolish things in order to try and make that happen. All of us who are parents want to do everything possible to make sure our kids, our daughters and our sons, don’t do the dumb things we did to try and get people to love us. How can we protect our kids from that? How can we protect ourselves from that (because that hunger for acceptance doesn’t magically disappear when you turn 21 – it pops up in different ways throughout our lives)? And the answer, of course, is that we can’t. We invest so much time and energy and resources in our kids in the hope they will be happy and not engage in self-destructive behavior. And the world around us tells us that if our kids will just do well in school, or if they are good athletes, or if they can just wear the right clothes in the right crowd, then they’ll be happy. And of course we all know those things don’t guarantee anything, because we all know people smarter than us, more athletic than us, more popular than us, who hate themselves. But if we belong to Jesus, that means you have another Advocate dwelling in your hearts (that’s verse 17) arguing with us, saying, “You don’t have to do this to get people to like you. You don’t have to feel ugly. You are wonderful, you are treasured, you are loved,

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because look, look at what Jesus has done for you.” 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, if you belong to Jesus, you have an Advocate inside of you telling you how loved you are! And if that’s true, then who cares what a seventeen year old boy thinks? Who cares what your boss thinks? Who cares what the most popular woman in the Oxford Junior Auxiliary thinks? Friends, to the degree you learn to listen to that testimony of the Holy Spirit in your heart, to that degree your capacity for doing the foolish things that hurt you goes way down and your peace and contentment and joy goes way up. One more time, 1 John 3:19-20: “By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him; 20 for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart …” Second, we must learn obedience. John 14:15: 15 “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” If we want to be able to hear the Spirit when he witnesses to our hearts about God’s love for us in Jesus, then we must strive to love him by obeying God’s commands. You can’t sit back and say, “Holy Spirit, speak to my heart and make me feel good, and in the meantime I’m going to live for myself.” If we do not obey God, we cannot expect the Holy Spirit to comfort us. Paul says in Ephesians 4:30: “And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.” 1 Thessalonians 5:19 he writes, “Do not quench the Spirit.” And for two thousand years Christians have said the way you grieve the Spirit and the way you quench the Spirit in your life is through disobedience. You can’t hear the Spirit’s witness while actively pursuing sin. It’s like turning up the stereo in your car while someone in the passenger seat tries to talk to you. Through obedience we experience the Holy Spirit. John 14:21: “Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself [through the Spirit] to him.” Third, we must learn to do the greater works. John 14:12: “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father.” Now, a lot of people have wondered what in the world the “greater works” are that we can do that Jesus did not do? Jesus can’t mean that if we believe in him we’ll perform greater miracles than he did. He made the blind see, he made the deaf hear, he raised the dead. I’m not saying those miracles can’t take place today; I’m only saying that we can’t top those miracles today. We can’t do greater miracles than those. So what does Jesus mean by “greater works”? He says that in the same breath as he talks about the coming of the Holy Spirit. That’s a big clue. What’s one big reason Jesus gives us the Holy Spirit? We talked about this last week: Jesus gives us the Holy Spirit so that we are empowered to tell everyone we possibly can the message of Jesus.

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Acts 1:8: [Jesus] said to them, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” The greater work we do is telling people with the help of the Holy Spirit what Jesus has done for them. Now, if you think: “But, J.D., how is that greater than what Jesus did? Didn’t he go around preaching the good news?” Yes, but with one big difference. When Jesus preached the good news, it was in anticipation of what was going to happen. Jesus hadn’t gone to the cross yet, he hadn’t been resurrected yet, he hadn’t ascended into heaven yet. He gospel proclamation was a promise of what would come. Our proclamation, by contrast, is all about what has already happened. We get to tell people about an already crucified, risen, and reigning Savior of the world who loves them and through the Holy Spirit wants to take up residence in their hearts and assure them of his love forever. Now, do you want to experience the Holy Spirit? I know some of you do. You are absolutely desperate for an experience. I’m glad you are – I’m thankful for Christians who want to do everything possibly to fight against a dead, emotionless Christianity. Here’s my challenge to you: don’t limit the way you can experience the Holy Spirit. Don’t think only in terms of internals. Some of you think the only way you can experience the Holy Spirit is through a powerful, individual, emotional encounter. Now, God does give those to his children from time to time. But not always. And in the Bible we are never encouraged to seek powerful, emotional experiences just for the sake of having powerful, emotional experiences. Instead, we are encouraged to think externally in order to experience the Spirit’s power. Think back to the greater works Jesus says you can do. When you tell people about what has already happened, what Jesus Christ has already done for them, and they believe, guess what you’ve done? By the power of the Holy Spirit you’ve opened the eyes of the blind, you’ve made the deaf to hear, and spiritually speaking you’ve even raised the dead to life. Those are great works. Do you want an experience of the Holy Spirit? Then just wait until you see someone you thought would never believe in the love God has for them in Jesus Christ believe. That’s an experience. And Jesus wants you to have it. He says, “The harvest is plentiful – pray that the Lord would send more laborers into the field to bring it in.” He does not want your faith to be only intellectual and dry and emotion-less. He promises us in verse 18: “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” Does that sound dry to you? That’s experience. So let’s pray for our church that we would experience that work of the Holy Spirit in our midst. PRAY

© 2016 J.D. Shaw

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