Faith Community Bible Church

Good morning, Church! Today, we are back to our study of the book of John. We are picking up where we left off and this morning’s message comes from John 14:15-21. Please turn with me there in your Bible’s if you have not already done so.

I want to start this morning by giving you my main point. Then, we will read a section of the text and make a few points related to this main theme.

Knowing God is to be unified with Christ by the Holy Spirit. Put in its most simple form: We need help. I don’t know what all of you are facing today, but I know what some of you are facing, and we are in need of God’s help. Here is the good news: God in Christ through the Spirit is our Helper. When it comes to the kind of help we need, and the offer of help available to us, the whole Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit are involved. Put negatively, this means that, “…where the Spirit it not cherished, or is unknown, neither will union with Christ be understood of enjoyed.”[1]

My hope this morning is that you will become more acquainted and familiar with God. And that by knowing God personally, we will experience the joyful reality of union with Christ.

Knowing God is to be unified with Christ by the Holy Spirit.

For the sake of context, we will read John 14:15-31. Let’s hear God’s word:

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.” 22 Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” 23 Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. 24 Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father's who sent me.

25 “These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. 26 But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. 27 Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. 28 You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I will come to you.’ If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I. 29 And now I have told you before it takes place, so that when it does take place you may believe. 30 I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no claim on me, 31 but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father. Rise, let us go from here.

I want to begin explaining this text with a part of my personal story. As I share this story, I’d like you to be reflecting on your own story. Here’s a question that might guide you: What is the role of the Holy Spirit in your Christian Life?

I grew up in a Christian home, attended a Christian School, and was steeped in Scriptures from an early age. I prayed to receive Christ at the age of four and sought to follow him as best as I could. I was both terribly moralistic and hedonistic. I was guilt-ridden over my sin, but thought I had the power to overcome it. I hid my shame and sin behind checklists and resolutions to do better next time. I enjoyed sin and maligned myself. This led my teenage soul into a season of spiritual depression.

What was the cause of this depression? There was a tragic flaw in my understanding of God, and for years, no one took the time to explain it to me. I did not clearly understand the Gospel, or the Spirit of God. No one tried to actively confuse me on the Holy Spirit, but I grew up thinking that the Holy Spirit was an impersonal ‘force.’ The Spirit was like gravity that worked out the mechanics of the Christian life. I considered him to be an “it”, rather than an intimate, personal friend. Even though I ran in some somewhat charismatic circles, my relationship with the Spirit was desperately naïve.

I was an extremely lonely Christian. For much of high school, you would not have known that I was a Christian aside from my affiliations with Christian institutions. My soul was parched. If the Spirit is gravity, gravity can’t care very well for your soul, can it? It just pulls you down out of guilt. I was afraid of what people thought of me. I struggled with besetting sins that would not relent. I could not confess my sins with the joy of knowing that I was forgiven. I doubted the existence of God, even while being a Christian. My prayers were powerless. My Bible reading was sleep-inducing. On the outside, everything was fine. I had decent grades, athletic ability, friends, but inside, I was desperate.

I suspect that some of you might be in this position today. This last year has exposed in you a spiritual lethargy, habits of sin, patterns of thought that are not the fruit of the Spirit. You may be trapped in a joyless Christian experience, and you’re afraid to tell anyone. You may be nervous that I am even bringing up the Holy Spirit because you’ve either seen abuses, or you’re afraid of what it might actually look like for God to take supernatural hold of your life. You’d rather keep your theoretical knowledge and your life structured the way that it is than have the Spirit of God utterly disrupt you.

For me, at age 17, God used the preaching of his word at a local church to introduce me to, and lovingly crush me with, a right understanding of the Spirit of God. This introduction to the Holy Spirit rescued me in a fresh way into true knowledge of God. I became acquainted with the Person and work of the Holy Spirit. I learned that the Holy Spirit is a Person.  This embarrassing realization helped me to see that I barely knew God. The Holy Spirit, I found, is God. God with me. God for me. God, who knew me. God, who loved me. God, who had forgiven me of my sins. God, who had set me free to obey Christ.

My vision of God was finally bigger than my vision of self.

I was no longer alone. Christ was in me. The Spirit testified to my spirit, “You are a child of God.” I believe that I became a Christian at age 4, but without a proper understanding of the Holy Spirit, I was a lonely Christian, a joyless Christian, an outward Christian. After I gained understanding for the person and work of the Holy Spirit, I started taking risks for the glory of God. I began studying my Bible out of joy, not obligation. I wanted to preach. Even though I was an introvert, I wanted to be around people the people of God. I was interested in the things of God.

God changed me through the Spirit.

It is my prayer that God will do the same for you this morning.

Let’s set up this text a bit by explaining why it is in our Bibles.  Why is John 14:15-21 here for us? My short answer is that it’s here because the Spirit of God is the answer to the tragic desperation that I just described.

Because we live in a fallen world, sin is real, deadly, and devastating, we are beset by many tragedies. We naturally experience a deep alienation from God and others. We naturally sense life as a downward spiral. I think we experience tragic desperation in our human experience in at least three ways:

First, Self-Inflicted Personal Tragedies

Some of the great tragedies of 2021 were self-inflicted. Because of sin we are beset by wrong moral choices that damage our relationships. The loose threads of our sins hung us out to dry. We feel desperate because of it. Illustration: In 2021, one of my besetting sins was dealing with anger and frustration. At 32, there is just so much to do, and not enough time to do it! My life and relationships suffered because of my failures to trust God, poor time management, and priorities, in very small and practical ways.

Second, We Experience Tragedies from the Outside

Some tragedies were inflicted upon us from others, or even by nature itself. Job loss. Broken relationships. Miscommunications. Shootings. Loss of family members in 2021. We are like weary travelers, “…sorely burdened[; pilgrims] who are still shifting the heavy suitcase [of our burdens] from one hand to the other.”[2] Though the year changes, the burdens remain. We feel weighed down by our broken world. Illustration: As I have reflected on the past few years, God has sovereignly allowed me to lose close contact with several good friends. No wrongs were committed, but it just happened from the outside in.

Third, We Watched Tragedies in 2021. 

Our attraction to tragedy shows evidence of our confused and parched souls. We are attracted and drawn into these stories of sorrow because, in some sense, we all conceive of our lives as tragic. Empty. Lonely. We sense the emergency. We’ve felt alone and sometimes feel like we should feel alone. Or, abandoned. In all of most read articles of 2021, loss is at the center: whether its Ravi Zacharias, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, the storming of the US capitol, withdrawal from Afghanistan, Tornadoes, COVID-19 deaths, or losses from racial violence. All the main stories are tragedies. Losses. We love these stories because they provide perspective on our own tragedies. Illustration: I heard a story recently about a family member, who after a car accident, was beset with chronic hiccups (don’t laugh!). This provides solace and relief for our occasional experience of discomfort. Perspective. “At least my hiccups are not as bad as hers.”

Jesus comes and addresses us in our sin and says, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink…” (John 7:37). And, “whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’ (John 7:38). John adds this beautiful editorial note that concerns us today, “Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.” (John 7:39). John says what the prophet Joel had anticipated hundreds of years before was happening right in front of his eyes:

“And it shall come to pass afterward,

that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh;

your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

your old men shall dream dreams,

and your young men shall see visions.

29 Even on the male and female servants

in those days I will pour out my Spirit (Joel 2:28-29).

Our texts today shows us that the Spirit of God is the answer to our desperation and loneliness. Knowing God is to be unified with Christ by the Holy Spirit. We will find in this passage that the Spirit of God is the answer to our deepest loneliness or fear of abandonment in three ways:

The Spirit’s Identity: God with Us Forever (14:15-17)

The Spirit’s Work: Communion with God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit (John 14:18-20)

Our Work in the Spirit: Joyful Obedience (John 14:21).

In the context of our passage, the disciples are experiencing a deep sense of desperation. This is not a happy scene. It is filled with dramatic irony. We notice that while the incarnate Son of God was right in front of the disciples, yet because they did not know the Spirit, they felt sure they were about to be “orphaned” (John 14:18). Though Jesus was there, sorrow had filled their hearts (John 16:6), rather than joy (John 14:27-28). Though the Prince of Peace sat before them, they were troubled and afraid (John 14:27). Despite the signs and miracles, the excitement around the Messiah, the bread, and the fish for the 5,000, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, the servant-hearted foot washing, and all the teachings of Jesus, these men were still crushed by sorrow. And, they were about to abandon Jesus.

Jesus says plainly that is doesn’t have to be this way. He says, “If you loved me, you would have rejoiced because I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). But, because they are not yet illuminated by the Spirit, they misunderstand and misinterpret their experiences with Jesus[3] They miss Jesus. They can’t rejoice. All they can experience is loss and grief.

Jesus,[4] on the other hand, shows us what it looks like to approach tragedy and loss in the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus does not become detached or mechanical to deal with his suffering. No, he senses his sufferings in total, full-souled absorption. He can still feel joy. He says, “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour.” (John 12:27). We find that Jesus was grieved because it was the time for grief. His hour had come. His purpose was about to be fulfilled. The time for his departure was at hand. Indeed, Jesus was “…a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). But, not without cause. He had a cup to drink, an hour to pass through, and he would drink the cup of God’s wrath down to the dregs. But, his sorrow was purposeful. Meaningful. He came to be a man of sorrows.

We underestimate that God felt grief. But that his joy went deeper than his grief. Just before Judas departs into the night in this scene, John writes, “After saying these things, Jesus was troubled in his spirit” (John 13:21). Jesus is feeling the tremors of his trail to Golgotha. He does not soften his suffering with any anesthetics. He takes it in with his eyes wide open. He feels grief and loss. But, he does so in the power of the Spirit. Every step of the way, he is being Helped along by the Spirit of God. So, even in the midst of this great trial, he draws near to God rather than running from him. His grief deepens trust. This is in starch contrast to the disciples.

In the confusion, Peter asks:

“Lord, where are you going?” (John 13:36). This is the question that plagues all of us when we are perplexed by God’s activity in our lives or in the world. “Where are you, God?” It’s a good question. It needs to be asked.

The answer that thunders through this passage is found in verse 17: “…I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth…” (John 14:17). In other words, Jesus says, “…it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7).

The answer to the question: “God, where are you?” for the Christian is, “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). This is the work of the Holy Spirit.[5]

So, at this great moment of tension Jesus says, Knowing God is to be unified with Christ by the Holy Spirit. He teaches this by showing,

The Spirit’s Identity: God with Us Forever (14:15-17)

The Spirit’s Work: Communion with God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit (John 14:18-20)

Our Work in the Spirit: Joyful Obedience (John 14:21).

First, the Holy Spirit is God with us forever. John writes,

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.

There are many advantages to being a reader of this text, rather than being present for Jesus’ words here.[6] We stand 2,000 years removed from Jesus’ death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost. We experience now the benefits being described then.

How would the disciples have heard these words?

First, the disciples’ love for Jesus was being tested.  

15 “If you love me, you will keep my commandments…

This is a tragic question for relationships. Do you love me? Jesus had just demonstrated what real love looks like. He had taken off his outer garments and washed the disciples’ feet (John 13:1-20). And, after resuming his place at the table, he says: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (John 13:34-35). This “if” is hanging over the last supper like a cloud.

He has just said that someone will betray him, and no one understands who it is (John 13:28-29). They are all questioning in their hearts whether they love the Lord. John is leaning back against Jesus to ask, “Am I going to betray you?” Is it me, Lord? Because they don’t understand the nature of their own hearts, they cannot see that each of them is going to betray Jesus in one way or another. Judas turns Jesus over to be crucified. Peter denies he knows Jesus. Mark 14:50 says, “They all left him and fled.”

Application: place yourself at that table with the disciples. If Jesus were to ask you face to face, “Do you love me?” What would you say? Let this question penetrate your soul. “Do you love me?” Jesus asks this very question to Peter at the end of the Gospel. “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” (John 21:17). It takes Jesus asking this question just three times for Peter to be spiritually distressed. In 2022, this is the question that Jesus has for Faith Community Bible Church. “Do you love me?” If you do, you will naturally keep Jesus’ commands.

Second, after the test of love, comes the promise of love.  

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.

Jesus says that obeying him out of love is not a lonely enterprise. In fact, love for Christ entails the benefits of Christ. Notice how Christian obedience is being helped from all sides.

First, the Spirit is another Helper. Jesus says, you already have me. I am infinitely lovable, glorious, beautiful, true, and good. I called you to be my disciples. I drew you to myself. I taught you. I trained you. I saved you. I helped you. And guess what, when I leave, I am going to ask the Father for a second Helper. The Christian is being helped from all sides. Jesus is asking. The Father is giving. The Spirit is coming. Jesus says, this is not a foreign deity. You have been watching Him work through me this whole time. He’s right in front of you. And, he’ll be in you.

Second, the Spirit is with you forever. This, Jesus says, is in contrast to his departure. While Jesus goes to the cross, is raised from the dead, and ultimately, is seated at the right hand of God, the Spirit comes from the throne to be with the Christian forever. He will never leave. He will always be present. So, the Christian can rest totally secure.

Third, the Spirit is a unique gift for the believer, not for the world. Jesus makes it clear that the Holy Spirit cannot be received by the world. The world is bound in materialism and does not believe in what it cannot see or know through the faculties of the fallen mind. So, Jesus instructs Nicodemus: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6-7). An important thing to mention here is that the Spirit is Truth. Truth is not an abstract concept, but it’s a Person. Truth is always Personal.[7]

Application: Practically then, the Christian who is filled with the Holy Spirit is one who is Helped, eternally resting in God’s work, and set apart from the world. Spend some time today:

Ask what Jesus asks. That Jesus sends a Helper implies that we be people who ask for God’s help. He has won for us the Helper, and it makes sense that we would be reliant on the Spirit for such Help.

Get to Know the Spirit. Read the Bible, God’s Spirit-inspired Word. Read other books by people who know the Spirit. Engage in conversation with people here at Faith about the Spirit.

Receive the Spirit. If you are not a believer, realize that Jesus gives you the most attractive of invitations. He comes in the flesh. He washes your feet. He draws near to you in creation and in revelation. Right now, through the preaching of God’s Word, he is pressing in on you, drawing you, loving you, asking you to open the door of your heart so that he might come in. Receive him!

If this is the promise of the Holy Spirit, when will this promise be fulfilled? That leads us to our next point:

Son and Holy Spirit. Knowing God and being unified with Christ is like being invited to a party. Not like being left alone at an orphanage. The tri-personal God invites you to be “in Him.” John writes,

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.

Through this text Jesus promises at least two things for us:

First, Jesus is coming. He says, “I will come to you….you will see me…you will live…you will know.” Here I think, the primary reference to Jesus’ coming is his resurrection from the dead. In just a few hours, Jesus is going to be betrayed, crucified, and laid in a tomb, but he promises a day where he will be seen and known. This coming will unlock for the disciples to complete truthfulness of all of Jesus’ claims, person, and purposes.

Second, the Father, the Son, (and the Spirit) are all present in this coming. He closes this verse by saying that “In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (John 14:20). This becomes a dominant theme in the New Testament. Paul uses “in Christ” over 160 times in his letters.[8] To be in Christ means to have access to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It means to be unified with Christ. Illustration: If I invite the Wolin’s over for dinner, I don’t just expect that Jason will come to my house for dinner. The more probable expectation is for Jason and Lisa to darken our door. But, really, I should expect at least 7 persons at my dinner table (they could also invite extended family). In the same way, when you trust Christ, you should be expecting your heart to be crowded with God the Father, Son, and Spirit. And, you should expect to be known by the Father, Son, and Spirit. Kevin Vanhoozer writes, “Without the doctrine of the Trinity, it’s goodnight, Christianity.”[9]

“To not be orphaned” doesn’t mean that you will just have a general sense that God loves you, but that objectively God is your Father, Jesus is your brother, the Holy Spirit is your Helper. This comes with legal, spiritual, emotional, and even physical benefits.

 

So, as we close, how does this relate to our Christian obedience? That leads to our final point.

Third, our work is a joyful obedience. John writes,

 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.”

 

First, Jesus reaffirms what he had just said. Keeping commandments is the test of love. But, again, he deepens the motivation of obedience by the final sentence.

Second, Jesus promises more depth.

He says, “And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” Jesus has already clarified that this is not talking about salvation by grace through faith. God does not love you because you obey. But, it certainly pleases God that you obey. In other words, there are hidden gems of the greatness and goodness of God that can only be found through acts of loving obedience. Kevin Vanhoozer writes, “Christian freedom is the capacity to realize what one is in Christ…”[10]

Andy Crouch, in his book, Strong and Weak a flourishing relationship with God involves both a high degree of authority (‘obedience to commands’) and a high degree of vulnerability (‘I will manifest myself to him’).[11] God is calling you as an individual and us as a Church both to a high degree of obedience, and he promises us a high degree of self-disclosure. This is the foundation of our church’s unity as well. We must become a church who is willing both to mutually submit to one another out of love for Christ, and to open up to one another out of trust in Christ, just ask Christ did for us.

 

[1] Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ, 122.

[2] Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel, 12.

[3] Edit: In a therapeutic age, we would like to think that God works primarily in comforting us, satisfying us, or saving us from our griefs, but the Gospels picture Jesus driving us straight into the eye of the hurricane of our sorrows and loss. If God alone will satisfy us, we must have a hunger for God alone. This entails the loss of all other lesser things. It entails that we must be born again, with new desires, a new heart, and entirely new framework for understanding the world. Jesus is not afraid to take us into his own sorrows. One commentator writes, that the sadness that pervades this passage was for the disciples “…an index of their self-centeredness.”[3] They were mainly sad because they were losing their idea of who God is, not because they were losing God himself.

Edit: So, the question for us this morning is: do we love God? Do we love God for God alone? Are we, as we say around here, satisfied in Jesus, alone? Or, are we quite satisfied with our idea of Jesus? Can we tell the difference? What we see in this passage is Jesus exposing self-directed, faulty griefs based on a lack of understanding.

[5] The answer to our loneliness, or abandonment, or weak faith, in other words, is that Jesus was truly abandoned by God at the cross. Because he faced this abandonment for us, he not only enters all of our grief with complete understanding, but he can promise and secure that we will never be left alone or abandoned by God.

[6] EDIT: First, we know about Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection as we read this. At the time, there was still confusion around what Jesus meant by his “hour,” the crucifixion, and the resurrection. It is not until John 20:8-9 that John writes, “Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the Scripture that he must rise from the dead.” As we sit safely drinking our coffee and looking on, the disciples were in the throes of grief, confusion, and despair. They were about to lose their best friend. This word is spoken into a room full of hot tears, anger, sorrow, and lament.

Second, we know and experience the Holy Spirit after Pentecost. The disciples had not yet experienced the manifest presence of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost in Acts 2:1-4 . The book of Acts records 40 days of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances. Then, after Christ’s ascension, this text was fulfilled as the Holy Spirit was poured out at Pentecost in a unique way. We live 2,000 years after that! We have been watching all throughout Church history as the Holy Spirit has been working through the centuries through the word of God to bring about the purposes of God. This word was first spoken before the Church was birthed!

Third, we have the whole New Testament! The New Testament had not yet been written as this text is unfolding. So, any dramatic irony that we see in this text comes from our privileged position as readers. We often laugh and joke about the disciple’s condition or confusion because we forget that we are watching from 2,000 years away, from the safety of full canon of Scripture.

So, let’s step into this scene for a moment. Let’s get close enough to feel the tension in the room.

[7] Rankin Wilbourne points this out in Union with Christ, 280.

[8] Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ, 13.

[9] Kevin Vanhoozer, Hearers and Doers, 191.

[10] Kevin Vanhoozer, Hearers and Doers, 49.

[11] https://thewell.intervarsity.org/arts-books-media/strong-and-weak-what-does-it-mean-flourish accessed Jan. 1, 2021.

https://www.listennotes.com/e/5aa3297b75c947699acd0daa4955723e/