THE PERSON OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
TEXT: John 14: 15-24
Sunday, May 19, 2002
Today being Pentecost, we are going to begin a series on the Holy Spirit. In preparation for today I was reading a book by Dennis Bennett, a wonderful writer, called The Holy Spirit and You. In the first chapter he tells a story about a couple who visits their neighbor. The neighbor is a Christian, but they didn’t know that. They are leaving town, the house is being sold at a sheriff sale, and they lost their car. The wife wanted to say good-bye to her neighbor whom she hardly knew. In the process, she poured her heart out about their losses, their plan to get a divorce, and the issue of alcoholism. The couple had tried everything including psychiatry, long-term counseling and A.A., but nothing seemed to work. The wife’s attitude was one of total hopelessness and despair. The neighbor said, “Don’t you know that there is an answer?” The wife asked, “What do you mean?” The neighbor asked if she had ever given her heart to Jesus Christ, and the lady looked very puzzled. She said, “We’ve tried religion. We tried to be good and we didn’t do a very good job at it.” The neighbor said, “I’m not talking about religion. I’m talking about a personal relationship with God.” The wife decided to try it and gave her heart to Christ. Two days later the husband visited the neighbor and asked what had happened to his wife. The neighbor shared the gospel with him, and instantaneously he was delivered from his alcoholism.
The alcoholism was just symptomatic of a life that was empty and without God. How do you explain a missionary going to a foreign country and spontaneously having a language that enables him to preach the gospel to that culture that he did not learn. How do you explain spontaneous acts of healing? This happens with regularity and I experienced one myself. How do you explain that in the context of worship, something you have been thinking about or arguing about on the way to church is the very thing that is spoken about in the service? How do you explain a sudden financial gift out of nowhere that met a particular need? How do you explain overwhelming peace when everything is falling apart around you, or overwhelming comfort in the midst of death? How do you explain a person who had no desire for God in his life to suddenly be transformed and then can’t get enough of God?
The answer is the work of the Holy Spirit in people’s lives. Whether you know it or not, we live in the age of the Holy Spirit. In past times, God worked primarily through God the Father, then there was a shift in which God used Jesus Christ the Son to work salvation in the world. Jesus then left the Holy Spirit behind for us to learn from. We live in the period of time in which the primary agency of God working in people’s lives is the Holy Spirit as well as His word.
What is the Holy Spirit, what has he come to do, and what will I experience? Do I have to be weird and speak in gibberish or enroll in Glossolalia 101 courses? What does God want to do with me and should I be fearful of it? Is it just the Pentecostals who have the Holy Spirit, or do Presbyterians have it too?
We are going to answer all these questions. We will begin with the question of who is the Holy Spirit. We will look at John 14: 15-18, 23, 25 and 26. One rule of thumb is if you want to learn about a certain subject in the Bible, go to where it is treated systematically. For instance, if you want to learn about love, go to I Corinthians 13. If you want to learn about salvation, go to Romans. If you want to learn about faith, go to Hebrews 11. If you want to learn about the resurrection, read I Corinthians 15. If you want to learn about the Holy Spirit, read John 14 because it is treated systematically and in-depth. Then you let all other scriptures fill in the blanks or fill in the picture from there.
The second rule of thumb is that you go to those who know the Holy Spirit. Who in the body of Christ knows the Holy Spirit? The Pentecostals and the Charismatics know the Holy Spirit. They may have other things wrong, and I believe they do. There are weaknesses in every denomination, but if you want to learn about the Holy Spirit, I encourage you to read writers who come from either the Pentecostal church or the charismatic movement. I tend to like those who are aligned with a major denomination and who have had this charismatic experience but who are also rooted and grounded in good theology. That’s important. Good theology is important because if you don’t have a good theology, you will have a bad theology, and a bad theology can be very destructive to you. Just ask the guy who put the bombs in all the mailboxes. He did it because of religious reason. Some very bad theology helped him become destructive.
The writers I like are Father Francis McNutt from the Roman Catholic church, Dennis Bennett from the Episcopalian church, Lloyd Ogilvie from the Presbyterian church, James Buskert from the Methodist church, and Siegfried Schatzmann who has since been thrown out of the Baptist church. If a pastor or a scholar gets the Holy Spirit in the Baptist church, they get kicked out. I don’t know why that is, but they do. It is unfortunate because the Holy Spirit operating in a person’s life is nothing to worry about.
We are going to talk about what the Holy Spirit is planning to do in our lives. First, let’s read the text for today:
TEXT
Who is the Holy Spirit? Quite simply, the Holy Spirit is the third person of the trinity. Verse 23 states: “My father will love him, and we (Jesus and the Father) will come to him and make our home with him.” So God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are three in one. If you look at the birth of Jesus, the baptism of Jesus, the transfiguration of Jesus, the cross of Jesus and the commission of Jesus in Matthew 28:20. Jesus instructs people to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. I don’t want to get lost in the trinity this morning, but the point is that the Holy Spirit is God, simply stated. In this passage, he is referred to as “another counselor.” The word is paraclete which means “one called alongside to help.” It is featured in Isaiah 9:6: “Unto you a child is born, unto you a son is given, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor...” Wonderful counselor means the prediction of a coming king who will carry out God’s purposes and programs in the world, and that’s exactly what Jesus did. He came and carried out God’s purposes and programs on the earth. This was to save everyone and open up a way so that everyone could have a personal, intimate relationship with God.
Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would come to them and do the same things that he did. He said it would be another king who would carry out God’s purposes and programs. He will continue the work that I started and will work not only through you, but will also be in you, which is a fundamental shift. Never had the Holy Spirit been in someone, simply upon someone. Now the Holy Spirit is given to someone. Jesus says in verse 18: “I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you.” What a relief it must have been for them to realize that although they would be separated from Jesus for a time, he would come back to them. They were not to be alone.
The simplest way to define the Holy Spirit is to simply say that the Holy Spirit is Jesus and God the Father in an unlimited spiritual form. No longer is God limited in time, space, dimension, person, location or history. He can be everywhere, in every person’s heart, in every time and culture and age. He can speak God’s word to every individual human heart and spirit and soul.
If you want more proofs about whether the Holy Spirit is God, all you have to do is look at the names of the Holy Spirit. He is referred to as the spirit of Christ, the spirit of Jesus, the spirit of God, the spirit of the Lord, the spirit of the Father. All the attributes of God are also descriptive of the Holy Spirit as well. There is absolute unanimity, absolute unity in God. When we talk about the Holy Spirit, God the Father and Jesus the Son we are not talking about three gods. We are not talking about one god with three functions or masks or faces. We are not talking about one god with lesser gods behind. We are talking about God in three persons, blessed trinity.
That’s the academia. Now, what does it mean? We just had a great Bible study, but what does it mean to me? It means a lot of things. First, it means that we are not alone. Despite what your circumstances may be, despite what you may feel at times, despite the momentary struggles you experience as a Christian, we are never alone. God’s promise is that he will not leave us as orphans. He has not left us without a parent or someone to oversee us or watch over us. Sometimes we can pray as though God is not here. We hear prayers like, “Oh, God. Where are you? Come down. We need you. We need revival. We need change. We need you to do something in our time and age.” I think God scratches his head because for the last 2,000 years he has been here, and he has always been here. I think it is our eyes that are unable to see.
He gives us promises from Matthew 28:20: “I will never leave you or forsake you.” “I am with you always to the end of the age.” Some people might say they don’t “feel” God sometimes or they don’t “feel” close to him. Why is that? Well, we are made of body, soul and spirit. There is the physical nature, there is the soul which is made up of the mind, the will and the emotions, and there is the spiritual component. God has created the capacity in every human being to know him in a personal way like I would know my mother or you would know your son or daughter. It is a different type of knowledge, but a very real knowledge.
In coming to us, the Holy Spirit resides in the spirit. He does not reside in the soul, the will or the emotions. He wants to act upon and reform our mind, will and emotions, but he does not reside in our will and emotions.
How do I experience God? By living in your spirit. Galatians 5: 16: “Live in the spirit, be led by the spirit, be filled with the spirit.” The average person lives in their natural self. The person without God lives according to their libido, their body and their soul, their mind, will and emotions. As human beings, we try to wiggle our ways out of problems or to accomplish things by sheer will. That’s not how we experience God as Christians. We experience God by being about the things of God, by living and tapping into the spirit of God.
How do we tap into the spirit of God in our lives? By being active in our worship and worshiping the way God wants us to worship, by praying the way God wants us to pray, by reading our Bible and studying it the way God wants us to read and study it, by serving him the way God wants us to serve him, and by fellow shipping in such a way that is pleasing to God. When we do these things, we live in the spirit and are led by the spirit and we then experience God.
I think a lot of times we spend too much time in our mind, will and emotions and not enough time in our spiritual lives. As a result, we don’t experience God. Are you spending time with God and doing the things of God?
We are spiritual people and have a spiritual nature. We live in a spiritual world and we need to recognize it. I grew up in an age and time that people smirked at you if you talked about these things. They thought you were an absolute idiot. Everyone knew that the only things that were real were what you could taste, touch and see. Everything else that you couldn’t explain such as weird phenomena, ghosts, goblins or coincidences could be explained by psychological reasons or material cause and effect. As a result, we have tried as a culture to deal with all our problems in body and soul methods. It worked for a little while, but as we become cut off from God things began to appear in our culture. We see them in our newspapers and our schools. Monsters grew up among us–people like Ted Bundy, people with doctorate degrees from Harvard who did unspeakable evil. We can’t believe the things that people are doing in our culture today. Christian people are doing things that we never thought they could do. Even the church got caught up in the taste, touch and see world. Some churches began to emphasize just the rational and the social and service-oriented type of things because we were embarrassed by spiritual things and we forgot to feed the spirit of an individual. As a result, a lot of churches simply became club-like places. Being a Christian came to be seen as someone who followed a philosophy or a set of rules or abstract principles of love and justice. Being a Christian became more about right thinking instead of right living. People began to see joining a church much like joining any other organization. You didn’t have to repent and change your life and begin to remold your thinking along God’s lines. It was simply someplace you joined because there were people there like you and who thought like you. When the church no longer believed the way you did, you simply left the church. As a result, many churches have become spiritually dead and they do not feed people’s lives. They have simply become places of social service and do-goodism.
I think a shift has occurred lately and you see this in movies like ‘Star Wars” and “Contact” where we are awakening to the spiritual side of life. Everyone here needs to know that you have a spiritual aspect to your life. You are born with a capacity to know God and to have a relationship with him. A long time ago that capacity was shut off like electricity leaving your home. It was shut off in our world and Jesus came to repair the damage that was done. If you neighbor was working across the road and hit a power cable and shut off all the power on the whole block, that’s really what happened with Adam and Eve and the fall in Genesis 3. Jesus came to repair those lines and hook up the power and be God’s cable repairman, you might say. As a result of the work of the cross, the spiritual capacity in all of us has been enlivened again. There is a new power that is flowing in the world that has brought our spirit alive again.
How come everyone doesn’t experience God, you ask? Well, because there is still one thing left to do–you have to flip the switch. The power is there in every life, but you have to flip the switch. Flipping the switch is having faith in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. Have you flipped that switch? If you have, you will receive the Holy Spirit, God’s divine presence, in your life.
Remember the couple I spoke of at the beginning of my sermon? The availability of God’s spirit was there, but they had to flip the switch. When they did, they discovered power that enabled them to become new people. That’s the hope that we have in Christ. There is power to enable us to become new people if we simply submit our lives to him. The wonderful thing is that Jesus didn’t simply return us to the Garden of Eden, because that wouldn’t have been helpful. How long do you think it would have taken us to fall again? The good news is that God put his spirit within us. We have heard of “eternal security.” I call this “internal security.” God’s presence and being within us to empower our lives. Have you experienced this in your life?
One question that is constant in the Christian church is this: Is the giving of the Holy Spirit something that takes place one time at salvation, or is there another experience. The Wesleyans call it “The Second Blessing.” The Pentecostals call it “The baptism in the Holy Spirit.” I don’t know the answer because you find historically and currently Christians who have experienced the move of the Holy Spirit at salvation and also again during a sudden outflowing of God. You see the same thing in scripture. If you read Acts 2 and Acts 10: 44-46 and Acts 19: 4-6. The common experience is that the Holy Spirit comes at one time and they receive salvation, the Holy Spirit and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. In Acts 8: 14-17, we find that there are those who knew Jesus as Lord and Savior but had not received the Holy Spirit. They had received salvation but did not have a demonstration of the Holy Spirit in their lives. Paul then laid his hands on them and they received this demonstration.
What I do know is that if you put your faith in Jesus Christ, you have the Holy Spirit. Romans 8:9 “If anyone does not have the spirit of Christ, he does not belong to God.”
I like the imagery of John 7:38. Jesus said, “Of those who believe in me, out of him will flow rivers of living water.” To know the Holy Spirit and to have the Holy Spirit operating in our lives is like tapping into a wellspring. Where before-hand there was no water, all of a sudden there is water when you tap into a spring. A spring constantly bubbles and flows and is never-ending. I think that’s the flow of the Holy Spirit. If you never knew Christ before, he will suddenly burst into your life at salvation. Then there is a continual bubbling, and that’s what the Pentecostals are referring to as the move of the Holy Spirit. This can happen an unlimited number of times. I see salvation as the inflow of the Holy Spirit and Pentecost as the outflow of the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, my counsel is simply to seek God. If you want a deeper, richer relationship or a move of the Holy Spirit or the gifts of the Holy Spirit, seek God. Remember, they are gifts, not rewards. With every gift, I hope that God also gives the gift of humility, too. You cannot wrestle gifts from God. He has to give them of his own accord.
There should be no fear factor in the Christian life, because this is from God. You don’t fear God or Jesus, and you shouldn’t fear whatever the Holy Spirit wants to do in your life.
I have experienced both sides of this. I was converted in a church that was strong on salvation but was very weak in the Holy Spirit. In fact, they feared the whole charismatic thing and thought it was excessive emotionalism. Then I went to a university that was strong on pentecostalism and it freaked me out. I didn’t know what to make of it, but over time I learned that there are things that they know that we don’t know. That’s the body of Christ. Each of us has a chunk of the truth, but we don’t have all of it. We can learn from each other. If you want to learn about the Holy Spirit, learn from the Pentecostals and the Charismatics. They have an important lesson for us.
I will conclude with Ephesians 5:18: “Be filled with the Holy Spirit.” Paul reminds the believers to be filled with the Holy Spirit, and that’s my injunction to you: Be filled with the Holy Spirit.
Let’s pray.
