The Helper – John 14:15-26

As Peter said, today's reading will be from John fourteen, starting in verse fifteen.

If you love me, you will keep my commandments, and I will ask the Father, and he will give you another helper to be with you forever.

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.

You will I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you.

Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more, but you will see me, because I live, you also will live.

In that day you will know that I am in my father, and you in me, and I in you.

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.

Judas, not Iscariot, said to him, Lord, how is it you will manifest yourself to us and not to the world?

And Jesus answered him, If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my father will love him, and he will come to him and make our home with him.

Whoever does not love me does not keep my words.

And the word that you hear is not mine, but the Father's who has sent me.

These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you, but the helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father has sent, who 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.

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.

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.

And now I have told you before it takes place, so that when it does take place you may believe.

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.

And so reads God's word.

As I mentioned a few minutes ago, I was in uh I was in Dallas for about a week, and uh one of the things that's striking about Dallas, and indeed much of Texas, is uh how dry it is.

Uh Austin, I spent about 48 hours there.

It's kind of much leafier and hillier, but Dallas is flat and beige uh and couldn't be more different uh to being uh in Ireland.

Uh the ground is cracked and dry, and it feels as though everything is kind of gasping a little bit for a drink.

And then about three days in, the weather changed and a thunderstorm rolled in.

And I sat on the back porch with my host, and we watched the lightning fork across the sky, and sheets of rain like I had never seen, not even in Ireland, come washing over those desert plains.

There was like uh one of the Spotify playlists that you might listen to if you're struggling to sleep, the kind of distant rumbling of thunder and the uh the gentle and then tremendous uh spattle of rainwater on the ground.

Then you wake up the next day and what's happened?

Well, it feels as though, in some sense, the landscape has been transformed.

The ground isn't cracked anymore.

Flowers that were struggling to bloom are now out.

The rainwater has brought life.

The human heart is thirsty, like that ground.

The human heart is cracked and dry, and it leaves a kind of restlessness in us because we're looking for a drink.

We look for drinks in all of the wrong places.

We look for it in intimacy and acceptance and money and sex and power and comfort and family and all of those things, trying to kind of satisfy something that's longing in our souls.

We're thirsty people, but the ground of our hearts is cracked.

The answer that Christianity gives to our thirsty souls is that God himself will come and will quench the deepest longings of our hearts.

And the way that he does that is by his Holy Spirit.

That is how God himself comes and meets the deepest yearnings and transforms, just as the landscape transforms and flowers bloom, so he comes and beautifies your life.

That's why we're taking these weeks to think about who the Holy Spirit is and what he does.

Because people, well, there's two major camps, isn't there?

There's there's people who see the Holy Spirit everywhere and in everything, and love all of the cool stuff that the Holy Spirit does, and then there's people like me, uh, who grew up a little bit kind of like, what's he?

What's he supposed to be doing?

That seems a little bit weird to me.

And so we kind of downplay him and maybe don't talk about him as much as we as we should.

What I want to plot over the next few weeks is a course through those two extremes, as it were, to show you the goodness of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit is essential to everything that God does.

He is the agent that brings creation to life, he is the one who speaks through the prophets and through the apostles and brings God's word to us.

It is by the Spirit that Jesus was conceived, it's the spirit that empowers his ministry.

It's the spirit who raised him from the dead.

It is the spirit and by his power that we are transformed.

It is by the spirit that we are born again, as we'll see next week when we look at John 3.

It is by the Spirit that we are joined to, united to Christ, made holy.

It is by the Spirit that we are assured of our salvation.

When we feel as though our faith is weak, he is the one who comes and who whispers comfort to us.

So to know the Spirit is to know the very heartbeat of God's actions in the world.

But the Spirit is not just a subject of theology, He is the source of our spiritual vitality.

He is the one who comforts us when we feel weak.

He's the one who convicts us when we drift into sin and foolishness.

He is the power that enables us to serve.

He is the joy when we worship.

He makes Christ real in our hearts and shapes us day by day, little by little, into his likeness.

He turns what we believe about God into lived experience, into love, courage, peace, hope.

And so my prayer as we begin this six-week series isn't just that we would inform our minds about what the Bible says about the Holy Spirit, but that in learning more things about him, our affections might be stirred for him, that we might feel differently about God and about his Holy Spirit as we walk with him.

That would happen for us individually and in our community groups and together as we gather, because a church that is alive to the spirit is not just a church that believes right things about God, it's a church that lives powerfully, prays expectantly, loves lavishly, and bears fruit that lasts.

Jesus, in the passage that Colin read, wants to reassure his disciples that he will be with them, that they will not be left as orphans, that there will be a permanent and more intimate way that they can know God than even having the Son of God with them, and that is through the gift of the Spirit.

And so our first point this morning is let me encourage you to trust the personal spirit.

Trust the personal spirit.

Let me pick it up in verse 18.

If you love me, I'm sorry, verse 15, if you love me, you will keep my commandments, and I will ask the Father, and he will give you another helper to be with you forever, even the spirit of truth, whom the word cannot receive, world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him.

You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.

I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you.

These verses, let me encourage you to have them in front of you if you don't.

Verses 15 to 18 of John chapter 14 help us to understand two questions.

John 14 · chapter mention

Who is the spirit and who's the spirit for?

Let's take them in reverse order.

Who's the spirit for?

Well, Jesus begins by, if you love me, and he says this a couple of times through the passage, if you love me, you will keep my commandments.

That sounds strangely conditional, doesn't it?

It sounds like, well, if you do good enough, then you know I might uh be so good as to send you the spirit.

It sounds a little bit like, well, if I just have enough faith, then I'll uh that's like putting my coin into the divine vending machine and then I'll get some of the some of the spirit.

Is that what Jesus is saying?

Well, no, that would be contrary to everything else that he has said and that we know about salvation.

We don't earn God's favor.

So what is Jesus emphasizing here when he's saying, if you love me, you will keep my commandments and I will give you the spirit?

Here it is.

Jesus is saying that the spirit comes to us in the context of a relationship with God, that in a love, faith-based, trusting relationship with God, Jesus gives us his Holy Spirit.

And he's saying, how do you know that you love Jesus?

Well, actually, if you listen to his words and follow them.

To love Jesus, to have faith in him, is to listen to what he said, to what he says, and to follow him, to trust him.

And it's in that relational context that he gifts us his Holy Spirit.

To love Jesus is to follow him and to receive the help of his Holy Spirit.

And who is this Holy Spirit?

Well, he describes the Holy Spirit in verse 16, and this picks up uh our uh our sermon series title.

Jesus describes him as another helper.

Now, both of those words are important.

Another, a helper, Jesus says, of the same kind.

So you ask, well, same as who?

Same as Jesus.

The Holy Spirit is like Jesus.

He is of the same kind as Jesus, of the same essence, otherwise known as He Himself, is also God.

That just as Jesus, the physical man, brought God's presence to the disciples for those years that he was with them, so he's saying the Holy Spirit in the same way brings God's presence to us.

That the Holy Spirit isn't, and this is something that we can fall into, the Holy Spirit is not the consolation price for those who were born after the first century.

You know, we weren't part of the 12 or the 72 or whatever.

And so we didn't get personal Jesus.

And so Jesus is like, well, I guess I'll give you the spirit then just as just to kind of keep you ticking over until you get to see me.

No, Jesus is saying, if you've got the spirit, you have as much of God's presence with you as when Jesus was with the disciples.

Do you see?

It's wonderful, isn't it?

That there's no there's no lack in us gathered here today, then Peter, James, and John and Thaddeus and Bartholomew, and don't make me name the rest of them, when they had Jesus sitting with them at table.

He's another helper, he's like Jesus.

That is why Jesus refers to him as he.

If we can make one little change in our discourse, let's give the Holy Spirit the personal pronoun.

He's not an it, he's a he.

And that's very important for our own kind of wiring, because if we refer to the Holy Spirit as an it, and it is something that we kind of control, and it is something that we kind of dominate that we dominate, but a he, that's a person.

We're relating to a person who is amongst us.

Not just the Holy Spirit is not the force in Star Wars.

What's more, Jesus says that not only is he like Jesus, but he is a helper.

Now, this word helper, it's the word paraclete, not parakeet, that would be a thing on a pirate's shoulder.

Uh, a paraclete is it means literally one who comes alongside, one who comes alongside to teach and to guide, but also to empower, also to comfort, also to pray for and advocate.

In essence, he is everything that Jesus did in his earthly ministry.

The spirit continues with us today.

So Jesus' language here, do you see, is intensely personal and reassuring.

The Spirit will continue with us forever, those things that Jesus did in his earthly ministry.

We will never be abandoned.

We're not orphans, he says.

Why?

Because we have the Spirit.

The Spirit is not just with us, but he's in us.

He's in us like those streams of living water quenching our thirsty hearts.

So in verse 18, Jesus says of the Spirit, I will come to you.

In the giving of the Spirit, Jesus is bringing his own personal care to you.

And so we trust, friends, brothers, sisters, we trust this personal, intimate spirit.

Acknowledge, therefore, his presence.

Acknowledge his presence amongst us.

Acknowledge his presence in you.

Ask him for help.

Ask him for his guidance.

Ask him for his comfort.

Ask him to help you see what areas of your life still need to come under the lordship of Jesus.

And act dependent upon that personal, empowering help.

Act dependent on his comfort.

Act dependent on his care.

Trust the personal spirit.

Secondly, enjoy, I use that word deliberately, enjoy the presence of the spirit.

Verse 19.

Yet a little while the world will see me no more, but you will see me because I live.

You also will live.

In that day, you will know that I am in my father, and you in me, and I in you.

Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me.

See that context of relationship again.

And he who loves me will be loved by my father, and I will love him and manifest, show myself to him.

Judas Nodascariot said, Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us and not the world?

Jesus said, If you love me, relationship, keep my word, the Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.

Jesus is going away.

In the context of John's gospel, where is Jesus going?

Well, John 14 is his discussion with his disciples on the night before his death.

It's just hours before his arrest.

He is going to the cross.

He is going to Calvary.

That is his going away.

And yet, we also know that three days later, by the Spirit of God, he will be raised again to newness of life.

That's what he means.

In a little while you won't see me.

I'm going away.

I'm going to the grave.

And then I will be raised again.

I'll come back to you.

And from there, the Son of God ascends to the Father's side.

And together the Father and the Son send the Spirit to all believers.

The presence of the Spirit with us comes, therefore, as a consequence of Christ's work of salvation.

It is only because he goes to the cross that he's able to gift us the Spirit, to gift us his eternal presence.

It is because of his death, resurrection, and ascension that he can say, because I live, you will live also.

How is that possible?

Well, the same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is the spirit that lives in you and brings your cracked dead heart back to life and mine.

And so we enjoy that resurrection life now, in a sense, because of the gift of the spirit.

And with that new life comes a new relationship with God, a new intimacy and communion with God Himself.

See the language Christ says that I'm in my Father.

My Father is in me.

That community of love and delight and joy-giving and glorying.

What does he say?

He says, By faith in me, if you love me, so if you're trusting me, I'm going to invite you into that love relationship.

Have you considered that?

If you're a believer in Jesus, have you considered that one of the things that happens by the power of the Holy Spirit is that you, believer, are invited into and caught up in the eternal relationship of love and joy and delight that God Himself, Father, Son, and Spirit, enjoy.

That that is where you are.

That is what you are invited into as a believer in Jesus.

When Jesus says that you know we will we will come and we will make our home in you, that's temple language, isn't it?

And they do that by the Holy Spirit.

The temple in the Old Testament was the house of God, the place where his presence was most intensely felt.

But now by the Spirit, each believer becomes the home of God forever.

And this is what answers humanity's deepest longings.

You see, ever since sin first entered the world, ever since we were cast out of the garden, we were Sent away from the presence of God.

We were sent away and we wandered.

For millennia, for generations, we wandered away from God, trying to make our own way back, searching for Him.

And we still today, as sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, we feel that restless wandering.

We feel that longing.

But do you see what God has done?

God hasn't just given us a road map to try and get our way back ourselves.

What he says is, I'm going to come and I'm going to make my home in ye.

He is going to bring his presence into your life rather than you simply making your way back into his presence.

The by the Holy Spirit, he comes and not just brings you home, he makes you his home.

So enjoy the presence of the Holy Spirit who has made his home in you.

This nearness.

It transforms our lives.

It transforms our following of Jesus.

It transforms our obedience because it's not based on a need to perform because we're trying to get back, but because we've already been empowered by his presence.

Following him becomes a delight and a desire for deeper communion rather than just a duty to perform towards a distant God.

And how do we do that?

Folks, it is in all of the simple and ordinary ways.

Somebody wants to describe the Christian life as long obedience in the same direction.

There's something very ordinary about the Christian life.

That as we observe it quietly and behind the scenes, as we confess our sin, as we join with brothers and sisters to pray for the needs of others, as we forgive those who have wronged us, as we seek to love the way that we have been loved, as we seek to do good to others in all of those small and ordinary ways.

The Spirit Himself restores something of the joy of our felt communion with God.

We can often just want mountaintop experiences.

Those experiences where we feel abandoned in worship, and they are glorious, aren't they?

Our God is good and he gives us those mountaintops.

But do you know what often comes after a mountaintop?

A valley.

And it is remembering that in those simple moments, those ordinary times, those quiet instances, that the Spirit is still fueling our obedience and giving us joy and delight in God.

We enjoy his presence as we gather together.

We mediate Christ to one another here.

That as you speak to one another after the service, you are Jesus' hands and feet by the power of the Spirit.

You are words of comfort and encouragement, words of soothing balm and help to the weak and weary.

We do it in our community groups.

As we worship, as we serve together, we recognize the quiet presence of the Spirit binding our hearts together.

And so enjoy the Spirit's presence and the intimacy that he brings.

But this is not where the story ends.

God simply doesn't just move in and make us comfortable.

He moves in in order to transform us and to direct us.

So the same spirit who makes Christ real now is the spirit who leads us deeper into Christ's truth.

And so our third and final point this morning is to follow the Spirit who guides us.

Trust the personal spirit, enjoy the presence of the Spirit, and then follow the Spirit who guides us.

Verse 24 to 26.

Whoever does not love me does not keep my words, and the word that you hear is not mine, but the Father who sent me.

These things I have spoken to you while I am with you, but the helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to remembrance all that I have said to you.

There's part of us that only sees the Holy Spirit and enjoys talking about the Holy Spirit in terms of the ecstatic, unusual, spooky things that he does.

And we will talk about that.

However, we do him and his work a disservice when we fail to appreciate his usual, day-by-day, normative work.

Jesus is teaching his disciples in John 14 and again in John 15 and again in John 16 that the Holy Spirit is a guide.

The Holy Spirit is a teacher.

Jesus begins in the verses that I read in verse 24 by talking about the importance of listening to and keeping his words.

Again, that's the context of relationship.

To listen to Jesus and to follow him is what Jesus means by loving him, having faith in him, trusting him.

He goes on to say that his words are not only his but his father's.

Jesus is not a rival to God the Father.

He is saying the same things.

He is making the words of his father known.

And now he's telling us that actually the Spirit is going to do that too.

So God the Father has given God the Son to say words on the earth.

What Peter called in John 6 the words of eternal life.

To hear them and to trust them is to believe in Jesus.

And so what's the Spirit's role?

The Spirit's role is to make those words alive in us.

We just sang about that, didn't we?

He doesn't replace what Jesus said.

He makes sure that we never forget it, that we never lose it, that we never move beyond it.

Jesus says the helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and remind you of what I have said to you.

In other words, the Spirit takes what Christ has said and he impresses it, he massages it into our hearts.

He brings it to remembrance.

For the disciples, those who became the apostles, that means that he is the inspiring agent of the New Testament.

The one who helped them to remember all that Jesus had taught them.

This is central to our belief on the inspiration reliability of the Bible, by the way.

Thomas, can you remember when we were having dinner that night?

No.

Jesus is anticipating this.

I will send you the Spirit and He will call to remembrance in a reliable, trustworthy way, all that I have spoken to you.

The Spirit is also a divine interpreter, not giving us new revelation, but deepening our grasp on the old, helping us to see what we once missed.

You've ever had that experience, you read in the Bible, you read a passage that you've read a hundred times, and you see something new.

I never made that connection to that other part of the Bible.

Or because of the experience that you're going through in that moment, what you end up reading takes on a new power, has a new resonance.

It offers a level of comfort that it didn't before.

How does that happen?

By the Holy Spirit.

See, Jesus words that the truth, the definite article.

Truth is not a subjective thing, well, I have my truth and you have your truth, and then everybody else has a truth.

Now the Spirit will guide you into the truth.

What truth is that?

Well, it's the truth about the Son of God.

It's the truth about who Jesus is.

He says, He will not speak on his own authority, he will glorify me.

He is like those great spotlights at the base of Cristo Redentor in uh uh in Rio de Janeiro, where that great Art Deco statue of Christ standing above Rio.

And the spotlights illuminating Jesus.

That's what the Holy Spirit does.

The Holy Spirit illuminates more of Christ.

So you climb up uh to the statue in Rio, and what you don't do is peer over and stare into the lights.

Burn your redness.

What you do is you look at the things that the lights are uplighting.

And Jesus is saying, that's what the Holy Spirit does.

The Holy Spirit illuminates more of me.

His ministry is to lead us into truth, not away from it, to lead us into more of Jesus, not less of him.

He doesn't shout over the scriptures, he whispers through them.

He is the faithful guide who points us always back to him, illuminating his beauty, clarifying his words, convicting us of sin, convincing us of his grace, and steering us towards more obedience of Jesus.

And so we ask ourselves, where does the speak where does the spirit speak to me?

How does the spirit speak to me?

Well, he speaks to us continually through the word that he inspired as he points us more to Christ.

Any revelation we experience, therefore, should be measured by what God has already said in his word.

I tell you what, all of our desire for the more miraculous things that the Spirit does, this is a miracle.

Because our hearts, by nature, don't want Jesus' words.

Our hearts by nature, our lives by nature, don't want Jesus to say certain things to us because it makes us feel uncomfortable.

We don't like the idea of Jesus' claim over our lives because you think, well, I'm my own master, am I not?

So do you want to know what a miracle is?

A miracle happens every day when a person says, I follow Jesus.

I want to know more of his words.

I want to learn from him.

I want him to guide me.

I want him to be Lord of every area of my life.

That's a miracle.

Because it takes the miraculous working of the Holy Spirit to turn your heart so that you say that, so that you long for that, so that becomes a driving part of your life and your decision making.

So praise the Spirit for His miraculous working to illuminate and guide our dark and often stubborn hearts.

So when you come to the Bible this week, ask, Spirit, illuminate.

Show me more of Jesus.

When discerning some decision and seeking advice or guidance, ask, Spirit, what will glorify Jesus?

What will align with his word?

The Spirit's guidance isn't mystical guesswork.

It's the living voice of Christ through his written word applied to us continually by his spirit.

Jesus said, I will not leave you as orphans.

And in saying that, he wasn't just comforting twelve anxious men, he was speaking to every believer.

He is with us now.

Trust the personal spirit, enjoy the presence of the spirit, and follow the guidance of the spirit.

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