John 16 (Part 1) :1-15 • When the Spirit of truth comes

--- John 16 (Part 1) :1-15 • When the Spirit of truth comes John Chapter 16. John 16 is where we are so turn there, please. We're going to read the first 15 verses of the chapter here and this is going to be our part 1, so follow along with me as I read. Jesus speaking here,

(ESV) Let's pray. Father, we thank you so much for giving us this time together to be in the Word. And we pray Lord God, that you would speak to us today, that you administer grace among us, that you would reveal your will, your heart, your purpose, your desire for us to know and understand these things that you have recorded for us in the scripture. We thank you, Lord, for preserving this Word for so many years, that we might have it today, to lay hold of it and to open our hearts to it. So, nourish us, we pray, feed us today, in the Word, we ask it in Jesus name, amen. Amen, amen. All right, you probably noticed as we read through these verses that Jesus is talking here predominantly about the coming of the Holy Spirit. We, we talked a little bit about this last week in our conclusion of chapter 15 and in these verses, He's going to speak to us about the purpose of the Holy Spirit coming, not just for believers but to convict also the world. So He's talking here in kind of these 2 sort of, purposes of the Holy Spirit coming. But the first statement that He makes in verse 1, at least as it's rendered in the ESV, I think requires some explanation. I want you to look with me at verse 1 again in your Bible because it's important, the wording is important here. He said,

Now that's an interesting way that the ESV renders that. Obviously, what Jesus is doing is He's reminding them, He's telling them, that they're going to suffer some pretty serious persecution, even death, because of the fact that they belong to Him. And He's telling them so that when those things begin to take place, they'll not be caught unaware, and that sort of thing. But I want you to notice again how the ESV renders it. They say,

Now that last part, "keep you from falling away," that sounds pretty, pretty serious. And in fact, it sounds like the ESV at least is saying that Jesus is telling them, lest you fall away from the faith, in other words, lest you fall into apostasy because of what begins to happen to you, I'm telling these things to you ahead of time. Well, the Greek word that is translated "fall away" here is pronounced "skandalizō." It's where we get our English word, scandal, but don't think of it from the English interpretation or definition. The Greek word literally means to cause to stumble, right? So essentially what Jesus is saying here is, I'm telling you these things, I'm warning you ahead of time that these things are going to happen, so that when they do happen, you don't stumble in your faith, all right. But as I said, the ESV renders this, so that you don't fall away and that is a little bit different from some of the other modern English translations. Many of them just use the word, stumble, which is probably better. But I wanted to explain a little bit about what the ESV is doing here, because it sounds again, like He's warning them against apostasy. So is that what Jesus is saying? I guess what we're kind of doing is we're asking yourself how correct is the ESV rendering of this particular verse and this particular word. Well, it could possibly get to that level, but not necessarily. This word skandalizō in the Greek is actually used elsewhere in the Bible to talk about a temporary falling away. Let me show you an example, recorded for us in the Book of Mark, really around these same events. But it says,

And when they had sung a hymn, (and that's after they had the last supper) they went out to the Mount of Olives. And Jesus said to them,

Now you know how the story goes. Peter promised, you know that he wasn't going to fall away that night, he did, and in fact, all of the disciples did. But I wouldn't really call it apostasy, I mean, they didn't fall away from their faith all together. In fact, I would probably call it more of a temporary failing of courage and they all just kind of freaked and ran off into the night and hid themselves so that they wouldn't be caught up in the same arrest, you know, that Jesus was experiencing. So, I guess the question that we're looking at here is, could the stumbling that Jesus is talking about possibly lead to falling away? In other words, is the ESV translation potentially correct? Well, yeah, potentially, I suppose it's possible someone could become so disillusioned with the persecution and difficulty that they're about to experience that they could be, they could forget the warnings that Jesus gave, you know, and be so discouraged that they abandon their faith. They fall away from the faith, but it doesn't necessarily mean that and that's what I think Jesus is really warning them about is just that surprise, that getting caught unaware, you know. He wanted them to know that persecution was just, this is part of what it means to be to follow me, okay, so I just want you guys to know that. I don't think any of the original apostles ever forgot the words of Jesus. I think that when persecution rose up in their lives, they remembered and they knew this is it, this is what Jesus told us was going to happen. What's interesting to me is that I find Christians today being caught unaware of persecution or any kind of opposition that they might get from the world. Whether it's a, you know, a worldly boss who hates them simply because they're a believer or any number of any other sorts of situations. And I've had Christians come to me and they're just they're incredulous and they're telling me about what's going on and what they've just experienced. They're like, Pastor Paul, what is this? I didn't sign up for this, I didn't, no one told me, this is…, why do people hate me so much? This is exactly what Jesus is warning His disciples about. Don't be surprised when this happens to you, don't look at yourself and go, what's going on? I'll tell you what's going on, we dealt with a lot of this last week. So He goes on in verse 2, you'll notice He says, in fact, He says,

You know, they were starting to threaten to kick people out of the synagogue even during Jesus's earthly ministry, you know, that was already going on and they did put people out of the synagogue and much worse. And He says, whoever kills you is going to think that they're doing God a favor. That was probably the apostle Paul before he became the apostle Paul. Before he came to Christ when he was Saul of Tarsus, you know that's what he did, right? He broke into people's homes, dragged them out before the magistrates. He tried to get them to renounce their faith, he got them arrested. He tried getting them thrown into prison, he tried anything to rid Israel of these followers of Jesus Christ, exactly what Jesus said was going to happen. And He said, even when they kill you, they're going to think, yeah, just did God a solid, you know. Do you know what's interesting? Paul actually in his letter to the Romans went on to talk about this way people think, let me show you

Isn’t that interesting verse? He's saying to you and me that it is possible to be very passionate about God and serving God, at least in your estimation of what it means to serve God and to completely miss His heart, intention, and will. It is possible for someone to feel like, I'm doing God's will and they are doing the opposite of God's will, so just know that ahead of time. He goes on

We talked about this last week in our completion of John 15. He says in

that's an interesting way of putting it, isn't it? He's telling us basically that those who are able to persecute believers have been given an opportunity, an hour in which to do it. When their hour comes to persecute the church of Jesus, He says, I want you to remember that I told you these things were going to happen, don't want you to be caught unaware. Don't want you to think something crazy is happening, I want you to remember, I warned you. Now, in the rest of the verses that we're really looking at here this morning. Jesus is going to go on and talk about more about the Holy Spirit and the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers and also the work of the Holy Spirit in the world, all right. He says in

I want you to stop there for a moment. We discussed last week this whole idea of what the Helper, the name, the Helper means that Jesus uses to refer to the coming Holy Spirit. And He's talking about the coming of the Holy Spirit after His death and resurrection. You guys remember the Holy Spirit kind of came in 2 phases, you remember that? At the end of the Book of John, Jesus will appear to the disciples who are locked in a room for fear of being arrested. He'll suddenly be among them and He will then say to them, receive the Holy Spirit while He breathes on them, and that's the coming of the Holy Spirit for them to be born again. They will receive the Spirit, the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit at that time. But then you're going to, you know, it's going to be days later when they are meeting in Jerusalem and the Spirit falls upon them, which is recorded for us in

The Spirit comes in that we might be born again, the Spirit comes upon that we might be empowered to serve the Lord, to do the work of the Lord, and so forth. But He's talking here about the coming of the Holy Spirit, but I want you to notice, couple of interesting points. First of all, did you notice who it is who sends the Holy Spirit? Jesus said, it's really for your benefit that I go away, because when I do, I will send the Holy Spirit. Who sends the Holy Spirit? Jesus, Jesus sends the Holy Spirit. Why is that important to know? Well, because that's something only God can do. I can't send the Holy Spirit, neither can you, Jesus can, because He is God. The second thing I want you to take note of is some of what the Holy Spirit is going to come to do.

Did you catch that? Now, to properly understand what Jesus is saying here, we have to really focus on this word "convict" because we Christians use the word convict differently than what Jesus means it here. When we talk about the conviction or the convicting work of the Holy Spirit, we're talking about that work of the Spirit in our lives where He gently chides us about areas of sin in our lives that we need to resolve and bring to Him, bring to the cross and get right so that we can get on the right path again. And we call this the conviction of the Holy Spirit. And people will even say as believers, well, last week you know, I said something really kind of mean to somebody at work and the Holy Spirit just convicted me the whole afternoon, and I finally had to go to that person at the end of the day and just apologize. That's a very common sort of a way we refer to, the convicting work of the Holy Spirit. So it's that gentle chiding where the Holy Spirit says, hey, child, son, daughter, whatever, that wasn't that very good, you need to get that right, okay? That's not what Jesus is saying here. When He says the Spirit will come to convict the world, He's using the word convicted more of a judicial sense where we're talking about a judge or a jury convicting someone of a crime, literally declaring their guilt. And this is what He says the Holy Spirit will come to do to the world. And you'll notice that He says that this will happen in essentially 3 ways, these 3 ways that the world will, if you will, kind of be found guilty. And first in

So the world, it will be found guilty of not believing in Jesus, which is essentially unbelief. And unbelief is at its root, the outright rejection of God and purpose and especially the person of Jesus Christ. He says the Spirit is going to come to bring conviction, to convict the world of guilt about the fact that they have just not believed in me, in me. Why doesn't He say just, they haven't believed in God in general? Well, have you ever noticed when you're talking to people, and I'm talking about unbelievers mostly, there's a good number of people in this world who are very comfortable talking about God in a very general sort of a sense and they like to use general terms, you know, like, yeah, well, you know, the big guy upstairs or something stupid like that. And it's all very impersonal and superficial, but you know, they don't mind, they don't mind because we're talking about God and who really knows what God's all about. And God's just kind of this big ethereal, you know, sort of, you know, something in the somewhere we're not really sure. And so sure, we'll talk about God. You start bringing it down to the person of Jesus and then we start having problems. Now suddenly people are going to get offended. Because we can talk about God, and we can talk about all of the general things that relate to God. You start talking about Jesus, now you're going to have to deal with the cross, what He did at the cross, how you've responded to what He did at the cross. We're talking about whether or not you've received what He did at the cross. We're talking about whether you're actually saved because you've understood and received what He did at the cross and it just changes the whole complexion of the conversation, you see? So, Jesus says, when the Holy Spirit comes, and He begins to convict the world of guilt, the first thing He convicts them of is the sin of unbelief about me. Because they have simply chosen to ignore me and what I did on the cross on their behalf. They will not recognize their sin and they will not recognize that I am the Savior of mankind if they would but turn to me, right? So that's the first thing that that Jesus says the Holy Spirit will find the world guilty about, right? Unbelief. He also comes to convict the world concerning righteousness, you'll notice. In

What does He mean when He says, because I go to the Father? What He's basically saying is, because I'm not going to stay in the tomb. The Holy Spirit is going to convict the world of righteousness, because you see, they called me all kinds of names. They said that I was a blasphemer, they said that I was a drunkard, they said that I was a liar and a madman. They wouldn't believe who I said I was, and they're going to kill me for it, but because I go to the Father and because that tomb that I get laid in is going to be empty, and they're all going to know that it was empty, the Holy Spirit's going to come and convict them of the guilt of the fact that I am the righteous one. They called me all those names, but I am actually the righteous one and the Holy Spirit is going to convict them of their guilt related to who I am and how the Father exonerated me by raising me from the dead. Do you understand that the resurrection is not just one of the most incredible? In fact, I'll even say maybe the most incredible event that you and I can look to as believers that speaks to us about the glorious work that Jesus did on the cross and how it was accepted before the Father. But that resurrection is also the exoneration of Jesus Christ for all that He was accused of. For all the things that people pointed the finger at Him and claimed that He falsely did or was or whatever. His resurrection was the work of God to overturn those ridiculous accusations and make a declaration that Jesus is who He said He was and who the scriptures foretold the Messiah would be, in fact. God absolved the Son by raising Him from the dead, it was the declaration of innocence. Finally, in

By the way, the ruler of this world is Satan, temporarily, temporarily. But the cross of Christ was the means by which God condemned and judged the ruler of this world, He passed sentence on Satan and condemned Him. Paul wrote about this in

And having, (He says) disarmed the powers and authorities (He's talking about the spiritual powers and authorities here) he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. And the Holy Spirit declares guilty the world of ignoring the judgment that took place when Jesus conquered Satan on the cross but there's more to it than that. The fact that there was a judgment of the prince of this world is a reminder to everyone that God will judge the world at large, and mankind rejects that too. And so, the Holy Spirit comes to convict them guilty of ignoring judgment, the fact that God will hold accountable those who are outside of Christ. Now, you know, you hear these things, you hear about the Holy Spirit's going to come and He's going to do this, you know. He's bringing this guilty verdict, you know, to the world related to these things but the question comes up naturally in our minds. Well, having been found guilty, can anyone still repent of the conviction of guilt that the Holy Spirit sentences them with? Yeah, absolutely. Many of us in this room did, in fact, I hope most of us in this room did. We were under condemnation, we were born under condemnation because of sin and yet, when we came to Jesus Christ, when we confessed our sin, and turned away from it. And we turned to the Savior and said, save me, Lord, there's no other way for me to be saved other than just to come to you and to believe what you did on the cross was for me. We passed from condemnation to acceptance and exoneration, we were acquitted at that point. So, yes, people can be under that condemnation and still come out from under it and receive forgiveness of sins. As John the apostle wrote in his letter later on from

All we have to do is get to that point and every one of us as believers, we had to do this. We had to come to a place where we had to say, I'm a sinner, I confess it, I'm a sinner, there's no getting around it. I admit it, God, I admit it and I ask you to forgive me. Boom!, it's done. Who in the world wouldn't do that? Who wouldn't opt for that? It's just pride that would keep somebody back. I'm not going to confess any sin to anybody, I'm not a sinner, I'm no worse than anybody. Maybe no better, but I'm no worse. Yeah, well, you know what your problem is? You're comparing yourself with other people. God doesn't do that, He doesn't grade on the human curve. When He looks at your sin, He compares it to His righteousness. Now, how do you think you measure up? I say that with a smile because Sue tells me, when you say those things, you need to smile. She literally does, so I mean, you know, it's like, you're a sinner and you're going to hell, you know. But come to Jesus and He'll save you, confess your sin, amen? Right? In

We're going to end with this, but He lists 5 things here that Jesus tells us that the Spirit is going to do. Up on the screen, for you note takers, you know who you are. Yeah, here we go, When the Spirit comes, He will:  Guide believers into all truth  Not speak of His own authority  Speak whatever He hears  Declare to you the things that are to come  Glorify Jesus by declaring what belongs to Him When the Spirit comes, He will guide believers into all truth. He will not speak on his own authority, He will speak whatever He hears, He will declare to you the things that are to come and He will glorify Jesus by declaring all the things that belong to Jesus, all right, let's talk about these. He says when the Spirit comes, He will guide believers into all truth. Now this is first and foremost true of the apostles. These men who were there in that place with Jesus that night and the reason it was uniquely true for them is also true for us, but it was true for them uniquely because these guys are the ones who would be the foundational pillars of the church to take the truth and to go out into the world and proclaim the gospel. They didn't have the New Testament, they were going to write it and so they had to have this special work of the Holy Spirit to declare truth to them. You remember Jesus said, you know, there's a whole bunch more I really want to tell you guys, but if I tried right now, you'd tilt because you just can't handle it. You couldn't deal with everything I want to tell you right here, right now. So here's what's going to happen, I'm going to go to be with the Father, and I'm going to send the Holy Spirit, and He's going to speak to you, and He's going to speak to you, in fact, His work among you is going to be so cool, because you see, Jesus is kind of saying, you know, I'm limited to one place, one time. If I'm not with you, then I'm with somebody else, if I'm with somebody else, I'm not with you. That's not going to be a limitation for the Holy Spirit, He's going to be with all of you simultaneously, wherever you are. Some of you are going to be thrown in a prison and the Holy Spirit's going to be right there with you. Some of you are going to suffer terrible things and the Holy Spirit is going to be right there beside you. Some of you are going to sit down and write some letters and the Holy Spirit is going to be right there speaking, looking over your shoulder, guiding you, directing you, right? It's what we call biblical inspiration. Paul wrote about it to Timothy from

And so on and so on and so on. He says it's breathed out or your Bible, if you have a different translation may just say God breathed, which is another great way to say it. But we're talking about that inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who was with these men specifically, as they wrote down the New Testament, as they recorded the events in the gospels, gospel accounts, and as they wrote the letters. Paul, Peter, John, James and so forth, as they wrote those things down, the Holy Spirit guided them into all of the truth and that's so important. Notice that Jesus went on to say that, when the Spirit comes, He will not speak of His own authority and very closely aligned with that, He will speak whatever He hears. Why do you suppose Jesus mentioned this? Why not just say, the Holy Spirit will come and speak on His authority, His own authority. But He actually made the point that He's not going to do that. Oh, this is a statement to underscore that interdependence of the persons of the triune Godhead, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Father will speak to the Holy Spirit and what He hears, He will speak to you and He will speak about me, the Son. The Father to the Spirit about the Son and it's a beautiful picture, but it also speaks to us about that unifying voice of truth. The Spirit is not going to come and say something different than what I've been telling you all this time. The Spirit is going to come and tell you exactly what the Father has been saying, because I've been telling you exactly what I hear the Father say. And so there aren't 2 truths or 3 truths or 4 truths, I don't care what the world tells you. There's 1 truth and that's what you're going to hear. This unifying truth that God is going to send to you through the Holy spirit about me and it's a beautiful thing. And then He says that the Spirit is going to come to declare to you the things that are to come. You guys know how many passages in the Bible, the Holy Spirit spoke to the writer about something that was going to happen in the future? Here's an example from

How did Paul learn that? Well, he tells you, the Spirit revealed it to him. The Holy Spirit revealed it, that's what Jesus said the Spirit would do. He would come, and He would tell them about things that are to come and so it's beautiful that we see the fulfillment of those various things here in the Word. And finally, Jesus says when the Spirit comes, He will glorify Jesus by declaring what belongs to Him, what belongs to Jesus. You might ask the question, oh, what exactly belongs to Jesus? What exactly belongs to Jesus? You ever thought about that? Well, He actually answers the question in

What belongs to Jesus? Everything! Because He's God, right? So here's what's cool. The Spirit longs to talk about it, He says the Spirit's going to come, He's going to reveal to you things about me and what belonged to me, and in that He's going to bring glory to me. Oh, now there's another interesting statement, He's going to bring glory to me, Jesus said, didn't God say elsewhere, I will share my glory with no man. Didn't He say that? Yes, He did and yet Jesus says the Spirit is going to come and bring glory to me. Is that God sharing His glory? No, that's God getting the glory because Jesus is God. People say, all the time people say, there's nowhere in the Bible where it says Jesus is God, you know, or where He claimed to be God. It makes me so tired, honestly, to hear those things, it's like, have you read the Book and really understood it? Look what Jesus is saying right here, the Spirit will come and bring glory to me. That's something that only God can receive. So, I think it's pretty cool that's the Holy Spirit's favorite topic, He loves talking about Jesus. The Holy Spirit just loves talking about Jesus and if you ask Him to tell you more about Jesus, He will be delighted to do so. You know, Sue and I spent some time in our early Christian life, our early, I should say our early life after, you know, coming to the Lord as a married couple anyway, we both kind of had a flirtation with Jesus when we, before we got married, when we were younger. But it wasn't until we'd been married for 5 years that we both came to the Lord in earnest and surrendered our lives and we spent some time in a charismatic church. Which I don't totally regret at all because, you know, there's a lot of things I really appreciate about the Charismatics. There's also a lot of things they get pretty whacked out about, but that's another message. But one of the things the Charismatics tend to do is they tend to, they want to get the Holy Spirit to talk about Himself. They want to focus a lot on the Holy Spirit for the sake of the Holy Spirit and what the Bible tells me is that the Holy Spirit wants to talk about Jesus, that's what He wants to do. He's delighted to do it, He loves to do it. It's like, just ask me a question about Jesus, love to tell you, you know. I wish, I've said you guys this before, I wish I could share with you the emails that I get every single day. And I'm not exaggerating when I say every single day from people around the world who have found us online, who will tell the, give a testimony of how they got serious about God's Word at some point in their lives and they basically came to the Lord, and they said, tell me more about Jesus. And the Holy Spirit said, oh, buckle up, I'm going to just tell you, oh, He is so cool and He just begins to shed abroad the knowledge of the Savior. And these people write letters to us about how their lives have been transformed. Literally transformed and they will tell they, some of them go into great detail and it's hard to get through their letters sometimes they're so long. But they'll tell, you know, these stories about how their lives were just an emotional, social, sometimes even physical train wreck and they just were not dealing with life at all very well, and life was just overwhelming them. And they cried out to God, God, I need you, and they finally decided, I got to open the Bible and start to read this thing and they start to read the Bible. And they kind of get stuck, and they go online, and they start looking for some help and they get led, for some reason, to our YouTube channel, and they start listening to the teaching of God's Word, and they get hooked on it. And some of these people tell me they listen to like, 3 or 5 messages a day. Trina can tell you, she fields a lot of phone calls from people. Just ask her, she surely truly does and they, some call into the church and tell their story. And they just, they want you, they want us to know that their lives are completely different now, whereas they were once a train wreck, now they are standing strong in the Lord. Their lives haven't changed from the standpoint of all the difficulties, they're still going through all the difficulties that they were before, but now they're standing strong in their faith. They have hope, they have joy, because they opened their heart and said, Holy Spirit, talk to me about Jesus and He accommodated them and they just busted out with all kinds of incredible growth spiritually and it is so cool to see. And that's why I wish I could share more of them with you. I don't have permission to do that, but if I could, you would be so blessed to hear what God is doing in people's lives, in your lives, in your lives. I trust that's happening in your life, if it's not, then maybe we need to do some deep diving into the Word and I mean deep diving. Not just this little, you know, I think I'll read a verse this week, no, I mean deep diving and ask the Holy Spirit to reveal Jesus, reveal the Savior, reveal the Redeemer of all mankind and oh, He will gladly say, yes, let me tell you all about Him, amen. He's so good, let's stand and pray. If you need prayer this morning, we invite you to come down so that we can pray with you. Father, thank you so much for your love, thank you for sending the Holy Spirit. Thank you, Lord, for the power of the Holy Spirit. Thank you, Lord, that He loves to talk about Jesus and remind us what He did and how our lives can be different if we will just trust in Him. We commit our hearts to you, we surrender our hearts to you. Lord, if there's anybody here this morning who has not yet confessed their sin, I pray they would do it right now, right now in the quiet of their heart, Lord, I confess I'm a sinner, I'm in need of a savior. Holy Spirit, come, give me new birth and tell me all about Jesus. Teach me about Jesus that I might live for Him, love Him, walk with Him, serve Him. We give our hearts to you this day in Jesus precious and holy name and all God's people said together, amen. God bless you. Have a good rest of your Sunday. ---