Transcription
Today's scripture reading is taken from the book of John, chapter 14, 15-26.
If you love me, keep my commands; and I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever. The Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But 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. Before long the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.
Then Judas—not Judas Iscariot—said, “But Lord, why do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?”
Jesus replied, “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching; my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Anyone who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me.”
All this I have spoken while still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.
The word of the Lord.
So these weeks in the fall, we're looking at the most basic beliefs of the Christian faith. And we're doing it, uh, using the outline of the Apostles' Creed, which is the most, u um, the, the first of all the church's summaries of the biblical doctrine. And if you speak the Apostles' Creed, you get eventually to the declaration, “I believe in the Holy Spirit,” or “I believe in the Holy Ghost,” the older version of the Apostles' Creed that we've had. Uh, and when it comes to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, without a doubt, the Holy Spirit is the most mysterious of the three. Uh, the one person we know the least about. Uh, and if you're going to learn about the Holy Spirit, there's no better place in the Bible to go than right here. Or maybe put it a little differently, John 14:15, 16, and 17. This is Jesus', uh, upper room discourse, the night before he's going to die, his last night on earth, the last time he has to, to teach his disciples. And it's interesting since, by the way, when, when you know that you're speaking to people that you love and you'll never speak to them again, you don't talk about the weather. You, you, you go to the subjects you think are the most crucial for them, maybe the most crucial to you. And it's intriguing, of course, that that the, the very, almost, almost the last words of Jesus to his disciples are filled with teaching about the Holy Spirit, which shows how important it is. So let's look at what we're taught about the Holy Spirit just in this section and let's look at it under three headings: Who the spirit is, what the spirit does, and how to receive what the spirit gives. Okay? Who the spirit is, what the spirit does, how to receive what the spirit gives.
Now, who the spirit is. Jesus gives us three clues, you might call them. The first clue is in verse 17 where he says, “The world cannot accept him because it neither sees him nor knows him.” The Holy Spirit is referred to as a person, not a force, not a nebulous, uh, power, uh, not an “it,” but a “him,” a person. The second clue is when he says in verse 16, “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate.” Now, we'll get to the word advocate in a moment, very important. But right now, let's take a look at the word “another.” In Greek, there are two words that can be translated “another.” And one of the Greek words means “another unlike,” and the other means “another like,” exactly like. And Jesus uses this here, the second of those two words, which is his way of saying, since he claims to be God, since Jesus says, “I and the Father are one,” since Jesus has already said in John 8, “Before Abraham was, I am,” then Jesus is saying the Holy Spirit is not only a person but an equally divine person, an equally infinitely divine person with me and the Father. But then he says one other thing which is intriguing and, uh, you have to look carefully. Notice in verse 18 he says, “I will not leave you as orphans.” Now that’s actually the theme of the entire four, three or four chapters. He constantly says, “I’m leaving you.” In fact, this chapter 14 begins with him saying, “I go away. I’m leaving you and I’m going to prepare a place for you in my Father’s house. There are many mansions and so on, many rooms.” So the theme is, “I’m leaving you. I’m leaving you.” And then look at in verse 18, he says, “I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you.” And then if you go down to verse 23, it says, “If you obey my teaching, my Father will love them and we will come to them and make our home with them.” So on the one hand, Jesus is saying, “I’m leaving you.” On the other hand, he’s saying, when the Holy Spirit comes, I’m leaving. The Holy Spirit’s coming. And when the Holy Spirit comes, I will be coming and my Father will be coming. Okay?
Welcome. Welcome to the dizzying, unique, and wonderful doctrine of the Trinity. Welcome. How do you like it in here? Um, the Trinity, uh, this is the teaching of the Trinity. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not three gods. They’re not three gods. They’re one. They’re one God. But on the other hand, they’re distinct. They, um, uh, it’s not like there’s one person who sometimes has his Father hat on, sometimes his Son hat, sometimes his Holy Spirit hat. There’s not one God and one person, not three gods and three persons. There’s one God in three persons. That on the one hand, they’re distinct. They know each other. In one sense, Jesus can leave and the Holy Spirit can come, but another sense, since they are so one that when you hit the one, you get them all. And, uh, when I was a new Christian, I must admit I was, I found this confusing. I would like to tell you now that after years of meditating on it, I believe the doctrine of the trinity, that God is triune, is the blazing brilliant heart of the Christian faith and its genius. But for our purposes, there’s just one inference, one thing that we need to learn from the doctrine of the trinity, that when the Holy Spirit comes into your life, you’re not getting some nebulous force. You’re not getting some emanation from some distant god planet. God himself is coming to dwell in your midst. In fact, in some ways, the triune God is coming to dwell right in the middle of your life. Now, have you been melted with the joy and the awe at the knowledge of that, at who is living in your life? Have you been, have you been changed by the privilege of it? Uh, the miracle of it? Now the reason I ask you that question that way is this. There’s another place, other places in the Bible that talk about, uh, being filled with the spirit. The Bible says we must be filled with the spirit. But now to be filled with the spirit, notice that idea of being filled with the spirit almost immediately moves our mind’s metaphor. I mean, everybody, our mind thinks in pictures, and “filled with a spirit” starts to move us away from thinking of the spirit as a person, right? To be filled with something evokes the idea of a gas or a liquid, right, or a force. I want to be filled with the spirit means instead of just three amps, I want six amps; instead of one gallon of the spirit, I want two gallons. And as soon as you begin to think of God, uh, the Holy Spirit like that way, you immediately get into looking for technique to be filled, or to have more of the Holy Spirit becomes a technique. What are the two things I have to do? The three things? No, no, no. If he’s a, a person, and he is, what does it mean to be filled with a person? To be full of a person, to be full of a person is a, is something like being in love, but it’s a little more than that.
Years ago, uh, my family, when I was a young teenager, I believe, and that’s one of the reasons why I don’t remember the name of the person I’m going to tell you a story about, but years ago when I was a young teenager, my family, uh, did something they very seldom do, and that is, I think at our church there was a visiting speaker. This speaker was a, a very prominent church leader, uh, I think from Britain if I remember, and, uh, this person was coming to speak. And my parents offered that he would stay with us for several days. And, um, and they were very excited about it because they really respected this person. They were amazed that they were going to be able to get him close. And so I never forgot how different our home was during that time. So, for example, the morning I woke up, the, the, the I woke up the morning that he was supposed to arrive, and it was like I didn’t recognize my house. I thought, “This is better. I died and went into a better homes and garden book.” So what, it’s beautiful, what’s going on here? And I must tell you it was just feast after feast. I never ate better in my life. But not only that, all the kind of the relationships changed. Uh, all the kind of little, uh, grumping at each other and snapping at each other and arguing, they all went away. We didn’t do it. Nobody did it. And you might say, “Well, you’re trying to put on a good face for them.” No, it was better and deeper than that. Everybody felt affirmed. Everybody was excited. Everybody was excited, looking forward to the next meal. They were, uh, they felt excited and affirmed. And so it really did mean that the little things that used to bother us about each other didn’t matter anymore. Okay. Has that happened to you with the Holy Spirit? Have you been melted by the acute consciousness of the glorious person in the middle of your life? Do you walk around in amazed wonder and awareness of it? Because see, for example, there’s a lot of things that you would do ordinarily, you would never do in front of somebody you respect. Well, you’ve got somebody you better respect right in the middle of your life. It would change your self-regard. We’ll get to that in a minute. But even more, Second Peter 1:3 and 4 has a remarkable statement, and he’s talking about the Holy Spirit, and Peter says we have been made partakers of the divine nature. See, the Holy Spirit is a person, and yet the Holy Spirit is a spirit, and when the spirit comes into our lives, in a sense we’re getting God’s very lifeblood, his—we are made partakers of the divine nature. It’s an amazing statement, and you know what this means? I—are you amazed at the wonder of this? It means that there is no wound in you so deep that this can’t heal. There’s no brokenness in you, uh, so great that this can’t repair. There’s no habit in you, no binding habit so binding that you can’t be freed from it. Are you full of the spirit? To be filled with the spirit is largely to walk around aware of what you have, who you have, who’s right there. So that’s who the spirit is. But now what does the spirit do? I almost, when it comes to this subject, I almost hate to have only one passage of the scripture to talk about because this, what the Bible tells us about the spirit does is so, so multifarious, so multi-dimensional, uh, so, uh, there’s so many things that he does. Uh, in fact, I, I’ll even mention two that go by in passing, even though we can’t spend more than a few seconds on them since the, the passage only spends a few seconds on them. But look up in verse 16, it says, “I will ask the Father; he will give you another advocate.” We’ll get to that again, “to help you and be with you forever.” So, the Holy Spirit is with you forever. First, let me just point out two things. One is that means, by the way, that’s a “you,” person plural. It doesn’t just say “you” individually. Uh, as you know, in the English language, unless you’re from the South, y’all have no second person plural “you,” English speakers except for some of you. Uh, that’s why very often when the, the Greek or the Hebrew is, you know, second person plural, we don’t have a good English deriv, you know, way to d, uh, to, uh, to designate that. But what he’s actually saying is when the Holy Spirit comes into your life, he doesn’t just bond, bind you and uni, unite you to Christ, but he unites you to everyone else united to Christ. If the Holy Spirit brings you into a new family and you get a new Father, that means you automatically get new brothers and sisters. And we’re going to look at this next week, so I won’t even say any more than this this week. The Holy Spirit puts you into community. And that doesn’t just mean, “Oh, now we have fellowship.” It means that every other Christian on the face of the earth, no matter how different their culture, no matter how different their race, no, h, no matter how different their temperament, you now have a spiritual bond of infinite depth because that bond is the Holy Spirit himself. But it also says, by the way, you receive the Holy Spirit who’s to be with you forever. You know, when Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. And he who lives and believes in me shall never die.” Now, those statements almost seem contradictory. It says, “If you believe in me, you’ll die, but you’ll live.” And then he says, “If you believe in me, you’ll never die.” And here’s what he means. He means that if you become a Christian, if you believe in Jesus Christ, of course you’re going to die. Your body’s going to die. Okay? And you’ll be resurrected. But there’s another sense in which he says, once the Holy Spirit comes into your life, once the Holy Spirit brings the love of God into your life, Romans 5 says, “By the Holy Spirit, God’s love is shed in our hearts.” Once you begin to experience you, you conscious you. Once you begin to experience God’s love through the Holy Spirit, that will never end. It’s forever. See, right now you might have a little bit of the love of God, but the minute you die, you’ll have an infinite amount of love of God. It’ll never end. There’ll be no interruption. Death will not have the final word. Why? Because you have the Holy Spirit forever. But we can’t keep, we can’t stay there. Those are, I mean, the Holy Spirit gives you community. It, it gives you an eternal bond not only with one another, but with, with, with the Lord himself. But the two things that are emphasized which we have to look at here still briefly but because they’re the main things is this. The Holy Spirit is a spirit of truth and he’s the ultimate friend. The spirit of truth and the ultimate friend.
First, the spirit of truth. Verse 17 calls him a spirit of truth. That’s a really important term. We better never pit the idea of the Holy Spirit against the Bible and say, “Well, you know, you got all your doctrine and you got all your truth and all that stuff, but I have the Holy Spirit. I’ve got experience. I’ve got, you know, he is the spirit of truth.” And if you look down at verse 25 and 26, you’ll see a, a two-layer promise. Verse 25 and 26. “All this I have spoken while still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name will teach you all things and remind you of everything I said to you.” Now, at the primary level, at the first level, this is Jesus talking to his disciples. And his disciples literally heard Jesus teaching. You see, “I will, I will the Holy Spirit will remind you of everything I’ve said to you.” In other words, Jesus Christ has been teaching them for several years. And he’s, of course, going to teach them after, after his resurrection as well. And he says the Holy Spirit will enable you to remember the things I’m telling you so that when you and your colleagues write it down in the New Testament, uh, it will be the truth. There’s a, so many, historically everybody’s understood that verse 25 and 26 is a way, one of the ways that the spirit is the spirit of truth is that the spirit is going to is going to make sure that the New Testament is inspired as the Old Testament, that the New Testament apostles are going to really with spirit’s help remember the things accurately that Jesus Christ taught, help them understand them and write it down so that the New Testament will be as inspired as the Old Testament. So the spirit of truth creates the Bible. But it’s not all, because almost everyone understands that he’s not just talking to the apostles here. First John 2, First Corinthians chapter 2 both say that when the spirit comes into us, it gives us an anointing that helps us understand the truth. Um, I was, uh, born and raised Lutheran, and, uh, my family took me to church all the time and I was confirmed. That was a two years of studying the Bible and doctrine before I could be confirmed, uh, at the age of 14. And, uh, also there was a lectionary. So there was every year we went through and read certain passages of the scripture. So I thought I knew the Bible. I knew a lot about the Bible. But when I went to college and in college met Christ, was converted, really brought to true faith, vital faith, the most interesting thing to me was how the Bible that I thought I knew a lot about, just somebody turned the light on. You know, it’s almost like, uh, it was almost like a, a, a, well, that’s the best way to put it. Suddenly, all sorts of things that I thought I understood, I saw things I’d never seen before. But it’s not just only that the spirit of truth teaches you and illumines your mind. It’s interesting. Notice in verse 21, “Whoever has my commands.” Okay, so here you’re reading the Bible. And keeps them is the one who loves me. And the one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them. And we will show ourselves. I will show myself to them. When you read the Bible with the Holy Spirit’s help, you don’t just find your, the truth makes sense to your mind. God becomes real to your heart when you’re wrestling with the commands and the truths of God in the, in the Bible. The Holy Spirit actually brings God to you. Uh, you know, in, in his very, very famous, uh, personal narrative, Jonathan Edwards, which I often quote, was an 18th-century philosopher and pastor. He also was a pastor of a Presbyterian church downtown New York City in 19, in 1723. And he actually later on wrote a what’s called a personal narrative. You can find it online, which was an account of his spiritual experience during that time. So when he was living in New York City, he had a, he had a strong, vital spiritual life, which shows it can be done, and you can read about it online. And, and, and both these aspects of how the spirit is a spirit of truth come out in the personal narrative. So here’s the first aspect. He says, “I had the greatest delight in the holy scriptures. Oftentimes in reading it, every word seemed to touch my heart. I seemed often to see so much light exhibited by every sentence and such a refreshing, ravishing food communicated, but I could not get along in reading. I oftentimes used to dwell long on one sentence just to see all the wonders contained in it.” See, that’s the first aspect of what the spirit does. Makes the truth, you know, make sense to your mind. But then listen to this. “But once in 1737 in prayer, I had a view that for me was extraordinary, of the glory of the Son of God. And I saw his wonderful, great, full, pure, sweet grace and love and his meek gentleness. The person of Christ appeared to me with such an excellency it was great enough to swallow up all my thought and conception. This continued about for an hour. The greater part of the time I was in a flood of tears and weeping aloud.”
There's always a little bit of a danger in, in uh, reading not only a very eloquent but a very uh, account, but a very intense account of both the illumination of your mind and the sense of God's reality on the heart that the spirit brings.
But I want you to know that if you have the Holy Spirit, what I just read is not completely foreign to you. You know what he's talking about. Maybe not like that, maybe not so intense, but you know it. He's the spirit of truth. However, he's also the ultimate friend.
Now, the reason I call him an ultimate friend is this. In verse 16, in some ways, the most important word in the passage to tell us about the holy about Holy Spirit is, "I will ask the father, he will give you another advocate." And then down at the bottom, he says, "But the advocate, the Holy Spirit."
Now, if you if you look at four or five different Bible translations, they'll all have a different word there. Some translations will call him the advocate. Some will call him the helper. Some will call him the comforter. Some will call him the counselor. And those are just the the top four. And whenever you come to a whenever you see that all the translations render a word in a different way, what you know you've got is a uh a word that's so rich that no one English word can convey the fullness of the meaning of it.
And even though I'm quite happy with advocate, I'll show you in a second. Nevertheless, uh the fact is that it doesn't none of these words suffice. English words, I mean, advocate is a little too hard. Comforter is a little too soft. They're there. Helper is a little too weak. Even counselor is a little too detached. You know, the professional counselor or the or the consultant, you know, the professional, they may help you very much, but then you go home and he or she goes home and that sort of thing.
Now, here's what here's here's my translation. He's the ultimate friend. And I'll tell you why. The Greek word is paraco. Someone who paracleos you. And parah is a word that means be alongside of someone who is alongside of you. And the image in ancient times of someone alongside of you meant someone always with you and always for you. See? Always with you and always for you. Never went home. You don't you don't see him one, you know, one hour a week. Never goes home, always with you, but always for you. Always for you. But the word calleo, parah, means always with you and always for you. But the word calleo actually means to declare or to argue. And that's the reason why none of these words quite gets across like I think the word ultimate friend.
And here's why I I would say ultimate friend, a friend, a true friend, a real friend. And by the way, this is a better friend than any friends you've got. Even if you think you got some good friends, there's no one has a friend like this. Because first of all, a real friend is willing to be with you, never leaves you, and is always for you, but is willing to argue with you. That's that's why the word advocate might be the best of the bunch. An advocate, but what your advocate, but an advocate who argues with you. Well, who does he argue with? He's making a case. Well, who's he making a case to? Not God and not the world. We'll get to that in a minute. He's actually arguing against the enemies in your own heart.
You know, the best example of this is in in Romans 8:16 where it says, "The spirit bears witness with your spirit that you are his child." And the word bears witness is a very very specific word and through which Paul is able to within a stroke create a picture because when it says the spirit bears witness, it's a word that means star witness or decisive witness in a trial. And so the picture that Paul is is is showing is it's like you're on trial and the outcome is in doubt. Will you be locked up or sent away forever? Or will you be freed? And nobody's sure. The outcome is in doubt. And in comes the Holy Spirit. He's the star witness. The Holy Spirit gives his testimony and it's very clear and and uh you're free. You know, the trial's over.
What is that all about? Here's what it's about. 1 John 3:20. When our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts. You know why? Because God the Holy Spirit is in our hearts. There's two things the spirit is going to constantly argue with you about like any good friend will. On the one hand, the spirit will tell you you're a sinner. John 16:7 says the Holy Spirit comes in the world to convict of sin. And one of the things you need and a friend will tell you is where you're being where you are being blind to your own sinfulness, where you're being blind to your own responsibility, where you're being blind to your own weakness. And the spirit has to come and argue with you against that blindness and has to say look you are a sinner here. You have done wrong. You need to take responsibility or look you are weak. You need God. You are overconfident. A good friend will come and tell you that. Break through that.
But here's what's weird. Not only does our heart not want to believe we're as sinful as the Bible tells us we are, but it also does not want to believe that we are as loved and accepted in Christ as the Bible says we are. Our our hearts are idiots. Because the other thing the Holy Spirit has to do is bear witness that you're a child of God. It it's the Holy Spirit that comes in and says, "You're not living loved. You're not living accepted. You're not you're not admitting this. you you will not see how sinful you are, but I'm going to show you. Otherwise, you're going to screw your life up, and you will not understand how loved and accepted you are. You're trying to earn it. You're trying to to achieve it. You're trying to get it.
See, the spirit comes into your heart. He looks around your life, and he's appalled. Just want you to know, he sees you working yourself to death to prove yourself. He sees you manipulating people to try to squeeze a little bit of approval out of them. He sees you addicted to power, to family and their approval. He sees you addicted to a He sees you like a like a drug addict addicted. And he is not going to let you alone. You know, a lot of almost all friends at a certain point give up. You know, they won't listen to me. But he will never do that. It says in Philippians 1:6, I think it's verse 6, the good work that God began in you, he will bring to completion in the day of Jesus Christ. And the reason why Paul can say to all Christians, he's writing to the good work God began in you, he will bring to completion in the day of Christ is because he knows you have the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit will never just let you stay the way you are. He will never let you alone. He will never do that. He will sanctify you. He will make you all that God wants you to be. He will never because he's always with you and he's always for you. And he'll either be telling you things that are too bad and he's they're too bad for your heart to believe, but he's going to show you that they're true. And also things that your heart finds too good to believe and he's going to show you that they're true. Well, because he's the ultimate friend. Isn't that wonderful?
Now look in the end here, how can you be sure that you are going to receive all the things that the spirit gives his illumination uh his the community he gives you, the illumination he gives you, the the experience he gives you, but you know most of all the ministry of the Holy Spirit as a friend inside your heart working against the various enemies your heart has, accusation, temptation, all the things by telling you the truth. You know how you can receive it? You have to do two things according to this text. If you want the ministry of the second advocate, another advocate in your life, you've got to believe in the ministry of the first advocate. So, you have to believe and you have to obey. You have to believe in the first advocate and you have to obey. And only then will the Holy Spirit as your second advocate do the ministry we've been describing.
Well, you say, "How does that work?" Well, here's how it works. First of all, because he's another advocate, that means his job is to basically tell you about the work of the first advocate, who is Jesus Christ. See, when I first became a Christian, I heard this idea that Jesus Christ died and rose and now is in heaven and he's interceding for us before the father. That's a it's a mysterious and wonderful that the father that the god Jesus intercedes with us before the father. And so that means I guess I thought it means he's praying for us or he's he's pleading for us. And and of course that's a warm and wonderful thought. But you know the longer I was a Christian in the early days I heard about that. It was really nice. But as the years went by and I saw how often I failed to be what God wanted me to be, I was not comforted by the idea that Jesus Christ was up there pleading for me, interceding for me. Uh because it seemed like every day I got up and I and I didn't do what God wanted me to do. And it was Jesus. I I I imagine Jesus was up there saying, "Father, he did it again, but would you give him one more chance?" Okay. Okay. Well, as the years went by, I kept saying, I mean, even Jesus, I mean, how how long can he keep this up for me, you know, and and even though the father I mean, h how long before the father finally says, "No, no, this is it. It's been years now for this guy." And so, I wasn't really particularly I wasn't really particularly uh comforted.
And then some years ago, I read a sermon. It was actually a chapel talk by Charles Hodgej who in the middle in the 1800s was one of the early teachers at Princeton Seminary and it was a chapel talk to students and was called the advocate and he pointed out that what Jesus is he helped me understand what Jesus is doing up there because he actually doesn't quote Hebrews or the other places that talk about Jesus Christ interceding for us. He quotes first John 2 verse one and this is what it says. I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the father. Jesus Christ the righteous one. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Same word. If anybody sins, we have an advocate with the father. Jesus Christ the righteous one. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
And here's what Charles Hodgej said. He says, "You got to think realize that Jesus Christ is up there and he's like your defense attorney. He's an advocate. And a defense attorney isn't just always begging for mercy. A defense attorney is making a case. And defense attorney is not just up there just hoping for mercy. Defense attorney is making a case based on the law. And what he's actually telling telling the father is not just, "Oh, please be merciful one more day." God showed his mercy when he sent his son to go to the cross and accomplish our salvation. That's where we got the mercy. But now Charles Hodgej says this is what Jesus Christ is doing. Something like this. He's saying, "Father, the wages is death. The law demands payment. And I've paid. I went to the cross. Here's my blood." You see these people down here? They have sinned. Yes, they have. And they sin today. But they've believed in me. And therefore, I have paid for their sins. And because I have paid for their sins, it would be unjust to get two payments for this sin. Be unjust. And therefore, I demand you accept them. You love them. You acquit them. Why? Because not to do so would be unjust. And therefore, Father, I am not asking for mercy. I'm asking for justice.
So Charles Hodgej says, look, he's up there and he's not actually pleading for mercy. One more day, please. No, he's saying this is justice. And justice is that there be no condemnation for those who are in me. And at that moment, I remember I read that I suddenly realized for the first time in my life, I even remember kind of the year it happened. I all my life, I had thought that the scales of justice were against me. The scales of God's justice were against me. And Jesus was just up there, you know, trying to sort of pull down on them every day, you know, maybe one more day. Now I suddenly realize the scales of God's justice were completely for me. And God's justice is like the mountains. God's justice is omnipotent. It means the justice of God demands that he love me forever. That's the act. That's the work of the first advocate. And what I have just done, what I've just said, does it move you? Does it move you at all? You know why? Because the second advocate's talking to you about it. See, the second advocate, that's the case. That's how the advocate does it. That's how that's how he is your friend. He's pointing to the work of the first advocate. And that's what not only humbles you into the dust out of your pride, it's also thing that raises you to the heavens out of your despondency. You believe in that work of the first advocate and the second advocate will do his work. You believe in the infallible case that Jesus Christ, the first advocate, is making. And when the Holy Spirit comes and talks to you about it, he'll give you the infallible peace that comes from the infallible case. H And then lastly, you have to obey. Why do I say that? Do you know how often in the Bible, how often in the Bible it says, "Don't quench the spirit." Disobedience. I mean, it's all through here. If you obey me, if you obey me, I will be real to you. If you obey me, I will come to you if you obey me.
And the reason I think that here's the reason why. Look at the work of the first advocate. Jesus Christ gives up his glory and goes to the cross. How selfless. How unselfish. Look at the work of the second advocate. The work of the second advocate is to point to Jesus, not to himself. The Holy Spirit does not come in and say, "Talk, let me let me tell you about myself." No, no. The the second advocate's work is to point to Jesus to glorify Jesus to show how beautiful Jesus is. Do you see the glory of the divine selflessness? Do you see the father emptying heaven of his his greatest treasury, his greatest treasure to come to earth to save us? Do you see Jesus Christ emptying himself of his glory? Do you see the Holy Spirit pointing away from himself to Jesus? Do you see the magnificence of the divine selflessness?
Now, you want to have the Holy Spirit in your life, you stop thinking about yourself all the time. You you stop your self assertion. Stop your self-indulgence. Stop your self-centeredness. Obey. Obey him. Serve God. Serve your neighbor. And then you will find the ministry of the ultimate friend flooding your life. And you will know the glory and the joy of having this one for your ultimate friend. Let's pray. Our father, we thank you that uh through faith in what Jesus Christ did on the cross and through obedience, through giving up our our self-deter our right to self-determination and obeying you, we can have the ministry of the ultimate friend Jesus Christ in our life. We thank you for that and we pray that you will enable us to uh be spiritfilled people and be a spiritfilled church because you have spoken to us oh holy spirit through the word and all for Jesus. It's in his name that we pray this. Amen. Uh the offering is an very important time to say Lord you know spirit of God descend. Give God your heart. Give God your gifts. After that we'll close with our final song. [Music] My [Music] heart. Oh. Oh. [Music] Oh. Oh. Oh. [Music] Oh, [Music] d down down no down no down no down no down no down no down no down no down no down no down no down no down no down no down no down no down no no no down no down no down no down no down no down no down no down no down no down no no no down [Music] down no down. Hey Mhm.