Just for those of you who don’t know, it said, “Set our hearts at liberty.” Okay.
Can we read a few Scriptures to begin with this morning? Start in Ezekiel 36, beginning with verse 24.
“For I will take you from among the nations,
and gather you out of all countries,
and bring you into your own land.Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean;
I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols.I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you;
I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes,
and you will keep My judgments and do them.Then you shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers;
you shall be My people, and I will be your God.
I will deliver you from all your uncleanness.”
Then, in John 16, verse 7:
“Nevertheless I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send Him to you.”
Then skip a couple of pages and go to John 20, beginning with verse 19.
“Then, the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst, and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’
When He had said this, He showed them His hands and His side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.
So Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace to you! As the Father has sent Me, I also send you.’
And when He had said this, He breathed on them, and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’”
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, we want to thank You this morning that we stand before You because of Jesus Christ and all He has done for us. We thank You, Lord, for the forgiveness of sins that we have in Him. We thank You, Lord, for His going to the cross for us. We thank You that You raised Him from the dead and seated Him at Your right hand.
And we thank You that because He is there, He has poured out the Holy Spirit upon us. Lord, we pray for that Spirit to be anointing us today, opening the Word to us today, and speaking to us today.
Lord, it is the speaking of Him that we want. We do not want the speaking of man. We do not want just the telling of stories, or this or that. We want the speaking of God into our hearts. We want the witness of the Spirit that it is God speaking to us, Lord.
And then we want to be able to move and walk in the power of that speaking. Lord, we are just unable to do this unless You, by Your Spirit, quicken us. So we ask for this quickening in Christ’s name.
That was a Charles Wesley song, for all of you who didn’t know. I chose this song because, as we are getting into John 16 now, we have two more chapters before He goes before Pilate and to the cross.
This is a hard time for the disciples. It is the time when He is getting ready to leave. The disciples must have thought this was really, really strange, because they had been with Him through these three years, and they were thinking that He was never going to leave. Yet, in the last year He had been with them, He had been talking about His death.
The thing is, you know, what? He is going to leave them? Because if we read the beginning of John 16, we find that He is talking about persecution, and then He is talking about leaving.
As a matter of fact, in my version it says, “It is to your advantage that I go.” G. Campbell Morgan translated it, “It is expedient that I go.” Is there a difference between it being to our advantage and it being expedient?
The idea of expediency—the word expedient—was used once before by Caiaphas: “It is expedient that one die for the many.” In other words, it is better that one die for the many.
In the same way, Jesus is saying, “It is better, to your advantage. It is of the greatest good that I go now.”
The reason I chose this hymn is that the verse we read last said, “Breathe, O breathe Thy loving Spirit into every troubled heart.”
Now, when the Lord was getting ready to leave, and He gathered these disciples together during the time covered in John 13–17, He was not jotting down memoirs. He was not giving them a creed and saying, “Okay, when I am gone, here is what you live by.”
Muslims look to the Sunnah, because that is a book telling Muhammad’s habits, and you are to follow Muhammad’s habits. That is how you are to live. Jesus did not do that.
Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, said there are four noble truths, and he left four noble truths. Jesus did not do that. He did not leave a creed.
This is what this is all about. T. Austin-Sparks says that this very moment is a transition: from the old covenant to the new covenant, and from the old creation to the new creation.
The old is being done away with. It is not just being done away with because it does not work; it is being done away with because it has been fulfilled.
In the Sermon on the Mount, when the Lord Jesus was speaking to His disciples—and I want to hit that thing again: disciples. Kenny has been speaking out of this, and all these things He is speaking are to His disciples.
As disciples, we hear these things. I just want to make a point of it: when we choose not to follow the Lord, even as Christians, we miss out on the good that the Lord has promised His disciples. That is not to say we are not saved. It is just to say that the good meant for us is missed out on.
When He is talking to His disciples in Matthew 5:17, He says, “Do not think that I have come to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I have come to fulfill them.”
I want to tell you that He fulfilled the Law and the Prophets in two ways. Before we get into the new covenant, the old one has to be fulfilled. It is not just saying, “Hey, this does not work. We are ripping it up and throwing it out.” No, it has to be fulfilled.
The Lord Jesus, as Man, fulfilled it in these two ways. First of all, having been born without sin, He lived a sinless life. You have to catch that: having been born without sin, He was not like us in that way. We have been born into sin. We have been born under sin.
Adam was not created with sin. In the same way, Christ, who is the last Adam, was born without sin, born of a virgin. And being born without sin, He lived sinlessly.
It is not because He was born without sin that He lived sinlessly. You need to understand that. He chose to live without sin. When the temptations came to Him, He overcame the temptations and decided, “I will go and obey My Father.”
Where Adam fell, Christ did not fall. He was tempted in every way, as the book of Hebrews tells us, like us, that He can save us to the uttermost.
At the Mount of Transfiguration, there was testimony to this: that He pleased God. When He was transfigured, the voice from heaven came and said:
“This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
At that very moment, He could have stepped right into heaven—the Man God had wanted—and that would have been it. He would have fulfilled the Law.
But do you remember when Jesus was going to be baptized? Look back in Matthew 3. When He came to be baptized, John was saying, “Wait a minute. You should be baptizing me. I should not be baptizing You.”
But the Lord Jesus said, “John, permit it to be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.”
To fulfill all righteousness. Now, I thought that Christ was righteous. What does He mean, to fulfill all righteousness? Well, He means this: the Law demanded of man a righteousness that he could not do, and therefore man had to be condemned.
When Christ came to be baptized, He was saying, “I want to fulfill the righteousness of the Law for man after Adam,” and that is to suffer the condemnation meant for him. In no other way can the Law be fulfilled. The punishment has to be done.
If you have read C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, that is the most powerful part of that book. When Edmund has to have the penalty, the penalty is demanded. For righteousness, for everything to be right in the universe, this has to happen.
If you remember, Aslan took the punishment—the innocent for the guilty. In the same way, this is how Christ fulfilled the Law. He fulfilled it not only in living that sinless life, but He fulfilled it in dying for man as the sinless Lamb.
This made possible man’s redemption. This life that He lived unto God, and this life that He laid down as a sin offering, makes possible our redemption.
Now, does it not do the redeeming? Okay, let me explain. Redemption is not just the forgiveness of sin. It is bringing man back into that place of being useful and of service to God. That is the total of redemption.
That is not to say that having your sins forgiven does not do something for you. It makes you right with God. It is the beginning of redemption. But the fullness of redemption is that we serve God out of a pure conscience and a clean heart.
Redemption cannot be summed up just with the death of Christ, because even Paul mentions that if Christ did not rise, you are still in your sins. So the death of Christ alone is not enough.
But in the same way, just the rising of Christ—being raised from the dead—is not enough. Even when Christ was raised from the dead, He could have been on this earth, going around with us, and it still would not bring us to the place of redemption.
You see, we would still just be sinners who had been washed up. That is it.
The fourth verse of that hymn is, “Finish, then, Thy new creation.” Then what is missing? If the death of Christ on the cross is not enough, and His being raised from the dead is not enough, what is missing?
That is what this chapter is about. He is talking about the missing piece. Christ did not say, “Okay, I am going to die, I am going to rise, I am going to go, and I am going to leave you a set of rules. I am going to leave you a set of things that I do, so that you can do those things and you will be okay.”
He did not do that, because that would leave man in a fallen condition. And that is not the new creation.
So, what then is the new creation? He says, “It is expedient that I leave, because if I do not, the Helper will not come.”
Brothers and sisters, it is not merely that He was raised from the dead. He ascended to the place at the right hand of the Power on high, and He sent the Holy Spirit. He took captivity captive and gave gifts to men. He gave the Holy Spirit.
This is really the subject matter, because the Lord is bringing us into the new creation. These men had not been brought into it yet, but they would be brought into it—and I will tell you, there is a big difference.
Kenny has been talking about Peter. We all talk about Peter and what a blow-it he was. We can relate to him because we know we are blow-its too.
But man, you go into the book of Acts, and you see a whole different Peter. It is not just because he has the teaching of Christ memorized, or because he has seen Jesus pray and says, “I am going to pray too.” It is because something has happened in him. Something has been replaced.
He has been given the life of Christ and the Holy Spirit. Read his epistles. You do not see the Peter who is talking about who is the greatest, or saying, “I am never going to leave You.” You find a humbler Peter, but you find a Peter who is fixed in Christ.
What amazes me is this: if you look at Acts and you look at the epistles of Peter, how many times does he mention, “I denied Christ three times”? How many times does he mention that? Zip. Why?
Because the forgiveness of Christ and the life of Christ put in him had put that away. I am not saying he did not every once in a while say, “Lord, I remember, but I thank You so much.” But it was not a big thing anymore to him. He had gotten beyond it because he had seen something more of Christ.
It did not matter what he did; what mattered was what Christ did.
My older brother—oh, that the Lord would get hold of him in a new way. I talked to him, and I said, “Why do you not just come back?” He said, “Well, you just do not know what I have done.”
We all get in those places where we say, “Oh, you do not know what I have done.” Well, the Lord does. The Lord knew Peter denied Him three times. Everybody else knows now too, do they not? It is in all the Gospels.
Do you think that mattered to Peter? No, it did not matter, because he knew that Christ was greater than all his faults and all his sins. I wish my brother could see that. I wish I could see it more.
How many times do we go off and give ourselves a timeout? I hate that use of that word for discipline, but we give ourselves a timeout. We go sit in the corner and sulk a little bit because we have failed the Lord in some way. Then we feel, after we have done that, that we are okay.
No. What Christ has done has made it so that you do not have to have a timeout. Done.
All right, the Holy Spirit. I am sorry for rambling there.
In John, the Lord mentions the Holy Spirit a couple of times. In John 14:16–17 and 26, He mentions Him. In John 15:26–27, He mentions Him. And here in John 16, He mentions Him. I want to read this section.
Starting with John 16:7:
“Nevertheless I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send Him to you.
And when He has come, He will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment:
of sin, because they do not believe in Me;
of righteousness, because I go to My Father and you see Me no more;
of judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged.I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.
However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come.He will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you.
All things that the Father has are Mine. Therefore I said that He will take of Mine and declare it to you.”
Now, I did not read the section in John 14, but we will touch on that. The question is: who is this One? He says that He is a Helper.
We know that He is part of the Trinity. He is God Himself. This is the very Spirit who led Jesus, our Savior, through His life. He was led by the Spirit.
A lot of us want to think, “Well, He was God.” Remember, He laid aside His deity to become Man and was led by the Spirit. It was the Spirit who led Him through His life. It was the Spirit whom He followed.
Remember, it was the Spirit who rested upon Him at John’s baptism. But for us, the Lord says that He will not only rest on us; He will dwell in us. That is a big difference from any person in the Old Testament.
That is what the new covenant is. Is that not what Ezekiel said? “I will put My Spirit in you.” He did not say, “I will put My Spirit on you.” He did not say, “I will influence you through My Spirit.” He said, “I will put My Spirit in you.”
This Spirit, this Helper—the word is Paraclete—means helper. Other versions translate it “Comforter” or “Counselor.” The point of all those words is someone who comes alongside to give aid, someone who is going to come alongside you.
Aren’t you glad? I do not know about you guys, but I was good with numbers. When it came to math, though, there is a difference between arithmetic and math. Give me fractions. Give me long division. I love that stuff. But start throwing letters in there, and that messes everything up. Who thought of that?
You get those letter things, and they say, “Plug in a number,” and that makes it a little different. But why do they not give you a number in the first place?
Have you ever had someone come alongside you and help you through a math problem? I am a schoolteacher, and I have students. They get stuck on their homework, and they are afraid to ask me a question. It is almost like they apologize when they ask.
“Mr. B, I just do not get this. Can you give me a hint?” Now, I never give them a hint, but I help them. I help them see what they are looking for.
That is the same way with a helper. He comes alongside. More than that, it is not just coming alongside; it is coming alongside to lead.
When the Lord Jesus talked about being yoked—“Take My yoke upon you”—it is like an older ox being called alongside a younger ox to lead him, because he has never gone this way before. He has never been set in a yoke. He has never trodden the grain or turned the gristmill. He does not know what to do or how to handle it.
So they hook him up with this older, experienced ox. That is kind of the picture here. The Helper will come. “I want to hook you up with a Helper.”
But the Helper is not going to be an outward set of rules, not a creed. The Helper is going to be an inward life. That is what I am giving you. If I do not go, He will not come.
When He talks about showing you the things to come, some people say He is talking about prophetic things, like in Revelation. There is truth to that, but I look at it this way: what was just about to come? His death and His resurrection.
What do those mean? What do they mean for us? We just take them for granted: “Yeah, Christ died and Christ rose.” Well, what does that mean for you? Is it just a fact? Is it just a creed?
We say the Nicene Creed, right? “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Jesus Christ the only Son, suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified, died, was buried, and the third day rose again.” Is that all it is to us, or does it have some meaning to us?
The disciples were in the dark. “What does this mean, He is going to the cross?” They never even got the resurrection, did they? They were already stuck on the cross part. I do not think they even heard it.
But He is saying, “I want to show you.” So He says, “I am going to send you this Helper.” According to Christ, this Helper has two things He is sent to do: first, to minister to the disciples; and second, to testify to the world.
Looking at the first one, what does it mean to minister to His disciples? A minister is someone who helps, someone giving aid. In John 14, it says, “He will teach you all things.”
One way the Holy Spirit, this Comforter, this One called alongside us, helps us is that He teaches us all things. What does He mean by teach? It does not mean, “I am going to dispense knowledge. I am going to give you a bunch of knowledge. Here is my outline.”
Then I go sit down and drink this glass of water, and you all should get it because you have the outline, right? Isn’t that weird? I can give you my outline, and you still do not get it.
I write notes on the board. The kids think I teach mystery. You ask a kid, “What does Mr. B teach?” “Uh, he teaches mystery.” “What do you mean, mystery?” “Boy, I just do not understand what he is talking about.”
We do not want that, and the Lord does not want to leave us in mystery. So He has given us Someone to teach us all things.
What I mean by teaching is not dispensing knowledge; it is revealing. It is revealing to us the truth: the truth about God and the truth about His Son.
In Acts 8, we have Philip the evangelist. Starting in verse 26:
“Now an angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, saying, ‘Arise and go toward the south along the road which goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.’ This is desert.
So he arose and went. And behold, a man of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great authority under Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who had charge of all her treasury, had come to Jerusalem to worship, and was returning. And sitting in his chariot, he was reading Isaiah the prophet.
Then the Spirit said to Philip, ‘Go near and overtake this chariot.’
So Philip ran to him and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah, and said, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’”
This is a helper: “Do you understand what you are reading?” Bless God for the honesty here, because you know what most of us say. Why do men not ask directions? Because we know.
My wife bought me a chair for my birthday, but I have to put it together. I have already been thinking about that. Hopefully there will be a Philip who will come alongside and help me out.
The eunuch said, “How can I, unless somebody guides me?” He asked Philip to come up and sit with him. Then Philip preached Christ to him out of that Scripture.
This is a picture of one coming alongside, someone bringing revelation where a man cannot, with his natural mind, make sense of it. Paul says the natural mind cannot discern spiritual things. But the Spirit of God, who knows God, is able to tell you all things.
The Lord Jesus has given us the Spirit to lead us and teach us all truth. It is like the disciples on the road to Emmaus. They were walking down the road, and He said, “What are you upset about?” They said, “We thought this was the Christ.”
Then He talked to them about how the Christ should suffer, and He went through the Scriptures with them. When they were breaking bread, their eyes were opened. Someone came alongside them. That is what the Holy Spirit is as a Teacher.
Not only that, He said that He will bring to remembrance the things that He said. In John 2, when Jesus cleansed the temple, they asked Him, “What sign do You give? Why are You cleansing the temple and driving out all the money changers?”
Jesus answered, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and You will raise it up in three days?” But He was speaking of the temple of His body.
Then it says:
“Therefore, when He had risen from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this to them; and they believed the Scripture and the word which Jesus had said.”
There were times when the Lord spoke things to these men, and some of those things went right over their heads. Does that mean they were lost? For us, they would be. But because of the Holy Spirit, they are not.
He brings up those things that the Lord has spoken to you, and sometimes He brings them in a new light. “Do you remember this? Remember that He rose from the dead? He was talking about His body.”
That is why it is so important for you young people to know the Scriptures, even if they do not make sense to you. There will be a time when the Holy Spirit will take those things and make them real to you, make them alive to you.
A lot of times, when we read the Scriptures, we are just reading them to log in time. I admit it: “I have got to do my reading today.” But there are times when the spirit is hungry, and we really read the Word. The Lord has given us that Helper to help us into those things.
In John 16, He said He will lead us, or guide us, into all truth. Again, this is not just a bunch of notes or a creed—all the truth.
That does not mean He is going to tell you why Saturn has so many rings or why a platypus lays eggs. That is not the kind of truth He is talking about. The truth He is talking about is the truth of God: the truth about God, the truth about His eternal purpose, the truth about who He is.
It is not merely a knowledge truth. It is an experiential truth. When we are first born again, we do not know anything. We do not know anything about God. The only thing we really know about God is what we have heard about Him, and we think He has a big hammer. That is about it.
We are just like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They did not know anything. When can you start learning about God? When you come to the place where you say, “I am poor in spirit. I do not know anything.” Then you are teachable.
When you think you know everything, you are not teachable. Abraham did not know anything about God, but what he learned about God, he learned by experience.
The Lord led him out. The Lord led him to say, “This is who I am,” by the things that he suffered. “You do not need to go down to Egypt. I will provide for you.” He learned that. Yes, there were consequences to his stumbling around, but out of all that, he learned that.
Otherwise, how could he have offered up his son Isaac? If he did not know God experientially and know that He was trustworthy from his experience, how could he have offered up Isaac? He could not have.
But because he knew Him in this experiential way, he was able to do that. It is the same with us. God does not just ask us to do things without saying, “You trust Me. I have shown you this. You can trust Me. I brought you this far. Trust Me for the next step.”
We are guided into all truth: the truth about who God is and the truth about what the gospel is. If we just had the four Gospels, we would have no idea about justification by faith.
Where is that really laid out for us? In the epistles. How did we get that knowledge? It was revealed. God revealed it. He guides us into the truth.
Once you have the truth, the truth sets you free. How many of you who have come into that real knowledge of justification—that you are justified in Christ—can testify how free you were made just from that little teaching?
He leads us into this experience. He leads us to understand who God is and whom God accepts. Think of Peter and Cornelius. Peter went to Cornelius’s house and thought, “He is a Gentile. I should not go there.” But God poured out His Holy Spirit even on the Gentiles.
What did Peter say? “God is no respecter of persons.” He did not learn that in a book. He learned that through experience. I am not saying it was not in the Scriptures. If you read the prophets, you see pictures of, “I will call a people who are not called My people.” But Peter had to experience it, and then say, “Yeah, it is in the Word.”
The Spirit never leads into truth that is not in the Word. Just let me say that. When people come around and tell you, “Hey, there is this new truth,” ask them, “Where is it in the Word?” If they cannot tell you, tell them goodbye.
Morgan says that it is like being on a pilgrimage, just like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, going from place to place and learning the Lord as you go.
“He will speak of the things to come.” We have already said that. “He will glorify Me.” In other words, He will magnify who I am. He will magnify what I have done in your eyes.
Christ will become so great. You will see Him as the Power at the right hand because the Spirit will reveal Him as such. He will unveil His greatness.
It is a wonderful thing to come into a place where all of a sudden Christ is bigger. If you are my age and you have been in the faith for a while, you never come to an end.
When we think we have come to an end, we have come to a stopping point, what do we do? We start asking the Lord to show us more. “Tell me more, Lord. I am stuck here. I know You are bigger than this. Open to me Your greatness. I want to see it.”
When you do things like that, the Lord likes that. He did not deny Moses when Moses said, “I want to see Your face.” He did not say, “I am too holy. You cannot see Me.” No. He said, “You want to see Me? I cannot show you all of Me; it will kill you. I will show you My back.” But even seeing His back—yeah.
Now, that is His ministry to the disciples. Notice: His ministry to disciples, not merely believers. I am making that point because when He told these things, He told them to His disciples.
If you stay in the place of a believer, you do not get all the goods. Yes, you have sins forgiven—hallelujah!—but you do not get all the fullness of who Christ really is, because you do not want to go that far. You do not want to learn that much more.
You say, “This is good enough for me. I will camp out right here.” It is a good place, and it is a good place. But there is even more. It is a land filled with milk and honey, not just a place.
Now, His testimony to the world. He says, “I will convict.” That is a tough word, is it not? This word is also translated reprove and rebuke. Some people say convict means to become aware.
The Spirit is doing this after He is sent. This means after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ—not before, but after He has ascended on high and been glorified.
The Spirit will convict of sin—not sins, but sin. To simplify sin, let us put it this way: sin is living outside the will of God. Plain and simple. It is living outside the will of God.
It is not, per se, doing this or doing that; do not confuse it with sins. It is living outside the will of God and saying, “God, whatever it is You say is right, I really do not care. I want to do what I am going to do. I am living outside Your will.”
It is like the prodigal: “Dad, I do not want to live under Your rule anymore. I am going.” Okay.
What He is saying is that the conviction is because Christ has risen. There would be no conviction if He had not risen. This would just be nothing, because sin would be nothing if He never rose.
He is saying, “You rejected Me, but God did not reject Me. He raised Me from the dead.” It is the idea that I was sent from God to bring you back, to bring you back to the place where you could be in the will of God, and you rejected that.
You will be convicted. You will become aware of that because He has risen.
Then He says, “Of righteousness.” We have read or quoted Isaiah 53 for the last three or four Sundays at the Lord’s Table. Have you guys noticed that?
Isaiah 53 is a wonderful picture of the Lord and His suffering. But part of it says that we esteemed Him. In other words, when regular people looked at this Lamb, at this Person, the highest we thought of Him was that He was smitten by God and rejected by God. That is how high we esteemed Him.
The Holy Spirit is going to say, “You thought He was being crucified because He was unrighteous. Well, God raised Him. What does that mean? He was righteous.”
Even Peter, in his first sermon, says that God, by His works, showed Him to be righteous. The Spirit will convict. He will make people aware that He was righteous, that He was right in doing these things.
Then He says, “Of judgment, because the ruler of this world has been judged.” Judgment, because a Man ascended to the throne.
Jeffrey put up a nice little symbol here of the different heavens. Christ got past the one where the prince of the power of the air is. He got through that, and He got up to the higher one. What does that mean? It means He is higher than that other throne.
Because of that, judgment is coming upon that one throne because He has overcome it.
It is the resurrection that men reject. They do not reject the death of Christ because it is historical fact. Christ was crucified, and they look at it as an injustice. “Oh, this is terrible. He was a righteous man. He did good.”
They accept the person of Christ as a great teacher. They like His teachings because they seem right: “Love one another. Do unto one another as you want them to do to you.”
But the resurrection they reject. You know why people reject the resurrection? Because if they accept the resurrection, it means God’s judgment on man is true and just.
That is why they do not want the resurrection. That is why they reject it: because they want to live in their sin. They do not want God to be over them, and they do not want to be told, “We are not on the path that we should be.”
But He rose, and that is a fact too.
That is not where the Holy Spirit stops. In those days, when things were so new and so recent, this was the big thing. But today, the Holy Spirit still convicts of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment.
He does it through us who are disciples. Think about that. We talked about this being the Holy Spirit’s testimony to the world. He is testifying of Christ, is He not? He is testifying of who Christ is.
Isn’t it fitting, then, that we as believers, as disciples of Christ who are His body, are used by Him to testify of Christ to the world?
The Lord Jesus was led by the Spirit. His character was molded by the Spirit. Romans 8:14 says:
“For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.”
Why are they sons of God? Because the Spirit is working into them that same character which the very Son of God has. By that, man cannot escape the testimony of the Spirit of Christ in our own lives.
It is interesting, because it is not a creed that convicts man. It is life. When you look at the life of Christ in the Gospels, it was not just His teachings that convicted man. It was His life.
It was His life. Steve brought up that parable today from the life of the Lord. It was not just the teaching, because the teaching backed up what He was doing. He was accepting that person.
It was His life that convicted. Someone was saying, “I do not know if He really is a prophet. If He were, He would have known.” And He said, in effect, “To show you that I am a prophet, I will let you know: who loves more? You, who think you do not have much to be forgiven, or this person, who knows she has been forgiven much?”
His life backed up those things.
Secondly, He convicts because of righteousness. Again, it is life, not a creed, that convicts. In 2 Corinthians 5, this is the chapter that talks about the new creation, and that is what we are really talking about here.
Second Corinthians 5:17 is one we all quote: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” But if you go down to verse 20:
“Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God.
For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”
A righteous character and righteous acts come because we are ambassadors. This chapter is about winning others to Christ. Righteousness is not to exclude others. Righteousness is to win others.
You look at the life of our Lord Jesus Christ. His righteousness excluded no one. He did not hold anyone back because He was righteous. Rather, because He was righteous, He acted righteously, like God acts righteously.
He said, “I cause the rain to fall on the just and the unjust as well. I go out to sinners as well as those who do not think they are sinners.” Righteous in that way. His acts are righteous, and that is what convicts.
When you see a man treating another man the same as he treats every man, you start looking at the way you treat other people. Have you ever been convicted by seeing the way someone treats someone else?
Remember how David was convicted? The man with plenty of sheep took the other man’s one little sheep and served it up for dinner. David was upset. Nathan said, “You are the man.”
Righteousness—righteous acts—convicts.
Then it says, “Judgment.” It is not life that shows judgment; it is death. Death shows judgment.
It was the thief on the cross. When he was dying with the Lord, he sensed judgment was there, did he not? Yet he could say of Christ, “This Man has done no evil.”
But the death I am talking about is not necessarily physical death. It is the death of the cross. It is death to our self-life.
That is what convicts of judgment. To understand that the self-life is put away is to see that the self-life is not the one God is after.
People see that putting down of self. “Why do you not put yourself forward?” They see something else. They are convicted. The old man is not the one that God raises up.
This is the exact thing Satan did not want Christ to do. He did not want Him to die. Go back to the temptation in Matthew 4. Satan was trying to get Him to bow down so that He would not have to die.
Even on the cross, there was that temptation from Satan that said, “Come down off the cross, and we will believe You.” That had to be a powerful temptation: “Come down off the cross.” Even to the end, Satan did not want to see the death, because dying was judgment to him.
Brothers and sisters, what convicts us about our lack in our walk with the Lord is when we see others dying to themselves. Not in a showy way, but you notice it because you know them.
You see them dying to self, and all of a sudden it convicts you that the life you are living is not the one God wants. It is the one that should be condemned.
So He says, “Present yourself a living sacrifice.” Present yourself a living sacrifice—alive, present yourself alive to God, and say, “God, You have me. Everything I am, You have. I give it to You.”
Finally, the last verse I read said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
Now, God bless you. All who have believed in Christ may have the Holy Spirit. But I want to put this in a different way.
Have you ever received a guest into your home? When you receive a guest into your home, what do you do? You give them place, do you not?
As a matter of fact, it is your house, and yet you are serving them. Shouldn’t they be serving you in your house? Some of us think that: “That is my house. Serve me.”
But when I say, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” this is what I think the Lord would want us to do: receive Him as we would receive a guest, give Him that place of honor, and serve Him.
This is the new creation. The new creation is not just that you have the Spirit. Having the Spirit, you have given Him the place that He should have.
Remember, we are triune persons: spirit, soul, and body. The problem is that we either put our body first or put our soul first. Really, God’s order is that the spirit should be first.
The spirit, when Adam sinned, was vacated. But now the Spirit has come back. The question for us is this: what shall I do with Him? What shall I do with the Spirit of God in me?
I think the Lord is saying, “Receive Him. Receive Him whom I have given, and let Him be Lord.”
He is saying, “Disciples, I cannot stop the hard time that is coming. But if I go away, I am going to give you all that you need. I am going to give you a Helper.”
I would just like to end with this hymn as a prayer:
Breathe on me, Breath of God,
Fill me with life anew,
That I may love what Thou dost love,
And do what Thou wouldst do.Breathe on me, Breath of God,
Until my heart is pure,
Until with Thee I will one will,
To do and to endure.Breathe on me, Breath of God,
Till I am wholly Thine,
Till all this earthly part of me
Glows with Thy fire divine.Breathe on me, Breath of God,
So shall I never die,
But live with Thee the perfect life
Of Thine eternity.
May God bless His Word to us.