John 16:1-15

 

 ¹ “I have said all these things to you to keep you from falling away. ² They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. ³ And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me. ⁴ But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember that I told them to you. “I did not say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you. ⁵ But now I am going to him who sent me, and none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ ⁶ But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart. 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 go, I will send him to you. ⁸ And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: ⁹ concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; ¹⁰ concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer; ¹¹concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged. ¹² “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. ¹³ When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. ¹⁴ He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. ¹⁵ All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

  

When I was in 8^th or 9^th grade, the French teacher in our school invited me to go with her, her husband, and their grandson, who was a few years younger than me, on vacation to Orlando, Florida.  That all sounds unbelievably odd as I say it now, but it happened.  If I recall, the French teacher, who was a friend of my mother’s, asked if I would go on the trip so that their grandson would have somebody to pal around with in Disney and Sea World.  Furthermore, if I recall, I was informed that I would be going on this trip and, not being one to pass up free vacations, I was fine with that.

Now I had been to Disney a number of times but I had never been to Sea World.  Many of you have likely been to Sea World many times, but, to date, this remains the only time I have ever gone to Sea World.

Regardless, I remember it well:  the underwater observation tunnel with the moving conveyor belt, the cool activities, the rides, the water stunts.  Of course, what I remember most of all – and, I suspect, what most people remember most of all when they go to Sea World – is Shamu, the orca, the killer whale.

Man alive, that was amazing!  To sit there and watch this massive black-and-white killer whale do tricks was unbelievable.  If you have been there, you know that the whales splash the audience with water, lay on their backs, wave their huge flippers (or whatever you call those things!) and, in general, show off for the audience.

The biggest thrill of all is watching these beasts interact with their trainers.  I could not (and still cannot) conceive of these men and women diving into this massive water tank and interacting with these gargantuan killer whales!  It was amazing.  A trainer would jump on the back of the whale and ride it around.  Then the trainer would jump into the water and the whale would come up behind him and pick him up and jet him around the tank at full speed.

The coolest thing, though, was when the trainer would dive into the water and Shamu would dive down behind him.  For a moment, they both disappeared under the water.  Then, all of a sudden, Shamu came rocketing straight up out of the water with the trainer on its nose and the whale would catapult this little human being straight up into the air, maybe 30 or 40 feet, then the trainer would come spiraling down into a dive back into the water!

Whew!  That was an awesome sight, and one I won’t likely forget for a very long time.  When you see something like that, you feel a number of things:  exhilaration, amazement, disbelief and, in my case, a certain measure of fear.  The whole time I watched the interaction between that killer whale and the trainer, I kept thinking, “Not me!”

I want to ask you to think about that image for a moment:  a man (small, comparatively insignificant, comparatively weak, comparatively puny) and a whale (huge, comparatively gigantic, comparatively powerful, comparatively awe-inspiring).  The man is submerged in water, momentarily drowned, dwarfed by the surrounding expanse of water.  Then, all of a sudden, this little man is acted upon by an alien and foreign source:  an orca, a killer whale, some wild aquatic behemoth.  The whale goes deeper than the man and comes up underneath him.  When they connect, the man becomes part of the whale.  In doing so, the man receives within himself all of the sheer power, speed, might and awesomeness of the whale. He is propelled upward, like Icharus shooting toward the sun.  He emerges from his watery tomb, buried no more.  He bursts into the light of day, his figure now animated and enlivened by the shocking power of the whale beneath.  Up he comes!  Up, up, up!  And then he’s airborne, propelled into the sky, shot heavenward as if out of a cannon.  He never could have done it on his own.  He never will be able to do it on his own.  For a moment, he flies – 10, 20, 30, maybe 40 feet into the air – then he returns triumphantly to the water!

The whale has an astounding impact on the man.  The whale and the man have an astounding impact on the audience.  We watch in disbelief.  We marvel.  We stand in awe.  Then we cheer!  We applaud!  We celebrate!

Would you like to know what I think about when I think about that whale and that man?  I think about the Holy Spirit.  When I read John 16, for instance, I see a similar picture of a similar motion and phenomenon:  a small human being acted upon by a foreign power, connecting to that power and sharing in His might.  Jesus will depict the Holy Spirit in just this way:  He is powerful, awesome, life-transforming and capable of more than any human being could be capable of on His own.  He is God and carries the authority of God.  And this Holy Spirit comes down – down, down, down – to reach us in our submerged and drowning state.  When we receive the Lord Jesus, repent of our sins and open our hearts to Him, the Holy Spirit connects with us.  He comes, as it were, down from above and up from below.  He catches us.  Then the Spirit connects with us and we form a bond.  In that bond, the power of the Holy Spirit surges through us and He propels us up – up, up, up – until finally we emerge from our watery tomb and shoot up into the air and into the glory of the heights!

Jesus depicts the Holy Spirit like this:  an awesome force operating on a frail but willing man or woman. And, like the crowd watching Shamu at Sea World, Jesus told His disciples that the watching crowd would have a reaction to the Spirit’s work in the world.  The world always reacts to the work of the Spirit. Unlike Sea World, however, Jesus said that most of the world would hate and resent the work of the Spirit.  This is because the Spirit did not come to entertain, to titillate, to exhilarate, to impress.  He came to bear witness to God the Son, Jesus.  And, when He does that, the world reacts to the Spirit just as it did to the Son:  it hates the Spirit and it hates the one through whom the Spirit is working.

What this means, then, is that there is a movement to the Spirit, a kind of grand, cosmic baptism or immersion.  It was the same movement Jesus spoke of in John 12:

²³ And Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.²⁴ Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. ²⁵ Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

Jesus applied this grand movement of immersion and re-surfacing, of death and resurrection prophetically to Himself.  He comes down to be lifted back up.  Jesus’ entire incarnation was an immersion and raising.

The analogy also fits us.  We die to self so that we might rise again.  We are crucified with Christ so we might live.  As Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 2:11:

¹ The saying is trustworthy, for: If we have died with him, we will also live with him

This is the grand motion at the heart of the resurrection:  descension, then ascension.  It was the grand motion of the Lord Jesus.  It is the grand motion of our own salvation.  And we find in John 16 that it is the grand motion of the Spirit as well.  He descends from glory, is buried within the believer, then begins working back upward to the Father.  In doing so, there are three different interactions with three different parties:  the believer, the watching world and the Lord God.

I. The Holy Spirit Keeps Us From Losing Heart and Falling Away (v.1-6)

Let us first consider the Spirit’s effect upon believers in Jesus, followers of the Lord God.

¹ “I have said all these things to you to keep you from falling away. ² They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. ³ And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me. ⁴ But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember that I told them to you. “I did not say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you. ⁵ But now I am going to him who sent me, and none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ ⁶ But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart.

The first movement in the great upward motion of the Holy Spirit is His movement in and upon the believer and the believing family of faith.  In keeping with the theme of the coming persecution that the Lord Jesus foretold in the latter half of John 15, He points to the comforting and strengthening ministry of the Holy Spirit.

The early disciples were about to undergo terrible persecution.  They were about to pay a great price for following Jesus.  For instance, John MacArthur has helpfully summarized the persecution that the original disciples faced in this way:

A brief survey of ancient Christian tradition reveals that Peter, Andrew, and James the son of Alphaeus were all crucified; Batholomew was whipped to death and then crucified; James the son of Zebedee was beheaded, as was Paul; Thomas was stabbed with spears; Mark was dragged to death through the streets of Alexandria; and James the half brother of Jesus was stoned by order of the Sanhedrin.  Philip was also stoned to death.  Others, including Matthew, Simon the Zealot, Thaddeus, Timothy, and Stephen, were also killed for their unwavering commitment to the Lord.[i]

Indeed, the disciples did pay a price.  And, as we saw last week, it is a truism that all who seek to follow Jesus will pay a price as well.

One of the crucial ministries of the Holy Spirit is the strength that He offers struggling and suffering believers to endure in the face of trials.  His ministry is a keeping, sustaining, strengthening ministry.  He whispers assurances to us, hope to us and represents the continued presence of the Lord Jesus with us in the most difficult of times.

The Holy Spirit encourages and equips us so that we will not “fall away.”  The fact that Jesus reveals this means that in the Christian life difficulties will sometimes become so great that we will be tempted to abandon the faith.

This reality need not be relegated only to literal, physical persecution or torture and the temptation to recant the faith in the midst of pain.  In our context, it may be the more subtle but equally eroding reality of the pressure of living in a secular and anti-Christian society.  For instance, we must realize how challenging it can be for believers in our country to face the constant and consistence cultural accusation of being backward, of being narrow minded, of being ignorant and non-progressive.  Consider, for instance, the decaying power upon the believer’s resolve of the constant bombardment of television and movies and music in which behaviors and lifestyles that God’s Word reveals to be ungodly and destructive are held up as normative and good.  As the culture in which we live increasingly embraces unbiblical lifestyles as normal and normative, it will increasingly view those who hold to a biblical worldview as intolerant, as ignorant and as outright dangerous.

“Indeed,” Jesus says, “the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God.”

In our cultural context this may well refer to those who seek to shut down biblical Christianity in the name of a false god who has been fashioned in the likeness of American secularism and sentimentality.  As the false god of the age is exalted more and more, the God of scripture will increasingly be caste as an evil God and His followers as likewise wicked.

In particular, we need to consider how challenging it can sometimes be for our young people to hold to the faith in the face of the constant secular onslaught to which they are daily subjected.  Do not get me wrong:  I have every reason to think that young Christians are holding to the faith with more passion, in many cases, than their elders, but that simply proves the point that the Holy Spirit is sufficient to the task. Our young people are faced with anti-Christian forces in ways that some of us never have been, but the Holy Spirit is able to strengthen them in the face of this opposition.

Believer, do you know that the Holy Spirit resides within you in order to help you not to fall away?  He is the present voice that whispers in the darkest moments of your life, “Do not give up.  Do not quit.  Do not stop following.  Do not stop believing.  The Lord is with you.  The Lord loves you.  The Lord will see you through.”

II. The Holy Spirit Challenges the World Through the Church (v.7-11)

Like the giant whale coming up beneath the trainer in order to catapult him heavenward, so the Holy Spirit pours His power in and through us to encourage and equip us.  Just as this watery marvel causes the crowd the cheer, so too the watching world reacts to the transforming power of the Spirit.  But here the analogy breaks down.  It breaks down completely.  For while we go to Sea World to see a neat trick that titillates us, the world looks upon the marvelous work of the Holy Spirit with anger and resentment. The world does not applaud the Holy Spirit, though the change the Spirit makes and seeks to make in our lives is no less dramatic than the effect of a giant sea creature upon a small man or woman.  No, the world hates the work of the Spirit for what the work of the Spirit reveals bout the world.

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 go, I will send him to you.

Let us first note Jesus’ proclamation of the coming of the Spirit in the wake of His own ascension into Heaven as a desirable reality, an optimal situation in fact.  We oftentimes think that it would have been better if we could have lived in the days of Jesus’ incarnation, if we could have walked with Him and fellowshiped with Him in the first century.  Please recognize, however, that Jesus says this is not so.  It is better, “it is to your advantage,” that the Lord ascend to Heaven where He intercedes for us at the right hand of the Father and that the Spirit comes to take up His residence within us.  This is because the Holy Spirit represents a constant, internal, transforming, life-altering reality within the believer’s life.  The Spirit resides within us, bringing all that the disciples saw in the life and teachings of Jesus into our own hearts and minds, altering us forever from the inside out.

Jesus then moves to the effects of the Spirit upon the world and the reaction of the world to the Spirit’s power:

⁸ And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: ⁹ concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; ¹⁰ concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer; ¹¹ concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged.

The Holy Spirit moves up, changing the believer and, through the believer, challenging the world.  He does so in three ways:

• He convicts the world concerning sin.
• He convicts the world concerning righteousness.
• He convicts the world concerning judgment.

You will immediately notice the fundamental contrast between the Spirit’s effect on the church and the Spirit’s effect on the world.  He strengthens the church and the church rejoices.  He convicts the world and the world seethes.

As the Spirit draws the believer further and further into conformity with Christ, He necessarily draws the believer further and further away from the predominant world system:  its assumptions, its worldview, its mindset, its behavior, its patterns.  When this happens, the world is convicted concerning sin and righteousness and judgment.  Tragically, the world does not seem to be convicted unto repentance. Rather, it is convicted and shown the truth, but it continues to hate the truth.

This is a vital truth.  It is vital because it reminds us that when the world hates us, it is actually hating the Holy Spirit within us.  When the world feels threatened by us, it is really feeling threatened by the Holy Spirit within us.  The world hates the artwork of the Holy Spirit and the the church is the canvas on which He paints.

The church represents a prophetic challenge to the world as it allows the Holy Spirit to shape it Godward.  The Holy Spirit challenges and convicts the world.

III. The Holy Spirit Brings Glory to the Son by Revealing Divine Truth to the Church (v.12-15)

We have spoken thus far about the Spirit’s effect upon the believer and the world.  In the final movement of the Spirit, we will not speak of His effect, but rather of His revelation and proclamation.  Ultimately, what the Spirit does is bring glory to the Father and the Son.

¹² “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. ¹³ When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide[ii] you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. ¹⁴ He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. ¹⁵ All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

The Spirit brings glory to the Father and Son when He declares divine truth to the believer.  The Spirit proclaims glory when the Spirit brings revelation to the life of those who know Jesus.  When the Spirit reveals divine truth to believers, He is revealing the deepest loving intentions of the Father and the Son: to redeem and strengthen a people.

The Holy Spirit brings glory to God as He teaches us and changes us and shapes us into the image of Jesus.  That means that the Spirit brings glory to God not only through what He shows the believer, but also through the life of the believer as it is transformed through this divine revelation.

I have a friend who took on an Associate Pastor position in a large urban church after graduating from seminary.  He worked for a pastor who was fond of clichés and cute quips.  He and I used to laugh at these clichés in a rather self-righteous manner, I must confess.  Truth be told, some of the little sayings really were cringe-inducing even if theologically sound.

For instance, one of these little sayings that his pastor would voice from the pulpit really stands out.  His pastor would say this:  “Church, let’s be an earthly ad for the Heavenly Dad!”

Now, I do not really like that much, though my reasons are probably pretty subjective.  I think it is a bit too cutesy and a bit too trite.  But allow me to stop being a snob for a moment and extol the virtues of this tacky little saying.

“Be an earthly ad for the Heavenly Dad” is not something I would say, but there is a profound truth in it. As the Holy Spirit works within us, changing us and transforming us and conforming us into the image of Christ, we do indeed become an earthly advertisement for the glory and beauty and grandeur of our Heavenly Father.  The movement of the Spirit works upward through the believer, in the face of the watching world, for the glory of God.  This means that we have the distinct and high privilege of getting to say something about God through the way we live.

That fact raises an interesting question:  what kind of ad is your life for the Lord God?  Have you given yourself over to the transformative and changing power of the Spirit?  What does your life say about Jesus and the Father?  Does your life reveal that the Spirit of God has control of who you are and is working His work within and through you?  Or does your life reveal that you are keeping the Holy Spirit at arms length, not allowing Him to move within and out of you?

Let the Spirit have His way.  Do not hinder His great upward motion to the glory of God.