Dennis Tuuri

# SERMON TRANSCRIPT
## Reformation Covenant Church | Pastor Dennis Tuuri

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The advent of the Holy Spirit. Our text is found in John 14:15-17.

Please stand for the reading of God’s word. “If you love me, keep my commandments and I will pray the Father and he will give you another helper that he may abide with you forever. The Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him for he dwells with you and will be in you.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this season of light. We thank you, Lord God, for the light of the Holy Spirit and we ask that he would come and illumine our understanding of this text and transform us by his power and by his might. We know, Lord God, that unless we receive the illumination of your Holy Spirit, we are unable to comprehend or understand this portion of Scripture. We know that unless we are inwardly instructed by your spirit, the understanding of us all is seized and controlled by vanity and falsehood.

We know that apart from the light of the Holy Spirit, darkness does indeed cover the earth, gross darkness covers the people. But we thank you, Lord God, that you have promised that you shall arise on our darkness. And we pray now that you would illumine this text to our understanding. Help us, Father, to have faith in your word by the strength of your Holy Spirit and strengthen us for the task you’ve called us to do.

In His name we ask it. Amen. Please be seated.

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Well, we rushed the season just a bit this morning. We sang Psalm 98 at the beginning of Advent instead of at the conclusion. Most of you should know that Psalm 98 is the center of the fourth book of the Psalter. It’s the great middle and turning point of world history, speaking as it does of the coming of Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ. This is Advent season. Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday that kicks off the season of Advent here in our country at least.

A wonderful time of contemplation of the Advent of the Lord Jesus Christ once and for all 2,000 years ago, but also a time of preparation, of seeking the coming of the Lord and the power of the Holy Spirit for the task that He has called us to do in terms of world mission as well. This is a wonderful time of year. I love it. Friday after our Thanksgiving celebration, we went with the Shaws and the Schubans and the Selmers to hear the Oregon Trail Band and what a wonderful way to start off the Christmas season.

Many good hymns were sung by these very talented musicians and it was a wonderful time of beginning then a contemplation of the joy of this particular season. There was mention by one of the singers that the spirit of Christmas was coming into the place and you know these sort of events are always kind of a double-edged sword. The world has its spirit of Christmas that it celebrates and what we’re going to be talking about today is the advent of the true spirit of Christmas, the spirit of Christ, the advent of the Holy Spirit.

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We will not be departing from the Gospel of John during this Advent season. Rather we’ll be going through the particular section we find ourselves in speaking of the coming of the Holy Spirit today. Next week we’ll be speaking of the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, his life and love that he promises in verses 18 to 24 of chapter 14. Two weeks from today we’ll return to the subject of the Holy Spirit as the strengthening teacher from verses 25 and 26.

And finally at the end of chapter 14, beginning in verse 27, we read of the advent of peace, the coming of peace. And so these will be our topics as we move through this Advent season coming up to a celebration of the birth and the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now I’ve given you on your outlines the chiastic structure from John 13-17 developed by Wayne Brower. I’ve returned to this to give you an understanding of where we’re at as we move through this very significant portion of John’s Gospel, chapters 13 to 17, the upper room discourse and then the prayer in chapter 17. And if you look on the outline, we’ve talked about the gathering scene, unity and love in the context of the footwashing in verses 1-35. I spent a couple of sermons speaking about that. We talked about the prediction of the disciples’ denial of Christ at the end of chapter 13 and then His coming departure in verses 1 to 14 with the assurance of the Father’s power to them that he was going to give them the Father’s power even as surely as he was leaving.

And now we reach section D of this particular outline of the entire section 13-17. The promise of the Advocate. This is really a central truth in the upper room discourse. This subject we’ll be talking about today, the advent of the other helper, the Holy Spirit. I’d mentioned this before, but at the bottom of this chiastic structure we have here, I make a reference that the Holy Spirit in John 13-17 has five significant sections of the upper room discourse given over to a consideration of the Holy Spirit and today is the first of those. And I mentioned I think before here that the references to the Holy Spirit are eightfold as we go through chapters 13-17. On four separate occasions the word that’s translated “helper” in the New King James Version, which I’ve translated as “strengthener” at the top of your outline, Paraclete—this is the word that’s used to describe the Holy Spirit four times in the upper room discourse. On three occasions He’s referred to as in the text today as the Spirit of truth. And then once and only once the name the Holy Spirit to make sure we know who we’re talking about here.

So there’s an eightfold repetition of references to the Holy Spirit, a fourfold designation as strengthener and as the Spirit of truth, and then a single declaration that this is the Holy Spirit that Jesus is sending upon His death and resurrection. So then very significantly, the Gospel as it moves to its conclusion after the resurrection, Jesus breathes on the disciples and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The new creation is at work. They will be dispensers of the Spirit and of the message of the Gospel of Christ to all the world. And the new creation will be unfolded as history moves ahead.

And so we have the advent of the Holy Spirit today that we’ll be considering in our text. We’ll be returning to this teaching about the Holy Spirit many times over the next few months. As I said, it’s really—you could almost say that the entire discourse is sort of summed up in this central image of Jesus as the vine and we are the branches. But the sap flows and the growth happens by this Advocate, the Holy Spirit that’s talked about beginning in today’s text and throughout the rest of the discourse.

So this is really a discourse about the coming, the advent of the Holy Spirit.

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I want to talk today about three very simple truths. First, that Jesus puts a task in front of us: the task of love and obedience. Second, He gives us an enabling unto this task. And third, He says that there is a permanence to this enabling for the task that He has called us to do.

So first the task: the call to obedience and love. Brick and mortar.

Verse 15: “If you love me, keep my commandments.” And so there is this combination of love and obedience that’s pictured for us here. One commentator said that when he was a child, he went to his father to watch his men lay a brick wall. And his father explained, “While bricks are strong, if you put them on top of each other, they topple easily. While mortar is strong, if you build a wall out of just mortar, it’s really not as strong as bricks and mortar. Nor is it as beautiful.” And so brick and mortar go together to make a strong structure. And it’s an analogy—a poor one, I suppose—but love and obedience are drawn together here in the context of this command by our Savior.

Now, this is the context for the answered prayer that we spoke about last week in verse 14: “If you ask anything in my name, I will do it.” And as we said last week, the middle of the two assurances of answered prayer is the glorification of the Father. That’s the purpose of our prayers—to bring glory to the Father. And now it’s immediately followed by our Savior’s statement that if you love me, you’ll keep my commandments. So commandment-keeping, obedience and love, brick and mortar combined together is also seen in the direct context of his promise to answer prayer. And so answered prayer is on the basis of obedience and love for Him.

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The greater context is that we’re dealing in this section of the upper room discourse where our Savior is giving comfort to the disciples. Remember in verse one: “Let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me.” And He begins to give us comfort by this assurance of our eternal home and that this is going to have an effect here on our homes where we live. He tells us that in the first few verses of chapter 14, remember He has predicted the denial of Peter. At the end of this section of the upper room discourse in a matching bookend, He’ll predict the denial and scattering of all the disciples. But He comforts both Peter and all the disciples. He comforts them with the assurance of the eternal dwelling place that we’ll all go home when our work is done here. And indeed that has a significant change to our homes here. Knowing that truth and being empowered by Jesus, it changes our homes here.

And then the disciples asked Him some questions as chapter 14 unfolded. You could almost see Him as kind of getting off the subject over here a little bit. But now He returns to discourse mode as opposed to question-and-answer mode. And as He returns to discourse mode, He returns to this statement that we are—if we are to love Him—we’re to keep His commandments.

Now, so the great context for this is that He’s picking back up the discourse of comfort to His disciples, and comfort is to be found then in the path of duty and of love for the Lord Jesus Christ. I believe I put on your outlines this quotation from Matthew Henry: “We must not expect comfort except in the way of duty.” So if we’re seeking comfort, we’re to be seeking comfort in the line of duty, so to speak, as we’re loving Jesus and keeping His commandments.

This is also part of the way He comforts us. Matthew Henry would honor His commentary to say that in difficult times, our care for the events of the day should be swallowed up in a care concerning the duty of the day. So if we are overly concerned or stressed or anxious about the cares of the day and what we were supposed to get done and couldn’t get done, what problems might be sent to us, what difficulties the holiday season may pose for us—Matthew Henry says that these cares for the events of the day should be swallowed up in a concern for the duty of the day, because our Savior says that our comfort comes as we keep His commandments and as we love Him.

Love and law are brought together in what our Savior says here. And not just here—over and over again in John’s Gospel as well as in John’s epistle, First John, the first of His epistles, we see this connection between law and love.

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In John 14:21 we read, “He who has my commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves me.” So it’s kind of the converse of this: “If you love me, keep my commandments.” He who is keeping my commandments, it’s the demonstration that he loves me. Verse 23: “Jesus answered and said to him, if anybody loves me, he will keep my word.” Now, here it goes from commandments to word. When Jesus talks about commandments, it’s not just the few little commandments that He gives in the context of the Gospels. It’s all of His word. And because Jesus comes to speak the Father’s word and do the Father’s will, all of the Scriptures comprehensively are being referred to here as His word and His commandments. And He says that if anyone loves Him, he’ll keep His word and the Father will love him and they will come to him and make their home with him.

So love is flowing back and forth in the context of obedience to Jesus’s commands, to Jesus’s words. In 1 John 2:3: “Now by this we know that we know him if we keep his commandments.” So the demonstration of our love and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ is commandment-keeping.

In 1 John 3:22: “Whatever we ask, we receive from him because we keep his commandments and do those things that are pleasing in his sight.” Just as here in this Gospel, the answer to our prayers is contingent upon obedience. So here in First John as well, we read that whatever we ask, we receive from Him because we keep His commandments and do those things that are pleasing in His sight.

Verse 24: “Now he who keeps his commandments abides in him and he in him.” Now at the center of the upper room discourse is the vine imagery. The abiding in the Lord Jesus Christ is tied directly here in this part of the discourse and later in John’s epistle to obedience. If we obey Jesus, if we keep His commandments, we abide in Him and Jesus abides in us and by this we know that He abides in us by the Spirit whom He has given us.

In 1 John 5:3: “This is the love of God that we keep his commandments.” So you know, we live in a day and age when commandment and love are seen as two different things. You know, it’s not “don’t tell me that I have to love my wife because if I love my wife the way the Scriptures tell me to, that’s artificial somehow. That’s not really coming from love for me. That’s commandment-keeping.” We have this distinction that is made. We have a distinction between loving one another, loving God on the one hand and keeping commandments, and we want relatively little to do with this now.

So the ditch that our culture or evangelical culture falls into is a commandmentless and obedienceless love, kind of a gushy, sentimental, romantic view of what love is. It would be easy for us to slide over to the other edge of the road and fall into the ditch where love is equated in a kind of wooden sort of way with commandment-keeping: “As long as I’ve done my obligations to my wife, as long as I’ve done my obligations to my children, I’ve kept the commandments and therefore I’ve loved them.” No, I don’t think that’s what’s being said here.

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There is this incredible, absolutely astonishing blessing being unfolded in this upper room discourse: this relationship that we have with Jesus as vine and branches. But peppered throughout the thing are references to the Father and how we’re abiding really in the Father. He’s making us a way to the Father. And now we begin to have a whole series of references to the Holy Spirit indwelling us. All of this because God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has set His love upon you and because He calls for your love to Him in relationship to that.

And whether we swing over to a love that doesn’t keep commandments or a bare keeping of the external commandments of Christ and not loving Him with our emotional aspect, with our covenantal faithfulness—either one of those things is wrong. Here in this text, law and love are wrapped together as a picture of what we do.

Now, the same thing is repeated in many places. In Romans 13:10, for instance: “Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law.” Again, this wrapping together of law and love. So we want to understand that this task that Jesus is commanding of us here or predicting will occur is a task both of love and commandment, of a relationship that has a definite structure to it. A structured relationship between people, between us and the triune God and between us and those that He calls into our lives as well. It is indeed brick and mortar. There’s a strengthening that happens as these two aspects of our relationship to the triune God are brought together in the context of God’s word.

C.K. Barrett said it this way: “John never allowed love to devolve into a sentiment or emotion. Its expression is always moral and it is revealed in obedience.” So this kind of love—biblical love—never degenerates into a sentimental, pious gush, so to speak, but rather is always set in the context of an ethical relationship of obedience.

And so the love and obedience go together here. Jesus Christ showed His great love for the Father by His obedience to the Father. And He calls on us to demonstrate our love for Him by obedience to His word.

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You know, we have a requirement to actively love our wives as husbands. You know, I’d been meditating—having taught the Song of Solomon—we know that God commands to our weakness and so He tells husbands to love their wives because we don’t, we fail to do that. We need to hear that over and over. But He doesn’t command only to our weakness. I think He commands with that commandment to the weakness of our wives as well.

If you go through the Song of Solomon, the woman there—Mrs. Solomon, the wife who becomes married to Solomon in the center of the text—very center of the book—what you find is that before and after the marriage, she has great insecurities about her relationship to her husband. She’s always asking, “Where is he? I can’t find him.” I think a lot of that is dreamlike scenes after their marriage—a very intense dream where she can’t find her husband and she goes out to look for him. He gets beat up by the guards of the city. Now, we know it’s a dream. She says that she is awake and yet sleeping. Plus, we know it’s a dream because Solomon’s guards would never beat his wife. But the point is that there’s an intensity to the anxiety of the woman to know the love of her husband.

Now, Jesus demonstrates His love for His bride all the time. And if we miss it during the day, we certainly see it focused here where He wants us to recall every Lord’s day the fact that as our church’s Husband, He died for us out of His great love for us. He wants us to meditate. He shows us these acts of love all the time because we need to hear it. We’re anxious about it. Husbands, your wives are anxious to know that you attend to them, that you love them. They want your presence to be with them. You see? They want to know you’re fulfilling your covenant obligations not in some sort of external ritual but with love and obedience.

And God commands us then not just because we don’t tend to do it but because our wives need it very much. And we can say the same thing about the central command of wives: the command to reverence and to have a submissive attitude, a desire to be thankful for their husband, to build him up in what he does. God commands women to do that because it’s not easy for them to do in the flesh. It’s impossible. But He also commands to your husband’s weakness. Your husband is prone to doubt whether he has done anything right in life. And so He wants the wife to constantly reassure him, to give him thanks for what he’s accomplished, to see what small acts he’s done.

So this love and obedience that we’re now talking about in terms of our relationship with the triune God—which is incomprehensible to us, that the value of that can be seen now at the basic level of what we do every day in our lives. We’re called to enter into it. It’s a love for one another as husbands and wives and a love that isn’t just some sort of sloppy agape, so to speak. Isn’t just some kind of pious sending flowers and valentines and all that sort of stuff all the time. It’s obedient acts to the Father’s will that you nurture and guard your spouse or that you reverence your husband.

So in the family, the very context of the family, the love that goes on in the family, we can get it very wrong all the time, and particularly in a culture that has separated law and love. We have separated commandments from our love for one another. The same thing’s true in terms of loving Christ. You know, people can say, “Well, I love Jesus. You know, I really love him a lot.” And then care not for what His commandments are, not study His word, not go to Sunday school class or other seminars to try to find out what Jesus’s word is.

We talked last week about, you know, may it never be true of us—and yet it so often is—that we neglect God in our lives. Well, here if our love for the Savior is tied explicitly to our obedience of His word, doesn’t that imply that we should never be neglectful of that word? And yet we are. I am. You are. We’re neglectful all the time. It’s hard for us to get together and spend a little time in the Scriptures in our families. It’s hard for us to make time for the very word of God in the context of our homes. But you see, if we’re not doing that and say we love Jesus, and don’t have a knowledge and obedience to His word, we’re just telling a lie. It just isn’t true. We’ve got some kind of romantic thing going on with them, but it’s not what the Scriptures call love. The Scriptures tie together love and obedience. And so we must never take these things apart.

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Matthew Henry—or I guess this was, let’s see, I’m not sure if this was Matthew Henry or John Calvin—said, “If they would show their love to him, they do it not by these weak and feminine passions, weak passions we’ll say, but by their conscientious care to reform their trust or to perform their trust and by a universal obedience to his commands.” This is better than sacrifice. Obedience is better than some kind of sacrifice apart from the word of Christ.

To speak of love apart from obedience would open the way to a purely emotional and sentimental interpretation of the abiding that Jesus is going to talk about here. What is it to abide in the vine? Well, it’s easy to get off the track, but here at the very moment as Jesus moves us toward this consideration of abiding, He tells us that our abiding must be unto obedience. That it’s love and obedience brought together.

Jesus has over and over again in this Gospel by a couple of different means shown the validity of the whole of Scripture to us. He said that He comes to reveal the Father. So if we want to say the Father is preeminent in the Old Testament, which I’m not sure is true—Yahweh is Jesus typically in the Old Testament—still, we can’t see the New Testament as some kind of better revelation somehow that’s different ethically or morally or in terms of covenant from the Old Testament. Through our differences, which we’ll get to, Jesus has many times asserted the unity of Father and Son in the revelation of what’s going on. And we have seen in John’s Gospel over and over again connections to the Old Testament from the very beginning of the Gospel in “the beginning” drawing it back to Genesis 1 and new creation is at work.

And so you know what we have here is absolute folly for the Church to separate the commandments of the Old Testament away from the word of the Father coming through now Jesus Christ. That is the absolute wrong thing to do here. What we want to see is that Jesus’s word—you know, what are the commands of Jesus? Though I got a book out on the commands of Jesus, well, I finally figured it out. It’s all the commands in the Gospels. So he lists all these—I don’t know, maybe there’s 70 commands or something. And so these are the commands of Jesus that we have to keep. Well, you see, that flies right in the face of what Jesus has said over and over in this Gospel: that there is one word from God. Jesus is the revelation of God. He’s the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of Scripture. Jesus’s word, His commands to us, demonstrate great love. We’re not to be neglectful, but attentive then to the Father’s word.

Jesus says in verse 24 of chapter 14: “He who does not love me does not keep my words. The word which you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me.” So Jesus calls us to this task of law and obedience. And He calls us to a task here that is impossible.

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That at this—if we were to stop the reading of the Scriptures at this point and if we were to just go home and say, “Okay, I got to keep the law of God as I love Him. I got to keep the commandments of Christ. I’ve got to keep His word. I got to understand that word. And then I got to try real hard to obey it. And I understand that this is connected to my love of Jesus. That if you love me, you’ll keep my commandments. In other words, if you’re going to abide in me, you must have love for me that issues forth in commandment-keeping—the demonstration of that love.” But if we were to stop here, He sets before us an absolutely impossible task. This is the very thing we cannot do in our fallen nature. In our fallen nature, we want to suppress the truth of God and unrighteousness. We want to hold it back. We have free will, but we will choose every time the wrong thing in the context of our fallen nature.

Jesus then goes on—then not just having given us this command—He goes on to tell us of the enabling of how we’re to keep this command. And if we keep this straight, this progression of love and obedience to now the gift of the Holy Spirit, we’ll understand more what the Holy Spirit’s job is, what He is going to get us to do.

Jesus sends us a strengthener. He promises us here that you know, in relationship to love and obedience: “I will pray the Father and he will give you another helper that he may abide with you forever.” So in other words, I know I’ve given you an impossible task. He says, you can’t do this. I’m going away. Without me you can’t do it. But I’m going to send the Holy Spirit. I’m going to request from the Father. He will send the Holy Spirit. And this Spirit will strengthen you to do these twin acts of love and obedience.

So this is the purpose of the advent, the coming of the Holy Spirit in a nutshell: to enable or to strengthen us to love and to obedience.

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Now this Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Now I need to touch on this. This is an important truth and it gets a little maybe a little arcane to you but this is a portion of Scripture where the procession, the advent, the coming of the Holy Spirit is discussed. Jesus says here that He will pray the Father. And by the way, this particular word for “pray” is not the word that’s usually used of us when we make supplication or entreaty to the Father. This is a demonstration of the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ. The word is different from that. It’s a request of the Father. So there is a functional subordination to the Son, but it’s not the sort of subordination the creature has to the Creator. You understand? Different word used here.

He requests from the Father and He will give you another helper. The Holy Spirit proceeds obviously from the Father. However, in chapter 15:26 we read, “But when the helper comes whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify of me.” “I will send you the Spirit who proceeds from the Father. So He’s proceeding from me. I’m sending the Spirit. He’s proceeding from the Father.”

Chapter 16:7: “Nevertheless I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I go not away, the helper will not come to you. But if I depart, I, Jesus says, will send him to you.”

Now this is called the dual procession of the Holy Spirit. Augustine was the first to really articulate this in theological work. I mean the Scriptures clearly do, but in a theological work. This has been a bone of contention for the last 2,000 years. Does the Holy Spirit proceed just from the Father or does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son? And it may seem not a big deal to you. But it is an absolutely world-shattering deal in point of fact because here’s the problem.

The problem is that humanity always wants to seek to itself more power and authority as opposed to ceding that to Jesus Christ, King of Kings. The fallen world wants to subordinate Jesus Christ to the Father. They want this master principle, unitarian kind of thing up there somewhere. And Jesus is subordinate to that. And the Holy Spirit is subordinate in terms of essence, not just function. And the value of that is that then we don’t have to go through Jesus and the Holy Spirit. They kind of show us the way, but then really it’s left up to mankind to reach to this unitarian Father in heaven who is the primary principle or sole source of everything else, the sole source of all beginning.

I heard Ravi Zacharias again this morning on the radio and he was talking about unity and diversity. This is absolutely essential to Christian freedom because it keeps the state at bay and it empowers the Church as a ministry of grace. It’s essential that the Trinity is affirmed. And what happens when the Holy Spirit is sent to proceed just from the Father and not also from the Son is the end result of that is a subordination of the Son to the Father in eternity and in essence, not just in His function of coming to do the Father’s will.

Now I know this is tricky stuff, but the reality is that when we say that the Spirit proceeds from the Son as well, that means the Son and the Father and by implication the Spirit are all equally in essence and in determination and sovereign in the affairs of men.

The early Church councils—the Fifth Council—said that anybody who did not affirm the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son as well as the Father is anathema, outside of the faith, accursed. You see, there are self-consciously those who believe this and teach this, and for many years this has been quite a dilemma. The Eastern Orthodox Church has never accepted in its doctrinal formulations for the last thousand years the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son. And one of the implications of that is that in Eastern Orthodox country after Eastern Orthodox country you end up with dictator-like states and diminished churches because the Son is diminished, the Spirit’s work is diminished.

There’s some vague single principle of the Father above it all. And as a result of that, now the state becomes the mechanism to show us the way to the Father as opposed to the Son and the Holy Spirit. So this has been a major problem, and it’s a problem in our day and age. In 1967, as an example, the Episcopalian Church in America in a trial communion liturgy produced talked about the procession of the Spirit not from the Son but just from the Father.

Even Episcopalianism is now moving away—slowly but surely—from the doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son as well as the Father. And so we need to point out here that John 14 and 15 is an absolutely essential text of Scripture describing the Holy Spirit and where the Holy Spirit proceeds from. We’re going to sing the Nicene Creed again, you know, and we’re going to sing about how the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and it’s emphasized in the text.

It is critical to the strengthening of God’s people to do the task that we’re called to do: to not subordinate the two other persons of the Trinity ultimately and eternally to the Father in heaven. We have more and more groups today that believe in just one God existing in three different forms—modalism. We have Protestant churches, Western churches beginning to move toward doctrinal formulations of the Eastern Orthodox Church where the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son is denied.

And as a result, the whole purpose of this denial is to exalt the Father as the single principle above all other truths and it’s a movement away from Christian freedom. It’s a movement away from strength.

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This Spirit that we’re going to talk about the next few months in this upper room discourse—this Spirit is explicitly said to proceed from the Father and from the Son. This spirit, to combat another heresy of our day, is not a gift that is earned. This Spirit is given by the Son and the Father. He says, “I will pray the Father and He will give you another helper. Not based upon some merit on your part, not based upon your abilities or some reward for you.” No, the Holy Spirit is a gift.

John 7:39: “This he spoke concerning the Spirit whom those believing in him would receive. Those believing in him would receive. For the Holy Spirit was not yet given because Jesus was not yet glorified.”

In Acts 2:38, Peter in his Pentecost sermon says, “Repent and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

In our day in charismatic circles, the Holy Spirit is seen as some kind of second blessing. All too often, something is to be earned by people. Well, if that’s the case, and the impossible task that Jesus set before us—apart from the strengthener to come—we will never be able to do it. Apart from the indwelling Holy Spirit who brings us Christ’s obedience, who ministers strength to us to the task, how can we complete the task? We cannot. The Spirit is a gift. It is received. It’s not gone out and sought after by Christ’s disciples. It is a gift from God.

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Secondly, or in addition to that, the Holy Spirit is another helper. Jesus says that He will give you another helper. So here the particular word for “helper,” which we’ll get to in just a minute, it’s only used in this Gospel and it’s also used in one other place in John’s epistle, the First Epistle, again chapter 2, verse one. “My little children these things I write to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.”

The fact that the Holy Spirit is given as another helper is because Jesus Christ is the first helper or strengthener to the task. Now I keep using this word strengthen and this word Paraclete means to call alongside of someone. And the particular word that’s used here can be translated in various ways and all of them good. More often than not probably many of you have heard of the Holy Spirit as the comforter, right? Comforter. Well, that’s a good name if we know the etymology of the word comfort.

We think of “comforter”—you know, I remember an old discussion of settler theology versus pioneer theology. And in pioneer theology, the Holy Spirit was the wagon train cook who’d throw up raw meat to the men and they’d grab it and go get ready to keep pressing forward. And in settler theology, the Holy Spirit was the barmaid. And you know, guys would be crying in their beer and she’d come up and tickle them under the chin. And that’s the idea of comfort. You know? Comfort you when you’re feeling… Well, there’s some truth to that of course but that’s not what this word means.

Comfort originally was used—and this is like the mansion thing by Wycliffe and then Tyndale—and the word was a composite of two things: “com” or “con” with “fort,” “fortis”—strength. To comfort someone was to give them strength, to embolden them, to give them courage, to bring fortitude to them. And here the Holy Spirit is being described in just that way. We have an impossible task to perform: to love and obey Jesus. But the Holy Spirit is given so that we might be able to have the courage, the fortitude, the strength for the task.

And so the Holy Spirit is the strengthener. Now this particular Paraclete also was—as we read in 1 John 2—can be translated “advocate.” Again there it’s a good word. “Counselor” is another word, but only if we think of “legal counselor.” That’s what the term was used in in Greek terminology. It was a lawyer who would guide you through the maze of all the laws and the regulations of the system. You needed an advocate in court to know how to plead motions and do this that and the other thing and fulfill all the requirements of law.

Well, Jesus has just told us that we have a universe that’s mediated to us in love and commandment, right? We have an entire world that moves in terms of God’s law. Yeah. We got a world in which we need to be guided and trained, guided through and by this law, this world of God’s law and its consequences of blessings and cursings. God gives us the Holy Spirit to guide us in the context of the legal realities of the world in which we live. We like to deny all that there is no law of God that’s moving in the context of the world. But God makes it quite clear that this world moves in terms of His providence, His overarching sovereignty.

And so the Holy Spirit comes to strengthen us to law-keeping, to guide us in terms of how that law is administered to us in our daily affairs of life. The Holy Spirit is a comforter in the sense of bringing strength. He is a counselor in the sense of getting us through the legal world in which we live. He is a lifegiver. We’ll see. He’s a teacher. We’ll see that in a couple of weeks. He brings peace and He brings us according to Second Corinthians 3:17 and 18 the freedom or liberty. The Holy Spirit is there as freedom or liberty as well.

And so Jesus promises to give us a strengthener to the task. And as we look forward to this season of light and the advent of our Savior, the Savior comes to us in the smaller advents every Lord’s day by the coming of the Holy Spirit who indwells us and empowers us to the particular task that we’re called to do this week.

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You know, my wife—my mother, dear Christian woman—had one of her phrases that she always said was, “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.” It’s a great life if you don’t weaken. We’re prone to weaken. And what we need to do in our weakened state is to rely upon the Holy Spirit to seek His strength, His guidance, His counseling strength to us, bringing comfort and endurance for the task. He is the source of strength for us. When we’re weak, He becomes strong in the context of who we are.

Now, the Holy Spirit always indwelt God’s people in the Old Testament. You know, Abraham, David, all the saints of old, Ruth—they didn’t live their lives of love and obedience to God through the power of their own abilities. The Spirit of God was moving in the context of them. Maybe they didn’t understand it quite as well, but they did. They moved in the context of obedience. You know, Abraham was obedient to the law. Well, wait, Dennis, the law didn’t come till Moses at Sinai. That was after. Yeah. But if you look at the Pentateuch, if you look at the book of Genesis, many laws that were then formulated later in the context of the law of Sinai were already obviously in place, right? Laws of slavery dealing with Jacob would become codified later, but apparently they knew all about them. Judah didn’t keep the law of the Levirate correctly and so was under judgment from God because of that. But the Levirate law isn’t published till well after that with the coming of Moses and the covenant at Sinai.

I could go on and on. There’s at least six or seven different specific case laws in Exodus 21-23 that are demonstrated as being known by the people prior to the law coming. In fact, Abraham is described as a man who keeps law, judgments, and statutes. See, Abraham didn’t have some vague concept of the character of God. God had apparently revealed law to him and not just general Ten Commandments stuff, but statutes and judgments because Abraham kept them and he couldn’t keep them if they weren’t there.

Paul makes the same point that while the law comes in the sense of the Sinaitic law, still, death had reigned from Adam on because there is law from Adam on all the way down through. Well, how did Abraham keep those statutes and judgments? He had the impossible task of trying to keep God’s law. Well, God, of course, empowered him to do that by the Holy Spirit.

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So, what’s new about this? Why is the need—why do we have this need now for this great strengthener to the task? Because what John’s Gospel is all about is that with the coming of Jesus, now the whole world will change. Now the Gospel would be preached to all the nations. There was some of that in the Old Testament, but there was still a division, a special priestly people, a preparation for the coming, the advent of Jesus, Savior of the nations come. Right? That’s what happened. And to save the nations, He sends forth you and I, our children, into the world. And we do our tasks in the power of the Holy Spirit with love and obedience to Jesus.

And as a result, He promises that all the world will be disciples—that all the nations will be discipled. He tells us that our task in life is to as we go make disciples of all the nations and He promises us that He will be with us forever in the context of that call to go forth as His people and disciple the nations. And here He tells us—in the middle, at the end of Matthew’s Gospel—here in the middle of John’s Gospel He tells us how He will be present with us. He will be present with us by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God is the strengthener to mission. The Spirit of God is the strengthener of obedience and of love.

The Spirit of God comes not to make us somehow uncontrolled in how we worship Him. You know, I had a question last week about why we don’t speak in tongues here, you know, and why aren’t there these manifestations of the Holy Spirit? Well, there are manifestations of the Holy Spirit. It’s coming as our strengthener to the task of love and obedience. And as we have in the context of our gathering together, love and obedience for the Lord Jesus Christ, for the Father in the power of the Spirit, there we see the presence of the Holy Spirit to us.

Remember, this is the same Spirit in the Old Testament who would come upon people to equip them for artistry and beauty and those several callings of life. When you go to work tomorrow, you go with the indwelling Spirit who strengthens you to keep not just the Ten Commandments, but to keep the entire counsel of God’s word which is comprehensive in terms of families, vocations, ecclesiastical matters, matters of state, matters of community, matters of all things in life.

The advent of the Holy Spirit that we celebrate this particular Lord’s day is the Spirit of truth, faithfulness to us in the word of Christ who empowers us for the task that He has set before us.

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Notice as well that this Spirit is antithetical to the world. This is why the disciples would need strengthening because you’re going to go on in this discourse to talk about the troubles they’re going to have in the world. If you’ve got a whole ocean of weeds and you plant a rose or two, the rose is going to have difficulties and in its own strength, it will not be able to overcome the weeds. But the Lord Jesus Christ says that “stronger is he that is in you” than “he that is in the world.”

The Scriptures make it quite clear in 1 Corinthians 2 that there are two spirits abroad. 1 Corinthians 2:8: “None of the rulers of this age knew. For if they had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him. Even so, no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God.”

How will we be formed this holiday season? Will we enter into the spirit of Christmas of the world? Or will we say no? We enter into the spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ because Christ makes it quite clear in calling us to this task of obedience and love and then providing the enabling, the strengthener to obedience and love. He makes it quite clear that the world cannot receive the Spirit of truth. Yet neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him for he dwells with you and will be in you.

Jesus says that this Spirit makes what we do antithetical to the world. “Blessed is the man that walks not in the counsel of the ungodly. Blessed is the man who seeks not strength from the world system, who seeks not prosperity in some way other than the strengthening of the Holy Spirit, bringing the word of our Savior as He indwells us and gives us the divine nature.”

Yes, the divine nature is what we’re talking about here. Second Peter 1:4 says that we have indeed been made partakers of the divine nature. We are now indwelt by the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit of God who brings us the Lord Jesus Christ that we might be empowered to love and obedience.

Jesus says in verses 30-31 of chapter 14: “But that the world may know that I love the Father and as the Father gave me commandments so I do. This is the purpose. He said, ‘for what I’m telling you now. Arise and let us go forth from here.’” Jesus shows us the divine nature. The divine nature is love for the Father, love for the Son, love for the Holy Spirit in obedience to the whole counsel of God’s word as it comes to us.

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Jesus Christ promises us not just that we’re enabled to this task, but He tells us that this Spirit will abide with us forever. He tells us of the permanence of this equipper. “He will pray the Father. He will give you another strengthener that he may abide with you forever.”

God tells us that this is our portion and our inheritance. This is the advent of the Holy Spirit: the strengthening into obedience and love. And this is a strengthening that will never be taken away from us.

Now, we can quench the Holy Spirit. In 1 Thessalonians 5:18 and 19, we read that “in everything we’re to give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus. For you, do not quench the Spirit.” The Spirit comes to give us a spirit of thanksgiving, obedience, and love for the Savior. The Spirit comes to give us empowerment for the mission that we take into all the world.

Today, in the providence of God, we will be praying for and commissioning a group of twelve of our members here at Reformation Covenant Church to go in the power and the strength, the enabling work of the Holy Spirit to go and preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to teach Christ’s word and to be an encouragement to the beloved of Jesus that have come to him in India and to be a further call upon those that are beloved of Jesus and have not yet come to the faith.

Jesus says that the Spirit comes that we might fulfill His mission. His mission is one to the entire world. His mission is one of strengthening to obedience and love. And Jesus promises us the advent of the Holy Spirit to that task.

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Our young people that’ll be going today—it’s an exciting time for them and for their parents. I thought of them and Matthew Henry says that “they who were designed for public service in life, they must disperse.” You know, there are these cohorts, these groups going through our Sunday school class. I had about twenty of them in my class today. And I thought to myself, you know, they’re going to disperse. They live a college life now, kind of, you know, collegiate together, but they’ll have to be dispersed abroad to the various tasks and callings that they’re given by God: to vocation, to family, to mission direct in some cases, indirect in the context of vocation in others.

Jesus says parents don’t worry. He gives the Holy Spirit to strengthen and equip our young people for that life of service—not just for the collegiate life that they do now, but the life of public service as well. Jesus said, in other words, this: “I am setting before you a hard task. I’m sending you out on a very difficult engagement, but I’m going to send you someone, the strengthener, the Holy Spirit, who will guide you as to what to do and as when you should do it, and he will empower you for that very task.”

This is the season of Advent, a season of preparation for the coming of the Savior. May the Lord Jesus Christ cause us in the context of our families to seek the Spirit through the music and singing of the season. We know that the Spirit is linked to the coming of music and the Scriptures. The Spirit is linked to the voices of other people speaking the truths of God’s word to us and the Spirit mediates the word of the Lord Jesus Christ to us.

May this be a holiday season in which we celebrate the strengthening of the Holy Spirit for the task of world mission and the task of the new creation that we have in our families, our vocations, and in the Church and the state.

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Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this tremendous blessing that you described for us here. We thank you for the very difficult task we have been given by you to do—to love and obey the commandments of our Savior. We know that it’s difficult, but we know also that you have given us strength to fulfill this task, not of ourselves, but through the marvelous indwelling of the Holy Spirit, who empowers us for the hard task you set in front of us.

Indeed, Lord God, it is a wonderful life if we don’t weaken, if we don’t move away from your Spirit by quenching Him with unthankfulness, quenching Him by a neglect of His word, quenching Him by a neglect of one another—the Christian fellowship that encourages us and strengthens us to the task you’ve called us to do.

May this be a season in which we congregate, in which we sing forth praises to you, in which we seek your word, not neglecting it, but rather seeing in that very word the strength to enable us not to weaken and to enjoy the wonderful life you prepared for us. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen. Amen. Amen.