The Holy Spirit

I wonder if any of you have ever had this experience of having something right in front of you that you've not been able to spot or see. I'm not talking about a man looking in the cupboard for a can of baked beans or something like that. For many, many years, my family and I, who are visiting again this morning, I had the amazing privilege of being able to go to the Kruger National Park on a regular basis, an annual basis, to go and spot animals, wonderful animals. I didn't say tigers, leopards, lions, zebras, monkeys, the like. One of the most interesting things that could happen when you were out trying to spot these animals would be coming along a road and seeing ten, twelve cars all parked and huddled together, obviously looking at something in the bush. And as you drive up, you know that the amount of cars there means that it's something pretty great.

So you pull up and you start looking, and you look at where they're looking and then you start looking. And you look and you look in the trees, and you look along the ground, and for the life of you, you can't see what is being looked at. So after twenty minutes of quiet staring, and feeling probably a little bit ashamed because you're not as good at spotting wildlife as someone else, you go up to them in the next car and you say, what are you looking at? And funnily enough, they can say it's a leopard just five metres, just in the ditch there. And as soon as they've said it, lo and behold, a leopard five metres in the ditch.

It's one of those uncanny things. Until someone has mentioned it to you, until someone has told you, you cannot see past the camouflage, and you cannot see past the stillness of the animal without a person pointing out the reality to you. It's as though that leopard or that zebra or that lion never existed. As Jesus, in this morning's passage, prepares his disciples for the cross, he shares an insight about God that is something similar to this. Unless God intervenes in our lives, in our hearts, in our minds, we will not see Him. We will not understand the cross.

Unless the Holy Spirit comes and teaches us the meaning of what Easter is all about, we might only see it as a celebration of chocolate eggs. Without the true reality hitting home for us, we will live as though the cross never existed. Let's have a look at John 16, and we're going to look at the work of the Holy Spirit as Jesus prepares His disciples for the cross. John 16 from verse five. Jesus continues with these words to His disciples.

Now I am going to Him who sent Me. Yet none of you asked Me, where are you going? It's because I've said these things that you are filled with grief. But I tell you the truth, it is for your good that I'm going away. Unless I go away, the counsellor will not come to you.

But if I go, I will send Him to you. And when He comes, He will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment. In regard to sin because men do not believe in Me, in regard to righteousness because I am going to the Father where you can see Me no longer, and in regard to judgment because the prince of this world now stands condemned. I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when He, the Spirit of Truth, comes, He will guide you into all truth.

He will not speak on His own. He will speak only what He hears, and He will tell you what is yet to come. He will bring glory to Me by taking from what is Mine and making it known to you. All that belongs to the Father is Mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is Mine and make it known to you.

In a little while, you will see Me no more, and then after a little while, you will see Me. So far, our reading. Two important topics that Jesus dispels about the Holy Spirit that is useful for us to remember. Firstly, this: that the Holy Spirit, this counsellor, this one that is sent after Jesus ascends to heaven, Jesus is talking about His death, resurrection, and ascension in the same time. Jesus says that the Spirit will reveal something about us.

I don't know if you remember a few years ago, there was an ad for toothpaste, and I don't know if it's true or not. I hope that it is because that would make it far more interesting. A woman was approached just walking down the street on her way to work or something like that, and it was, I don't know, a Colgate booth set up there. And they asked the lady, did you brush your teeth this morning? And she said, yes.

She said, do you feel that you've done a good job? She said, yes. They said, well, would you please help us with an experiment? Would you chew this tablet for us? And she does.

And this tablet is designed to soak into the plaque and the tartar of a person's mouth and to reveal sort of what's going on, and she smiles to the camera and she's blown away by all the plaque in her mouth still. And then obviously, the ad tries to promote or sell off this toothpaste, saying that's going to help. The work of the Spirit, however, is kind of like that. Jesus says, what would under normal conditions not appear to us, what would in day to day living not appear to us, the Holy Spirit makes visible.

Jesus says it is good for Him to go away in verse seven. I tell you the truth. It is for your good that I am going away. Why? Because unless Jesus dies, is raised from the dead, and returns to the Father, He says the Holy Spirit is not going to come.

It is for our good that Jesus leaves because then the Holy Spirit and His work arrives to be at work in every person's heart. And Jesus says, when this happens, the Spirit will convict of sin. The Spirit will convict of righteousness and judgment. Verse eight. Why?

Why is it better for Jesus to go and for the Holy Spirit to remain? Why not have Jesus instead? Because it's all got to do with what the Holy Spirit does as a third person of the Trinity. We've been talking a lot about the Trinity. Jesus has been introducing and talking a lot about His relationship with the Father, the Son, and now the third person in the Trinity has been called upon.

And He says, He will convict of sin. Now the Greek word to convict of sin, of righteousness, of judgment used here in verses seven and eight comes from the drama of the courtroom in the Greek world. It refers to what the prosecuting attorney did when they argued their case. They would put the defendant on trial.

And as the defendant stood there, they would begin to pile on the evidence, evidence. They would bring facts, fact upon fact. They would bring in the witnesses, witnesses upon witnesses.

They would bring and show the truth, truth upon truth, and slowly, irresistibly build the case until finally, the enormity of the evidence is so overwhelming that not only the judge, but the entire courtroom will say, this person is guilty beyond reasonable doubt. But this convicting work that the Holy Spirit does, this building the case is good, Jesus says. Who uses the word conviction and good in the same sentence? Jesus says it's good for this reason because it is gracious, gracious.

Its intention is not to bring about a death sentence for the defendant. It is actually with a hope of bringing life and rescue. It is designed to bring men and women of the world to recognise their need, to turn to Jesus, to avoid the consequences of their actions. And we see this in these three respects or aspects that Jesus talks about: sin, righteousness, and judgment. The Spirit, in other words, will show people that they are firstly sinners.

That they are unbelieving rebels, unwilling to live the life that Jesus desires. It is exactly like that toothpaste ad, that tablet that we eat or chew, that reveals our true nature, that reveals something that we may be totally missing, totally not seeing, the leopard in the bush. The Spirit highlights and convicts and challenges the heart firstly about sin. But then this is done in relation to the second thing, where the Spirit convicts the world, Jesus says, about righteousness. Now that is maybe a little bit strange for us to understand.

What does Jesus mean by a conviction of righteousness? Well, it means that the Spirit shows us what is truly good as well as what is truly bad. But it points not to the good in us necessarily, because if we were to be honest, we would not see very much there in us. It points to the righteousness, the goodness, the rightness of Jesus. At the centre of this idea is crushed or broken the idea that as a humanity, we're pretty right.

We're pretty good. We're doing not too badly. And it highlights the difference between the righteousness of God and the righteousness of humanity. Each generation and each iteration of humanity comes up with a morality of its own, it seems, a morality that is often very fluid.

Today, we will call someone a good person, a righteous person, if they will affirm that gender is neither male nor female, it is at times both, or it is somewhere on a spectrum between the two. We will say that this is a good person, a good politician that will affirm this. That is righteousness in the world's eyes.

But if you are convicted by the Holy Spirit through the words of God in the Bible, you'll start seeing rightness, goodness in very different ways sometimes. Genesis one, verse twenty-six, for example, just talking about this, will say that God created male and female. Both of them, God created in His image. Instead of glorifying the physical expressions of love, which is so often to do with this gender debate that idolises sex as pseudo gods, the Bible calibrates humanity and love to see that God is ultimately the good in life and that my heart needs to be calibrated with this. Psalm 16, verse seven reads that God is ultimately the one worthy of my worship, ultimately the one that I should aspire to.

Not gender, not sexuality. Psalm 16, verse seven reads, I will praise the Lord who counsels me, who instructs my heart at night, and I will set the Lord before me. He is my north on the compass. So the Spirit points out what is truly meant to be right or good. It is always in relation to God.

And specifically here, Jesus is saying to Himself, my righteousness, because I am going to the Father. He is the only one that can go to the Father. He is the only one that can go there because He is perfect and righteous and holy like the Father is. We calibrate our life by the power of the Holy Spirit towards Him. And then thirdly, He says, the Holy Spirit will bring conviction about judgment.

When the Holy Spirit points out the righteousness of God, exemplified ultimately in Jesus and compares it to our own righteousness, we become so very aware of how far we have fallen. And the only conclusion is that we stand guilty. We stand with a whole bunch of evidence against us. Only when the world is convicted of its own hollowness will it appreciate the righteousness of Christ. The world system of judgment is flawed.

It is always prone to ups and downs, but Jesus points out in this passage that its sense of what is right and wrong is linked to the prince of this world, He says. The prince of this world is another term for Satan that Jesus uses elsewhere. This prince of the world is seeking to overthrow the true King of this world. But the Spirit will give true understanding. The Spirit will say that God is Judge and that He is dealing with this issue of our shortcoming in righteousness.

So the Spirit comes to reveal our disease. He brings us a knowledge of our sin. He calibrates our heart to what is true righteousness, and then he allows us to see the difference between these two things and to realise what the conclusion is. We can't make it on our own. We are guilty.

We have fallen short. So friend, let me ask you, has the Spirit revealed that truth to you? Or to put it in its true light, as concerning as it sounds, have you seen your disease? Has a plague on your soul been highlighted? Or if you were honest, would you say that you've looked with some perhaps rudimentary glances over your life and said, well, compared to my neighbour, it's not too bad.

May the Spirit convict us. May the Spirit speak very truthfully to us. May He highlight what we need in our life and show us the true condition of the heart. But then the Holy Spirit doesn't simply reveal that to us. He points us to the remedy.

He points us to the solution. The Spirit not only exposes our disease, but He shines a spotlight on the remedy, and that spotlight is centred right on Jesus. As Arturo Azerbia has rightly said, Jesus will be the sum and the substance of the Spirit's ministry of revelation. He is the sum and the substance. The predominant work, he says, of the Holy Spirit is to reveal and to glorify Jesus Christ.

He stands like this next to Jesus and says, look at Him. Behold Him. Worship Him. Magnify Him. Make Him a part of your life.

Jesus told the disciples that the Spirit, who is invisible but is working in each person's heart, the Spirit would guide them into all truth, He says in verse twelve. He does not do this by His own, but He speaks on the authority of Jesus. The Holy Spirit, Jesus says, speaks on His behalf. The Holy Spirit reminds and brings back every believer to what Jesus has said and what He has done. On the one hand, the Spirit brings conviction.

But then on the other hand, He points to Jesus, who is the remedy. Now sometimes you can lead horses to the water, but you can't make them drink. Not only does the Holy Spirit point us to Jesus, but He enables us to worship Jesus, to find that remedy for ourselves. In verse fourteen, Jesus says, the Spirit will glorify Me by taking from what is Mine and making it known to you. The Spirit's job, in other words, is to melt our hearts, is to make us aware, is to open our eyes.

Who remembers this? I won't ask you to put up your hand, but before the self-adhesive envelopes, there used to be something where you would have to seal things with wax. Now maybe, yeah, yeah, maybe that has been the case for all of us, but there used to be a time where things would be sealed in wax.

And what you needed, if you don't know, would be to have a little bit of wax, a little bit like a candle or something like that. You would also have an object called a seal. Sometimes kings would have signet rings or something like that. Families that were well-to-do might have their crest on this seal. And thirdly, to make this whole thing work, you would need a flame, a heat source.

Now in order to put and ensure that this envelope was sealed properly, that what you had written in there remained yours, had integrity, that it was your words in the envelope, you would have to seal it. You would have to enclose it. You have to make sure that it would reach the other person without having been read or tampered with. You had a guarantee that the envelope had integrity, and in order to do this, you would melt this little bit of wax, dip it onto the lip of the envelope containing the message, and squeeze it down with this seal in order to stick it together. But in order to do this, you needed to soften the wax.

You needed to melt that wax for it to become pliable, for it to become workable, susceptible to the imprint and the pressure of that seal. Now if you try to use that stamp, that seal on a bit of wax that was not melting, was still hard, two things would happen. Either it would shatter into a thousand pieces, just crumble, if it wasn't soft, or it would just have a very light imprint on it, just a very faint stamp, and it wouldn't stick. But if the wax is softened by the flame, then the wax is pliable and it seals that envelope.

Now with this long analogy, the Holy Spirit is the flame that makes our hearts pliable. The Holy Spirit is the flame that melts us so that the signet ring, the stamp of God's truth, can seal our lives with integrity. When I hear the truth of God, if I read about the power of God without the work of the Spirit in my heart, I will say, oh, powerful, He is powerful, but without the influence of the Holy Spirit, all I can do is have a superficial impression of Him on my life.

And many of us would know people that have an awareness of God. Oh, He's invisible. He is out there. He may have created the world. For some of us, it may shatter us to know that there is a powerful God who may smite me, who may strike me down.

But when the Spirit of God comes and breathes life, and you read about His power then, then there is susceptibility. There is a truth that begins to transform, and we start thinking, this God of power knows me. This God of power cares about me. When you read about the God of goodness, the Spirit will apply to your life and it will begin to develop peace in you. When you read about His forgiveness, it develops relief. You shake off guilty fear.

You may even be sensing this as I speak now. When you hear about this forgiveness, it develops generosity and mercy in us. That is what the work of the Holy Spirit does. It melts our hearts. Without the Spirit, the knowledge of God will shatter you.

It will leave a very small impression on you. But with the Spirit, it makes all the difference. Only when the Spirit does that will you truly understand who Jesus is this Easter. Only then will you understand that what He did was for you. To be led into the truth about Jesus is more than to know about Him.

It is to be intimately and experientially acquainted with Him. It is to be strongly affected by Him. It is not only emotion, therefore, in our heads. It is something that overwhelms the heart. This is what Jesus meant when He said that the Spirit will take from what is Mine and make it known to you.

That word in the Greek to make known translates as a word meaning a momentous announcement that rivets the attention. You hold on to your seat when you hear it. The Holy Spirit's task then is to unfold the meaning of Jesus and His work in believers in such a way that it brings Him glory. It makes us marvel at the beauty of this work. It makes us joyful and want to dance.

It is brought home in the heart and the mind. This is why in the letter to the Ephesians, Paul the apostle can say in Ephesians 1:18, and pray this for every believer: that the eyes of your heart be enlightened. Whose hearts have eyes? No one. Anatomically, that doesn't work.

It is that our hearts perceive. It is so that our hearts understand. Paul goes on to say in chapter three of that book that if their hearts can see this wonder that Jesus has brought to us, if we can understand that, then we will be able to have the power, he says, to grasp just how wide, just how long, just how great the love of God is for us in Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit's ministry is to make incredible truth, truth that for these poor disciples was just too overwhelming. Jesus said, I can't tell you all that you want to know right now.

You just won't get it. It will just break you. The Holy Spirit is to make these incredible truths understandable to us. And so now you can understand the holiness of God and His expectations, but instead of being crushed, instead of being shattered by this truth, your heart is made pliable and susceptible to the good news of Jesus, that although you were guilty, although you were so in all fairness standing there to be condemned for those transgressions you made against God who is Judge, we understand Jesus saying in that very moment to God the Judge, here I am. I will go for them.

When our hearts are rightly convicted of sin, God, in His infinite mercy, sends us the Holy Spirit, who He calls the Counsellor, the Comforter, to bring great peace of the truth of Jesus' love of us. The Spirit guides us there not only to see Christ, but to savour Him. To be filled with the Spirit then is to live a life of joy. Sometimes a quiet joy, sometimes a towering, overwhelming joy. And the Spirit that guides us into all truth guides us to trust the news about Jesus and His saving work this Easter so that we may trust and see and perceive with our hearts and our minds.

Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we invite You by the Holy Spirit to enter our lives again this morning, to console us, to speak to us, to comfort us, to empower us so that we are changed at the very centre of our lives. We offer to You our bodies as living sacrifices in view of the cross. We ask, Lord, that as we come there again this Friday and Sunday, as we pause, as we reflect, that the great truths will be truths for us, not of a tradition, not of a habit. Truths for me that my Saviour has died for me, that He lives so that I may live.

Father, we ask that You'll continue this work in us by Your power. In Jesus' name, by the power of the Spirit. Amen.