Word of Salvation – Vol. 13 No.21 – May 1967

 

The Holy Spirit

 

Sermon by Rev. Prof. T. L. Wilkinson on John 16:14

Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 36:22-32

 

Beloved Congregation,

For many people the teaching of the Bible about the Holy Spirit has produced a lot of frustration and even despair.  It seems to promise them so much, and yet they themselves experience so little of the benefits the Bible speaks about.  When they read their Bible they see the mighty power of the Holy Spirit that enabled the early Christians to witness, and win men for Christ.  They learn of the great deliverance from the power of sin that the Holy Spirit granted to them.  They look with covetous eyes at the fruit of the Spirit – the love and the joy for example, that were so characteristic of New Testament Christianity.  Yet their own life seems so devoid of these blessings, and they feel that something is wrong.  Why is there such a discrepancy between what is promised, and what is actually experienced and possessed?

These and several other questions are often in our hearts, even if we can’t consciously express them.  But we seldom hear any realistic attempt to answer them.  As everyone knows, there was a great neglect of the whole subject of the Holy Spirit in the early centuries after Christ.  A great deal of energy and thought was given to the understanding of the Person of Christ, and we have the results preserved for us in such documents as the Nicene Creed.  But precious little was said about the Holy Spirit, “the Lord and Giver of Life”.  It is true that much has been written since then, but there is still quite a lot that is not clear to most of us.  It is for this reason that we consider this particular passage today, and see what Jesus meant by what He said about the Holy Spirit.

It is of paramount importance for us to realise what Jesus sees the main task of the Holy Spirit to be.  He says, “He will glorify me”.  That in a nutshell is the central work of the Holy Spirit, and if we can get that clearly in our minds, we shall be able to get out of some of the fog surrounding this subject.

Jesus obviously sees this as a future coming of the Spirit.  In fact elsewhere in this Gospel we are explicitly told that the Holy Spirit was “not yet”.  This information is given us when John tells us how Jesus at the Feast of Tabernacles stood up and proclaimed, “If any man thirst, let him come to me and drink.  He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, ‘out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.'”  John then goes on to say, “Now this he said about the Spirit which those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit was not.”  Undoubtedly the meaning is that the Spirit was not yet given.  But in any case we immediately want to ask, “Was there not the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament?  Was there no Holy Spirit in Jesus’ own ministry?”

Again we can answer quite definitely, that there was the work of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament, and there was the work of the Holy Spirit in Jesus’ own ministry.  But perhaps it will help us if we think of the work of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament as merely the foreshadowing and prophesying of what would actually find realisation in both Jesus and His Church.

There are two lines of expectation in the Old Testament.  One is that Messiah would be endued with the Holy Spirit.  Jesus Himself read in the Synagogue the well-known passage from Isaiah beginning, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon men”, and He then proceeded to tell them that this prophecy was being fulfilled in His own person.  Indeed the New Testament sees Jesus’ ministry, from the time of His baptism when the Holy Spirit descended upon Him, as being carried out in the power of the Spirit.

But the Old Testament had another expectation.  This is expressed in the longing cry of Moses that God would put His Spirit upon all the Lord’s people.  It is again expressed in the prophecy of Joel that the Lord would pour out His Spirit upon all flesh.

It was this expectation that had not yet been fulfilled when Jesus uttered the words of our text.  It was in this sense that the Spirit “was not yet” or “not yet given.”  We hardly need to be told that this prophecy was fulfilled at Pentecost, when the gift of the Holy Spirit became the birth right of all believers.  For although our text shows Jesus speaking directly to the Apostles, who themselves had special powers conferred upon them by the Holy Spirit, yet the Spirit was given to all believers.

At this point there is some uncertainty among Christian people.  In the past certain Pentecostal teachers maintained that unless you could speak with tongues you did not have the Holy Spirit.  Today however it seems that some would not go that far, but would say that you certainly were not filled with the Spirit.

The New Testament however certainly teaches that every believer has the Holy Spirit, and that “anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to Him.”  In other words you simply are not a Christian if you do not have the Spirit, and conversely if you are a Christian you do have the Spirit – whether you know it or not.

The New Testament evidence shows that it was at their conversion that believers received the Holy Spirit, and in some cases at least this was indicated by the special gift of tongues.  Our main contention here however, is that it was at conversion, and not at some later stage of sanctification, that the Spirit was received.

But in spite of this, many Christians long to be sure that they really do have the Holy Spirit, and long to know that they are filled with the Holy Spirit.  In their hunger and desire for this blessing they sometimes turn to Pentecostal groups where they are taught that they can have definite evidence of the Holy Spirit’s working, in their own experience.  This is pre-eminently obtained by the gift of tongues.

Let me say quite frankly, that I have a lot of sympathy with Pentecostal people and those who attend their meetings.  Sometimes they are in churches where they do not get any spiritual inspiration, or where the preaching is cold and dull, or where there is harshness and formalism.  Sometimes it is simply that they long for a greater enjoyment of all that God promises them in His Word, and they feel that the tongues experience will enable them to obtain it.  Whether the experience of speaking in tongues claimed by Pentecostalists is the same as that found in the New Testament, is a matter for controversy.  My own conviction is that it is not.  To me the Pentecostal experience is merely a psychological phenomenon.  It is something that many can experience simply by following a technique.  We should be careful about claiming that it is the same as what we discover in the Bible.

But even if we do believe that it is essentially the same today as it was in Bible days, there are still weighty objections against the view that speaking in tongues is evidence of being filled with the Holy Spirit.  For one thing Paul makes it quite clear that not everyone spoke in tongues.  Then again, we should note the distinction between the “gifts” of the Spirit, and the “fruit” of the Holy Spirit.  The gifts of the Spirit would be such things as speaking in tongues and preaching – to name only two.  But while Paul certainly rates the gift of preaching far above the gift of tongues, he tells us very bluntly that without one particular fruit of the Spirit – i.e. love – we are nothing – whether we can speak in tongues or preach.  So preachers cannot claim that because they have the gift of preaching, that this means that they are filled with the Spirit.  They may in fact lack the great gift or fruit of love which is the unmistakeable indication of the fullness of the Spirit.  But it follows that simply because a man has the gift of tongues, he cannot claim that he is filled with the Spirit.  To know that he was filled with the Spirit, we would need to watch his life and see whether he showed the love of Christ in his daily life.

But this interest in speaking in tongues is fundamentally due to a misunderstanding of the work of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus said, “He shall glorify me.”  This means that the Holy Spirit does not draw attention to Himself, but to Jesus Christ.  The Spirit is self-effacing and Christ exalting, in His work.  It is the great mistake of Pentecostalists that they tend to lose sight of this, and see the Spirit as largely independent of Jesus Christ.  But the very purpose of the Spirit, is to glorify Christ.  It is noteworthy that John tells us both that the Spirit was not given until Jesus was glorified; and that when He came, the Spirit would have this very task of glorifying Christ.

Perhaps we could illustrate the point in this way: You have sometimes walked down a certain city street in the day time, and have hardly noticed a particular building.  But one night you walk down that street and your attention is immediately drawn to it, and its features stand out clearly and attractively.  The reason is that at night it has been flood-lit.  I said that your attention was drawn to the building.  But what drew your attention to It?  Well, the light, of course.  Yes, that is true, but if the lighting was done skilfully, then you did not see the source of the light those great globes that directed the light on to the building, but only the building itself.  It is the same with the Spirit.  He is not seen or felt, but He does His work most effectively when our attention is focussed upon Jesus Christ.

But some will object and say “surely we must be able to feel the presence of the Holy Spirit.”  This objection is closely connected with the reliance upon such things as “tongues” as evidence of the Spirit’s presence.  But again it is due to a wrong idea of how the Spirit works within us.  For this work of the Spirit within us is not something we feel in the way we feel hot or cold, or in the way we feel happy and joyful, or in the way we feel a toothache, or the pleasant sensation of eating or drinking.  Let us keep steadily in mind that the work of the Spirit is to glorify Christ, and that he does this by focussing our attention upon our Lord and not upon ourselves or upon the Spirit Himself.  If we ask, “how does the Spirit work within us?”  Then we must answer that He works in us below the level of our consciousness.  That is to say, we do not feel the Spirit working in us; nor are we able to say, “I am now at this very moment, conscious that the Spirit is operating in me.”  No, the evidence that the Spirit is working in you, is in this, that your mind and your life are directed to Christ.  Perhaps we could again illustrate this in a way that will help us.  Today you have been concentrating your mind on the hymns that you have been singing.  You were able to do this because the blood was flowing through your brain and enabling you to concentrate.  But you didn’t ask whether the blood was doing its work or not; you were not the least bit conscious of it flowing through your brain.  But on reflection you know that it must have been, because without it you would not have been able to sing the hymns and concentrate on them.  In the same way, the fact that our minds are concentrated upon our Lord, and that our hearts respond to His word, is itself the proof that the Holy Spirit is working in us below the level of our consciousness.

Therefore to concentrate on our feelings as an indication of the Spirit’s presence, is to misunderstand the way He works in us.  But it can also lead us to the place of misery and discouragement, since our feelings are the most changeable things imaginable.  If we go on our feelings, then we may well feel that the Lord has left us, or that we had better give up trying to serve the Lord.  But the work of the Spirit is not to make us look within, at our feelings or experiences, but to make us look out and away to Christ who will never change, but remains the same loving and gracious One.

If we now ask ourselves how the Spirit glorifies Christ, then Jesus Himself makes this plain: “He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”  In this context, Jesus has pointed out that He has many things to say to His disciples, but they cannot bear them now, but it is when the Spirit of Truth comes that they will be lead into all the truth.

All through the Gospels we observe Jesus teaching His disciples but they on their side often fail to understand what He is saying to them.  But in this passage Jesus promises that when the Spirit comes, they will understand.  In keeping with this, we read sometimes in this Gospel that later, after the resurrection, the disciples did understand.  But the point we have to keep in mind, is that the Holy Spirit is not seen as some independent source of knowledge but as the One who makes Jesus’ words and work intelligible to the disciples.  One of the final results of this work of the Spirit is seen in the writings of the New Testament which do precisely what Jesus said the Holy Spirit would do, “take what is mine, and declare it to you.”

It is important to keep this point clearly before our minds, for lots of people say things like this: “The Holy Spirit told me so and so, just as though they had a direct telephone line to the Holy Spirit, and not one that went through the Exchange of the New Testament.  The truth is that the Spirit glorifies Christ by showing us our Lord as He is revealed in Scripture, and bringing home to our hearts the wonder of His grace and love to us, His people.

But again we come up against a problem.  If the Holy Spirit does this, then does it mean that I am to sit down and let Him go right ahead, while I sit down with folded hands and do nothing?  There are quite a few people who rather vaguely think about it this way.  They think that if the Spirit is to do His work, then He will, and nothing I can do will alter it.  But again this is to misunderstand the work of the Spirit.  It is quite true that we owe every good thing in our life, to the work of the Holy Spirit, as the hymn reminds us: “And every virtue we possess, and every victory won, And every thought of holiness, are His alone.”

But the believer lives in the power of the Holy Spirit, and he is called to live, work and serve in the power of the Holy Spirit.  He is not called to sit down and be passive, but to actively set his mind and heart on the very goal that is set for the Holy Spirit – to glorify Jesus Christ.

It is this tremendous purpose in our lives, that gives us the sense of meaningful living.  Our lives are not useless and without any work.

On the contrary they are of the highest importance, since Christ has conferred upon us this task to glorify Him.  So then, if you feel so inferior, so useless, so discouraged, look again to your Saviour and Lord.  Look away to Him, and not into yourself.  Believe all that He tells you in His word.  Learn to live with His word in your mind and in your heart, till the wonder of Christ fills your whole being.  But above all, respond in full faith and in utter surrender to this Lord Jesus Christ, so that all your actions, speech and thoughts contribute to the glory that is rightly His.  Then some day the work of the Holy Spirit will be completed; some day your own work will be finished, and you will join with the great ransomed throng who will sing with a full heart:

“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain,
to receive power and wealth and wisdom,
and might and honour and glory and blessing.”

Amen.