John 16:5-11 (p. 1678).
Int.: Pentecost – the Festival of the Holy Spirit. What thoughts does that bring to your mind? Probably not the thoughts of our text, right?
Our text today is another portion of Jesus’ parting comments to his disciples on the night before he died. Jesus and his disciples were in that upper room in Jerusalem where they celebrated their final Passover Seder together.
Judas had already left to arrange with the Chief Priests his betrayal of Jesus. Jesus had already instituted the Lord’s Supper as a Means of Grace and a lasting memorial meal to him. Their Passover meal was completed or else nearing its end. That meal together is not all that was now over.
This was the end of the road for Jesus and his disciples. In a few minutes they would leave that room in Jerusalem and walk out to the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives. After Judas arrived in Gethsemane with the High Priest’s guards, the disciples would flee into the night and Jesus would begin his passion as the payment for our sins.
St. John tells us that Jesus was overwhelmed with emotions as he spoke to this close circle of friends in that upper room. It was very hard for Jesus to say goodbye.
There was so much to say to those men, and so little time to say it. How could Jesus possibly prepare them adequately for what was to come? They were not just his closest friends that Jesus was leaving behind, but the leaders of his Church on this earth. It was not just the events of the next day that they needed to be prepared for, but the rest of their whole lives. They were immature young men, still in their twenties, and the gospel of salvation, the future of the world and the fate of God’s saints, was about to be placed into their hands.
If you had just one hour left to live and had to prepare your family and friends for the rest of their lives, what would you say? How infinitely more important were the last words of Jesus to his disciples! These last words would live in their minds and burn in their hearts forever. Because the Holy Spirit of God saw fit to have these words of our Savior recorded in the Bible, they are meant for us today as well as for Jesus’ first disciples. So let us listen carefully as …
JESUS SAYS GOODBYE.
I. His Disciples Were Filled With Grief.
To them it surely sounded like everything was over.
They had been Jesus’ disciples for only three years – three short years. Just think about that for a moment – today we ask men to spend twelve years in training to become pastors, but the disciples’ training ended after just three years, and they were not even close to ready for the immense task that was about to be placed upon their shoulders. Why, those disciples of Jesus did not even begin to grasp the spiritual dimensions of what Jesus had come into this world to accomplish, or the spiritual nature of the kingdom of God that they must now lead.
Jesus was about to leave them. As he said, “Now I am going to him who sent me, yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’” They all knew were Jesus as going. He was about to die and to return to heaven. But they could not imagine carrying on without Jesus – not a single one of them could imagine doing that. So it seemed to them that it was ALL over: their hopes, their dreams, the Messianic kingdom that they thought Jesus was going to establish here on earth – everything was about to end. No doubt some of them were convinced that their lives were about to end as well. That is why they spent the next ten days hiding behind the locked doors of that upper room in Jerusalem.
“Because I have said these things, you are filled with grief,” Jesus said.
Filled with grief?! You bet! – and fear and horror at the thought of what lay ahead for them. They did not even really understand Jesus’ teachings, so how could they convey those teachings to others without Jesus around to help them? They could not grasp what the kingdom of God was on this earth, how could they lead it? How could they bring people to Christ when Christ was no longer here?
Many a Christian today has felt inside the emptiness of those disciples as they faced life in this world without Jesus. Have you ever wished that Christ were still on earth today, so that you could see him, touch him, and go to him personally with your questions, concerns and needs? Almost every Christian has felt that way. Like Job of old, we all long for the day when we can Jesus with our own eyes instead of having to put our faith for salvation in someone whom we have never seen.
No doubt Christ’s disciples had planned to spend at least another decade learning from Jesus before they became leaders in his Church. How could they survive and carry on without Jesus? “I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away,” Jesus told them. “For your good”?! What good could possibly come of being left behind in this hostile world when Jesus returned to heaven? But before they could even mouth the words of that question, …
II. Jesus Promised To Send The Counselor To His Followers.
“Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you, but if I go, I will send him to you,” Jesus told his heartbroken friends.
Today, on this Festival of the Holy Spirit, we understand what Jesus was talking about, but those disciples had no clue what he was promising to them. Jesus had been their Counselor as long as they had known him. The Greek work that is translated as “Counselor” in our text has no direct equivalent in English. It means someone you go to for help and assistance. It can mean a teacher who gives you instruction, or a counselor to whom you turn for personal help and advice with problems in your life, or someone who steps in to defend you before the law, as in legal counsel. As I said, Jesus had been all of those things to his disciples, and as you read the gospel accounts of Christ’s life, you can find examples of Jesus acting in each of those capacities for his disciples. But mostly Jesus had been their Rabbi, their Teacher, which is the term that they usually used in addressing him.
The Counselor that Jesus promised to send to his disciples would not only take Christ’s place in their lives, he would take them to a far higher realm of understanding and competence than Jesus had been able to. The love and the help that Jesus had shown to each of his disciples was not able to keep Judas from betraying him and Peter from denying him. The constant teaching about the kingdom of God that Jesus had been giving to them for the past three or more years had not been able to make them understand its nature or their personal part in it.
Although he was both God and man, Jesus had been teaching his disciples like a man would teach them, and he had shown them God’s love as a person could show it. In fact, Jesus was so human that even his closest disciples had trouble seeing the divine in him. The Counselor whom Jesus was about to send to his friends would not have that limitation.
The Holy Spirit acts as God in Christ’s Church.
That is because the Holy Spirit is truly God, he is God along with the Father and the Son. But he does not have the limitations of the human nature that Jesus had. The Spirit is not confined in space and time, and he does not confine himself to teaching us with human words and examples.
As we heard in Acts chapter two, our second Scripture reading this morning, the Holy Spirit gave the followers of Jesus the ability to speak fluently in languages that they had never learned. He also gave them a full and complete understanding of God’s plan of salvation for sinners, and of the roll of the Gospel in bringing people into God’s kingdom of salvation. This was a miraculous work of God’s Holy Spirit within them, not something that human words or actions could convey.
In that story of the Holy Spirit’s coming on the first Pentecost, we see how the Holy Spirit becomes our Counselor to bring each and every Christian to God. This is a miraculous conversion, not subject to human limitations. Thus the Holy Spirit can work in the hearts of infants through baptism to bring them to faith in Christ Jesus as their Savior and Lord, just as he does to adults. And the Spirit can work through the bread and the wine of the Lord’s Supper to bring us into communion with Christ and to strengthen our faith in him as Savior by giving us Christ own body and blood for the assurance of the complete forgiveness of our sins.
But Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit will do even more than work in the hearts and minds of people like his disciples. The Holy Spirit will work in the hearts and minds of people all over the world. Thus Jesus promised his disciples that ….
III. The Counselor Will Convict The World Regarding Sin And Righteousness And Judgment.
Jesus said, “He will convict the world in regard to sin … because men do not believe in me.”
The world is guilty of sin because people have turned their backs on God. They have made gods for themselves which are not gods. Today many people worship the god “freedom,” in whose name they do whatever vile things they feel like. Other people worship the god “greed,” as they sell their souls to pursue wealth and power. Others serve the god of “knowledge,” believing that man’s wisdom and science and inventiveness must and will solve all of the world’s problems. Often these people have no use for the living God or anything that he tells us in the Bible.
Finally, there are those who live for the god “pleasure.” They live for the moment, never thinking about tomorrow and the costs that they will have to pay for the pleasures of today. They do not want to hear the word “sin” from the Christians around them in regard to their chosen lifestyles.
Because these people all reject the true, the living God who rules the universe, in order to serve themselves and their own desires, God has sold them into death. “The wages of sin is death,” God declares, and they die. From greatest to least, from successes to failures, they all die.
Jesus also promised, “He will convict the world … in regard to righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer.”
This world knows nothing about righteousness. All too often it is the innocent who suffer while the guilty go free. The people of this world often call evil “good” and good “evil.” They mock and slander those who do right, and leap to the defense of people who live in the vilest of sins.
And yet, while evil abounds, the people of this world are convinced that they can and will save themselves and the world by their own sin-filled works. Christ’s works and his perfect righteousness they reject, while trusting in a self-righteousness that does not really exist, to save them.
Finally Jesus promised, “He will convict the world … in regard to judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned.”
Criminals usually go free today, while their victims often suffer for the rest of their lives. Where is there any justice in that? Even when criminals are caught and convicted, those who have brutalized and harmed others are seldom made to pay for what they have done! They are never asked to make restitution to their victims, or even to apologize to them.
But now, the prince of this world, Satan, the Father of lies, stands condemned eternally. All those who live by the lie, who use, abuse and harm others stand condemned with him. No fast-talking attorney will get them off; no judge will throw out the case for them on a technicality. God’s justice waits at the end of their road. The Son of God is their Judge and his angels their executioners. This Judge is Justice personified. His code of justice is the Law of God, the Law that demands, “You shall be holy as I the Lord your God am holy.” In his court you are either holy or you aren’t, and only the saints of God shall pass into eternal life. They have been made holy by the blood of Jesus Christ through faith given to them by God’s Holy Spirit. We are among those saints of God by faith in Christ.
Con.: So to us as well as his first disciples, JESUS SAYS GOODBYE in our text this morning.
His Disciples Were Filled With Grief, because they could not imagine life without Jesus.
Jesus Promised To Send The Counselor, the Holy Spirit, To His Followers.
That Counselor Will Convict The World Regarding Sin And Righteousness And Judgment, and he will bring us into eternal life with our Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ. Today and throughout the rest of this church year we celebrate the coming and the work of that life-giving Spirit of God. Amen.