THE COUNSELLOR, THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH, SENT BY THE FATHER
John 14:16&17 “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counsellor to be with you for ever - the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.”
You look with concern and admiration at widows learning to cope existing without their husbands. For many years their lives together had been intertwined. Now they battle with living alone. How could such women face the future without their God? These twelve young disciples had been summoned from their businesses – fishing and collecting tax – from their families and localities. Off they’d been taken by Jesus. Then they’d known years of breath-taking miracles, mind-blowing teaching and constant provision - a good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, poured into their laps. What a trip those wandering preachers had been on, but now their Master has begun to confirm the hints he had given them earlier, that the time had arrived for him to be leaving them. What on earth was he thinking he was doing? He’d disrupted their lives, turned them upside down so that they’d never be the same again. They couldn’t go back, and then he announced that he was going away, and that it was impossible for them to go with him, so they couldn’t go forward with him either. Jesus is speaking into a great pastoral situation. What would happen to them? They were on a train without a driver. How could they disembark? They’d been dreaming of the promised kingdom being restored to Israel and they were going to share in King Jesus’ reign, but there was little evidence of any structures of some new kingdom being set up, and how could they build the kingdom without the King? They were twelve shell-shocked men. They feared they wouldn’t be able to cope without him. How they needed him always, but then Jesus spoke at great length, the most wonderful sermon they had ever heard him preach, directing all his eloquence and wisdom to them explaining the future, telling them not to let their hearts be troubled, but to keep trusting in him because of wonderful new provision he had made for them. Did they imagine he would just dump them?
He spoke of a new phenomenon. “My Father,” he says, “will give you another Counsellor to be with you for ever – the Spirit of truth” (v.16). The Holy Spirit, who gives a birth from above, does not fly off after doing his supernatural work of regeneration and abandoning them to their own wits. He will remain with them for ever. Jesus assures them that they are going to have illimitable access to the Counsellor, the indwelling Spirit of truth. Surely there was initial disappointment. He needs to stop half way through his sermon and say to them, “It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you” (Jn. 16:7). Were they persuaded? Isn’t the problem today that the Holy Spirit is the faceless person of the Godhead? When we think of God the Father our hearts are drawn out in love for him, and when our Saviour Jesus is spoken of we think of his teaching and miracles and parables and we love him who laid down his life for us, but the Holy Spirit is rather anonymous and nameless and vague. Let me test you like this, what would you rather have today, the physical presence of the Lord Jesus speaking to you and answering your questions and giving you advice, and then for the rest of your life remembering this hour together? Or would you rather have the Holy Spirit always with you and in you for strength and enlightenment, leading you to purity?
The Spirit is God, the Son is God and the Father is God, and these three are one God, and all three persons will henceforth live in the disciples of Christ. “The Godhead in me? I can scarcely believe it.” Yet you see how this is spelled out so unanswerably in this great sermon before us. Two verses later Jesus assures them that having taken them away from their families and homes and so creating many grieving mothers and fathers he’s not going to leave them parentless boys; “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” (v.18). This was seen in his return from the dead in resurrection power – he will live as their Saviour in the power of an endless life; it will certainly be true in his coming again in the clouds and in great glory at the end of the age. At that time and for evermore he will be seen as the everlasting Father of his people, but before that glory it will be true for the daily reality of the Twelve as they seek to fulfil their chief end in life, glorifying God and enjoying him. The Lord Christ will never leave them; “Lo I am with you always even unto the end of the age.” This wonderful friend sticks closer to us than our own brothers who may live miles away, across the seas, and we see them once a year at the most - though they are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, but Jesus will never leave us. What a friend to be here for us always!
Then he adds something just as mind-blowing to everyone who loves and obeys Jesus’ teaching; “My Father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him” (v.23). We are not going to be orphans. We’re going to have a home and the home-maker will be God. Let me turn that a couple of ways. There is a couple you love and once every few years they make the long journey to your home and stay with you for a short time. It is the high spot of the year; their time with you is such a happy and blessed period, and how sad you are when they have to go away. Now multiply by infinity . . . God the Creator of the Universe, the author of all the good and perfect gifts you have received, your own Father, the King of love, is coming into your life along with his blessed Son your Saviour. Both Father and Son are going to make their happy home with you. You are never going to feel crowded or intimidated or exhausted by their presence. You are never going to start thinking plaintively, “Are they never going to leave us?”
Hans Christian Andersen was a great admirer of Charles Dickens, and Dickens and he once met. Charles invited Hans to visit and stay with him in London. So Hans Christian Andersen came to Gad’s Hill in the summer of 1857 and he stayed and he stayed going on into a second month. The men did not have much in common, and Dickens was tearing his hair with frustration, and dropping unsubtle hints that it was time that Hans should move on, but he continued on in Gad’s Hill. When the Dane did finally pack up and leave Dickens walked into his bedroom and wrote on the mirror, “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks – which seemed to the family AGES!” His kind hearted daughter Kate decribed Hans as “a bony bore who stayed on and on.” When was this man going to leave them? My point is this, that no Christian has any problem like that with the living God living with and in him. His fears are the very reverse, that the God of Love might take off and forsake him. The Trinity are the most perfect guests. You cannot imagine your life without them. They soothe your sorrows, heal your wounds and drive away your fears; they make your life complete. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit make their home with the youngest Christian boy or girl and with every single believer.
Let me also turn it this way, that you ask a woman what she does, and she tells you rather shyly, “I am only a homemaker” or “I am just a homemaker.” But her husband and her children feel supremely loved because she makes the family what it is. The whole family depends on her and revolves around her. She is the hub of the home; they’d be loose spokes without her. How they’ve been blessed because she is the homemaker. So it is with the Christian; we are blessed people, and the Christian life is such a happy life because the Holy Spirit has made our hearts a dwelling place for God!
Now do you see again in these words another example of the growing link of promise and fulfillment with what has been written in the Old Testament? In the prophecy of Ezekiel there is the promise that the Lord will purify and cleanse his people and that he will put a new spirit within them. In the New Testament that is fulfilled in the coming of Christ and the new birth. Again, in the Old Testament there was the concern that God should live with men. King Solomon, at the dedication of the Temple, asks the question, “Will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less this tent I have built” (I Kings 8:27). Here in the Upper Room discourse Jesus answers Solomon. Yes, God will really dwell on earth in the incarnation of the Son of God, and then when Father, Son and Holy Spirit come and dwell on earth in all their people. God himself was anticipating with delight such a time; “My dwelling place will be with them; I will be their God, and they will be my people” (Ez. 37:27). “Shout and be glad, O daughter of Zion. For I am coming and I will live among you” (Zech. 2:10). That was fulfilled in these last days when Christ came; “The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us” (Jn. 1:14) and that coming, and all that Christ achieved in his saving work, has made it possible for every believing sinner to become the residence of a holy God. He writes his own holy name on the shining brass plate outside the front door of our lives in marks of indelible grace; “The Residence of the Holy God, Father and Son and Holy Spirit.” Don’t you know that you are a residence of God?
Think of how that theme is taken up in the New Testament letters; Paul writes, “For we are the temple of the living God, as God has said, ‘I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people” (2 Cors. 6:16). How Paul prays for Christians that the Father, “may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith” (Ephs. 3:16&17). These are the blessings of the new covenant; they are part and parcel of eternal life. This is the great mark of evangelical religion. If the essence of Roman Catholicism is to focus on the church and its priesthood and ceremonies, and if the essence of modernism is to centre on man and his good works in society then the essence of evangelicalism is to centre on the indwelling of God in the individual lives of his people. The Lord coming and making his home in man is the experience of each mere Christian. It is not that we are deifying ourselves or pronouncing ourselves to be gods but that through Christ this extraordinary gracious humbling of God is the privilege of all of us who believe in Jesus. The Son of God humbled himself to the virgin’s womb, and that same Lord humbles himself to take up his dwelling in our lives.
It is a powerful incentive to godly living. How can you take your members and join them with a prostitute if God is indwelling you, Paul asks the Corinthian church. How can any of you enfeeble through drink or drugs the holy place of God? You dare not make yourself less efficient. What are you constantly watching with your eyes, or doing with your hands, or where are the places to which your feet are walking as an extraordinary person indwelt by the Maker of the rolling spheres, and the loving Saviour, and the Spirit of holiness? But I don’t want to speak of God’s presence in our hearts in terms of a threat but in terms of privilege. I remember hearing Dr Sinclair Ferguson reminiscing about the first sermon he heard as a Christian teenager of the Lord indwelling us – “the Lord in me!” and going home from that meeting with his feet hardly touching the pavement.
“The Father will give you another Counsellor to be with you for ever,” (v.16) says the Lord Jesus. Three points of interest are in these words of our Lord.
i] The Spirit is another Counsellor. Don Carson makes the point about this word ‘another.’ He says, “In English we have but one word for 'another'; in Greek there are two common words, and often they are distinguishable in meaning. For instance, in Galatians 1:6-7 Paul expresses astonishment that the Galatian believers could so quickly abandon the one who called them into the grace of Christ and turn to 'another gospel: which is not another’ (AV). The first 'another' really means a different gospel; and the second 'another' means 'a gospel of the same kind.’ That is why the NIV renders the Galatians passage: 'turning to a different gospel -which is really no gospel at all.' In John 14:16, the word for 'another' in the expression 'another Paraclete' is the same word as the second 'another' in Galatians 1:6-7. Jesus is promising not a different Paraclete but a Paraclete who is essentially the same kind as Jesus himself is” (Don Carson, Jesus and His Friends, Paternoster 1995, p. 49). So the Spirit is another Counsellor, one who’d be all that Jesus was to them. But . . .
ii] The Spirit is a Counsellor. The Greek word is Paracletos and it has been transliterated into English in the familiar word ‘Paraclete.’ Its etymology is related to a person who is called alongside another person. The word Paracletos outside the New Testament writings refers to a legal adviser. He stands beside you as your advocate. In those days if you were in some legal trouble you would go to a friend, maybe your best friend, and ask him, “Will you speak up for me as my Counsellor, and plead my cause in court, and tell them the truth about me?” The Holy Spirit had been Jesus’ most intimate friend. He had always been with him. No one could speak the truth about Jesus like the Spirit could. He had been with him in eternity, and then throughout his life on earth from his conception the Spirit had been intimately there enabling and keeping Christ.
The Holy Spirit is Christ’s advocate to every Christian. He brings out one exhibit after another, one example after another, one memory or saying after another, and the purpose of all he speaks to your heart is to show you the truth and beauty and grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the one who is being accused by the world of being a crook. The Spirit shows you the loveliness of the Lord Jesus, his holiness and tenderness, that he is like a lamb without spot or blemish. He speaks to the heart of every Christian and persuades us that Jesus is worthy of our constant love and service.
The Counsellor is also one who supports our words when we tell the world that their lives are wrong in the sight of God. He’s like a prosecuting attorney exposing the sin of the world. The Comforter also is one who helps us overcome our personal limitations and lack of gifts helping us to speak up and say a word for the Lord. He is an enormous source of strength and comfort to us as we work for him. He is the one who helps explain who Jesus is and what he’s done.
If we put such descriptions of his work together then I think we can call the Holy Spirit the ‘vicar of Christ.’ The word ‘vicar’ means a substitute for another. So the Spirit is going to be the substitute for the physical presence of the Lord Jesus Christ. He has told the disciples that he is leaving them. In his glorified body he is not going to visit this world again until the last day. But in the meantime he and the Father send onto the field of conflict where you are weary and fear being beaten this glorious and magnificent Substitute to do the work of the Son of God. The Spirit who comes alongside you as the ‘Sub’ is no mere pastiche of the Lord Jesus. He is equal in power and glory to him.
The Spirit continues the instructing, enlightening and sanctifying work of Christ. He comes into this world and he teaches the disciples and he counsels them; the Paraclete will do now what Jesus did then. He will teach the disciples and guide them into all truth (Jn. 16:13). He will bear witness to the listening world that the gospel message is true (Jn. 15:26&27). He will convict the world of its sin as Jesus did (Jn. 16:8-11). So this is the way the Godhead makes his grace and love known to us, it is by the Spirit, and this he does, not just in Galilee or Jerusalem, but everywhere. Think of his work in the 18th century how the Spirit was mightily at work all over Wales, all over England too mightily at work, throughout Scotland mightily at work, and then across the Atlantic in New England mightily at work, on identical days the Spirit was divinely busy turning many from darkness to light. The man Christ Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount on one mountain, at one time; he could not be anywhere else. He spoke exclusively in the one upper room on this planet one evening before his crucifixion, but the Spirit of Jesus Christ now does the work of Jesus on a thousand mountains and in 100,000 rooms all at the same time. He knows no physical limitations. He is duplicating the work of Jesus at this very moment in a million places. Little wonder Jesus could say to the disciples that they would do greater works than him. It is all through the Spirit, the vicar of Christ.
iii] The Counsellor is the Spirit of Truth. This expression is found three times in John’s gospel. Earlier in this chapter the Lord has said, “I am . . . the truth” (John. 14:6) and then he speaks of the Spirit he loves and sends as the Spirit of truth. For example in the next chapter, “When the Counsellor comes . . . the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father, he will testify about me” (Jn. 15:26). I suppose one great obstacle some people have to overcome to become believers in Jesus Christ is a thought that the whole thing is a fairy tale, that it was dreamed up by a group of fanatics over a period of a hundred years, embellishing the simple tale of a martyred healer who had had a few good ideas. The enemy of their souls tells them that his followers blew the whole tragic story out of all proportion to what actually happened. In other words, what we have in the gospels and letters is really an elaborate hoax and a tissue of lies. Yet consider the entire Jewish background of the writers of the New Testament. They were men who felt the authority of the ninth commandment which forbad giving a false testimony and bearing false witness. What a terrible thing to lie and deceive others, especially about holy Jehovah. How could such religious men construct such a fraud? There is no evidence for it at all. Not one person broke ranks and said, “You are being duped by rogues.” What we see in the New Testament are men and women who immediately after the resurrection, within thirty years, long before tall tales had time to get elaborated, are researching and carefully writing this extraordinarily uniform testimony to Jesus Christ saying, “This is who he was; this is what he said; this is what he claimed; this is what he did, and we were eye-witnesses of these things. We will lay down our lives for its truthfulness” and numbers did. They were led by apostles indwelt by the Spirit of truth that came into them from God himself, and by his energy and insights they testified about Christ in the most controlled and modest of ways.
Or again you find Jesus saying this in chapter sixteen about the Spirit of truth; “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 only speak what he hears, and he will tell you what is to come” (Jn. 16:12&13). This Spirit is absolutely obsessed with truth; he is not interested in pious exaggerations. Deceit and lies grieve him. His activity is quenched by the falsehoods of men. Jesus Christ does not need them. He guides the thinking of the apostles away from any hint of believing that they can gain some followers to the cause of Christ by lacing their gospels with a few lies. He is not the bamboozling Spirit; he is not the hoodwinking Spirit; he is not the crafty Spirit. “He will guide you into all truth.” The world says that there’s no harm in a white lie, but, Jesus says, “he will only speak what he hears, and will tell you what is to come.” Jesus spoke to men exclusively what he’d been given by the Father, and the Holy Spirit also doesn’t go into flights of fancy playing around with men’s imaginations. He only speaks what he hears from Father and Son. All that was going to happen to Jesus Christ “he will tell you what is to come” (16:13) - those mysteries of Jesus’ departure from this world – the Spirit knew all about those events and he would be telling them those things too. Isn’t the Spirit a wonderful substitute for Jesus?
So the Twelve were not going to be twelve orphans, rudderless, lacking any purpose, breaking up full of mutual incriminations, drifting off in different directions handling the loss of Jesus disastrously. No, it was not going to end like that. It was only just beginning. Jesus never leaves his people in the lurch, without provision, without affection, without a guide, without a sovereign protector, without an explanation of the crucifixion of the Son of God. No. He promises, “I will come to you” (v.18). There is such a breath-taking merger of identity of Son and Spirit, as the apostle says, “The Lord is the Spirit” and in this inter-trinitarian union the Lord who is the Spirit comes to us. The Spirit is the Counsellor, the successor of Jesus, the one sent by the Father, the vicar of Christ. He is with us now as closely and lovingly as Jesus was with his own disciples during the days of his flesh. They could go running to him and blurt out their questions and troubles. So too we ourselves have the Comforter, the Spirit of truth, today. “Help me Spirit of God,” we cry, and we do not cry in vain. The gospel church is the fellowship of the Spirit.
“You know him,” says Jesus, “for he lives with you and will be in you” (v.17). Jesus affirmed that they already knew the Spirit, although we know that he’d not yet been poured out in majesty and glory as he would be in about fifty days’ time at the feast of Pentecost. The Lord Jesus is preparing them for this. They are being told that when the Spirit comes he will not be an unfamiliar alien presence. “You know him,” says Jesus (v.17). In what way did they know him pre-Pentecostally? From their knowledge of the Old Testament and the teaching of the Spirit in creation, the one anointing the kings and inspiring the prophets. Then, more than that, John and Peter and the others knew something of the person and work of the Holy Spirit in their own ministries, as they had preached and cast out demons, as they had been helped when put on trial in synagogues, as they counselled people coming to them for advice, and secretly marveled at the words they heard themselves giving to men and women. In such ways they had already been experiencing the ministry of the Spirit though, just like ourselves, unaware that the Spirit was the one helping them. All the insight and moral convictions they had developed since following Jesus of Nazareth had come to them through the Spirit. Already they knew the Spirit; he was living in them, but not yet in his fulness and glory as the Spirit of Christ. That could not be until the Lord Jesus was raised and exalted and he poured the Spirit forth on the church (Jn. 7:39).
So what does Jesus say of the link between the Spirit and these twelve boys? He separates two prepositions and he tells them that the Spirit will be with them and in them (though he could apply every single preposition to our relationship with the spirit, before us, behind us, beneath us, above us, alongside us, etc). Now what is the distinction between the Spirit being with them and in them? It is not exactly that with them refers to the presence of the Spirit in the church, and in them refers to his presence in them as individuals. Someone has observed that “‘With them’ suggests an association, a personal sharing, some kind of fellowship; while ‘in them’ suggests real indwelling.”
i] The Spirit is with us, literally, that the Spirit is with this congregation now at this moment, just as really as I (as to my spirit and my body) am with you now. He is with us even when we might feel he is not, whenever we judge ourselves in a gospel church to be as cold as ice. He is yet with us because Jesus has said, “he will be with you.” The Spirit is here as much as Christ is here. So we Christians are the fellowship of the Spirit, an association of the Spirit, a movement of the Spirit, a body of the Spirit, a community of the Spirit, a society of the Spirit. He is with us all, and all of us need him desperately; the presence of the Spirit is never some option in our midst. We need him, and all of us also need one another. We never grow as Christians in isolation, and if we try to we shall develop into the most distorted and handicapped believers. We only grow healthily as members of one another, coming under the influence of those we have to love with a fervent pure love, whose burdens we have to bear, sharing in the life of the Spirit and the different ministries that the Spirit has given to them and to us. He is with us as this church faces its future; as the pilgrim congregation climbs its mountains and fords rivers and meets temptations and is built up in likeness to the fulness of Christ. We all do so with the Spirit’s corporate inspiration, and morale-building ministry, and guidance, and keeping power. We don’t do it alone. We never go to war at our own expense. We’re always conscious that the Spirit is with us all.
ii] The Spirit is in us. In other words we will individually and personally constantly be in need of him. We will feel this especially when there is no other Christian about, when the rest of the family and school or workplace are functioning in terms of another spirit, when we are far from a place of worship, at all such times and places we must have his very presence within us giving us new life, sanctifying us, helping us to cope with loss and heart-ache and ignorance. It is the Counsellor who makes the presence of God immediate, bearing witness with our own spirits that “we go not forth alone against the foe” as the hymnist expresses it. Pause and think of this in all its wonder, that the Spirit is the transcendent, infinite God, and yet this immeasurable, immense Spirit chooses to live within us, yet he is never reduced to such narrow confines. He cannot be the claustrophobic Spirit. The Spirit fills the heavens and the earth; there is no place where God’s Spirit is not. From the bottom of the deepest sea to the remotest edge of the cosmos the universe is constantly confronted by the Spirit of God, and yet - marvel of marvels - he chooses to live within us, as his home, as the seal of our personal adoption into the family of God, energizing, enlightening, making holy, convicting, comforting, working faith and trust, cleansing, assuring, leading, assisting, interceding, transforming, fructifying and endowing each individual believer.
So the Spirit is in us, and also he is with us. He must be both. If we think of him exclusively as in us then we slide into thinking of him almost as if he were belonging to us, someone we can virtually control, our very own Spirit. That increases the danger of failing to distinguish between God the Holy Spirit and our own spirit, and our own hunches, and our own desires, and our own hopes, and our own wills. We can choose to identify all those things with the leadings of the Holy Spirit. You hear such claims too often, “The Spirit told me . . . led me . . .” That is mysticism, and it is often defamation of the Spirit. We need more than the Spirit in us, we need him also in his ministry with all other Christian men and women. By one Spirit we are all baptized into one body. So there has to be our accountability to them as they bravely reject our feelings, rebuking us if necessary, teasing us, bringing us down to earth, saying sweetly, “Hang on a minute; I don’t think that the Spirit is saying those things to me.” We can’t protest, “He’s in me and I know what he wants us to do, and so it has to be done in this way,” because the Spirit is with them too.
However, if you think of him exclusively as the Spirit with you then you are losing out on appreciating the wonderful pity of the mighty God who comes and takes up his residence in our lives and is the inner witness of divine truth and power. If we think exclusively of the Spirit being with us then that will lead to denominationalism, and even to cult commitment. The Jim Jones followers all took poison and killed themselves because they thought only of the corporate ‘withness’ of the Spirit. “He is with us and so we will all die together.” What horror! No, the Spirit must be in us individually as well as with us all and that is our balanced courage and insight. It delivers us from ecclesiastical tyranny and cult leadership.
The Lord says in our text, “The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him” (v.17). Remember our Lord’s words to Nicodemus that he could not see the kingdom of God unless he were born of water and the Spirit. Nicodemus was of the world and in order to see God’s Spirit, God’s kingdom and God’s gospel he needed to be regenerated. The phrase ‘world’ in the New Testament usually refers to a moral and spiritual entity rather than a geographical and spatial entity. The ‘world’ stands for a loveless, defiant, selfish and fallen humanity, a sewer of infidelity, a habitation of cruelty, a promoter of greed, the source of torture, pornography, knife-attacks and unfaithfulness. Yet this is the world that God loves, and sent his Son to die for, and his Spirit to regenerate and indwell.
This world has this enormous problem of refusing to accept the work of the Spirit as he strives, and convicts, and illuminates, and draws. Grace is irresistible and effectual only to the elect. The world will not accept that this is the work of God the Spirit in its midst. It says, “We cannot see him! We do not know him, this Spirit you are talking about. We understand eloquence and oratory, and persistence in speaking to us and a certain attractiveness – yes we can see and know all about that sort of thing . . . but seeing and knowing the Spirit of God. That is your imagination. It is unacceptable to us.” So Jesus tells us that this is the reaction we are going to meet - the world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. So we are not to be surprised that that is the whole background for our ministries. The world cannot accept the Spirit because it cannot see or know him. In order to see and know him it has to accept him. It does not have the power to see and know, and it does not have the power to accept him. In what a closed circle of wretchedness the world lives. I must see him to receive him; I must receive him to see him. O wretched man that I am who can deliver me? God can do what the world cannot do. God’s love gives his Son. God’s love gives his Spirit. Forgiveness is accomplished by the Son; life and grace is applied by the Spirit. The Spirit comes and I can receive Christ. The Spirit comes and I can see Christ. So I am delivered from that closed circle and brought into the liberty of the children of God. So what am I to do? Wait? No. Cry mightily to God for his Spirit. You say, “But I can’t.” No but you must and out of the awareness of your helplessness the true prayer of longing for deliverance from the world comes.
“I will ask the Father and he will give you another Comforter to be with you for ever” (v.16). “Father, here are my apostles, eye-witnesses of my glory. Give them the Spirit of Truth. They are going to be writing gospels and histories and letters and a book of revelation from heaven. Every Christian that follows them for the next two thousand years is going to depend on what these apostles write in order to know what they’re to believe and what to reject. So lead these apostles into all truth.” You see what Jesus is asking the Father to give them. You meet it again ten verses later; “teach them all things and remind them of everything I have said to them” (v.26). Jesus wants there to be not even a membrane separating the words that the apostles write and the words that the Spirit says. What Paul writes the Spirit says; what the Spirit says the apostles write. All that occurs because Jesus has asked his Father that it might be so. What a reliable advocate for Jesus is the Counselor. He is the Spirit of truth.
Then he prays for favoured sinners all over the world; “There’s this man and woman in the 21st century in Wales and Father I want you to send the Spirit of truth to them to convict them of all the follies and falsehoods they have been believing in their lives. I want them to come from ignorance to the truth. So draw them to read the Bible and understand it. Draw them to a church where the Bible is taught. Illuminate their understanding. Give them inner knowledge and assurance that I am the truth.”
Then he prays for a preacher in Aberystwyth and asks his Father that I might be filled with the Spirit of truth, that I will be increasingly gripped by the truth, that I will be so fired by the truth to preach it with the Spirit that inspired it sent down from heaven, so that what happened in Jerusalem at Pentecost will happen when I preach of Christ, that many may come to love and serve him by the power of his Spirit. That is the wonder of the preacher who is kept by the intercession of a great loving High Priest.
6 July 2008 GEOFF THOMAS