1409-07P XXX
HE WILL TEACH YOU ALL THINGS
(John 14:25-31)
SUBJECT: The Holy Spirit
F.C.F: What is the promised ministry of the Holy Spirit?
PROPOSITION: We must preach and pray in the power of the Spirit.
INTRODUCTION:
A. I once read an apt illustration of what it means to grow in Christ. Imagine several straight wires about a yard in length jammed one by one into a narrow-necked glass bottle. When all is done, you have a hopeless, tangled mess. If you would break the bottle, what would you have? Well, you would still have a mess, but it would no longer be hopeless. And what you would have to do is to untwist each wire, one after another, until all was straightened out again.
When we come to Christ and are saved, the bottle is broken. But we still have a lot of straightening out to do.
B. That image also applies to true and false teaching. For more than a generation now we have had some poor teaching on the Holy Spirit. According to a certain section of the church the work of the Holy Spirit is to make us giddy and bubbly, silly even, causing us to speak gibberish or swoon or to bark like a dog or collapse in laughing spells, all of which were clearly caused by emotional excess. Or as one person suggested, according to these folks, the purpose of the Holy Spirit is to get us to do things in public we wouldn’t dream of doing in the privacy of our own home.
So it’s good that we are tracing through the Gospel of John. Jesus had much to say about the blessed ministry of the Holy Spirit whom he and the Father would send to us, another Helper. And you will notice: no confusion, no gibberish, no swooning, or barking. Rather, the Holy Spirit brings order, clarity, understanding, and deep conviction of the truth.
C. Unfortunately, these texts have often been misread and misapplied by those who hold to this enthusiastic view of the Spirit’s ministry. They suggest that the Holy Spirit will continue to teach us new things all the time, that we need to listen more to the fresh wind, fresh fire, new messages of the Spirit more even than to the Word of God. Bible scholar Alex Motyer walked into a church one Sunday carrying his Bible. An usher at the door assured him that he would not need his Bible today: “God speaks to us directly.”
Here’s what Jesus said about the other Helper, the Holy Spirit, in our text for today. “25These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. 26 But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” Is this a promise of continuing revelation, so fresh and so current as to make the Bible obsolete? Hardly.
I. THE PROMISE OF UNDERSTANDING.
A. What was the major problem the disciples had been suffering from all the way up to the last moments with Jesus in the upper room? They continually failed to understand what Jesus was saying. Like everyone else in their day, they had such strong expectations for what the Messiah would be that when he came, they could hardly recognize him. They found it hard to fit many of his sayings into their preconceived context of who he should be, and they could not make sense of much of his teaching.
So, far from continually adding fresh installments of new teachings, the Holy Spirit’s first ministry was to enable them to understand what they had already been taught. That’s what Jesus means when he said that the Holy Spirit would “teach them all things.” He had already taught them all things. But the Holy Spirit would teach them from the inside, opening their minds to grasp and to believe what Jesus had already taught them.
Jesus assured them that the Father would send them the Holy Spirit “in my name.” Yes, it would be according to Jesus’ request, but the Holy Spirit would come in his name, as his emissary. He would not come with his own agenda, but would come on behalf of Christ. And that explains his ministry: to open their hearts to receive what Jesus had already taught them, not to bring more and more revelation to them.
B. We call this the “illumination of the Holy Spirit.” Some churches have a “Prayer for Illumination” during their worship services. They offer this prayer immediately before the reading of Scripture, and this is the same idea. Anybody who pays attention can understand what the Bible says. It is plain and simple enough. The skeptic Mark Twain famously said, “It’s not the things in the Bible that I don’t understand that bother me. It’s the things I do understand.” But only the Holy Spirit can open the heart to receive the truth, to accept it and believe it with saving faith.
C. The disciples heard, but they did not comprehend. It was the working of the Holy Spirit who would illumine them to the truth. We find statements to this effect in John’s gospel. In 2:18-22, for example, after Jesus had cleansed the temple of the money grubbers, the religious leaders asked for a sign to prove his authority to do so: “18 So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?” 19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” 20 The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” (They didn’t understand what he was talking about, but neither did his disciples at first.) 21 But he was speaking about the temple of his body. 22 When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.”
That was a fulfillment of Jesus’ promise that the Holy Spirit would teach them all things.
Or in chapter 12, at the triumphal entry, Jesus came into Jerusalem riding a young donkey: “14 And Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, just as it is written, 15 “Fear not, daughter of Zion; behold, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey’s colt!” 16 His disciples did not understand these things at first, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written about him and had been done to him.” That’s what Jesus was promising here.
And even on the morning of the resurrection, still they were without understanding: “Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; 9 for as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” They knew the Scripture, but they did not comprehend it until the illuminating ministry of the Holy Spirit.
So you can see that the giving of the Spirit would not result in more information, but in his work of opening their hearts to grasp what Jesus had already taught them.
And the Holy Spirit would aid them in remembering.
II. THE PROMISE OF REMEMBERING.
A. One of the other mistakes of those who teach the exuberant view of the Holy Spirit is that they read mail written to the apostles as though it was written to them. Jesus was not addressing us directly there in the upper room. He is speaking to the eleven who were soon to pass through the troubled waters of this shocking ordeal. We weren’t there. This is not addressed directly to us, though there is an important message here for us.
25 “These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. 26 But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” Jesus was promising John and Peter Andrew and Matthew and James and Bartholomew and Thomas Phillip and Judas (not Iscariot) and the rest of them in the upper room that the Holy Spirit would aid their faulty memories, especially since they were likely to forget some of this as they underwent this severe trial. We never heard Jesus say these things in the first place. He was not promising you and me that the Holy Spirit would somehow help us remember what we never heard in the first place. This was for the eleven alone.
Now why would this be important? What help did this news offer to John’s first readers a generation after these events? They never heard Jesus speak either.
B. Well, one of the questions that would have been foremost in the minds of John’s first readers, and the question that we should be thinking about as well, is whether or not these disciples got the message right. Again, they showed remarkable dullness all through the story up to this point. And how could we be sure that they both heard it straight and remembered accurately what they had heard? This was the ministry of the Holy Spirit to these Apostles.
Do you see what Jesus is doing here? He is authorizing the Apostles to be his official spokesmen. How many of Jesus’ sayings do we have that were recorded by Jesus himself? (None). All that we have from Jesus has been handed to us by his eyewitnesses. And here Jesus is explaining that his Holy Spirit, sent in his name, in his authority, would empower the apostles to speak correctly and to interpret faithfully what Jesus had entrusted to them.
C. And, of course, this would be of great importance to John’s first readers who were suffering rejection and even worse for their faith in Jesus. They would want to be very sure that those who brought them the message did so accurately and authoritatively. And they did, illumined and informed by the power of the Holy Spirit. I remember a joke told about a pope who had a vision of Christ. When he awoke, he was very troubled. When his fellow priests asked him about it, he replied in this way. “The Lord said it was “celebrate” not celibate.”
D. Are you any less interested in making sure they got it right? I’m assuming you’ve trusted your eternity, heaven and hell, forever, on the hope of Christ in the gospel. How do you know his apostles got the story straight? Again, Jesus here is authorizing Matthew and John, and by extension, Mark and Luke, and the rest of the New Testament writers, to be his official spokesmen, and the Holy Spirit would ensure that they got it right, word for word.
Listen carefully to D.A. Carson’s explanation of this text. “John’s purpose in including this theme and this verse is not to explain how readers at the end of the first century may be taught by the Spirit, but to explain to readers at the end of the first century how the first witnesses, the first disciples, came to an accurate and full understanding of the truth of Jesus Christ. The Spirit’s ministry in this respect was not to bring qualitatively new revelation, but to complete, to fill out, the revelation brought by Jesus himself.” (p 505)
APPLICATIONS
The primary application of this text for us is the assurance that we have the true teaching of Jesus in the apostolic record, the New Testament. The Holy Spirit has not only helped them remember and to get the story straight, the Holy Spirit has inspired the writing of the New Testament so that it is the very Word of God written.
Peter explains this in his second letter: “16 For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. 17 For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” 18 we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain.
“19 And we have something more sure, the prophetic word, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, 20 knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. 21 For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
So here is the ministry of the Holy Spirit in teaching them all things and bringing to their remembrance what Jesus taught them. It is more sure than their mere eyewitness testimony because it was enabled and empowered, inspired by the Holy Spirit.
But there are secondary applications from this text. The first disciples heard what Jesus said to them, but did not grasp his teaching in a saving manner, not until the Holy Spirit was given to teach them from the inside out. And that means that in our teaching and sharing the gospel today, we are likewise utterly dependent on the inward working of the Holy Spirit of God to teach in a saving manner from the inside.
Think of it, the greatest teacher ever, the very Word of God taught them, and they could not lay hold of these saving truths without the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit, enlivening them to the truth. How much more are we dependent upon the same Spirit to aid us both in our teaching and helping our hearers to grasp the saving truth of God!
That also means that the same Spirit who gave the Word also works through the Word. We should not expect the Spirit to work apart from the Word, and so our main focus is on doing what Jesus did: teaching the Word of God. That’s why we are unapologetic in our strong focus on teaching and preaching God’s Word and calling God’s people to be faithful in their intake of the Word. The Holy Spirit may save through his Word, but he will not save apart from the Word.
There’s a great example of this in the tenth chapter of the book of Acts. God had chosen to save a god-fearing Gentile, a Roman centurion named Cornelius. So God sent an angel to him in a vision. The angel told him that he should send for Peter who had an important message for him. He sent for Peter, who came to him and preached the gospel to him, and Cornelius believed and was saved.
Why didn’t the angel simply tell him the message himself and cut out the middle man? Or why didn’t God just save him on the spot? It’s because God has determined that he would save through the Word of God, through the Gospel, and we must be faithful in preaching and teaching the word of Christ.
J
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