SERMON: “The Spirit of the Christian Life” (John 14:15–24)
“The Spirit of the Christian Life”
(John 14:15–24)
Series: “John:
Life in Christ’s Name” Text:
John
14:15–24
By: Shaun
Marksbury Date:
April
28, 2024
Venue: Living
Water Baptist Church Occasion:
AM Service
I.
Introduction
Sometimes
this is reactionary against legalism, another dangerous error that says we can
earn or keep our salvation through obedience to the Law. That is an error we see in some Hebrew Roots
movements, calling us back to strict Torah observance, or in some
fundamentalist circles, calling us to a peculiar manner of life or spiritual
ecstasies to be blessed by God. Legalism
is a wicked sister, also rejecting the clear teaching of the Lord of Scripture. Legalism and antinomianism seem like
opposites, but since neither understand the grace found in Jesus Christ, they
are actually opposites of the gospel.
These
verses demonstrate that we should keep the commandments of our Lord, but our
motivation for keeping the Law isn’t to gain salvation but to demonstrate
love. Moreover, the next verse
demonstrates that the power to keep the law is not in ourselves but in the
Lord.
The Holy Spirit changes everything for the life of the
believer. Today, we’ll see that,
because of the Holy Spirit, a believer can obey, know, and love God. Let’s consider the first of those:
II.
First, Believers Can Obey God Because of the Indwelling
Spirit (vv. 15–17)
If you love Me, you will keep My
commandments. I will ask the Father, and
He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; that is the
Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or
know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you.
This
is a chapter of comforts. We saw that in
v. 1, where, as Jesus is telling them He is going away, He says, “Do not let
your heart be troubled.” He said He
would be with them, that He would answer their prayer requests, and the promise
of the Spirit seems to fit right along with that promise.
That
is the loving relationship we see with God the Son and God the Father. Jesus is doing the Father’s works (vv. 10–11). He also calls us to do His works and even “greater
works than these” (v. 12). So, we should expect a call to keep His
commandments, following our model.
Yet,
it’s more than that: Jesus helps us to obey through the Holy Spirit. That is the connection between these verses. He promises to pray on our behalf to the
Father (interceding for His people!), and He will send the Holy Spirit.
We should take a moment to consider who this
is. There are several options in your
translations: “Helper” (NASB, ESV, NKJV), “Advocate” (LSB), “Counselor” (HCSB),
and “Comforter” (KJV). The Greek word is
paracletos, “one called alongside to
help.”[1] This term
is often used in a legal sense, with the advocate coming alongside the accused
for defense.[2] Some prefer
just transliterating the Greek and calling Him the Paraclete because of the
difficulties in translating such a rich term.[3] He brings conviction and comfort to our
lives, working through His word, our consciences, and through other men.
Of course, it’s worth noting that this is the
Holy Spirit. If you ever talk to a
Muslim, he will say Jesus is predicting Muhammad here.[4] However, this is clearly a spiritual being,
someone who can be with Christians forever.
In v. 17, it says that the world cannot see Him, but unbelievers saw
Muhammad as he went conquering the Middle East and into Africa. That’s to say nothing about how he
contradicted Scripture and the ways of Christ.
It makes more sense to read this as the Holy Spirit.
In
this Trinitarian passage, with Father, Son, and Spirit all present, we see that
we can receive the help we need to keep God’s commands. Jesus is providing comfort for the disciples,
and He promised that this would be “another Comforter.” This is means “another of the same kind, i.e.,
someone like Jesus Himself who will take His place and do His work.”[8] John
calls Jesus a Paraclete or Advocate in 1 John 2:1 — “And if anyone sins, we
have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” Jesus is our Advocate or Intercessor with the
Father; the Holy Spirit is His with us.
And
He is with us forever. In 1 Samuel
16:12–16, the Spirit came on David for a time, but departs from Saul. In Psalm 51:11, after David had sinned with
Bathsheba, he fears this same loss. Jesus
assures His disciples that the Helper here will not depart, however. Christians, on their worst day, do not need
to share David's fear. On their best
day, though, they don't deserve Him!
Jesus
sent the Spirit for this purpose. The
Holy Spirit would provide them the truth of God that they need. Jesus previously said He’s the truth (v. 6),
so this “another of the same kind” Helper would also be truth in a world that
rejects truth.
That’s
why the world cannot receive the Spirit.
The natural man cannot receive the things of the Spirit of God (1 Cor
2:14). As one commentary notes, “Without
a radio, radio waves go unnoticed. The
Holy Spirit is unnoticed by the unsaved who have no spiritual life.”[9] Those
who are spiritually dead have no perception of the Holy Spirit, let alone know
Him.
Jesus
contrasts His disciples to the world. He
says that they know Him because He abides with them and will be in them. Jesus is speaking prophetically — proleptically
is the term, when a prophecy speaks of a future event with such certainty that
it speaks of it as a past or a present event.
At the moment, they have regeneration in the Old Testament sense, but
not in the post-Pentecost sense (Peter understands this promise as being fulfilled
then in Acts 2:33). Jesus promised all
who believe would have the Spirit in their innermost being (John 7:37–39).
The
Spirit inspired these apostles to write true, Holy Scripture. He is also with Christians today, both with
us and already indwelling us; in 1 Corinthians 2:12, Paul affirms that “we have
received… the Spirit who is from God.”
Because of Scripture and the internal work of the Spirit, we can know
God’s will and keep it.
As
such, we have what we need to obey God through power in the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is with us in all situations,
through all trials and temptations, and He is in us, giving us the strength of
God to overcome our hardships to the glory of God. Of course, a key to overcoming is knowing
that God is with you through the Holy Spirit (which brings us to our next point).
III.
Second, Believers Can Know God Because of the
Indwelling Spirit (vv. 18–21)
I will not leave you as orphans; I will
come to you. After a little while the
world will no longer see Me, but you will see Me; because I live, you will live
also. In that day you will know that I
am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you. He who has My commandments and keeps them is
the one who loves Me; and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I
will love him and will disclose Myself to him.
Once
again, remember that these are comforts that Jesus gives to His disciples
before He is crucified. He uses the word
orphanos here, the word from which we get “orphans.” Earlier, He called them his little or dear
children (John 13:33). Since He is going
away, He would then be leaving them as “orphans,” without any heavenly
comfort. This is where the Holy Spirit
comes in, as we will see.
He
gives them a promise for the future: He will come to them. There are different fulfillments of this
promise. The first and most immediate
would be that Jesus returned to them with His resurrection. He then spent time teaching them until His
ascension before Pentecost. We might
also think about the rapture, or when He physically comes again to judge and to
reign, a fulfillment still on the horizon.
Jesus’s
life leads us to spiritual life, and one day, resurrected life. If we live now, we can live according to a
new way of life. As Colossians 3:1–3
says, “Therefore if you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the
things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the
things that are on earth. For you have
died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” The Lord is giving us a new way of life which
to know the commands of God and keep them.
That
brings us to v. 21. The one who has the
commands of God is anyone with Spirit-inspired Scripture in his hand. For instance, Romans 3:2 says that the Jews
were “entrusted with the oracles of God,” but not all believed. A person today can go to a Christian church
and hear the truth of Scripture, but that isn’t enough. You can turn on your TV, or pull your Bible
apps up on your phone, but that only proves you have the commandments. Do you keep them?
Paralleling
v. 15, Jesus says here, “He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one
who loves Me.” Keeping Jesus’s word is a
way of expressing love for Him, and we’ll talk more about that in a
minute. For now, it’s abundantly clear
that it’s not enough to say you have God’s word — you should obey it. Thankfully, in the power of the Spirit, you
can, as we’ve already seen.
Jesus
goes on to say that “he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will
love him and will disclose Myself to him.”
We cannot read this in a legalistic way.
We’re not getting God’s love through our commandment keeping. In 1 John 4:10, the apostle records, “In this
is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” In v. 19, of that chapter, he says, “We love,
because He first loved us.” All of our
love for God and each other originates in the Lord.
What
is His command? Or, we could ask as the
people asked Jesus in John 6:28, “What shall we do, so that we may work the
works of God?” Jesus said, “This is the
work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent” (v. 29). The first work for us to obey is to believe
Jesus. If we keep Jesus’s word in this
regard, trusting in Him for salvation, then we’re loving the Son and keeping
God’s will. Of course we will then know
more of the love of God.
To
put this another way, we will know of God’s love personally. We will also have self-disclosure of
Christ. If you want to know Jesus and
the love of God, then repent of your sins and turn to Him. If you’re a Christian, but you’re continuing
in sin, then you are not going to experience the same light of God that you
could. Either way, you cannot know God
as well as you hope if you embrace sin.
IV.
Third, Believers Can Love God Because of the
Indwelling Spirit (vv. 22–24)
Judas (not Iscariot) said to Him, “Lord,
what then has happened that You are going to disclose Yourself to us and not to
the world?” Jesus answered and said to
him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him,
and We will come to him and make Our abode with him. He who does not love Me does not keep My
words; and the word which you hear is not Mine, but the Father’s who sent Me.”
We
tend to not understand that obedience is an expression of our love for the
Lord. In Luke 6:46, Jesus said, “Why do
you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” Jesus modeled this; He says down in v. 31, “so
that the world may know that I love the Father, I do exactly as the Father
commanded Me.” John goes on later to
link love and commandment-keeping (1 John 5:3; 2 John 6). Should we expect to demonstrate love
differently than fulfilling His will?
We
see something of that in one of Jesus’s disciples here. There was another man named Judas among the
disciples (it was a common name), and he wants to know why Jesus will only
manifest Himself to believers. He’s
still hoping for a spectacular Messianic display to the world, toppling earthly
kingdoms and establishing His own.
However,
that isn’t what Jesus is saying He’s about to do! He’s as patient with this question as He has
been with the others. As Mathhew Henry
notes here, “He overlooks what infirmity there was in what Judas spoke, and
goes on with his comforts.”[10] The
coming Holy Spirit may not be what the disciples had in mind or wanted, but He
would provide the manifestation of Christ that they needed.
With
the Spirit, they can love as God wants them to love. This is good news for us. Sometimes, we don’t do what we’re supposed to
do, and it feels like it puts relationships in jeopardy. Kids will sense that they do wrong, so they
need Jesus through the Holy Spirit. In
the power of the Spirit, we can show our love for Christ!
If
we do, we have this promise here that both the Father and the Son will make
their abode with and in us. We don’t
need to feel separated from God; He will be with us forever in the Spirit. Just as there are many “rooms” in the
Father’s house (John 14:2), the Father and the Son will make a “room” or a home
with us.[11]
Remember,
we experience this love because we are also loving God. Jesus warns in v. 24, “He who does not love
Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine, but the
Father’s who sent Me.” We actually
demonstrate hatred for God and His Word if we don’t keep it. If you are contemplating sin, turn form that
and back to the Lord! Thankfully, in the
Holy Spirit, you can.
V.
Conclusion
Again, we can both love God and, in turn, know of God’s love
personally. Christ will disclose Himself
to us. We draw closer in our walking in
His ways. We will also have
self-disclosure of Christ. If you want
to know Jesus and the love of God, then repent of your sins and turn to
Him.
He will say both the Father and He will make their abode
with this person (v. 23). There is a
sense in which the Holy Spirit moves in our hearts before salvation,
regenerating our hearts of stone so we can exercise faith in Christ. However, it is only at that moment of belief
that we receive the Holy Spirit and an understanding of Christ. We believe in order to understand. Those who will not obey the Lord by trusting
in Him will not receive any manifestation of the Lord. Yet, those who do will find the day star
arising in their hearts, dispelling the darkness of the night!
If you’re a Christian, but you’re continuing in sin, then
you are not going to experience the same light of God that you could. Either way, you cannot know God as well as
you hope if you embrace sin.
[1] New American
Standard Bible: 1995 Update, (La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995).
[2] Gerald L. Borchert, John 12–21, The New American Commentary, (Nashville: Broadman &
Holman Publishers, 2002), 25B:122–123.
[3] Ibid., 25B:123.
[4] Barbara B. Pemberton, The Apologetics Study Bible: Real Questions, Straight Answers, Stronger
Faith, 2007, 1602.
[5] For scriptural evidences, see John F. MacArthur Jr., John 12–21, MacArthur New Testament
Commentary, (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2008), 113–114.
[6] Ibid., 114.
[7] Ibid.
[8] John MacArthur Jr., Ed., The MacArthur Study Bible, electronic ed., (Nashville, TN: Word
Pub., 1997), 1614.
[9] Edwin A. Blum, The
Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures, 1985, 2, 323.
[10] Matthew Henry, Matthew
Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible: Complete and Unabridged in One Volume,
(Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994), 2016.
[11] Blum, 324.
