More to Come

Text: John 16:12-15

Focus: The Holy Spirit's revealing power

Function: To help people connect (always!)

Intro:

I remember studying Hermeneutics. That is the fancy term for the system by which we approach Scripture.

My professor would say, “Now remember, the gospel can be understood by a child, but the Scriptures are not first grade primers. Take the time to study the source, know the context, understand the heart of the author and more than anything, listen to the Spirit of God. Judge your hermeneutic by the rest of scripture and be faithful to God's revealed Word.”

That was good advice.

Today is Pentecost. We have been speaking of the Holy Spirit the last few weeks, today we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit to the Church.

More than anything, I think of the giving of the Holy Spirit, the fulfillment of Jesus' promise from the same passage, chapter 14:6 that He would not leave us orphans.

I wonder how much we think about what this means. I am sure that after 3 years of what appears to be non-stop ministry with all kinds of exciting events, those three years came to an end. Even though Jesus rose from the dead, His death began the process of separation that must have been hard to bear.

I understand it a little. Thursday started a week of comfort for me because I went home to get Kathy, she has a long weekend, and then I will take a day or two off this week and we will get to be together 7 days straight!

I can't imagine the feeling of loss after years of marriage to be all of a sudden alone.

The heart aches to be reunited.

The Holy Spirit came back to reunite them to Jesus. That is how they understood this event that day.

The promise is also in Romans 8:¹⁴For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. ¹⁵For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” ¹⁶it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God,

Through the Holy Spirit, we sense, we believe, we realize, that we are the children of God.

When I hear the term “Abba,” which most of you know is the intimate term for father: daddy, I begin to get the picture of just what is happening between God and humans when the Holy Spirit fills the heart of the believer.

What happens is this: God's Spirit calls us to God.

I understand why, at times, in worship, I feel led to cover my heart (cross arms at chest) to preserve the feeling and the moment, or to raise my hands in childlike faith and trust.

It is a real experience. It was new to them, so God punctuates the moment with tongues of fire.

God's Spirit calls us to God. Don't be ashamed, or fall in to the trap of feeling guilty when we don't sense a close presence because God's Spirit calls us to God. God does this.

So, let us focus on a particular aspect of the Holy Spirit this morning from our text: “You cannot bear it now.”

That moment, punctuated with these tongues of fire, changed the way they looked at their religion.

That same theology professor that I mentioned earlier sort of took, what I think, to be a skewed image of this passage, almost sort of the opposite of what it seems to me.

He said this. “Jesus' teachings were incomplete, this verse is telling us about the rest of the NT, and therefore the epistles are there to help us interpret what Jesus said.”

The weight we put on Jesus' teaching versus the rest of the scripture is a big question.

For example, the poor man in Luke 16 was saved simply because he was poor. The person who gives to the poor, feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, visits the prisoner, welcomes the refugee, accepts the man or woman from a different race, whoever shows mercy to the least of all people, (the worse of all people?), has done it to me?

And yet, Paul said that we are saved by faith alone and not works.

My bother and I debate this sometimes.

I believe that it is those who are actually working to show kindness to every person, looking especially for those who are cast out, looked down upon and disregarded who are those who live as those being saved from the thinking that the world is evil and the only person we should care for is ourselves. Jesus said, “the least of these.”

But my brother believes that it is simply a matter of faith and he has scripture to back it up.

But the question seems to me to be, was Jesus incomplete in His teaching? Do we look at those other scriptures in light of Jesus, or Jesus in light of them?

I say, we start with Jesus.

But, was did Jesus mean?

Well, there is the rest of the New Testament. The writings that explain what happened after Jesus did all this teaching. And all of that does count for something.

Why did Jesus say they could not bear it now?

There may be many reasons, but I want to submit one for us to see this morning.

Jesus came to fulfill the law, not make more laws. The whole problem with the ancient Jewish faith was that they codified law after law, 13,000 to explain the 1,300 so that they were sure they never made any mistakes.

They didn't understand Jesus' words, A new law I give you, love one another.

If you go through the rest of the NT, you can see a progression away from the law.

First, the Holy Spirit tells them to baptize Gentiles. The Holy Spirit leads women into leadership. The Holy Spirit leads them to change worship from Saturday to Sunday. The Holy Spirit teaches them that they do not have to be circumcised.

The Holy Spirit was changing things away from more religious duties to less, to only one: Love one another.

All of those new rules were a direct contradiction to what they experienced through the OT law. Jesus was telling them to abandon the idea that more rules, without a changed heart, were not going to help them love one another, or love God more.

Just love one another. And the Church began the process.

But they went back and forth. You can read about some of the arguments, debates and even power struggles that occurred as they were trying, and we still are, trying to work all this out.

And the teaching was for the disciples to let the Holy Spirit work on their minds and hearts to help them understand the grace and power of God's forgiveness toward others.

And you can see it. Even though the Holy Spirit showed Peter to baptize Gentiles, the crowd arrested Paul simply for being in Jerusalem with a gentile follower.

They could not have born the idea that the letter of the law was to be demolished in favor of the Spirit of the law which is to love one another.

And, through the process, they got better. But society has been on a cycle ever since. At one time, they got carried away. In 1 Corinthians 5, we read how a man, thinking there were no moral values at all, had a relationship with his father's wife.

And Paul said to them, “Look, you have gone to far. Even the culture around you has a problem with this kind of behavior.”

They reigned in their behavior a little bit and they struck a balance point.

Society is on this cycle. We are certainly not in the prudish age known as The Victorian Era, but we are in a time where behavior is scrutinized by others for the purpose of passing judgment.

And here is the question: what message do we send? Yes, we have standards, and they do reflect the culture and at this time, the culture is asking the question, does God love the other? The culture is asking the Church, Does God love Muslim? Does God love the transgendered person? Does God love the minority race as much as the dominant race? Does God love everyone as much as God loves you, or does your faith tell us that you think you are better than us?

And the Church responded at the time the same way it does today. Some were afraid and said no, we must stick to the older ways, and others, I believe, led by the Holy Spirit said yes and opened their arms to more and more.

In a day and age when group after group is criticized simply because controversy and attacks attract attention and that sells advertising, and those groups, Muslims, Women, Minorities, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Christians, Conservatives, Liberals, Gays, Straights, Religious and irreligious, the one who demonstrates a consistent message of love and acceptance is the one who is following the leading and power of the Holy Spirit.

More to come. I believe, it is more to love, more to accept, a bigger and bigger circle is included in God's great family as the Holy Spirit keeps on working.