No Longer Orphans

 

Text: John 14:15-21

Focus: Holy Spirit

Function: to help people see how the Spirit moves us into family

¹⁵“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. ¹⁶And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. ¹⁷This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

¹⁸“I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. ¹⁹In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. ²⁰On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. ²¹They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”

Well, Good morning. I love to talk about the Holy Spirit and experience how the Holy Spirit is moving us together in our community. She is making us into a family.

So, today I am going to do a little Bible Study. Let us break down these verses.

It starts out with a passage that either inspires us or shames us. I was raised hearing that first verse of our text, “If you really loved Jesus, then you wouldn’t sin. And when questioned about that, the justification was that we don’t sin, not to save ourselves, but because we are so grateful for the suffering of Jesus on the cross. Hence, “If you love me, you won’t sin. You won’t repeat the offenses that brought Jesus to the cross.”

Now I want to tell you that this is a crock of stuff that comes out of the South end of a North bound bull.

The passage says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” And John, the apostle writing this passage goes on later to repeat that phrase of Jesus, in his epistle, and adds a significant addendum to it. He says, ³For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome,

This verse was intended to set us free, not put us in bondage to shame.

John, in the epistle, has just got done saying that God is love and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. And he adds that those who do not love do not know God (no matter what they confess.)

And he repeats Jesus from this passage from today’s text where Jesus himself has just said, “here is the new commandment: Love one another.” John 13:34

So, to be clear, Jesus is not saying “If you love me you will not sin” but he is saying “If you love me you will love others.”

Remember, according to Matthew 25, we love God by loving others.

That is why, I believe, that John takes an entire epistle to describe the nature and working of love and its connection to the power and the infilling of the Holy Spirit.

God gives us the Spirit of God so that we can have the power to love others.

That is the gospel according to Phil.

The Spirit inside of us, according to scripture however, bears witness to the Christ inside of us. And she adopts us into the family of God.

The Holy Spirit of God whom resides inside of us does the work of transforming us into people who were once selfish, proud and self-righteous to those who love mercy, do the justice of God and walk in humility because of God’s grace given to us.

So what about this idea of sin and not sinning?

In the beginning of the epistle, John tells us to confess our sins and we will be forgiven. Simple as that.

But I want to remind you about what sin is.

Sin is anything that gets in the way of loving others, since that is the new commandment and the term “sin” means that we miss the goal. It oftentimes means that we thought our hearts were in the right place, but the arrow missed the bullseye, not quite there. It could be a big miss, or a little miss. But what it is is a deviation from God’s love for us and for others.

I was raised in an holiness movement. Growing up, sin was everything. One that was particularly emphasized was using slang terms for cuss works like shucks, darn, dang, and shoot since they really were metaphors for those awful four letter words.

And I don’t understand that. Some of the actual language in the bible is much worse, there is a lot of cussing and cursing in the Bible that is glossed over by the translators so that it can be read from the pulpit.

Sadly, we made a religion out of not cussing when I was growing up. And it was all coated under the guise that if we really loved Jesus we wouldn’t cuss.

Now the apostle did say for us to not let any unwholesome words come out of our mouths, but again, there are times when the phrase “God, damn this,” maybe with a please added, is appropriate.

I was once convicted by the Holy Spirit about what “unwholesome words” means after telling a racist joke. And then in history class at Bible College I learned how the Pollock Joke was invented so that the German soldiers would not feel bad about killing their white, but Slavic, neighbors.

The Pollock joke was made to dehumanize the others. And I learned the process of racism inside of myself began to lessen when I refused to laugh at or repeat racist jokes.

Again, the Spirit of God convicted me to give up racist jokes.

It is a serious aspect to loving our neighbors. When we joke about the other, we dehumanize them and that makes it easier for us to not love them.

We are called to love others, even our enemies.

And Jesus gives a promise in this passage.

He tells them that if they do indeed obey and love others, the Holy Spirit will move inside of them and bring them into a sense of belonging to the family of God.

He calls the Holy Spirit the advocate, or the comforter. God with us. Brother Paul talks about her in Romans 8 when he tells us this: “You have received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, “Daddy!” The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then we are heirs, heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ, if only we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him” (Romans 8: 15-17).

Paul puts the caveat “If we suffer with him…” to the promise of the Holy Spirit.

And I believe that this means if we, like Jesus love sacrificially.

But I don’t like looking at the condition: “if we suffer with him” so much as I love looking at the empowering that God is doing in our midst.

In Our midst, here, right now.

The longing for community and the way that it is fulfilled in the presence of God here in this holy place shows us that God is indeed at work in our midst.

And the promise of God is that through love, we are adopted into the family of God.

There is a suffering of self-sacrifice in forgiveness. If we suffer with him reminds me of Christ on the cross forgiving his murderers.

In Kairos, on Saturday night, we have a hand washing ceremony. They guys are given a forgiveness list at the beginning of the day and are encouraged to write names of people they need to forgive on the list. The list is written on rice paper and then we place the paper in a bowl of water and the lists evaporate as we pray over them and give our unforgiveness over to God to heal.

And then, we wash their hands while proclaiming they they are forgiven, they are cleansed and they are now the child of God.

And I believe we get the authority to make that proclamation from this passage.

And then we give them an extra dozen cookies to take back to the pods and they are asked to give the cookies to someone they forgave.

Through love and forgiveness we are born into the family of God.

And in Kairos, that is where we witness the men being born of God, from above, by the Spirit of God.