The Helper

 

Text: John 15:26-27; 4-15

Focus: Holy Spirit

Function: to help people experience the Spirit’s power

15:²⁶“When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf. ²⁷You also are to testify, because you have been with me from the beginning.

16:^“4b I did not say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you. ⁵But now I am going to him who sent me, yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ ⁶But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your hearts. ⁷Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you, but if I go, I will send him to you. ⁸And when he comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: ⁹about sin, because they do not believe in me; ¹⁰about righteousness, because I am going to the Father, and you will see me no longer; ¹¹about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.

¹²“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. ¹³When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. ¹⁴He will glorify me because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. ¹⁵All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

Good morning and I guess I should say, “Happy Birthday Church!”

Today is Pentecost. It is the day that we celebrate the beginning of the Church when the Holy Spirit filled the 120 gathered in a large room in Jerusalem.

It is an amazing story. Pentecost is the Jewish celebration that always occurred 50 days after the Passover celebration.

So, this group of believers after seeing Jesus appear to them several times in different form, is coming to terms with the reality that Jesus did indeed die and rise from the dead as Christ.

Some of them have witnessed his ascension into heaven and heard his instruction given to them in the book of Acts 1:8 when Jesus told them that they were to go to Jerusalem and wait for the power of the Holy Spirit to come upon them so that they too can testify to Jesus’ death and resurrection.

It seems to me that this early group of disciples are grasping the reality of their faith and are starting to trust in the promise of Jesus that he will send the Holy Spirit.

And that leads us to today’s text. They are parts of Jesus’ final instructions to the disciples in the Upper Room right after he washes their feet, dismisses Judas for the betrayal and right before he prays a lengthy prayer for them.

Jesus tells them about the mystery of the Holy Spirit in this passage.

He first wants to assure them not to grieve at his absence because by leaving, he will come back to them in the form of the Holy Spirit who will give to them the power to testify as he did.

That phrase I used, “The power to testify” takes me back to Acts 1:8 when he told them they will be his witnesses.

The word for witness is martyr. He tells them literally that they as well will testify to Jesus death by their own martyrdom.

And they didn’t shrink away. God was compelling them to follow God no matter what happened to them.

I keep preaching that we need to follow Jesus example and be willing to take up our cross and follow him as well.

They were not afraid to die because Jesus set the example for them. Jesus resisted the political power, because the spiritual powers were also the political powers, by dying on the cross and and forgiving the political powers in the process. They lived in faith of Jesus’ example to not resist or fight back but to trust in God.

Fighting back leads to more fighting and does not bring us to the peace that Christ intended for us.

But I digress.

Jesus gives us an example of hope in the justice of God.

He tells them that the Holy Spirit will prove their faith and the love and justice of God as he makes us just and righteous people.

We are to testify about his love and sacrifice for us by living loving and sacrificial lives for others.

That is what he means by being his witnesses. They are the ones who bear witness to his resurrection and the way he died. They recognize as well that he didn’t compromise his teachings even though they killed him for them.

We live in culture wars. I had a colleague tell me he was in trouble for “being woke” because he preaching from the Bible about how we are to turn the other cheek and disarm oppression through non violent means, like Jesus did, even if it cost him his life.

I don’t want to scare or shame you about being willing to be a martyr.

The promise from Christ is that we will live an a life without boundaries for eternity life in Christ.

The power of the Holy Spirit in our lives, according to Jesus is like a river of living water running out of us.

I might define Christians as those who allow the Spirit of Christ to move in their hearts.

As we allow the Spirit to move in our hearts we grow deeper in our faith.

And maybe it is because of the emphasis on forgiveness during Kairos, but I find the one thing that frees or limits the moving of the Holy Spirit in my life, is my faithfulness to the spiritual discipline of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is a way we testify to Jesus. It almost always contains an element of our own martyrdom because it involves the sacrifice of our pride. But sacrificing our pride is always spiritually beneficial for us.

Even though John mentions Jesus speaking about how the Spirit will show Jesus love and justice to the world through us, the main emphasis of the passage is on the fact that the Spirit is here to help us. Hence the title, The Helper.

The passage translates the idea of helper into the world advocate. An advocate is a sort of counsel who has the power to make things right.

I remind myself that Jesus came to earth to restore the creation back to God by restoring us back to each other and breaking down the walls, not building them up, between the races and cultures and religion and all peoples of the world. And he came to restore all of creation, so it includes justice for the planet without poisoning our children’s future.

And I this passage reminds us that if Jesus leaves planet earth and he will return as the Christ Spirit inside of all of us, made evident in this passage to those who rest in Christ. He left planet earth as Jesus the Nazarene and returned as the Christ just like he promised and it was marked by the miracles of the appearance of flaming tongues and people being able to speak languages that they didn’t know previously.

The Christians were filled with the Holy Spirit and God began doing great things in their midst.

As then we see in the next few chapters of Acts that they gave up their greed and shared in common and helped the poor, who also became believers and shared and helped others and the community prospered because they took seriously the command to love their neighbor just as much as they love their own selves and families.

So the promise is that we will not only be baptized in water, but in the power of the Holy Spirit and it will transform us so that we can follow Jesus and transform our culture into a more loving place.