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Good morning my “Walking with Jesus” friends,
In these days of “shelter in place”, many people, in many countries, are experiencing a lifestyle we have not known before, right? Most people have been very active, living ‘on the run’ from morning till night. We have been highly social, connecting with many people each day, and often in large groups, giving no thought to our proximity to each other, even the people we don’t know personally.
But things have changed over the past several weeks for most of us. Automobiles remain parked for days. Contact with people is more by technology than face to face in person. Many people have not spent as much time inside their home each day, for years! Face masks are becoming normal fashion. Caution and maybe fear is keeping people apart from those we know and love, and distant from everyone else. What we are experiencing is very similar to what I believe the closest friends of Jesus experienced in the days immediately after that world changing Passover/Easter weekend. While the rest of their world seemed unchanged, Jesus’ friends were living a radically different life of near isolation.
John, Peter, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Jesus, may have been the four people who spent these days in the greatest isolation. They were the most easily recognized as those closest to Jesus and perhaps therefore the most hunted. I believe they each spent long hours of deep reflection on the events of the past week, and the words Jesus had spoken. I wonder if this one sentence of Jesus had reverberated in John’s heart for many days: “I tell you the truth, it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you.” (John 16:7)
How could it possibly be for their ‘good’, to their benefit, that Jesus would leave them, especially in the horrific manner in which He died? Troubling questions haunted Jesus’ friends… if Jesus was alive, where was He now? Why was He seen in several different places on resurrection Sunday, but only briefly? Today is Thursday and no one has seen Him since Sunday. Is this the ‘new normal’? If so how could this possibly be better than being with Jesus 24×7? Who is this “Counselor” Jesus speaks of? When will He come to us and how will we know Him? How could this “Counselor” be better for us than Jesus has been? Oh so many questions in these radically different times! My dear “Walking with Jesus” friends, I suggest to you that these words of Jesus are just as much for us today as they were for His close friends that week after Passover/Easter.
John records that in the upper room that Thursday evening, Jesus had told His friends to not be troubled, because He was going away to prepare a place for them and that He would come back to take them to be with Him. Assuming Jesus was speaking of some special place here on earth, Thomas had said “Lord, we don’t know where You are going, so how can we know the way.” And Jesus had replied “I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except by Me.” (John 14:1-6) It was a bold statement. More and more Jesus had been talking about the unique relationship He had with Almighty God, whom He was now almost always referring to as “My Father”. Jesus increasingly challenged His friends to discern between truth and fantasy, or worse, deceit. He had invited them to ‘follow Me’, and they had, but now He seemed to be talking about following Him without Him being present, physically visible, with them. How could that be?
Then Jesus had said “I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in Me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these because I am going to the Father.” How was that possible? They’d seen many unexplainable miracles. They didn’t understand them, couldn’t explain how they were accomplished, so how could they possibly do them? Blind people received perfect sight. Cripple people stood and walked. Storms were stilled with a word.
Demons were bound and cast out of people. Even dead people had been raised to life! It was preposterous to imagine that any of these normal people who’d been with Jesus these past months, now enjoying the Passover meal together, could possibly do the things they’d seen Him do! Especially if He wasn’t there with them! Can you imagine their confusion, maybe even their anxiety, my friends?
John remembered the heavy silence which hung in the air while Jesus had spoken. He had continued: “And I will ask the Father and He will give you another Counselor to be with you forever – the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept Him; because it neither sees Him nor knows Him. But you know Him, for He lives with you and will be in you.” (John 14:12,16,17) If you had been at the table with them that evening, what would you have understood Jesus to mean with these words? And a week later, with all that had taken place through the weekend, if you were right now sitting with John reflecting, discussing what has happened, what would you conclude now, about these words Jesus that had spoken last Thursday evening?
I can see John saying to us, as we sit listening to him recount Thursday evening to us… Jesus had continued: “All this I have spoken while I am still with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.” (John 14:25,26)
So the Counselor Jesus speaks of is the Holy Spirit of God and God the Father will send Him to live with, and in fact live WITHIN people like us, whose lives are being changed as we trust in Jesus, and are seeking to follow Him? This Holy Spirit of God is the same Holy Spirit who was guiding and empowering Jesus, and the same Spirit which was sent often in Old Testament times. Jesus was promising this Holy Spirit Counselor for John and other friends of Jesus, in the days after that first Easter, as well as you and me, nearly 2000 years later, could it be true!? YES! Yes!
Can you imagine John saying to us… So, what do you think? When do you think this Holy Spirit Counselor is coming and how will we know when He is among us, and especially, how will it be to have Him living WITHIN us? How would you answer those questions, if John were asking you?
My friends, if time travel were possible, and you and I, from April 2020, were sitting with John on Thursday following resurrection day, what would you try to explain to John, that you now understand, about Jesus’ words? We have the benefit of the entire New Testament, John didn’t have any of it. We could tell John what was going to happen to him and about 120 others in Jerusalem at the Pentecost festival, as Luke reported in Acts 2, when the Holy Spirit came upon them for the first time. We could perhaps explain some of what Paul wrote about in his letters to the churches he had started throughout the Empire… Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, 1 & 2 Thessalonians.
But here’s my question, my friends… what could you and I explain to John about what YOU and I, personally, are experiencing with the Holy Spirit of God as our resident Counselor, as Jesus had promised?? What is it like for Him to be living within us, guiding us, teaching us? What difference is the Holy Spirit Counselor making in our lives, today, in this season of the Coronavirus pandemic, regardless of where any of us live in our world this Thursday in April 2020?
Perhaps John would remind us that Jesus had continued that Thursday evening by saying: “When the Counselor comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father, He will testify about Me… and when He comes, He will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin, righteousness and judgment. In regard to sin because men do not believe in Me; in regard to righteousness because I am going to the Father where you can see Me no longer; in regard to judgment because the prince of this world (Satan) now stand condemned.” (John 15:26; 16:8-11)
So, just as Jesus had often said He had come to earth, to humanity, sent here by God the Father, so the Holy Spirit Counselor will also come, sent by God the Father, to us, a humanity in desperate need of God’s help. And God was sending the Holy Spirit because Jesus was leaving, returning to the Father in heaven, and God so loved us He did not want to leave us without God’s Presence among us! What a remarkable concept! What a tremendous kindness of God.
In the absence of Jesus it would now be the Holy Spirit of God doing what Jesus had been doing, only doing it on an individual, personal level, with all who trust in Jesus and desire a personal relationship with God, as Jesus has explained. The Holy Spirit would make God’s truth clear. The Holy Spirit would convict of sin, evil, wickedness deep in the heart of each person, as the Holy Spirit helps us compare our thoughts, words, attitudes and actions with God’s unchanging standard of perfect holiness!
Jesus said the Holy Spirit would make it clear that Satan is a defeated foe, and while God is merciful to us a sinful humanity, the Holy Spirit would help us see that we reap the painful wages of our sin everyday as lies break hearts, disease wrecks bodies, anger wounds deeply, and death is growing in all of us. God’s Holy Spirit would help us understand that God’s justice wrath will bring final judgment of Satan when he is confined to hell for all eternity. (Rev. 20:10)
We see this all now much more clearly than John did 2000 years ago, don’t we my friends? But here’s my question, for all of us today: is God’s Holy Spirit Counselor real, and doing the things Jesus promised He would do in our lives, my ‘Walking with Jesus” friends, all around the world TODAY? Are you living in the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit Counselor?
Finally, John reminds us that Jesus, that Passover Thursday evening, had said “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when He, the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on His own, He will speak only what He hears, and He will tell you what is yet to come. He will bring glory to Me by taking from what is Mine and making it known to you…” (John 16:12-15) Ah this, my friends, is one of Jesus’ great promises for us. Do you see Jesus referred to Him several times as the Spirit of truth? Why? Because God’s truth is vital to life, especially life being lived in our dark, evil tainted world! The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God’s truth, and one of His important roles is to TEACH all those who desire to understand God and God’s truth. Each day as I sit with my Bible open, ready to write the “Walking with Jesus”, I first am praying, asking the Holy Spirit Counselor, to guide me very carefully in what HE wants to say to us, so that as I write HE is guiding me, so as you and I open God’s Word together “The Spirit of truth will guide us into all truth.”
If we were sitting with John, on that Thursday after Passover/Easter, one week after Jesus had said these things in the upper room, can you imagine John leaning back, perhaps his hands clasped behind his head, looking back across the recent events in Jerusalem, and then out into the future and saying “If this is all true, I can only imagine what it would be like for me, and you, and people like us, who want to be like Jesus, to live our lives with the daily, powerful, influence of the Holy Spirit Counselor guiding us. What a contrast there would be between those so determined to destroy everything about Jesus and those of us who want to honor Jesus with our lives. Can you imagine what it would be like if there were hundreds of us, thousands of us, in every city in the world?”
In closing today, do you remember the Apostle Paul wrote this to the first century Christians in Rome, but it was intended for all Christ followers in every generation, every place: “Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what the sinful nature desires; but those who live in accordance with the Holy Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Holy Spirit Counselor is life and peace; the sinful mind is hostile to God. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God.
But if the Holy Spirit of God lives in you, you are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit of God! And if the Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through the Spirit who lives in you!… because those who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave to fear but you received the Spirit of sonship.. The Spirit Himself testifies that we are God’s children.” (Romans 8:5-16)
Wow, now that my friends is powerful truth to ponder in these days of Coronavirus!
Oh Lord Jesus Christ, we thank You for the words You spoke and John recorded for us. Words of promise and hope. Words of assurance and explanation regarding the Holy Spirit Counselor who longs to live vibrantly, powerfully in each of us who trust fully in You.
Bible images provided with attribution to www.LumoProject.com.
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Pastor Doug Anderson 262.441.8785
“Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, with our eyes fixed on Jesus…” (Heb. 12:1,2)
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