Listening No.10 Call the next witness - that's you

And turn to John chapter 15, Gospel of John chapter 15, and we're going to begin reading at verse 18. Our Lord Jesus is speaking to his disciples. If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.

If you belong to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.

Remember the words I spoke to you. No servant is greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also.

If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also. They will treat you this way because of my name, for they do not know the one who sent me. If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin.

Now, however, they have no excuse for their sin. He who hates me hates my father as well. If I had not done among them what no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin.

But now they have seen these miracles, and yet they have hated both me and my father. But this is to fulfill what was written in their law. They hated me without reason.

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 you also must testify, for you have been with me from the beginning. All this I have told you so that you will not go astray.

They will put you out of the synagogue. In fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering a service to God. They will do such things because they have not known the father or me.

I have told you this so that when the time comes, you will remember that I warned you. I did not tell you this at first because I was with you. Now I am going to him who sent me, yet none of you asks me where are you going.

Because I have said these things, you are filled with grief. But 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. When he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and 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. And in regard to judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned.

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.

All that belongs to the father is mine. That is why I said the spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you. And our prayer is that the Holy Spirit will do that for us this morning.

And let's go to the word of God, to which Tony, who is one of the directors of the Far East Broadcasting Association, has already made reference. We're picking up on this theme of listening to Jesus, and we're especially now considering what our dear Lord has to say about the Holy Spirit. This will be found out in greater fashion and with more time next week as Tim links into my prefacing remarks.

Let me read again the 26th and 27th verses of John 15. In fact, if you have your Bible and it's an NIV version, then read it with me. 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 you all must testify, for you have been with me from the beginning.

One of the things our Lord Jesus does not want of people in this world is that in any way they shall feel spiritually what alas tens of thousands of children are physically, that is that they will not be orphans. Our Lord says in this 14th chapter, part of this paschal discourse in the 18th verse, I will not leave you as orphans. An orphan is a most unfortunate person.

In one sense, the children who are orphans are living in an unnatural condition. Children do need mothers and fathers. They do need the support of adults.

And here is our Lord, and he takes what is this natural illustration and he posits it, he predicts it, he brings it into the spiritual context, and he says to these disciples who he is going to leave in just a few days' time, he says, I don't want to leave you feeling that you are bereft of guardianship. I won't leave you as orphans. When you come to these two verses that we're looking at in particular, you are driven to the conclusion that you must already have arrived at if you've read these chapters with sensitivity earlier on, and that is that there is a close relationship between the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

In the prophetic scriptures in the book of Isaiah, reference is made to the titles of our beloved Lord when he comes on earth. His name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Now drop down to this 26th verse again of the 15th of John.

When the Counselor comes, you see the point. Our Lord Jesus, his designation, the Counselor. Now he speaks in terms of the Holy Spirit.

When the Counselor comes, this is not because our Lord had run out of language. No. You see, there is a sense in which there are two Counselors that are part of the gracious bestowals of the Father God for the benefit of the Christian church.

There is the counsel of the Lord Jesus Christ while he is on earth, and we have his counsel, his wisdom in this holy book. And then there is the counsel of the Holy Spirit. The Lord Jesus goes and the disciples are bereft of a comforter, or so it would seem.

But no, our beloved Lord, when he leaves, he says, I will send another who is so like me that when he is come, you might just as well say that I am present also with you. So there is a sense in which grammatically the person of our Lord or the title of our Lord and that of the Holy Spirit are interchangeable when the Counselor comes whom I will send to you from the Father. Historical theology teaches you.

This is just a little complex, but not such that you can't grasp it this morning with a snippet of explanation. There is a teaching in the church known as the two processions. What the church fathers meant when they referred to this was this.

God the Father sent his Son into the world. Now, that's easy to grasp. For God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten Son.

So there is the procession of the Son into this world. The cry in Bethlehem's manger that left the lips of the infant Jesus was the indication of the first procession. God processed, proceeded into this world.

He's born incarnate of a Virgin Mary. And there is God the Son in Bethlehem, matures, comes to manhood and spends three years in this remarkable ministry explaining the gospel. Ah, yes.

But there is not only the procession from the Father of the Son. There is also the procession from the Father of the Holy Spirit. Look at verse 26 of John 14.

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. You see the point? There are two processions, two proceedings that commence in heaven and are lived out on earth as far as God's providential dealings with the church is concerned. Indeed, without them there would be no church.

There is the procession of the Son. And when the Son goes back into heaven, there is the procession of the Holy Spirit. And the two are so identified that, as I have said, where you see the work of the Son, you see the work of the Spirit.

Where you see the work of the Spirit, you see the work of the Son. Thus, the fifth chapter of the fifth book of the New Testament is called wrongly, in my estimate, the Acts of the Apostles. What should it be called? Well, it should be called the Acts of the Holy Spirit, or if you like, even more accurately, the continuation of the ministry of Jesus within the orbit of the disciples stimulated by the Holy Spirit.

There is a correspondence, you see, between what Jesus came to do and what the Spirit continues to do through you and me. And now I say there is hardly anything that is more important than that you grasp this. You see, there are those who, perhaps in an understandable fashion, but oh so wrongly, believe that the experience of the Holy Spirit is something that the church has latched onto in the twentieth century with the birth of the Pentecostal and the charismatic movements.

And now, in one sense, I have no critique to offer, at least not in substance, to those two movements. My own spirituality was birthed in them. But, you see, it is wrong to feel that it is the church in the twentieth century, in fact, she ought to blush to make this claim, that actually has discovered the power of the Holy Spirit.

There would be no church if there was no Holy Spirit. There would have been no Reformation if there had been no Holy Spirit. God the Father has sent the Spirit into this world, the second procession, as a result of His express purposes and also as a result of the request of His Son, when the Counselor comes, whom I will send to you from the Father.

You see, there is not only a correspondence between the Son and the Spirit, but between the Son and the Father. What the Father wants, the Son wants. What the Son wants, the Father wants.

This is the remarkable thing about the doctrine of the Trinity, the tri-unity of God. I can only explain it in some degree. Often I speak as a fool, trying to interpret to a congregation the mind of God.

That is utterly impossible. But there are certain things that we can grasp. This great relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, always working together in a policy of unity for the benefit, incredibly, of people like you and me.

The sects, whatever group you want to name, the church so-called of Latter-day Saints, the Unification Church, the Watchtower Society as it was formerly known, the Jehovah's Witnesses more popularly known, all these sects have as a common denominator this one fringe heretical teaching that the Holy Spirit is not a person. The Holy Spirit is an influence. The Holy Spirit is a sort of minor adjunct of God, whereas the Bible raises up and contradicts such a notion.

The Holy Spirit is none other than God Himself, who can incredibly come and tabernacle in your life to the extent that you are born of the Spirit of God and no longer acknowledge being a spiritual orphan, but rather you appreciate that you are the Son of God, the Daughter of God. You see, this whole business of knowing that you are a Christian to a large measure rests upon your understanding of and your experience of the Holy Spirit. There are those who have taught, and I think with a degree of accuracy, that there are at least three areas in which we can convince ourselves in which there is evidence that we are Christian people, those who've acknowledged Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.

Now, the first one is the testimony of Scripture. Now, all of you here, or at least the vast majority, have had this experience. What happened? Well, the day came when you heard a message from someone like myself, or you read the Bible yourself, or you were given a tract, or you listened to someone give testimony, and you realized that Jesus Christ is God's own Son, that He died on the cross of Calvary to save you.

You know, somebody turned you to John 3.16 or to one of those glorious verses in Romans 10, If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. Maybe someone slipped alongside you, as they did in my hearing years ago in my native city, and they said, you know that business about confessing, you write your name in there. That if Tony Sargent confesses that Jesus Christ is God's own Son and was raised from the dead, then Tony Sargent shall be saved.

Or maybe it was John 3.16 that whosoever in you put your own name in, Peter, John, Sarah, whatever your name was, and you've got the confirmation of Scripture. This tremendous witness. How do I know I'm saved? Well, it says so in this book.

I've done just that. Now, I'm not arguing against that at all. That's remarkable.

It's wonderful. It's true. But, my friend, there is a deeper assurance that you belong to the Lord that is yours, enjoyed by so many, many people here, and if not entered into, is still part of your inheritance as a child of God.

What is it? Well, it's that mighty overwhelming of the Spirit of God that comes across a Christian in terms of an experience maybe immediately on conversion or a few days later or months later or with some people years later. This mighty sealing of the Spirit of God. This conscious realization that I belong to the Lord.

It's not just intellectual, though. It hits the mind. It's so powerful that it surpasses all that the mind can really understand.

It envelops the total personality. It affects the emotions. It's that overwhelming realization that the Spirit of God is in my heart to the degree that if everyone in the world rose up in testimony against me, I would deny them and say, but this, my experience, is so powerful, I am absolutely convinced as to its veracity.

You see, here is the Apostle Paul, and he speaks of this experience as he's writing to the Romans in the eighth chapter of that glorious epistle. He's talking about the temerity, the sheer spirit of fear that sometimes hits the believer or has done in years before as far as his readership are concerned. And he says in the 15th verse of Romans 8, For you did not receive a spirit of fear that made you a slave again to fear, but rather, says the Apostle Paul, you received the spirit of sonship.

Now what happens as a result? Well, by him, by an acknowledgment of who Jesus Christ is, you have come into such a spiritual awareness that involuntarily you find yourself crying out, Abba, Father. And says the Apostle as he clinches the argument, the Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. Now that's not just intellectual.

It is that. But it is more than that. It's this emotional quickening.

It's this charging of the whole personality with a sense that not only God is, but God is for me, and I am not on my own. I am empowered by, I am sealed by, I am trusted with the blessed Spirit of God. You see, it's only through this sort of explanation that I have any answer to the question how people have held on to Christian faith under enormous difficulties.

You take the church in China or the church that has been persecuted in some of the Islamic or Hindu countries, and you read of astonishing experiences or astonishing testimonies of faithfulness on the part of individuals. There they have been stripped of Christian fellowship, never within the sound of a sermon, never able to sing hymns with their brothers and sisters, and sometimes the solitary confinement has gone from months to years. I've spoken to some of these people and asked them, what is it that kept you going through those dark, long years? And the answer has been, and historically is, if you read the records in church history, is that overwhelming sense that God is mine.

A man whose shoes are not worthy to clean. I say that not theatrically, I say that because that's how it is. A man in whose presence I feel so very small, Richard Wurmbrand.

He writes of being in a rat-infested jail in Bucharest, and he says the Spirit of God was so precious he danced with the rats as he praised the Lord. I'm almost reluctant to pluck an experience from Wurmbrand's book and bring it in front of you in case you feel, ah, but I'm not Richard Wurmbrand. I'm not one of the spiritual aristocracy.

Don't you remember my pleadings from this pulpit last Sunday? The spiritual aristocracy is open to all who want to enter. You can be as spiritual as you want to be. You can be as holy as you want to be.

Your salvation, well, in one sense that's out of your control. That's as a result of the sovereign activity of God upon you. He elects you.

He calls you to himself. But from that moment on, in this spiritual progression, it's a question of to what degree do you want the counselor, the blessed paraclete, to come into your life to dominate every aspect of your lifestyle? In one sense, that's over to you. When the counselor comes, who I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father, he will testify about me, not just in terms of intellectual teaching.

Our Lord has been giving this to the disciples. And the Spirit continues the tutorial, for the Spirit will continue to teach the disciples as the Lord has taught the disciples. Verse 13 of chapter 16, When he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth.

He will not speak on his own. He will only speak what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. But it's not just that intellectual enlargement which the Spirit brings.

He also testifies of the reality of God. I finished some work that I've been attempting for a couple of years and sent it off to a seminary with which I'm associated in the States, Westminster Theological Seminary. Westminster actually came from Princeton University, one of the great three universities in the United States.

Some years ago, there was a split from Princeton's Theological Seminary, a theological department, over the inerrancy of Scripture, and as a result, Westminster was born. But that all by the way. The first president of Princeton University was Jonathan Edwards, reckoned by some to be the greatest mind that America has ever produced, a philosopher, a man skilled in logic, a man who was so like I am that I have the benefits of modern health, was so short-sighted that when he preached his sermon, he had to hold his script almost an inch from his eyes, but as he preached, so great was the power of the Spirit upon him that people would writhe when he was speaking about judgment in the aisles beneath his pulpit.

One day, this great American gets on his horse and he goes off, as he often did, for an hour or so each day into the woods. He on horses, that is, he gets off his horse and he said, suddenly he has an encounter with the Lord Jesus. He said, so real and so wonderful it was that it completely transformed him and his ministry.

Here, we're not speaking of some emotional person. In one sense, Jonathan Edwards was not emotional. We're not speaking of some spiritual or intellectual dwarf.

We're speaking of a giant. And yet one day, this Spirit of God, the Counselor, comes upon him in a most remarkable fashion, and Edwards says he's had nothing like it before. You take a man by the name of Pascal, a great French philosopher and mathematician who wrote a compendium of mathematics, but one day he comes to a realization of Jesus Christ, not only as Savior, but as Baptizer in the Holy Spirit.

Ten minutes to twelve, one evening, the Spirit of God fell upon Pascal in such a fashion and with such consequences that Pascal never went back to his work as a mathematician and as a philosopher. He wrote about the experience on a piece of paper, and then he took this paper and he stitched it on the inside cover of the coat that he was wearing, and at his death, they slipped open the cover and they read, of that night, when the power of the Spirit of God fell upon Pascal, and he said, fire, fire, glory, glory. Everything that I have done up to this point seems utterly insignificant.

And from that moment on, though he'd been a Christian before, he lived the rest of his life for the praise and for the honor of God and did nothing else but seek for the Lord within some Christian community. You take another man, completely different from D.L. Moody, and completely different from Jonathan Edwards and Pascal, an American evangelist, D.L. Moody, a remarkable man, Moody and Sankey. Some of you will remember reading of their great campaigns in this country at the turn of the century.

Moody was an unlettered man, an unskilled man in terms of oratory. Never went to college, although he founded a great theological seminary. And one day, though he'd been so blessed in his preaching, he's in New York and a couple of ladies come to him and they have the temerity to say to Moody, all right, your preaching is fine, but there is a spirituality about you, or rather, there is a lack of spirituality that we detect.

And Moody, far from being incensed, went and cloistered himself in some room and he sought for the Spirit of God. The Spirit came upon him, to the extent that Moody says in his biography, in his autobiography, I had to ask God to stay his hand. He talks about liquid glory just pouring into his soul, and then he said from that moment on, he started to preach again, and sometimes he used exactly the same material as he'd used before, but now with tremendous difference.

Before he'd been a successful evangelist, but now it wasn't a question of hundreds, it was thousands of people in the United States and in this country who were impacted by the gospel, proclaimed by D.L. Moody. You see, when the counselor comes, not only does he minister of the Father and of the Son to the individual, but he empowers, enables that individual also to continue the work of evangelism and tuition. Verse 27, John 15.

I haven't lost my moorings. I'm back here with this verse. I'm just trying to open the verse out, as the Puritans would say.

And you also must testify, for you have been with me from the beginning. Now here's a question, and I must watch the time as we still want to come around the Lord's table. When did the disciples start to testify with any degree of enthusiasm and repeated success? And the response to my question must be, in large measure, it was after the day of Pentecost.

Oh yes, it had some preliminary evangelistic sorties. I'm aware of that. But it's interesting, isn't it, that none of the preaching in those evangelistic tours that they made prior to Pentecost was recorded at all.

But after the day of Pentecost, it's completely different. What Peter has to say, what Paul has to say, what John has to say, a synopsis of that is encapsulated and put into the New Testament. After the day of Pentecost, these men, who'd been so timid before, who'd fled when Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, they find a boldness which was not theirs previously.

And Jesus has said, when the Spirit comes upon you, you will be what? You will be my witnesses. Exactly the same word. You will testify about me.

How will they testify? Through their own ability, through their own empowering? No. They found that their own power was not sufficient, thus they left the Lord Jesus in the crises in Gethsemane. And with the exception of John, you find no scriptural records for the disciples being in attendance on the spectacle at Calvary.

But after the Spirit's come upon them in great power, what happens? Well, you can't stop these men. They're unlettered men. That's what the Jewish authorities said.

They're untutored men. They are men who've not been to college and yet, listen to what they have to say. This is amazing.

The Roman authorities, the Jewish authorities, they can't understand this. What has happened? Well, these men, they've understood truth. Truth as it's fallen from the lips of Jesus.

But beyond that, they have known this mighty empowering of the Spirit of Jesus to the extent that the world is turned upside down as a result of their ministrations. Now I put it to you. To what degree are you knowing this sort of empowering? You see, it's here.

It's within the legacy left by our beloved Lord for the church. It's got nothing to do with Pentecostalism per se or with the charismatic movement per se. There was a man in Oxford called Thomas Goodwin who was the Chancellor of the President of Magdalene College and he preached some of the most remarkable sermons that there have ever been preached on the opening chapters of the Epistle to the Ephesians a couple of hundred years ago in which he's making reference to this heightened awareness of the Spirit.

And what he says to his people who are listening to him so many decades ago, two centuries ago now, was, Sue him for it. If you don't know this empowering, if you still feel somewhat feeble in your Christianity, then come before the Lord. Hunger for it.

As the deer pants after the water brooks. Are you seeking him? Are you seeking him regularly? Are you seeking him frequently? You know, in one sense, I'm so glad that the architect of the tabernacle made it so that the preacher always has to descend into the pulpit and not climb the steps. And the reason I say this is because there is a sense in which the ambassador of God, be it a preacher at pulpit level or the person communicating his testimony in secular society, needs to spend time in the presence of God, coming down to the people, to the one to whom he's testifying, empowered with the Spirit of God, and able to communicate the Word of God.

Now this is what our Lord Jesus illustrated in himself. The Spirit of God was within him without measure. All the fullness of the Spirit in him.

Now this same fullness of the Spirit, he promises to the disciples, and he says, I won't leave you. I'll send this comforter, this consoler, but not only will he give you an assurance of who I am and that you are sons and daughters of God, but he will empower you to continue the ministry that I have commenced and to achieve this successfully. When the consoler comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of Truth, who goes out from the Father, the double procession, he will testify about me.

He will confirm in your heart, in this highest level of assurance possible, that you are a son and daughter of God. And the consequence of that will be you too will testify me, about me, of those things that you have heard and seen of me from the beginning of my ministry. Brothers and sisters, as it was then, so it must be now.

For the acts of Jesus continue by his Spirit through the church in the 20th century. As we prepare for communion, let's be singing that, or thinking through that little song, Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me. I'm not asking you to sing it, I'm asking you to go through the words, 613 in Mission Praise, and ask the Lord for a great encounter with him, as from the table, or rather as from the word, we come to the table.

♪ He testifies of the Son And he is in your spirit too For the living God May love your spirit too And in glory be for ever Lord, I come Leaving your spirit To be heard Jesus comes Lord, I come Living as your Son Leaving your spirit To the Word of God Father, we're grateful for those two processions from heaven. Of the Son and the Spirit. We thank you for the way the Spirit opens our eyes and teaches us of the things of God and enabled us to acknowledge the Word of God as truth.

Now we pray that that same Spirit may constantly infill us, empower us, overwhelm us, and sometimes may be that great surprise, even when we were not expecting it, suddenly the Spirit of God welling up from our very soul, indicating intellectually, emotionally, in every way, driving home the point that we are indeed sons and daughters of God. We're not orphans. We're not powerless.

We're not without authority. Help us, Lord, to be what we are, the Church, the community of the redeemed, blood-bought, Spirit-empowered, destined for the new heavens and the new earth. Grant it for Jesus' sake.

Amen.