Last night we continued our study of the Holy Spirit.  We looked at a main passage for studying these things, and sought to further answer the question: what happens to a human being when the Holy Spirit comes into their life? Here are the notes:

First, see Galatians 5:1 and 13-14. Let’s notice the big thing Paul starts off with—this idea of freedom. It’s pretty fascinating, once you get into it, that this is where this all begins, because we’ll loop all the way back around before we’re done and see how this idea ties some interesting things together. But just to say it—we see here that followers of Jesus have “been called to freedom.” So right off the bat we should have a question pop up, which is, what is freedom? We’ve talked about it from time to time on Monday nights. Most people would say that freedom is the ability to go do whatever we want. You’re really free if you get to live out your desires, especially those desires we feel most deeply inside.

But God knows that that’s an incomplete definition of human freedom, at best. And at worst, if you take that definition as an absolute, you end up totally missing true freedom. The bible actually says, in other places, you end up in a kind of slavery. Paul starts to address that in verse 13, where he says that liberty is not an “opportunity for the flesh.” He’s working with God’s definition of human freedom here, and so he sees freedom in a totally different light, than most people and you can tell by what he writes next.

See  Galatians 5:15-26. Lets’ just examine that list Paul gives us in verse 19-21 for a minute. In verse 19 he uses the phrase “the works of the flesh.” When he uses the word “flesh” here, he generally means something like “humanity minus God.” So “the works of the flesh” are “what we do when we live out the desires we feel inside.” They’re what a human naturally does, without God’s Spirit in their life, when left to themselves. You see this pretty clearly if you connect verse 16 and 19—The “works of the flesh” (v.19) are just the results of “fulfilling” the desires of the flesh (v.16).

When you see these things for what they really are, you start getting excited about what Paul says about the Holy Spirit. Let’s break this list in verses 19-20 down for a minute. The works of the flesh are:

1. Pursuing physical pleasure, regardless of God’s law, marital covenant, personal relationships, or others’ well-being. (sexual immorality, impurity, orgies)
2. Extreme expressions of self (sensuality, fits of rage)
3. Making God in my own image or making him in another, lower image, in order to love and enjoy creation while excluding Him (idolatry)
4. Experiencing spiritual power or escape while excluding God (sorcery)
5. Pursuing selfish ends, regardless of personal relationships or others’ desires, and all the fighting and relational breakdown that comes with that (enmity, strife, dissensions, divisions)
6. Desiring things that belong to other people (jealousy, envy)
7. Venting feelings regardless of the consequences (fits of rage)
8. Experiencing pleasure at the expense of health and clear thinking (drunkenness)
9. Experiencing pleasure in the heightened form of group experience—getting together with others to revel in, and express, the desires of the flesh (orgies)

We know it’s not an exhaustive list because he ends in the middle of verse 21 by saying “and other things like this.” So this is just representative sample. And just to keep pressing into it, you can look at this list from the perspective of the actual effects of each one of these things. For instance, those first few words all refer to different aspects of sexual sin—in other words, any sexuality outside of the boundaries God set up of loving, life-long commitment between a man and a woman—so this is covered by those words fornication (or sexual immorality), uncleanness, lewdness (or your bible might say impurity or sensuality). When you consider what comes from all of these things, you can say that the works of the flesh include dehumanizing and objectifying each other, the porn industry, messed up imaginations, all sexual exploitation, sex slavery, sexual violence, rape, city streets and college campuses that are unsafe for women, the spread of disease, and parentless children.  Or if your translation starts off the list with “Adultery” (which is included in this area), you see that the works of the flesh include broken marriages, heartbreak, loneliness, child neglect, bitterness between the sexes, and ultimately, family breakdown leading to community breakdown and eventually societal breakdown. In verse 20, the effects of idolatry include all the commitment people make to small and ultimately meaningless things, or even worse, all the love people have for evil things. Sorcery includes all of our intoxication and the neglect of real life because of it, and all our interaction with spiritual darkness. The works of the flesh related to envy include our inability to be happy for other people, robbery, bitterness, materialism and wasteful consumption.  Murders are obvious—the works of the flesh include killing and terrorism. Drunkenness and revelries includes our current drug epidemic, and the epidemic of cynicism about life which leads to obsession with partying, YOLO, the general feeling of meaninglessness of life, depression, and anxiety.

I remember once sitting with a room full of young high school students—who are right in that demographic where the message of Christianity is supposed to be way too constricting for them. And I asked them if they really wanted lives full of the things on this list. And when they honestly looked at it, they were like—“no way!” When we stop and get honest, nobody in their right mind really wants their lives filled with this stuff, or their families, or their neighborhoods. And aren’t these things exactly the big problems everyone is talking about trying to solve right now? We all know these things are messing everything up. And everyone has solutions—but if you examine their solutions, they’ve all been tried and none of it’s working. God’s giving us a solution here. And it’s a real solution and a powerful solution.

Now when the Bible talks about “walking” in these things, it means living them out on a daily basis. So here it says that we will “walk” in these things—in other words, these are the things that will make up our normal lives on a regular basis—unless we’re led by the Spirit. I think that’s the implication of verse 16—the phrase “walk in the Spirit, and you will not fulfill the Lusts of the Flesh,” can just be turned around, and you get “unless you walk in the Spirit, you will fulfill the lusts of the flesh.” So the only way to not live in verses 19-21 is to do what Paul calls “Walking in the Spirit.”

And look at verse 17. “The flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish.” That’s NKJV. ESV translates it, “The desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.”  So if the things in this list are simply the result of living out the desires of my heart when it’s not influenced by God (aka my flesh), what that means is that of a lot of the desires I find in my natural self are the opposite of the desires the Holy Spirit has. (Romans 8:7 says it explicitly: “For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot.”)

And we’ve already seen in these studies that the Holy Spirit is God himself, so the stakes are really high here. It ends up to be kind of a bleak picture—in my natural humanity, I will end up feeling, thinking, and living in ways that are totally opposed to God, unless I “walk in the Spirit.”

But that’s the point of verse 16—the Holy Spirit is God’s way of empowering me to escape all of that. And this explains verse 1 and verse 13—the “freedom” God gives us is the freedom to not be a slave to my desires, and not be destined to live them out and end up living in verses 19-12. Once you’ve really seen what that list is about you can hear what good news this is. I think Chris said something like this in his study in Judges—the Holy Spirit sets me free from doing whatever I want. And maybe that’s behind the last phrase of verse 17.

So when the Holy Spirit comes into my life, evidently he sets gives me the power to not live out these desires, and instead, to bear the fruit of the Spirit in my life. And that’s what verse 22-23 describe: As opposed to what the desires of the flesh lead to when we live them out, Paul says, the fruit of living out the Spirit’s desires is “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.”

There’s a lot we could say about each one of those. But here’s two thoughts:

First, I think we could all say we’d like to live in that world.  Who wouldn’t want to live in a family which was totally full of love and joy and peace and patience with each other when we fail… and we totally stick by each other and we’re all about promoting each others’ well-being? What about a business or a neighborhood like that? What about a church like that? What about a whole world like that?  I mean, I think I want to be that kind of person. I think most of us do in our best moments. So clearly God is offering us a better way forward than just looking inside, discovering what we want, and going and living it out. Our own world shows us that doesn’t work. Here’s better news.

Second, I think we can see is that really, aren’t these things just the qualities of Jesus? In Romans 8 Paul wrote that God’s work is to conform us into “the image of his Son”—in other words, what kind of human does the Holy Spirit make me? He makes me a person like Jesus.

When I’m yielding to the Spirit’s desires, instead of the desires of my old “humanity minus God,” I end up being a person who has love and joy and peace coming out of my life. And it’s not only the individual element that matters. The works of the flesh are what we do to each other when we’re just acting out our personal desires. And the fruit of the spirit is what the Spirit does through us to others when we act out his desires. In other words, what the Spirit does when he comes into our lives is not just make us better individually, He makes human community better—we start to have real relationships that work.  Another way to say it is, since the Spirit makes us like Jesus, when a bunch of people who are all like Jesus live together, that’s awesome—and that’s supposed to be called “church.”

But I think the way to really tie this all up and get practical is to go back to where we started, and notice the way Paul began this discussion and the way he ends the list of the fruit of the Spirit. We saw that he started all this off talking about freedom. And he ends the list of Spirit-fruit with “self-control.” And I’m going to suggest to you that there’s a huge connection between those two ideas that helps us get to the heart of our question—which is, what does the Holy Spirit actually do in us when He comes into our life?

If you read the whole letter to the Galatians, you get more of the story, but it when the Galatians heard the Gospel, they believed it, and received the Spirit. And we know from the rest of our studies that what happened went like this: 1. The Spirit made them alive. 2. He brought God’s presence to them 3. He was teaching them about God, and … here’s where we’re going,  4.) The Holy Spirit freed them from a life of simply acting out their desires.

In the bible’s way of seeing the world, it’s beneath us, as men and women, to spend our lives figuring out what we want and then going to get it…and then suffering the consequences. The Spirit is opposed to this “humanity minus God,” this flesh. (That’s because God is opposed to everything that breaks humans down, enslaves them, makes them weak, and messes them up). God’s Spirit sets a human free to be what humans are meant to be—and what we’re meant to be looks like the fruit of the Spirit in v. 22-23.

Right there is where we really get some insight into how God works with our humanity. Because the fact that Self-control is the fruit of the Spirit tells us something about the nature of the interaction between the human spirit and the Holy Spirit. It brings up a couple awesome questions for you to mull over for yourself: Like…what does it tell us about humanity, and about God, that for a person to be most yielded to the Spirit, to have him working most powerfully in you… is freedom, and not slavery? And, what does it mean that, when we are bearing the fruit of the Spirit in our lives, we are actually under the control of our selves? Here’s my shot at it—it must mean that, because of how God made us, human freedom is the freedom to be fully in control of ourselves, instead of being controlled by all our urges. Freedom is the freedom to live in true love and joy and peace and all the things that make up the fruit of the Spirit. Self-Control is the ability to be the kind of person God originally created men and women to be. When we have control of ourselves, and we’re not under the slavery of our hearts, we act like Jesus.

So God wants you to see a difference between you and your urges. Your desires don’t define you. You are not just who you want to sleep with. You are not just your cravings. We’re not supposed to see any of that as our identity.  Which means that self-mastery, true self-control, true freedom, is the opposite of living out our desires and doing these “works of the flesh.” To be most under the control of my inner desires is to be most enslaved, but to be most under God’s Lordship, most influenced and moved by the Spirit is to be most free.

It seems like God wants to have words with our culture. We’re being lied to. Our culture demands that we spend our lives living out our hearts’ desires. And the result is that we have homes and families and neighborhoods and cities and a whole national culture of media and politics that look exactly like the list in verses 19-21. And it’s horrible.

It’s pretty obvious that to have homes and families and neighborhoods and cities and a whole national culture of media and politics full of the fruit of the Spirit would be better, and we’d all rather live in that world. So God says, “I know, and what you need is my Spirit, and Christians, you need to neglect and starve the desires in you that want to ruin your life (aka, crucify them) and instead allow the desires of the Spirit to lead you.”

And then in the end, you’ll reap—everlasting life (see 6:8)

Last night we continued our study of what the Scriptures say about the Holy Spirit, looking at one passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church. Here are the notes:

We began by reading 1 Corinthians 1:17-25. In this passage Paul’s working with a fundamental problem we humans have: we need saving, but the method God designed to save us, seems either offensive (a “stumbling block”) or foolish (i.e. “dumb” or “weak”) when we first encounter it. And it goes even deeper. The problem isn’t only one of salvation, it’s also a problem in our ability to know God at all. Because Jesus, and what Jesus did, is the way God has revealed himself to us. And if the way he’s revealed himself to us seems either offensive or stupid, then we just aren’t going to understand him…which means we can’t really grasp God.

It’s interesting, because I think a lot of people get the idea that God’s not easy to understand. But people tend think that our main problem is that God’s so big, or so different than us, that we just could never conceive of what he’s like. And the bible does affirm that God is so much bigger, and different enough, than us, that our minds can’t totally get him nailed down. But in passages like this, we see that, actually, God’s bigness or different-ness is not our main problem. The main problem we have is that, when he reveals what he’s like, when he shows us how he thinks, how he does things, the normal human reaction is like—that’s stupid! Or that’s offensive! The main issue we have that keeps us from knowing God is not that we’re small, it’s that we’re, well…evil. It’s not that we don’t know enough facts, it’s that our minds don’t work like his. It’s not that he’s Spirit and we’re flesh, it’s that we just don’t think about things and feel things like he does.

In other words, it’s a relational problem—he’s healthy and we’re messed up, and so, the more he does things for us, and shows us what he’s like, the more humans just tend to think, “nah, it can’t be like that.”

And we Christians have a problem, because, once we’ve come to know God this way, we realize that the message we have to preach runs up against all these same issues. The good news Jesus told us to tell people is actually the good news that God has come to us and shown us who he really is—that’s what the life and death and resurrection of Jesus is all about. And we’re going around trying to tell people this and we meet these same reactions—some people think it’s madness, some people think it’s harmful.

Either way, we need a solution. We’re going to get to God’s solution for this, but first Paul gives us a little more insight into how God’s working right now, in chapter 1 verses 26-29. Notice the ideas here. The people of God mirror the message of God—we’re weak and insignificant in the eyes of the beautiful and powerful. God wanted it this way. He wanted the people who preach the message, for the most part, to embody the message by the way they are and the way they preach. So Paul says, “Just like people think our message about a crucified messiah is dumb or offensive, people tend to think the same things about us!”

But in verse 30 he reassures us that we don’t need to worry about all this–Christ is God’s power and God’s wisdom for us.

The, in 2:1-5, we see that Paul is pressing deeper into this idea of weakness here. He says that, not only is the message one which the world’s elite think is powerless, and not only is God all about working with people in general who exhibit the same kind of cultural weakness, but Paul personally chose to apply these truths practically in his work as a spreader of the message. How did he do that? By adopting methods for spreading the message that were consistent with the ways God worked in Jesus. In other words, the way he went about spreading the message of God mirrored, or illustrated, the content of the message itself. What he had to talk about was demonstrated by the way he said it.

But look at verse 4. Paul’s turning a corner for us here. God wants us to know—even though the world of people outside of God’s family is going to tend to hear what we have to say as irrelevant, that doesn’t mean that either we, or our message, is weak. Not at all. Paul says that he himself came to them in real power. And I think it’s something that anyone who wants to spread the message of Jesus needs to learn—my life needs to exhibit real spiritual power to back up my message. Verse 5 tells us that God wants it this way—because it will help the people who hear and believe to put their faith on the right things—not cool people with a smart-sounding message, but just God’s power alone.  God’s messengers don’t wield the world’s weapons, but we come with something more powerful—God’s power.

And, even though the powers-that-be think our message is foolishness—Paul says, “we have real wisdom too.”

Now see 2:6-13. The wisdom we have is called a “secret and hidden” wisdom of God (v.6). He doesn’t mean that it’s a wisdom God made hard to find (since clearly Jesus came so we could know it), he just means that it hadn’t been revealed until Jesus came, and it remains obscure to those who find it foolish or offensive, precisely because their thinking is so different from God’s thinking. Paul says in verse 8, you can tell people are naturally opposed to how God thinks, because when Jesus showed up as God’s solution, people killed him! Then in verse 9 and 10, Paul gets poetic and quotes from Isaiah’s prophecy (Isaiah 64), and then says—yeah, these amazing things the Bible talks about, these awesome, huge, cosmic truths that are past our finding out—God has revealed them to us by his Spirit.

The idea is that, left to ourselves, we don’t have the capacity to understand God’s wisdom, or even the right qualities we would need to grasp the way he works—Only God can understand God. But this is where the Holy Spirit comes in. Here’s a great quote I read that sums up what Paul’s getting at: “The Spirit of God becomes the link between God and humanity, the “quality” from God himself who makes the knowing possible…in our reception of the Spirit, we are on intimate terms with none other than God himself, personally and powerfully present, as the one who, in this case, reveals God’s ways to us.” (That’s by Gordon Fee).

So for the last few weeks we’ve already seen that Jesus taught that when we trust in Christ, the Holy Spirit comes and makes us alive in the fullest possible sense.  In other words, when Jesus was on earth, we could say, He was the way God was present to humanity. Now that the Holy Spirit has come, we can say, the Spirit is the way God is present with humanity. In this passage we’re seeing that one of the main things the Holy Spirit does for us is this work of enabling us to really know God.

This works, Paul says in verse 10, because the Spirit has access to “the deep things of God.” There are things about God, and things God knows, that are way beyond our ability to figure out, but they’re not beyond His ability to figure out, because of course, the Holy Spirit is God—and that’s the point of verse 11. “No one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God,” and the way the Spirit knows the things of God Paul says, is illustrated in the way your spirit knows you. It’s not identical, since the Bible never says the Spirit is the Father, but in terms of being God, the Spirit is as much God as your Spirit is you. So there are barriers and limitations to us, as humans, in our knowing of God, but there aren’t any for the Holy Spirit.

Now in verse 10 when Paul writes that the Spirit knows “the deep things of God,” he doesn’t mean some weird, out-there, extra things that only a few initiated people know—he means, the “deep things” God revealed in Jesus’ life and death—in other words, the Gospel—the things that proved to be too deep for the elite of the world that find them dumb or offensive. So he’s really just explaining how someone could come to grasp what he was talking about in chapter 1… That God would come in human flesh, that the messiah would die on the cross, that Jesus is risen from the dead, that all of that is what is needed to happen for men and women to be saved, these are the deep things of God which he says that natural humanity cannot grasp.  But as he says in verse 12, the “deep things of God” are also “the things freely given to us by God” (v.12) in Christ. That’s’ pretty awesome.

Verse 13 brings this all the way home to address the issue of how Christians feel when we face opposition when we try to spread the message about Jesus.  Paul says, we don’t need to worry, all we’re telling people are these things God has revealed in Jesus, and when we stick closely to what the scriptures say, we can know that what we preach is God’s wisdom, straight from God the Spirit. We’ve been taught by the Holy Spirit.

Verses 14-16 put an exclamation point on this. Verse 14 says that people who don’t have the Holy Spirit as their teacher won’t understand God’s ways. And Verse 15 says that people who do will be misunderstood. But we can take heart because of verse 16. The answer to Paul’s question there, “who has known the mind of the Lord” is—The Holy Spirit!  So if you’re a follower of Christ, then you have the Holy Spirit, or as Paul says it here, you have the mind of Christ. In other words, the Holy Spirit is in us and with us, giving us God’s thoughts, explaining to us what God has shown us in the life and teaching and death and resurrection of Jesus.

This leads us nicely into some reflection on all these things.

First, Christians, you don’t have to listen to people tell you can’t know God or know about him. We can admit, “Sure I’m small. Sure I’m not smart enough figure God out,” but—We do know him. Because…God knows himself, and the Spirit is God, and if you’ve trusted in Jesus, then the Spirit is in you, telling you about God. And there’s even more: God has revealed himself in three ways: His written word (Inspired by the Spirit), Jesus (Anointed by the Spirit), and the Spirit in you. The written word, the Word of God inspired by the Spirit, is outside of our own heads (which is a good thing for us all), and so we have a trustworthy, unchanging source of God’s thoughts that is outside of us, and the Spirit within us as teacher who applies it to us. And so even though we’re small, God is big, and he knows how to tell us things about himself so we can really know him.

Second, if you’ve already seen the logic, and the power, and beauty, and desirability of what God did in Jesus on the cross, how are you going to try to help others see it? Here’s where we tie in with what we read last week. If you remember, Jesus said that the Spirit would come and convict peoples’ hearts—he would be there with us, working to convince people who heard us talk about Jesus that what we said is true. So we don’t have to fear—If I’ve seen the wisdom of God’s salvation in Christ, I can freely tell people about it and trust the Holy Spirit to work on them so that they see it too.

Know this—if you’re going around telling people the big, central truths of the scriptures…you really can be assured that you do know those things about God, and that you’re really telling people the truth.

Third, we don’t need to be ashamed of our message our own weakness. The world’s going to heap scorn on you, but the antidote for that is to depend on the Holy Spirit (2:5), and trust in the knowledge of Christ (2:10), and preach the cross, even though it’s considered foolish.

And here’s one final challenge: Paul wrote that, even though the Corinthians were believers in Jesus, they were starting to think like people that weren’t, and they were starting to miss the wisdom of the God in the cross. So the Spirit teaches Christians that Jesus’ death was necessary, powerful, and beautiful. It seems easy to agree with that on one level. If you don’t see that, you’re not being taught by the Spirit. You might not have the Spirit.

But there’s another layer here for those of us who follow Jesus—and it seems to be exactly where the Corinthian Christians were struggling. Paul says that the way he lived his life, and the way he carried on his ministry, the way he promoted the message of Jesus, had the same character as the crucified Jesus—it looked like it, it felt like it—weakness in the eyes of the world’s beautiful people and foolishness in the eyes of the world’s powerful people. It was offensive madness. So the Corinthians might think they loved the cross—it saved them, after all—but if they rejected Paul’s way of teaching about the cross, or his way of presenting himself to the world or to them, because it wasn’t outwardly beautiful or outwardly powerful or culturally compelling or respectable, then actually, they didn’t understand the cross, and they weren’t being taught by the Spirit, and they weren’t mature. If they needed outward beauty or power, they were thinking like people who didn’t know Jesus.

This is big for us. We know we think we love Jesus and the cross. But what about the way we want our lives to go, and what about the way we want to promote Jesus?

It seems good to spend some time reflecting on this passage and opening ourselves up to the Holy Spirit’s teaching, since we know that the main thing he has to reveal, and the main way we meet God’s power, is an apprehension of what the death of Jesus means—and how the cross is the pattern for the way God works?

If you don’t know Jesus , we admit that on first glance the message of Jesus seems weird. He came and told people they were sinners and needed to repent. He said you couldn’t know God’s love unless you got it through what he did by dying on the cross. If you get tempted to reject that as dumb or offensive, maybe just pause for a few minutes and see if you don’t have other thoughts rising in your mind—thoughts like, but actually I know I’m far from God, I know I’ve sinned, and I want forgiveness and I want to be close to God. I want Jesus to be real, and I want to know him. All we’re saying to you is, that’s the Holy Spirit of God leading you to those thoughts. Don’t reject them. Don’t turn away from them. Respond and go with them—he won’t lead you wrong.

On Monday night we continued our study of the Holy Spirit, this time focusing on what Jesus taught his disciples on the last night before he was crucified. Here are the notes:

The Holy Spirit: Bringing God Near Intro:

First here are three scriptures. Note one thing about the Spirit from each of them.

Genesis 1:2  The Spirit was there at the beginning.
Psalm 139:7   Where can I go from your Spirit?
Ezekiel 36:25-28   The Spirit will be “in” you

Now, see John 14:15-17.

What we see is that, at the end of his time with them, before he was crucified, Jesus took time to specifically teach his closest followers about the Holy Spirit. Before this, when he had been speaking to crowds, or people who weren’t his followers, he spoke kind of indirectly, like he was trying to entice them to want to know more. Last week we saw that he liked to talk about the Spirit in terms of “new birth”, or “living water”—images and ideas meant to draw people out and engage them. Now, in this passage, he’s hosting a private dinner, on the last night before he was crucified, and he’s directly, explicitly teaching the disciples about the Holy Spirit.

So he tells them that He’s going away, but he’s going to ask the Father, who will send the Holy Spirit, and we learn some things about Holy Spirit here:

• (v.16) The Holy Spirit is “another helper.” (The original word in the Greek New testament is “Parakletos” which means “someone who offers assistance in a situation in which help is needed” (H. Ridderbos))
• (v.16) Once he comes, he’ll never leave.
• (v.17) He’s the Spirit of truth. The Holy Spirit only deals in reality. He is all about what’s true, and we can assume that means that where lies are—He’s not.
• (.v 17) When he comes, his coming is “in” you. This is crazy. And we might not even get what he means until we look at the contrast right before that statement—Jesus says, “He dwells with you.”

So you have to immediately ask, What did Jesus mean by that? How was the Spirit dwelling with them, right then? Probably we’d say it was in the person of Jesus. The Holy Spirit was in and with Jesus in everything he did. But soon, Jesus says, the Spirit’s going to come in a new way—He’s not just going to be working in Jesus for the disciples to see, He’s going to be in them. That must have rocked them!  And once we see that it helps us understand what he means in verse 17 when he says the world can’t receive the Holy Spirit.

He says, “The world cannot receive him, because it doesn’t know him.” That’s interesting. Maybe Jesus means that the world is totally focused on what it can see and touch, and the Spirit (like He said back in John 3) is more like the wind—He’s not directly traceable in materialistic terms. Maybe the world can’t receive the Spirit because he’s the Spirit of truth, and there’s so much commitment to lies. And maybe also it’s connected to the idea of the Spirit being with them in the life and work of Jesus. The Spirit was in and with Jesus in everything he did–which meant that, in those days, if you failed to recognize Jesus for who he was, you were also failing to recognize the Holy Spirit, and if you rejected or opposed Jesus, you opposed the Holy Spirit. Which means that, you have to know Jesus to know the Holy Spirit. It’s similar to when Jesus said in John 5:23: “Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him.” You don’t know God the Father if you don’t embrace Jesus as God the Son. So maybe it’s this simple—when Jesus said that the world can’t receive the Holy Spirit, he was using the word “world” the way John tells us that he typically used it—which was to refer to all those people who rejected him as God’s solution to the world’s problems…and so when people reject Jesus, it turns out that they reject the Holy Spirit too. And someone might hear that and think it’s no big deal, but the more we learn about who the Spirit is, the more tragic this rejection seems.

See John 14:19-23. As Jesus got into talking about these things on that night, he started to get to the heart of the matter. They were getting upset by the fact that he was telling them he was leaving. It made no sense to them how this was going to work without him around, and to make it worse, he kept acting like they should be happy about the whole thing. And the more you read what he was saying, the more it becomes clear that the fact that God was going to send Holy Spirit is the main reason why Jesus thought they should be excited. For instance, notice how he’s trying to say that, even though he’s going away, in another sense he’s not going away. You see it in verse 20, with that “you in me and I in you” language, and in verse 21 when he tells the disciples he will show himself to them, and finally in verse 23, when he says “I and My Father will love the person that loves me, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”

So you just have to ask the question: How do Jesus and the Father “come” and “make their home” with us? And even if we haven’t already started to guess the answer, I think if we keep reading we get it…

See John 14:24-26.  …So, How do Jesus and the Father “come” and “make their home” with us? Based on verse 26, I think Jesus’ answer is—By the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is God’s way of being with us. Gordon Fee wrote, “I am convinced that the Spirit in Paul’s theology was always thought of in terms of the personal presence of God. The Spirit is God’s way of being present, powerfully present, in our lives and communities as we await the consummation of the kingdom of God.”

Now this is where we could stop and do a whole study on the way God is God—he is god in three persons, Father, Son and Spirit in total unity of being. So Jesus would never say that the Spirit is the Father or Jesus. But…wherever the Spirit is, and wherever he goes, all of God is there—so the Son is there, and the Father is there. Or you could say, the Holy Spirit brings Jesus to us—the Spirit is also Jesus’ way of being with us.

And since Jesus promises that the Spirit will be in His followers to, this is why we say that “Jesus is in our hearts.”  So, if someone said to you, “how does Jesus live inside you?” The short answer would be—By his Spirit.

But there’s even more in verse 26. Jesus says that when he sends the Holy Spirit, the Spirit “will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.” So the Holy Spirit is the one who taught the Apostles what they needed to know and helped them remember what they needed to remember about Jesus. This is big—the Spirit is not only the way we experience God, He is the One who teaches us about God, and He’s the way we know God. I wonder if Jesus would say that, based on verse 27, the Spirit is also the way God gives us his peace.

And that’s kind of the heart behind what Jesus says in chapter 15—it’s the same truth about God being with us in the Spirit, but with a different focus.

See John 15:17-27. In verse 26 we see that the Spirit doesn’t only teach Jesus’ followers about God, He also, through them, proclaims the truth about Jesus to the world.

Even though, as he says, people will be hating the followers of Jesus and persecuting them, he says they don’t have to worry, because he will send the Holy Spirit, who will be present, in the believers themselves, preaching to the world the truth about Jesus. In other words, Christians can’t expect to have the power of culture, or money, or government on their side, but they must and will have the power of God himself, through the Holy Spirit, on their side.

So the Spirit is God’s way of being present when we’re persecuted and opposed, and when we want to get the message out to people, even though they’re hostile to us because of our association with Jesus. It might seem like if the world is hostile to us, there’s no chance of them listening to our message, but God tells us not to worry, because He’s with us—we have the Spirit.  He keeps teaching about all this in chapter 16…

See John 16:7-15.

There’s some more great truth here:

• In v. 7, having the Spirit with us and in us is actually better than having Jesus with us in the flesh.
• In v. 8-11, Jesus tells us that the Spirit doesn’t only impress the power of the message of Jesus on the world, He also convicts (D.A. Carson: “shaming the world and convincing it of its own guilt, thus calling it to repentance.” Ridderbos: “prove guilty.”) So again, it might seem like it would be impossible for the message of Jesus to spread if the world is hostile to Christians, but Jesus tells us that we have divine help—God himself, in the Holy Spirit, will be in us and with us to make powerful impressions on people’s hearts and minds when we live the Christian life in front of them and tell them about Jesus’ message. As pastor Joe sums up these three things Jesus says, the Spirit impresses on the world “what’s wrong, what’s right, and that there’s consequences to our actions.”
• In v. 13, Jesus tells them that the Spirit will be God’s way of being with them to guide them into truth.
• And in v. 14, he says the Spirit will be God’s way of being with them to help them know and honor Jesus.
• So even when things get crazy, and the disorientation of real opposition to the Christian message sets in, Jesus says we don’t need to be afraid, because the Spirit will be God’s power to do his work in the world.

Now read Acts 2:1-4. Here is is. The Spirit comes.

Summing this up:

God isn’t far from us. He hasn’t left us alone.  He came and lived among us in human flesh once. And while he did, he promised that he would be with us in a new way, and that would be permanent. Since God is a Trinity—he can do this. The Father can send the Son, and then send the Spirit. Because the Spirit is God, when the Father sends the Spirit, that is God sending, and God coming to live in us. And since God is not divided up, when the Spirit comes, the Father and the Son come too—in the Spirit.

Who does God come to this way? This takes us back to last week’s study—God comes this way to anyone who wants him, receives him, trusts in him. Anyone who sees God in Jesus and in what Jesus did. Anyone who ‘s thirsty, and comes to him to drink— (John 7:37), that is, anyone who trusts Jesus to satisfy the hunger of their soul.

And even though we don’t have Jesus in the flesh with us right now, we do have the Spirit. And the Spirit isn’t just keeping God close, and helping us be more and more acquainted with God, He is also speaking to people who don’t follow Christ—even people we know who are actively hostile to Christ. When we live out the life of God around them, because the Spirit has made us alive and satisfied our thirst, and because he keeps us close to Jesus, he is working through us and our words and actions to bring a good, loving pressure to bear, intense pressure to bear on those who oppose God.

Sometimes we wish we could just see Jesus. But to have the Spirit within and among is better, for now. (The New Earth will have both.)

Paul said (in Acts 19:26-27): “He is not far from every one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being.”

And so Jesus said, “He’s been with you, but he will be in you.”