Daily Archives: May 6, 2014

The Testimony Within

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THE TESTIMONY WITHIN 

“‘When the Advocate comes, whom I will sent 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.'” John 15:26-27 NIV.

The Holy Spirit, beautiful, gentle, powerful, mysterious, third Person of the Trinity, How was Jesus to explain Him to His disciples?

He would gently lead them into a new realm that they could only know and understand by experience. Although the Holy Spirit has many titles and functions, Jesus chose to call Him the Spirit of truth because truth is what sums up everything that He is and does.

He is not the Spirit of spiritual “goose bumps” or the Spirit of spiritual gifts or even the Spirit of out-of-this-world experiences like being “slain” in the Spirit or being sprinkled with gold dust or travelling “in the Spirit” to other realms. He is the Spirit of truth.

Truth, above everything else, characterises the three-in-one God who calls human beings to worship Him “in spirit and in truth”. Pilate asked Jesus, ‘What is truth?’ not because he wanted to know but because he cynically dismissed truth as too mysterious and elusive to know. But the Bible gives us the answer — God is truth. Everything He is, says and does is the truth and truth is the essence of who He is in His three-in-one being.

Jesus often began an important teaching with the declaration, ‘I tell you the truth…!’ Not because everything else He said was not true but because of the importance of the truth He was about to communicate.

The Holy Spirit’s primary role and the one for which He was sent to indwell believers is to reveal Jesus to the inner being so that His followers can be true witnesses to who He is. It was impossible, at that stage, for the disciples to know everything there was to know about their Messiah. Their minds were still closed to many things, their understanding darkened by prejudice, religion and often stubborn resistance to the truth.

It would take the powerful witness of the Holy Spirit within them to awaken a new perception of their Messiah and a broader perspective of the life they were called to live “in Him”. All the other functions of the Holy Spirit have to fall into place within the scope of truth.

What is the truth that should govern the outflow of our lives as disciples of Jesus? The Apostle Paul called the Holy Spirit the one who “brought about your adoption to sonship” (Romans 8:15b NIV). Until we deal with the issues in our personal lives that block our understanding and experience of God as our true Father, our unfinished business with our earthly fathers, we will never enter into the fullness of Jesus’ life as sons and daughters of God.

Jesus came to reveal the Father and to reconcile us to the Father so that we might receive the life that permits us to be sons and daughters in fellowship with the Father, just like He was. His final audible plea to the Father before He left them was  that the Father and His disciples, present and future, would be one just as He and the Father were one.

“”My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you sent me…I in you and you in me — so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them as you have loved me.” John 17:20-21; 23 NIV.

It is not tongues, or gifts, or goose bumps that unites us but the power of the Holy Spirit, the truth He reveals about our Messiah and the faith we have in Him that binds our hearts into one.

“Christ Himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip His people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” Ephesians 5:11-13 NIV.

In that unity, created by the Holy Spirit who reveals the truth that we are to treasure and guard because through our unity in Christ, we testify to the truth about Jesus to the world as the Holy Spirit testifies to the truth about Jesus in us.

Like Father, Like Son

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LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON 

“‘If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged 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 what I told you: ‘A servant is not 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; but now they have no excuse for their sin. Whoever hates me hates my Father as well.'” John 15:18-25 NIV.

It was time. Jesus knew that the frenzied mob were almost on Him. A few more hurried instructions to His frightened disciples before they came, and He would be ripped from their side and they would be on their own.

He needed to warn them of the chasm that existed between them and a hostile world system because of Him. They had to be very clear about whose side they were on. Their association with Him meant that they had taken a public stand for the kingdom of God and had automatically become friends of God and enemies of the state.

Jesus warned them not to be surprised by the treatment they would receive from the “world”, the human system represented by its authorities that had no mind to obey God and uphold His laws and His disposition. Humankind had declared war on Him in the Garden of Eden; the battle lines were drawn and the final showdown was about to begin. There was no time now to be undecided. They were to know on whose side they stood and were to recognise the source of the hatred and enmity that was arraigned against them.

This was not about them. It was about Him. The devil had declared war on God from the beginning. Human beings were the players in this battle. God had already evicted Satan and his minions from His immediate presence because of his arrogance and rebellion. Satan had no power over the Almighty, but he was determined to do as much damage as he could to the race of humans whom God passionately loved, and to go down fighting.

The war into which all mankind had been drawn, was reaching its crescendo in Jesus, the God-man who came to earth as the last Adam. Although the world did not know or acknowledge Him, the hope of rescue lay in Him alone. If He failed, He and all mankind were doomed to eternal separation from God.

How important it was for these few men to realise that they must resolutely stand on His side no matter how the world treated them! Jesus had invested everything He had and was in them. “Because of my name” was the reason for the world’s antagonism and they must know it. This was not a personal struggle, but a cosmic war and they were to stand for their King and their heavenly country, no matter what the cost.

As long as they understood the issues and the stakes, it would strengthen them resolutely to take their stand because they were not alone. Jesus was confident of the outcome because His victory was assured from before the foundation of the world. What was now being played out in history was already accomplished in eternity, hence they could have confidence in Him and in the final outcome.

Although His words seemed incomprehensible then, just like everything else He had taught them, the Holy Spirit would remind them at the appropriate moment and they would draw strength and direction from them to stand in the battle because their Master had already overcome the world.

For these men, and all who come after them, the operative word is “stand”. The war has already been won; the enemy has been vanquished; the struggle is over. Just as they were to know on whose side they were then, so we too must know that we are “in” the one who won the war. Ours is not to fight but to stand, secure in Him because His fight was ours, His victory ours and the enemy is only a loser who tries to unseat us with his lies.

Whatever the enemy tries to do to us reflects right back to the Father because, what they do to us, they do to Jesus; what they do to Jesus, they do to the Father because the Father and the Son are one, and we are “in Him”.

Chosen For Friendship

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CHOSEN FOR FRIENDSHIP 

“‘My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

“‘You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit — fruit that will last — and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you.

“‘This is my command: Love each other.'” John 15:12-17 NIV.

Love… friends… fruit… ask…

Is there a progression in these words? Jesus was looking into the faces of eleven men who did not exactly love each other as He wanted them to do. There was constant bickering and competition between them; vying for top spot in the new government of the kingdom; James and john tried to get in first by sending their Mom in to speak for them. Perhaps they thought she would have more clout with Jesus!

“Love each other as I have loved you.”  That was a tall order for a group of guys who were as different as chalk and cheese and as far from each other in their experience and business lives as east is from west. Some were fishermen; one was a tax collector; some were political activists; some were nobodies — no pedigree given; a heterogeneous group brought together to follow their rabbi and become like Him.

Did He really think it were possible for them to love one another as He loved them!? Although it was written into the constitution of ancient Israel — “Love you neighbour as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18), it was not big on the agenda of God’s people. In fact, oppression of their own people was one of the reasons why they were sent into exile.

“The faithful have been swept from the land; not one upright person remains. Everyone lies in wait to shed blood; they hunt each other with nets.” Micah 7:2 NIV.

No wonder, then, that Jesus had to give them a “new” commandment and repeat it over and over in the hopes that it would sink in! Like everything else He was teaching them in these last hours before His arrest, both their remembrance and their understanding depended on the Holy Spirit who was to live in them and empower them to be what Israel could never be. Although they had the commandments, they had neither the will not the power to fulfil them.

Friends! Imagine that! Jesus was elevating them to a new status, offering them friendship with Himself, with all the privileges that friendship offered. This new standing with Him, though, had one condition — obedience. What does that mean? Was He looking for master/servant obedience while offering them friendship status? That does not make sense.

The friendship that He was seeking with them had a much more intimate basis than mere blind obedience. He was asking that they would become so one with Him that His values would become their values –that they would be walking together and looking in the same direction so that His vision became theirs, His desires, intentions, plans theirs.

This union would become so strong that they would begin to resemble Him in both character and lifestyle — what He called “fruit”. The closer they were to Him, the more fruitful they would become. And that was the prerequisite for answered prayer. To Jesus, prayer was not about “Give me; do this for me; help me; me, me, me.” Prayer was about discovering what He wanted, what the Father had planned, and entering into it with Him so that His kingdom would come to earth and His will be done on earth as it was done in His realm.

In this unity of love between us and Him and between us as His followers, there is power to accomplish everything He has set out to do so that, what He set out to do in the beginning, will be accomplished and His kingdom setup on earth for His glory.