Tag Archives: Spirit of truth

Christian Life, , , ,

THE HOLY SPIRIT REVEALED

Except for the few times Jesus mentioned the source of His power, His disciples did not know this Spirit whom He said was coming. He spent the final precious hours before He would be torn from them to fill them in on the Person who would take His place, both with them and in them. He told the disciples, in what we call the “Upper Room Discourse”, everything they needed to know about the Holy Spirit so that they would learn to walk with Him as they had walked with Jesus for three years.

  1. Jesus’s “other” self

So close and one were Jesus and the Holy Spirit that He could call Him His “other self”. He could say with confidence.

I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. (John 14: 18)

But how could He come to them since He had told them that He was going away? After His resurrection, He was only around for forty days before He left them for good. Ah, but He had another “self”, the Holy Spirit who would take up residence within them forever. He would not come and go as Jesus had done. He would not be confined to a geographical location as Jesus was. He was spirit, not flesh and blood, and would soon come upon them to be fused with their spirits in an unbreakable union. They would be His temple, individually and together. He would make real the name that was given to Jesus prophetically in the Tanakh – Emmanuel – God with us.

The Holy Spirit withdrew from fallen man in the beginning because He could not dwell with sin. Jesus atoned for and removed sin forever, and promised that He would send the Holy Spirit from the Father to be in them permanently once again. Everything that Jesus was to them, He would be.

  1. The “Paracletos”

Jesus promised that “another Parakletos” was coming – one who would do the same things He had done while He was with them. The word parakletos comes from two Greek words – para, meaning “alongside” as in the word “parallel” – and kaleo, meaning “to call”. “Parakletos” is in the passive voice – “one who is called alongside”.

Who was this Parakletos and what would He do? Firstly, He was “another Parakletos”, implying that Jesus was the first Parakletos. Therefore He would take Jesus’s place and do everything Jesus did. To His disciples Jesus was their rabbi and their model. He was their protector and provider. He was their teacher and mentor.

This “another Parakletos” was called alongside them to support them in their human weakness. He would help them when they tottered under the weight of their burdens by carrying the burdens with them. He would be there to enable them to walk “upright” on their journey to the Father.

  1. The Spirit of Truth

Jesus described the Parakletos as the Spirit of truth. He was not just any spirit. He was the Spirit of truth. Jesus identified Himself as the “truth”. Pilate asked rather cynically. “What is truth?” and did not even stay long enough to hear His answer. What would Jesus have said to Pilate? Would He have defined truth in abstract terms? No. As a true Hebrew, Jesus would have simply said, “Look at me. I am the truth.” In other words, everything He was, everything He said and everything He did was the truth.

Now He said to His disciples, “Just as you watched me and saw truth in action, the Holy Spirit will be in you to teach you how to be truth in action.” If they listened to Him as they had listened to Jesus, they would be in no doubt at all about who and what the truth was.

  1. The Spirit of Jesus

But how would they be able to differentiate between the voice of the Holy Spirit in them and every other voice that clamoured to be heard? Jesus gave them a simple test.

All this I have spoken while still with you. But the Counsellor, 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)

I have much more to say to you, more than you can bear now. 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: 12-14)

What the Holy Spirit says and does is always in perfect harmony with what Jesus said and did. The test is simple and backed up by a powerful witness:

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid. (John 14: 27)

How would they know they were on the right track? Jesus promised that He would replace their insecurity with the same confirmation that powered Him – peace. Peace in the heart always follows truth in the mind. Emotional disturbance is God’s warning sign that there are lies in the mind that contradict what God has said. Jesus assured His disciples that, as long as they followed the Holy Spirit who would lead them into the truth embodied in Him and His word, His supernatural peace would confirm that they were in the truth.

Scripture is taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

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So Much More…

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SO MUCH MORE… 

“‘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 glorify me because it is from me that He will receive what He will make known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will receive from me what He will make known to you.'” John 16:12-16 NIV.

Hallelujah for the Holy Spirit!

Jesus had such confidence in the Holy Spirit that He could anticipate His departure with the knowledge that He, His unique and intimate partner in the work of salvation, would most competently carry on where He left off. In the emotional state His disciples were in at that moment, most of what He was telling them was probably lost to them. They could not cope with the revelation, but the Holy Spirit in them after Pentecost, would be the supreme teacher of the truth they could not at that moment bear.

It is difficult for us to conceive of the closeness between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Everything that belongs to the Father is at the disposal of the Son and the Son, in turn, makes every truth and every resource that the Father owns, available to us through the Holy Spirit. Although the disciples may not have grasped even that, their failure to understand would not negate the truth Jesus was telling them. It would all become clear when the Holy Spirit came.

What did that mean to the disciples then and what does it mean to us now? We may not grasp, believe or accept the truth that we are everything to the Father just as His Son Jesus is. He has made us equal to the Son. “In this world,” said the apostle John, “we are like Jesus.” 1 John 4:17b. “Now if we are children of God, then we are heirs — heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ,” declared the apostle Paul (Romans 8:17). According to the writer to the Hebrews, “Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.” Hebrews 2:11 NIV.

But how can this overwhelming revelation become reality to us? Only as we are willing to set aside our suspicions about God and our reservations about what He has said about us, can we embrace unreservedly the magnitude of what Jesus has done for us through the cross.

Jesus promised His disciples, and us through them, that He would send the Holy Spirit and that He would make known to us every truth about Jesus and every resource of the Father for us as we can bear them. Why then are so many believers of many years still in spiritual kindergarten, unable to move on to spiritual maturity and certainly unable to bear witness to the new life Jesus gave us through His death?

Transformation only comes to us through the renewing of our minds. As we think, so we are. Until we are prepared to fill our minds with truth from the Word of God instead of absorbing what comes from the world, the flesh and the devil, we will remain spiritual “spaghetti”, unable to stand up and become who we are.

The apostle Paul used the word “count” which is an accounting term. Write it in the credit column of who you are — sons and daughters, heirs and equal to Jesus as His brothers and sisters — and live as though it were true because it is. The debit column has been erased. It no longer exists. “He forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us; He has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.” Colossians 2:13b-14 NIV.

“Now if we died with Christ, we believe that was will also live with Him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, He cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over Him. The death He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life He lives, He lives to God. In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” Romans 6:8-11 NIV.

Not only are we alive to God but we are also alive to everything He has made available to us in His Son, and the Holy Spirit administers to us all His resources as we receive them by faith.

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.