The
Personal Spirit John
14.15-27
You would never refer to Jesus as
‘it’ or to God the Father in that way, but sometimes people do refer to
the Holy Spirit as ‘it’ although the Bible never does. The fact is that we can
often regard the Holy Spirit as a thing or a force rather than a person, but
the Bible insistently refers to him as ‘he’ although it has to break all the
rules of Greek grammar to do so .
It’s tempting, as some of the cults
do, to view the Holy Spirit as a power or a force, like electricity or
magnetism, mysterious, & invisible, and only known but its effects. But if
we are going to relate to the Holy Spirit in the right way then the first thing
we need to do is:
1.
Recognise that the Holy Spirit is a Person
In the New Testament the Holy
Spirit has all the attributes of a person: he guides, he teaches, he speaks, he
reminds, he hears, he restrains, he gives gifts, he can be known, he can be
grieved. And he is bound up in an eternal relationship of love with the Father
and the Son, one God, Father, Son, & Holy Spirit
He is as much a person as Jesus
was:
John 14.16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give
you another Counselor to be with you forever-- 17 the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it
neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and
will be in you.
Admittedly, the Bible itself uses
impersonal analogies to explain the Spirit’s work. He is compared to fire, and
to water, and to the wind. But these are only analogies, pictures, visual aids,
to help us understand how the Spirit works. They should not be pressed too far
As we go through the next three
weeks we need to constantly remember that the Holy Spirit is a person, a living
member of the Holy Trinity of God, that brings us to our second point: we need
to:
Recognise
the Holy Spirit’s relationship with the other Persons of the Trinity
There
is a tendency in admirable British sense of fair play for all to regard all
three persons of the Trinity as essentially the same, and therefore to treat
them equally. Many songs adopt this democratic approach
So
we sing : Father we love you, we worship & adore you, glorify your name in
all the earth
¨
And then: Jesus….
¨
And then Spirit:…
But
its in the third verse that our song goes off the rails because it asks the
Holy Spirit to do the very opposite of what the Bible tells us is his essential
work in this world. In John 16.14 Jesus says of the Holy Spirit He will bring glory to me by taking from what
is mine and making it known to you. 15
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
The
focus of the Holy Spirit’s work is to bring glory to Christ, to point to him,
to make the Son the centre of everybody’s attention. The Holy Spirit is the
most self-effacing member of the Trinity, his joy and delight is not to make
his own name great but to lift up the name of Jesus
Tom
Smail ‘If the Spirit is in effect saying ‘Look at them, not at me’ then to
persist nevertheless in concentrating on him is to frustrate rather than
promote what he wants to do in us’
Jim
Packer uses the image of a floodlight:
Jim
Packer ‘When floodlighting is well done, the floodlights are so placed that
you do not see them; you are not in fact supposed to see where the light is
coming from; what you are meant to see is just the building on which the
floodlights are trained.. This perfectly illustrates the Spirit’s new covenant
role. He is, so to speak, the hidden floodlight shining on the Saviour.’
The
Spirit is most at work, not when much is made of the Holy Spirit, but when much
is made of God’s Son. That is seen supremely on the day of Pentecost when the
Spirit is given to the church and Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, gets up
to preach a sermon all about Jesus
That
Jesus-centered ministry of the Spirit is further explained in verses 12 and 13
of John 16, where Jesus says:
16.12 "I have much more to say to you, more than you can now
bear.13 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.
The
Spirit will not speak on his own authority but only what he hears from Jesus
So
what does all this mean for daily Christian living?
We
will say much more in the next three weeks about the work of the Holy Spirit ie
what he actually does in our lives. Today we have been laying the groundwork
for all that by recognising that the Holy Spirit is a person, not a force or a
power. And that he is a member of the Holy Trinity and he must be understood in
the context of his relationship with the Father and the Son
According
to the Bible they are two things that the Spirit enables us to say:
They
are ‘Jesus is Lord’ And ‘Abba, Father’
In other words the work of the Spirit is to make real in our experience our relationship with the God as our Father and Jesus as our Lord