Our Indwelling Counselor
December 13, 2020
Preached by David McHale
Scripture Reading
John 14:15-24
15 “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, 17 even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.
18 “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. 19 Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. 20 In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. 21 Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” 22 Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” 23 Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. 24 Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father's who sent me.
I remember when I was old enough for my parents to leave me at home alone. They would leave to go to another couple’s home or go out to eat and I distinctly remember the moment the garage door hit the ground signaling that they, indeed, were gone. I was alone. First, I locked all the doors. Then, I closed all the curtains. Then, I checked all the doors to make sure they were locked. Then, I turned on the TV. Then, I might check all the doors again one last time. I was a pretty fearful kid and maybe you are thinking that was a bit overkill, and it was. It’s weird because when everything was the same but my parents were there I had no fear, or if my brothers were there I would have been fine. I was safe but being alone changed me, it brought fear and loneliness and made me do peculiar things. And it does so for us. Being alone can even lead us into trouble, it can make us go to dark places where we shouldn’t go. In life, we desperately need another to be with us, but not just anyone. We need Immanuel.
We have been walking through our Advent sermon series called, “Immanuel: How God gives us himself” in which we are celebrating the coming of Jesus Christ.
Benjamin taught last week about Jesus Christ, the Word of God, who “became flesh and dwelt among (with) us.” (Jn 1:14) – He united himself with our experience, literally took upon our flesh, skin, blood, and bone – YHWH, the Great I AM, the Creator God, came to be with us in Jesus Christ
Then, how peculiar is it then that Jesus would say to His disciples, “I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away” (Jn. 16:7). What?! How could it be that the departure of YHWH in the flesh, the Light in the darkness, could possibly be better than his presence among them?
How could it be better that Jesus is not here in the flesh among us right now in December 2020 as we sit here in this sanctuary? Jesus gives us an answer in John 14:15-24.
Our Union with Jesus
In verses 15-16, Jesus says “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper to be with you forever. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be[g] in you…” He goes on to say, “In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you…If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (Jn. 14:15-16, 20, 23).
Jesus makes a promise to the disciples and He does so following a description of what a disciple is, namely one who loves Jesus and follows Him. He is not telling them they need to earn anything, but simply naming the fruit that follows love. You work for what you love. You labor for what you long for. And if you love Jesus, then you are going to start looking like Him. Jesus’ promise isn’t predicated on their perfect obedience. Rather, their obedience is a sign that they love him. And the Father loves those that love His Son. Jesus promises that He will ask the Father, on behalf of the disciples and the Father will give them another Helper, the Holy Spirit to be with them forever. He has been with them, but will be in them. Even more, in verse 23, we read that Jesus and the Father Himself will come and make their home with them.
This is why it is better for Jesus to go. He is going to send the Spirit to dwell inside His disciples, inside us. Jesus, YHWH in the flesh, came to be with us. The Spirit, who is God, comes to be within us. And this Spirit of God descended upon Jesus at His baptism and dwells within Him. Therefore, the Spirit unites us to the living Jesus. And Jesus says that He is in the Father and the Father is in Him. So, by the Spirit, we are caught up into real fellowship with our Triune God.
The God who dwelled in the holy of holies in the temple, lives within your heart. No wonder Paul says to the Corinthians, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s spirit dwells in you?” (1 Cor. 3:16). In some mysterious way, we are temples of the living God. Jesus, who tabernacled in flesh in the incarnation, tabernacles in you. To an Israelites ears, this would be blasphemy. People died when they went into the holy of holies. And here, the same holy God, dwells within us by faith.
And this a communal reality. We are together filled with the Spirit, a collection of living stones, as Peter puts it, alive because God lives in us and we, as a church, are being built up into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. We are a temple. God is at home here.
If God is here and we are united to Jesus by the Spirit, then what does that mean? It means we have a new identity. JI Packer spoke of this beautiful fruit of our union with Jesus well when he wrote:
“...our bonding with Christ by faith and his bonding with us by the Holy Spirit entail that we share forever in the status and position that are his by virtue of who He is and what He has done for us. In English society, a commoner who marries a Lord thereby becomes a Lady, and one who marries a Duke or a Prince becomes a Duchess or a Princess, simply by virtue of who her husband is; his dignity now embraces her, so that hers now matches his...the Father’s present and ongoing embrace of his incarnate Son as perfectly righteous, to be honored accordingly, embraces us with him, for his sake, by virtue of what he has done for us. This, then, is the divinely devised method of our reconciliation…”
In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, He achieved our redemption and the Holy Spirit applies it by uniting us with Jesus. Our union with Christ by His Spirit is the means through which we gain all the good that the good news offers. We were guilty, in need of forgiveness, unclean in need of cleansing, orphaned in need of a Father, despairing in need of hope, and dead, in need of new life. But now in Christ, we are righteous because He is righteous. We are cleansed from all sin because He is perfectly pure. We are adopted because Jesus is the Son of God. We are loved with the same love the Father has for Jesus because we are joined to Him by the Spirit. And we have been raised to new life, because Jesus is alive. Paul in Ephesians 2, goes so far as to say that, right now, because we are united with the risen and reigning Jesus, we are seated with Him in the heavenly places. If that is true now, then how much more is our future with Him secure. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus for He dwells within us.
Our Indwelling Counselor
If this Helper dwells within us, then what is He doing there?
The name that Jesus uses, translated in our text as Helper, comes from the Greek verb meaning “to encourage or exhort”– the name means a person who is called to one’s side or a person who is at one’s side, offering aid, encouragement, guidance, direction, wisdom, comfort. He is like an advocate, an advisor, literally like a legal counselor – the Spirit is much more like a coach, than He is like our modern concept of counselor
In HS and College, I ran cross country. One of the most memorable parts of running on a cross country team was my coaches. My coaches were fantastic. They taught us about running, training plans, racing strategies. They planned our training. They literally ran with us on our daily runs, talking with us about our lives. In our training, they pushed us…HARD. They told us to not let up. I remember in races, I’d be trailing a guy in front of me and I did not think I could catch him. I’d pass my coach and He would look at me, point at the guy ahead of me and, with tenacity and full confidence, command me, go get him! I had confidence that my coaches were for me, that they knew what they were doing, and that they weren’t going to leave me. That is a true helper. Alongside and offering strong, encouraging, committed direction.
I wonder if we have bought into a peculiar belief that the Spirit is a force, an ambiguous energy that helps us follow Jesus. The Spirit is not an it, but a person. HE bears a character, a heart, mind, and will. He bears a name and He invites us to abide in Him today.
Maybe you find yourself thinking: “Wait, wait. All of this sounds great, but if God dwells in me and all of that is true, then why do I feel so alone and anxious? Why do I feel like He is far away? Why can I not shake this addiction in my life? Why do I deal this back-breaking pressure to figure my life out, to prove my worth to my coworkers, my family and even God Himself? Why am I numb to my bible?”
Though there can be lots of things that contribute to woes like these in our Christian life, at the core of it, the answer is that, despite the fact that God is in us and He is able and eager to give us all we need and wants us to abide in Him, we don’t. We so quickly walk away. We depart from Him. Deep down we don’t really believe that these things are true, that He loves us, that He is on our side, always present; and so we seek to do life on our own. Sometimes without even realizing, we depart from the Lord just like Adam and Eve in the garden who departed from intimate fellowship with the living God because they wanted the lie of independence.
Though we are adopted children, we choose to be orphans. It is like for every moment we abide in our union with the Lord, we fall into the rut that is our own world. We come to church or community group, see the Lord, find encouragement, then we leave and sometimes on the very ride home, we’ve already walked away, paying no mind to the God who dwells in us in love. He dwells within us and we can go days without acknowledging Him, talking to Him, or even thinking about Him at all. Can you imagine being married and never acknowledging your spouse when you are in the same room? That’d be absurd. Yet, that is what we do with the Lord.
But the Lord pursues us by His Spirit. Our Helper within rouses us from our spiritual slumber with honest convicting pricks of love. He tells us the truth about ourselves, about our impatience, our pride. The Spirit doesn’t just join us to Jesus and give us a new identity à He reminds us of it and brings us back when we stray.
“But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (Jn. 14:26).
Andrew Murray called the Holy Spirit, our Great Remembrancer. He also says this,
“The singular ministry of the Holy Spirit is to convey and communicate to us the glorious redemption and life in Christ. This is God’s power at work in us! The Holy Spirit makes the living Christ – victorious over sin, mighty to save – forever present within us.”
What Andrew Murray is saying is that the Spirit of Christ in us doesn’t just advocate to the Father on our behalf, but advocates to us on the Father’s behalf. He convicts us of sin and He comforts us with good news of grace. He doesn’t draw attention to Himself, but always points us to beauty of Jesus and the love of the Father. In our guilt and shame, the Spirit testifies with our spirit that we are the children of God and in His testimony, we are invited to rest in God’s grace and His real presence within us.
When we rest, we are empowered to walk in loving obedience to the commands of Jesus. Our Helper gives us the power to walk in newness of life, to live in a way that we could never do on our own, to forgive sin, to persevere through pain, to love like the Lord loves.
The Spirit of God in us, emboldens us to pray BIG prayers and imagine what the Lord could do in our hearts, in our church, and in our world. He gives us a holy discontentment with the way things are. 2020 has been rough, but 2021 must be about so much more than “just making it.” Imagine what the Lord could do in 2021. What do you want to see? How do you want to grow? Who do you want to see come to know Jesus? What are their names? If the Spirit can do more than anything we ask and think and He resides within us, why not beg him to do what only He can do.
Maybe you deal with anxiety and you need courage. Maybe you have been addicted to pornography for years. Are we boldly begging the Lord, who dwells within us, to change our hearts, to redeem us from sin like this? Do we believe that He can or have we given up hope? Maybe you need courage to face your fears of doing some sort of ministry. Maybe you want to see those that are far off from Christ brought near. Maybe you want to start to care that the far off are brought near. Maybe you have been through loss this year, you are struggling to believe that God is good, and you need Him to restore to you the joy of your salvation. Maybe you want to grow in patience with your family. Maybe you want to come to the end of this coming year actually knowing God loves you.
These are all supernatural things. God is able to do far more abundantly than all these things AND he dwells in you today, guiding you, comforting you, and loving. He has begun a good work in us and he will bring it to completion on that day when we will dwell with Immanuel forever.
