“If you love Me, you will keep My commandments. 16 “I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; 17 that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you. 18 “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. 19 “After a little while the world will no longer see Me, but you will see Me; because I live, you will live also. 20 “In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you. 21 “He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will disclose Myself to him.”
We are coming today to a portion of the much longer discourse of Jesus to His faithful followers on the night before His arrest. We could literally go through chapters 14 – 16 one verse at a time and take a very long time to do so; there is so much here to be learned. We aren’t going to attempt to do that of course. I am aware of my own limitations. As we go through however, stopping to study these chapters in small portions and passages, it is important that we continue to keep them in context and thus follow the progression of this final address of Jesus to the Apostles and also to us.
Remember that chapter 14 has been dubbed ‘the comfort chapter’ and in our last session we talked a little bit about why it is called that. This chapter begins with the admonition from our Lord to stop letting our hearts be troubled. Now of course He was talking directly to Peter and to the group of His friends to whom He has been revealing information about His impending departure from them.
They are therefore saddened and confused and unfortunately worried more about their immediate future than His, so He is graciously comforting them at the very moment when they should have been doing their best to comfort Jesus.
Backing up just a step from verse 1 of chapter 14, Jesus has told them He is leaving and they cannot follow, but He is quick to assure them that they will follow later. He actually has better news for them which we are going to be talking about today, because whereas they would, in their future lives, come to a place where they would also depart this world and be with Jesus again, which was good news, what He has to tell them in today’s text verses is of a more immediate nature and it also has to do with Jesus being present with them and they with Him. We’ll get to that in a few moments.
Then He tells them to stop letting their heart be troubled by the revelation of His imminent departure and the reason He gives is that He is only going to prepare a place for them. Well, that’s good and comforting news also, isn’t it? If a loved one assures you that they are going to another place where you will eventually follow, and they say that they are going to have a place all ready for you when you get there, that tells you at least two things, doesn’t it? It tells you that they are very confident you are going to be joining them – otherwise why go to all that preparation trouble, and it tells you that they really want you there because they’re going to do all of that for you in anticipation of your arrival.
And that’s really in essence what Jesus is conveying to them when He says what He does in verse 3.
Then as we move down the early verses of this chapter we see that Jesus says some things that most certainly aren’t true at the moment He says them, but He knows they will be true very soon so He puts them in the present tense. I’m speaking of His assertion that they know where He is going and they know the road to get there. They didn’t, but they would.
Then He says they know the Father as they know Him. They didn’t truly know either in the sense in which He was saying it, but He knew they would soon, and again, that’s what we’ll be discussing today.
Then Jesus gives them some promises that must have sounded very strange to them at that moment. They were going to do greater works than they had seen Him do, and they were going to do those works because He was going to the Father. He also promised them that what they asked in His name – that is, according to Divine will and character – He would accomplish for them and do through them.
So Jesus is offering much comfort and assurance to these poor, confused and doubting eleven. And they did not understand then, but they soon would, and when they got it they really got it.
Before we go to our text verses though, there is something in this for us as Spirit-filled followers of Jesus Christ in the modern world that we really need to get.
You see, Jesus was talking to the very ones who would be His replacements in the world. They would be the charter members of His new church. Now what is the church?
We know that the church is a spiritual entity, don’t we? The church consists of all true believers, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, referred to also as the Spirit of Christ.
That means that we are Christ to the world. The world knows no Christ except the Christ they see in the lives of those who comprise the true church.
Are you with me so far?
There is much more to be said about this and we will endeavor to do so. But for now what I want you to understand is that Jesus was telling His Apostles these things just hours before the murderous, Christ-hating world put Him on a cross. Therefore once He was gone from this world and they were His ambassadors to the world, the same Christ-hating spirit in this world was going to hate them just as much and with the same venom with which it hated Him.
They needed to know, and Christians you and I today need to know that there is a place where we are welcome and it is not in or of this world. They needed to know and we need to know that the One who went there to prepare a place for us really wants us there, really is the Sovereign One who keeps all His promises and always tells the truth and who cannot be thwarted, and no matter what the Anti-Christ world threw at them or throws at us, His plan and purpose for us cannot be hindered or stopped.
Now why do I say all of this now instead of later as we are talking about the coming of the Holy Spirit and the presence of Jesus with us forever and so on?
I’m saying it now because we are in a time when the anti-Christ spirit of this world is growing increasingly emboldened to show itself openly through God-hating unsaved people, and many of them are people in political power.
And the thing I want to say to you, Christ-followers, is that you need to get your eyes off of the troubles around you and worrying about the political climate and the condition of the economy and naughty things people are saying about Christians and the legislation that ungodly men and women want to get passed to shut up the mouths of those who would expose sin and tell them about the Gospel. You need to take a step back from all that and remember who God is, and remember who Jesus is and what He has done for you and the promises He has made concerning your security in Him and His love for you and the power that works in and through you to produce and accomplish His purposes. You need to talk to your soul, believer, and you need to say,
“Why are you in despair, O my soul? And why have you become disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him For the help of His presence.” Ps 42:5
…and remind your soul that the Sovereign One knows all, is in control of all, orchestrates all and in the end will have all the glory, and He has made you His own and nothing can snatch you out of His hand.
For our own well-being and for His glory in this world, Christian, we of the church need to stop fretting and fussing about the state of this passing world and start standing strong in the Lord and in the power of His might.
Now let’s go see some amazing things from verses 15 – 21 of this chapter.
EVIDENCES
Jesus is continuing to comfort them and us about our future in these verses, and He makes some astounding promises; the most assuring one being that they will not be alone – we will not be alone in this world.
Now that is a great and comforting promise, if you are remembering that I just said we who are Christ’s live in a Christ-hating, Christ-murdering world. In verse 18 Jesus says, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” That’s the key verse of our text – and in fact might be considered the key verse of this chapter – because everything He is saying to them is in support of that promise. Jesus is giving them evidences to look for and look at to confirm that this promise is true – for them and of course for us.
THE FRUIT OF THEIR LOVE
Let me just go through and list these evidences, and as we go observe that they are all evidences that manifest in and from the life of the true believer because of the indwelling Holy Spirit. In other words, when we witness certain things about others and sense certain things within ourselves that is how we can be reassured that the promises Jesus makes are true and that we are truly recipients of them.
First, He mentions the fruit of their love; by that I mean their love for the Father and for Jesus and for one another. Listen to verses 15 and 21 and see if you can discern what that fruit is.
15 “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.
21 “He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will disclose Myself to him.”
So according to Jesus the fruit of love for Him is, what? Obedience!
Now listen; this is not said in the same sense as an immature man or woman might say to their romantic partner, ‘If you love me you will’ do such and such. Jesus is not using the concept of a love exchange between Him and us as a manipulative tool to extract obedience from us.
He is saying that obedience from the created to the commands of the Creator is evidence of love. Do you see how blessedly opposite that is from a selfish and manipulative claim?
Here is what I’m getting at. If Jesus was not God, if He was as the false gods of the world or if He was simply a man and not God at all, but a powerful dictator, He might have said, “If you fear me you will keep my commandments”, and “He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who need not fear me”.
But instead of saying ‘You can prove your love for me by keeping My commandments’, Jesus says ‘Your obedience to the commandments I have given you will be the fruit that proves to yourself and other believers that you love Me’.
Here is a simple truth. Are you ready? If you say you are a Christian, but you know in your heart that you do not keep the commandments of Christ, then you are deceiving – or attempting to deceive – others, but you are not deceiving God.
Now don’t get me wrong. We are still in this world though not of it, and our feet get dirty. We sin and when we do the Holy Spirit is faithful to convict us and when convicted we repent and confess to God and He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
But if a person knows in their heart that they are consistently living in disobedience to Christ and they are unrepentant and do not feel convicted, then I don’t care if they wear the shirts and the bracelets and carry a big black Bible and paper their car with clever Christian bumper stickers; I don’t care if they’re an officer in the church and/or are on all the right committees and helping to choose the next pastor or running the sound booth during worship – or whatever – they are not a Christian.
In your spare time read the 3rd chapter of 1st John, prayerfully.
So that is one evidence. Do you ever wonder if you really belong to Jesus? Do you ever wonder if all this amazing stuff He says could really be true? Check your self over. Is it your joy to be obedient to Christ and do you feel shame when you catch yourself disobeying, and does that make you want to say that you are sorry to Him and then go on in His love? There’s your evidence. That’s fruit. It is proof for you that you are His and your love is real.
By the way, before we move on let me answer the question that is undoubtedly in some of your minds. “Obedience to what commands? What are the commands? What commandments is Jesus talking about that we keep if we love Him?”
Here is the answer. Every thing Jesus said in the Bible. So I guess you have to study your Bible, huh? The more you know the more you can obey.
‘Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God’. Find out what Jesus said and obey it. You can do that because you have the Holy Spirit in you to help you. Let’s talk about that.
THE HELPER
Now, we are talking about evidence here, and beginning at verse 16 Jesus promises to send the Helper. So I want to be clear that it is the very presence of the Helper, the Holy Spirit, in and giving life to the believer that allows us to recognize these evidences. They only exist because of His presence in and with us. So in reality the Holy Spirit, coming to us as a gift from the Father, is the first and greatest evidence that we are not abandoned in this world; we are not orphans. However, since we cannot see Him and we cannot hear Him or perceive Him with any of the physical senses, what I am emphasizing today are the things we do sense and do understand that prove to us He is there because we know that we could not if He wasn’t.
Christian, the world, and by that I mean the people of this world, have absolutely no knowledge or understanding of the presence of God or the nature of the Holy Spirit.
I’m going to expound on this from verse 17, but let’s not move too quickly from verse 16 since there’s still some amazing stuff to see there.
“And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever”.
Ok, first, look at those beginning words. And I will ask the Father. What does that tell us? It says that Jesus is asking of the Father, a gift for all His chosen ones. The Holy Spirit is a gift to you, believer, and He comes from the Father at the request of the Son.
Now we know that the Holy Spirit in us always points us to Jesus. Much more is taught in chapter 16 but listen to verse 14 of that chapter.
“He will glorify Me, for He will take of Mine and will disclose it to you.
So the Son asks the Father to send the Helper, the Father sends the Helper at the request of the Son, and the Helper teaches about and glorifies the Son in the believer, which brings glory to the Father.
“…and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever”.
Again, let’s not jump too fast. Look at that word ‘another’. Do you see it in verse 16? “He will give you another Helper”. What does Jesus mean by that? Why didn’t He say, “He will give you a Helper”?
Well, who has been their helper up to this point? Jesus. Right? He has! He has been their Teacher to help them understand the truth about God and the Kingdom of Heaven.
He has defended them before the self-righteous Pharisees. He got their tax money out of a fish. He has fed them and healed them and encouraged them. He has saved them from the stormy sea. That’s why they’re so downcast at the news He is leaving! What? What’re we gonna do now? We don’t have the power, HE has all the power! Now He’s going away and we’re left to do…what?
Yes. He’s been their helper all along and now He is leaving, so He promises to send them ‘another’ Helper.
Now there are two words in the New Testament that are translated ‘another’.
One is heteros. It refers to something different. In Romans 7:23 Paul uses ‘heteros’ when he says “I see a different law in my members”. In Acts 7 Stephen said “After Joseph’s death another king arose”, using the same word, ‘heteros’.
The other word is ‘allos’, and it is the one used here in John 14:16. ‘Allos’ denotes another of the same sort. It means that what Jesus promised was that when He went away – their Helper – he would ask the Father and the Father would send a Helper exactly like Jesus. Another Helper.
Do you see the doctrine of the Trinity being taught here? Now I’m not going to try to come up with some clever illustration of the Trinity. I can’t sufficiently do that and neither can you and neither can anyone else. We’re stupid, fallen creatures who cannot begin to understand God at all, and even after He saves us there are things we won’t comprehend until we are glorified and for all I know we may still be shaking our heads at some things then.
But just look at this. In verse 9 Jesus told Philip, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father”, and in verse 16 He promises to send a Helper exactly like Him, and in verse 17 calls the Helper ‘the Spirit of truth, and in verse 26 He confirms that the Helper is the Holy Spirit.
So the Father is like the Son is like the Spirit is like the Father…
…now listen, Christian, to the end of verse 16… “…that He may be with you forever”
What is He saying? That the Helper will be with us until we’re glorified and no longer need His help? NO! He said ‘forever’. Christ-follower, when Jesus the Son of God rose from the dead and returned to the Father, He asked and the Father sent the Holy Spirit to live in every believer FOREVER.
That means that though you have never seen Jesus and cannot see Him now, since the very moment you were born again and became a true believer in Christ, the Holy Spirit, who is exactly like Jesus and truly has been called the Spirit of Christ, came into you and for the rest of eternity He will never leave you. You are now in the presence of Jesus and He is present in and with you by His Spirit, and you will never, for one split second, be separated from Jesus again, for eternity – forever.
You know, there are people who teach and believe this absolutely absurd doctrine that since God cannot look upon sin, that whenever a believer sins the Holy Spirit leaves and doesn’t come back until and unless the believer confesses his sin and gets right with God again, then the Holy Spirit comes back.
That is ridiculous on too many levels to cover them all in this sermon. For one thing, if the Holy Spirit left we would never repent and confess, for it is the Holy Spirit who convicts of sin and leads us to repentance. I could say more on this but here is the main thing that contradicts that doctrine – and if you ever encounter someone trying to expound that nonsense you can bring them here – in John 14:16. “…that He may be with you forever”.
Ok, so going back to the evidences, what demonstrates this presence of Jesus in us; this Helper; this Holy Spirit?
SPIRIT OF TRUTH
Well Jesus calls Him the Spirit of truth. So one thing that demonstrates His presence in us is our understanding of the truth. The Holy Spirit guides us into all truth.
Unsaved people can never know the truth about any spiritual reality. When the Bible says they are dead in trespasses and sins it means just that. There is no life in them and they are dead to God and cannot have one right thought about Him.
That’s what Jesus is explaining in verse 17 when He says that the world cannot receive Him “…because it does not behold Him or know Him”. The world rejects the truth because the truth of God exposes sin. The world – people of the world – do not like to have their sin exposed. That is why they love the darkness rather than the light; for their deeds are evil.
Nowhere is fallen man’s rejection of truth more apparent than in the picture Paul gives us of the condition of men at the second coming of Christ, after God has given man opportunity after opportunity after opportunity to repent and turn from sin and embrace the truth, but having been given total revelation of the Son will have finally totally rejected Him forever.
And Paul writes in 2 Thessalonians 2:8-12
“Then that lawless one will be revealed whom the Lord will slay with the breath of His mouth and bring to an end by the appearance of His coming; 9 that is, the one whose coming is in accord with the activity of Satan, with all power and signs and false wonders, 10 and with all the deception of wickedness for those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved. 11 For this reason God will send upon them a deluding influence so that they will believe what is false, 12 in order that they all may be judged who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in wickedness.”
They will have totally rejected the totality of revealed truth, choosing rather to believe a lie, so God will give them what they have demanded.
But the believer, says Jesus, does know the Helper because – and here He is giving pre-Pentecost information to His Apostles – ‘He is with you, and will be in you’.
Christians, you have the truth and no one else in the world has or knows the truth. You love the truth because the Spirit of truth lives in you and no one else in the world loves the truth but the Spirit-filled believer in Christ.
It is impossible for people of the world to know or love the truth because the One who guides into all truth is not known to them
That means that only you, Christian, can understand God’s Word, either written or spoken. People of the world, many of them in churches and some of them even presuming to be preachers, will talk as though they understand the Bible, but they do not. They cannot rightly divide and discern the Word of Truth because the truth is not in them.
The most ignorant and unschooled Christian can understand God’s Word better than the most highly intelligent student of theological studies who does not have the Spirit of truth in him.
Do you see how wonderfully blessed and privileged you are, Christ-follower? You are alive and they are not. You have all the promises of God pertaining to eternal life and they do not. You are enabled to understand and love God’s Word, because His Word is truth and the Spirit of truth lives in you and leads you into all truth.
Let me toss out a thought here for you to stash away in the back of your mind and pull it out whenever the need arises. If you hear anyone saying that God has told them to do or say something, or that the Spirit has ‘led’ them in a certain direction, or that He has told them to come to you with some instruction or counsel or for any purpose at all, the only thing you have to do is ask yourself if what they are saying lines up with what the Bible says.
If it doesn’t, then it is a lie and it is not of God because the Holy Spirit in you is the Spirit of truth. He doesn’t lie, He doesn’t tell people to lie, and He will never contradict the Word of God. He will never tell or lead anyone to do or say anything that the Bible says not to do or not to say. Let that be your standard to judge the spirit of the person you are hearing, and let it be the standard for you to follow in your own life. If you ‘feel’ strongly ‘led’ to something, if that feeling would lead you to act in a way contrary to God’s revealed truth in the Bible, then you need to reject that feeling and not follow that leading because no matter how right or good it might appear to you, it is not from the Spirit of truth and you are about to sin.
We have to move on.
YOU WILL SEE ME
Look at verse 19
“After a little while the world will no longer see Me, but you will see Me; because I live, you will live also.”
We’re talking about evidences of our adoption. I haven’t said it that way until now, but that’s the truth of it. We are not left as orphans, we are not abandoned. Jesus said He would come back for them but even in the meantime they would not be alone because One exactly like Him would come and be both with them and in them.
It is the presence of that One in us that causes us to know and believe that Jesus is coming back and that we will behold Him. We will see Him.
Jesus said “After a little while the world will behold Me no more”. I want to touch on that for a moment before we move on. Jesus was talking about His death and burial when He said ‘after a little while’. He meant that literally because by 3pm the next day He would be dead, and it is my belief that after that the people of the world never saw Him again.
I do not believe any unsaved person ever saw the risen and glorified Christ.
Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15 lists the people Jesus appeared to after His resurrection and all of them were believers. Now he does say in verse 6 that Jesus appeared to more than five hundred at once, but even then he calls them ‘brethren’.
The Christ-rejecting world will never have the privilege of seeing Him until the day He returns to judge in righteousness and reign on the earth.
They rejected and murdered the Son of God and they have only hatred and murder in their hearts for God’s chosen people, and when they next lay eyes on Him it will be a terrible sight to behold. It won’t be good news that He brings to them.
But He has only comfort and good news for those who believe. Here in our text Jesus is promising the coming of the Holy Spirit and He has not departed from that theme when He says, “…because I live, you will live also. In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you I Me, and I in you.”
What is He talking about? He is talking about His resurrection and the coming of the promised Helper. Because I live you will live also. And when they saw Him again He was alive forevermore, and on the day of Pentecost the Comforter came as promised and filled them with His life. And in that day they finally knew that they were in the Father as the Son is in the Father and the Father in them. This is the ministry of the Holy Spirit to believers. He leads into all truth and the first truth He makes known is that we are in Christ and Christ in us and all in the Father, forevermore.
This is the evidence in you, believer, to prove to your sometimes doubting heart that you are truly in Christ and the Christ-life is in you; that you love Him and long for His coming – long to see Him as He is – so that you may finally be transformed perfectly into His image, never orphaned for a moment, but made glorified children of God by the power of the Eternal Spirit that raised Jesus Christ from the dead, to the everlasting glory of the Father and Sovereign Majesty of all.
Let’s just close with a look at these words.
“…he who loves Me shall be loved by My Father, and I will love him, and will disclose Myself to him.” (vs 21)
What an amazing gift! What an amazing privilege! What an amazing Savior; that He would love even us and though the world can never see Him, would openly disclose Himself to us in full and without limit through His Word and by His Holy Spirit, Who births us into the family and leads us into all truth!
Amen, amen.
