Dare to Receive Again – “Up From The Grave” series, Lent 2003
John 20:19-23 March 15/16, 2003
Intro:
Friday afternoon I was driving home after spending much of the week at a leader’s retreat at St Paul’s Anglican up the road, and for the first time in a long, long time the sun was shining, it wasn’t minus a million, the snow was melting (or more like the frozen mud on the roadway was melting), and I just had this need to open all the windows in my truck and feel the fresh breeze. Of course, driving along the Whitemud the fresh breeze smelled a lot more like dirt, but at least it was that refreshing cool breeze and not the biting wind of last week, and not the stale air we get so accustomed to during a long winter. I got home and literally ran through the house, throwing open every window in the house, longing for that fresh air to blow into all the stale corners. I turned the furnace off first, not wanting to pour numerous gigajoules of gas out the window at $8.54/Gj, and not feeling the need to needlessly inflate my gas bill any further, but definitely feeling the need to feel the freshness of the breeze blow out the stale winter air.
That’s a metaphor for what I want to talk about today. I believe God wants to breathe some fresh wind into us today.
John 20:19-23
Turn to Jn 20:19-23. Last week we looked at the story just previous to this, where Mary Magdalene hears Jesus call her name into the midst of her grief, and she dared to believe again. This week, as we read this passage, I want to ask the question: will you dare to receive again? (read).
It is still resurrection Sunday, but now it is evening. The disciples, and by this we should likely understand this not just the “official” disciples but rather “disciples” in a more general sense, were gathered together. Undoubtedly they had heard from Peter and John, and their discovery earlier in the day, and it is likely that Mary had reported to them as well. So you can imagine the buzz in the room – is it true? Could it be?? Is Mary crazy, did the Romans steal the body, or is it possible that Jesus really IS alive??? They are afraid – with good reason after seeing what happened to Jesus – they lock the doors.
And suddenly Jesus appears. He shows them the wounds, proves it is Him, and then speaks to them. Let me show you how what He says here compares to the promises Jesus made just before His crucifixion:
The Promise (Jn 14; 16) The Fulfillment (Jn 20:19-23)
I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. (14:18)
Jesus came and stood among them (20:19)
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid. (14:27)
"Peace be with you!" (20:19)
Again Jesus said, "Peace be with you! (20:21)
Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy. (16:22)
After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. (20:20)
And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever-- the Spirit of truth. … the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things. (14:16-17; 26)
And with that he breathed on them and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit. (20:22)
There are essentially four things Jesus says: 1. He proclaims Peace. 2. He sends. 3. He breathes. 4. He gives authority.
The Gift of Peace:
Jesus says, “peace be with you,” twice in this short passage. We need to notice that this is the typical Hebrew greeting, “shalom.” So it could simply be Jesus saying, “HI!” But since He repeats it twice, and since it is clearly the fulfillment of the promise in 14:27, we are correct to understand this as far more than a simple greeting. Jesus is here giving the spiritual gift of peace, which He had promised.
I believe this is the gift of peace which Jesus promised in 14, and which Paul described as “the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Phil 4:7). It is a spiritual thing which Jesus is gifting.
Do you have that gift? I’m convinced that what Jesus is giving here is not the peace we usually think of, as what we experience when all of life is going good and things are calm and happy – that kind of peace doesn’t “transcend all understanding.” I think this is the gift of a heart of peace in the midst of messy life. When you are told you have cancer, when your teen is out four hours after curfew and hasn’t called, when you sit at the funeral of a loved one, when everything around you is in the midst of a storm. At those moments, Jesus comes and says, “peace be with you.” He says, I’m Alive! I have risen from the dead!! It’s ok, I’m still God and I’m still on the throne, and I am in control. “Peace be with you!!!” I’m here.
Sometimes my 2 ½ yr old son wakes up crying in the middle of the night. Joanne usually goes in, sometimes we both will if he’s really upset. Sometimes, as she holds him, I lean in and place my cheek against his cheek, or on his forehead, right in close. And I whisper, “It’s ok Thomas. Mommy is here. Daddy is here. It’s ok.” And as he calms down, he’ll push his face back against mine – he’ll nestle in. He’ll relax. And He’ll go back to sleep, and I’ll see the peace of sleep on his face once again.
I don’t know what it is that makes Thomas so upset sometimes, and I don’t know what storm is raging in your soul today. But I do know this – God the Father holds you. God the Son leans over you and places His cheek against yours and says, “It’s ok. I’m here.” And God the Spirit comes and brings peace in the midst of the storm.
That gift of peace, Paul says, guards your heart and it guards your mind. It places a protection around your feelings and your thoughts, and keeps you from being overwhelmed. And I proclaim to you that since Jesus is alive still, He longs to give you that peace right now.
Jesus Sends
“As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.” I don’t plan to talk much about this since we spent much of last fall talking about how Jesus has sent us into the world as a “hospital”, but let me ask a simple question: how did the Father send Jesus?
1. He sent Him to live in the middle of a lost world.
2. He sent Him in the power of the Holy Spirit (which we’ll look at in a moment).
3. He sent Him to minister to the real needs of real people.
4. He sent Him to give His life for others.
This is a simple version of the great commission Jesus gave us, put very clearly to us: “Just as the Father sent me, so I am sending you.”
In a very real way, Jesus gives us peace so that we can take it to our world. Jesus gives us the Holy Spirit so that we can make a difference in our world. He gives us authority to proclaim forgiveness to a hurting world. It is critical that we understand all that Jesus is saying here in the context of the mission He has given – to go into the world and take the peace and the power and the forgiveness of God into all the corners. Just like Jesus did.
He Sends with authority
I’d like to jump to the last verse, verse 23, and then come back to 22, because it is best understood in the context of this sending. It is a little confusing: “If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” At first read, it sounds like Jesus is giving the responsibility to forgive sins to the disciples. This doesn’t really make sense though – since we know that only God can forgive sins, because it is God that we sin against. I think the best way to understand this verse is to recognize that Jesus is sending His church – us – on a mission to the world which is empowered by the Holy Spirit. This sending is accompanied by the authority to proclaim forgiveness. It is not that we do the forgiving, but that we are sent to share the forgiveness that is available in Christ – and that as we are filled with the Holy Spirit, we are able to proclaim as reality to people that which has been decided in heaven. If you want to know more, grab me afterwards and we can chat about it a little more.
Jesus Breathes
Let me come back to what I believe is the climax: Verse 22: “And with that he breathed on them and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit.” The word “breathed” is an interesting and very deliberate choice of words. This is the only place in the entire NT where we have this particular word, which is the same word used in Gen 2:7 (which is the story of the creation of man), and Ezek 37:9-10 (which is Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones which come to life):
“the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
“Then he said to me, "Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ’This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’ " So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet-a vast army.
So it is pretty clear to me that John chooses this word to describe the coming of the Holy Spirit as bringing new life – he draws a picture for us of the breath of God entering us and breathing life to our death. Jesus breathes on the disciples, and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
My first question reading this passage earlier this week was, “how does this passage relate to the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, 50 days later?” Remember at that time, in Acts 2, the Holy Spirit comes and all heaven breaks loose! A violent wind fills the whole house, fire falls, the disciples speak in tongues and 3000 people get saved. Here, John doesn’t say anything happens. In fact, if we jump down to vs. 26 we find the disciples 1 week later, still huddling behind locked doors! What is going on here??
I think we have two choices: either they received the Holy Spirit, or they did not. Frankly, if the resurrected Jesus breathed on the disciples and said, “receive the Holy Spirit,” I think they received the Holy Spirit. So why didn’t anything happen? Why weren’t the disciples changed at that moment from a scared bunch of disciples into bold ambassadors ministering in the power of the Holy Spirit?
The best theological answer I found was that this giving of the Holy Spirit was analogous to the conception of the church, and the Pentecost experience was analogous to the birth of the church. This experience in John 20 is an inner reception of the Holy Spirit, 50 days later we see the external birth of the church in a dramatic, signs-and-wonders kind of way. If fact, according to Jesus’ earlier promise in Jn 16:7, the coming of the Holy Spirit would only be complete after Jesus had left: “Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” So Biblically, the coming of the Holy Spirit is not a one-time event, but rather a continual and somewhat complicated process.
Let me follow that up with a practical question: what has been your experience? I think we will all agree that we become Christians by the Holy Spirit converting us from darkness to light, from death to life, from orphans to adopted children, from bondage to sin to freedom in Christ. The Spirit comes and sets us free and we experience the saving power of Jesus effected in our life by the Holy Spirit and we are adopted as God’s precious children. That to me is the internal witness, the “conception” phase. But were you done there? Was that it for you?? Or was there another time where you experienced the Holy Spirit come powerfully into your life and do some neat things in you and through you? More accurately, do you not find that every day you need a fresh “filling” (if you’ll allow me to use a loaded term) from God to live and walk that day in holiness and in power and in an ability to be sent as Jesus was sent.
I think somewhere along the line we learned that we receive the Holy Spirit when we become Christians, and then we’re done. We think the rest of the Christian life is about us working hard to do all the things that the NT tells us to do. But you know, that is incredibly false. All of the things the NT commands us to do are things that we are supposed to do by the power of the Holy Spirit living in us and filling us on a moment by moment basis. How else could we love as Jesus did? How else could we go as Jesus did, and how else could we proclaim forgiveness? How else could we know peace? How else could we work in God’s Kingdom? Grace is not merely the thing which saves us, but is the continuing presence of the Holy Spirit walking with us. I don’t believe we need a “second experience of God’s grace,” I believe we need a daily experience of God’s grace if we are to experience all that God desires for us.
So let me ask you the pointed question: Have you only ever experienced the Holy Spirit when you became a Christian – have you only had the Spirit “conceived” in you? Do you want more of God’s love and power and grace in your life? Do you long for peace in the midst of the storm? Do you long for greater intimacy with God, and to know more of Him in your life every day? Will you dare to receive the Holy Spirit? Will you dare to receive the Holy Spirit again?? We’re going to have an opportunity to pray in just a moment, and I’m going to invite you to allow the Holy Spirit to come as we pray.
But just before we do that, I remember sitting in church one week as a teenager listening to a sermon that was kind of like this, where my pastor was asking questions of us like, “are you willing to be used by God wherever He wants? Do you want to know Him more? Do you want Him to be fully a part of your life?” and I sat there thinking these were pretty basic questions. Of course! That’s what being a Christian is all about!! I honestly listened to all of these thinking they were simply rhetorical questions with an obvious answer. Now, this might show my youth and naivety at that moment, but then our pastor asked if we would stand if we wanted to say “yes” to those questions. And I hopped right up to my feet. I looked around, no one else was moving. I was honestly shocked! I couldn’t believe that the whole place hadn’t jumped to their feet the moment the invitation was given!! It seemed so obvious! After a few painful moments, someone else stood up on the other side of the church – and to this day I don’t know if she stood up just so I wouldn’t be the only one on my feet or if something else was going on… After the service, my pastor caught me in the foyer and asked if I wanted or needed to get together that week and talk – I said no – because you see it wasn’t that I felt some weird powerful move of the Holy Spirit at that moment, the invitation just seemed so obvious that I was surprised I was almost the only one who responded.
I see this invitation the same way. We all recognize that we need God to live our lives fully, day by day. And we have all experienced the need to know God more deeply in our lives. And that is all I want to pray for us! Simply to seek God. To pray to Him and ask Him to breathe on us once again – or maybe for the first time – and allow us to know more of Him.
I had a really good week at this leaders retreat I mentioned earlier. There were Godly men and women there, who genuinely just wanted to seek God and know His love more deeply, and to learn to minister the love of God to a needy church and world. And we prayed for each other, exactly what I want to pray for us today. And God refreshed me – He spoke to my heart. In case you are a little hesitant about this idea of praying for us to be filled with the Holy Spirit, let me share with you what God said to me. He just came and encouraged me and told me that He loves me and wants to spend more time with me. He invited me to sit with Him beside the river and have some food and just enjoy letting Him love me. I believe He wants to tell you the same kind of thing – just the depth of His love and kindness and affection for you. My experience was like the fresh wind blowing into some stale corners. It wasn’t anything weird or abnormal, I didn’t bark like a dog or flop like a fish. I just experienced God speaking. God loving. God encouraging. I’m excited! I want you to have the chance to know that also – to feel the breath of Jesus. To hear His voice calling your name, speaking to you, filling you once again with everything you need for this day. And I want to pray that God would do that.
Will you throw open the windows of your life and let God breathe in? Will you open your arms and say “Please Lord, come and fill me! Come and love me! Come and encourage me! Come and fill me!” If so, let me invite you to come forward and let one of us just pray a very simple prayer, that you receive the Holy Spirit in a fresh way. That’s all we want to pray. And maybe you won’t feel any different, like it appears the disciples didn’t in Jn 20. Or maybe you’ll experience something else. That’s up to God! But I know He longs to honor that prayer, and fill us with everything we need for life and Godliness.
