Gooding, David: 14 - Highway to Holiness

In our last session, we were listening to Christ warning his disciples that they must be prepared to meet hatred and persecution in the world, and that was very daunting. But next they heard him say that he would expect them to go out into this very world and witness boldly for him whom the world had crucified, and that must have been far more daunting. But then he immediately comforted their hearts by telling them what the secret and key to their witness would be. It would be the coming of the Holy Spirit. Verse twenty six and seven of chapter fifteen read as follows: But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth which proceedeth from the Father, he shall bear witness of me, and ye also shall bear witness because ye have been with me from the beginning. We notice at once that in this matter of the church's witness, the Holy Spirit is to play the prime and by far the greater part. He shall bear witness, says our Lord, putting the Holy Spirit and his witness first in the team, and then you also shall bear witness. At this point, then, I should like us to notice the recurring pattern that we find in these chapters from thirteen onwards. In every lesson that our Lord teaches, right at the very beginning of the lesson, he urges upon them God's provision for their need, far in excess of their own little efforts in the school of his Holiness. For instance, in chapter thirteen, it was a question of basic cleanliness. And of course, the disciple has his part to play in allowing the Lord, in seeking the Lord to rinse his hands and his feet. But the Lord hastened to add that there is something prime, there is something prior even to that responsibility of the disciple, that is the being bathed all over and being made clean every whit, the washing of regeneration. And then in chapter fourteen, when he proceeded to talk to them about holiness as being devotion to a person, and that person Jesus Christ and the Father, yes, he indicated that the disciple has his part to play. The disciple is to make in his own life and heart a dwelling place in which the divine persons may come and set up their residence. But before that happens, our Lord indicated a provision that he himself was going to make for this very cause, far bigger than anything that the disciple could do. If to- if holiness is devotion to a person, if it is following the Lord Jesus, then said he, I go to prepare a place for you, and if I go away and prepare a place for you in the Father's home, I will come again and receive you to myself, that where I am, there ye may be also. And the whole of eternity is provided, and a dwelling place therein, in fulfillment of the purpose of the developing holiness and devotion of the believer. And then in chapter fifteen, when it comes to the producing of the fruit of holiness in a believer's life, yes, again, the believer has a responsibility in cooperating with God, in praying, in asking the Father to do this and that for him, in abiding in the vine. And yet, before all that happens, even as its basis, our Lord indicates that God has made a provision. God it is that has provided the true vine, even our Lord himself. God it is that has made it possible for a believer to be incorporated in Christ as a branch in a vine, and God himself it is that is the husbandman responsible for the bringing forth of the fruit. The question of witness which now follows, is no exception to the pattern. For the church's witness to the world, yes, every indivi- in- individual believer has a responsibility. Ye also shall bear witness, says Christ. But we would get things utterly out of proportion if we thought that that was the chief responsibility. It is only the secondary thing at best. The chief and prime responsibility for the church's witness in the world rests not with the church, but with the Holy Spirit. When the Comforter is come, says Christ, even the Spirit of truth which proceedeth from the Father, he shall bear witness. And we who live in this advanced age may be exceedingly grateful to God it is so. We live in what has been rightly described as the post-Christian era. There is more unbelief in the West than there has been for centuries. We feel the burden of witnessing to the Lord as perhaps never we did. What a wonderful thing it is, in a sense, to be able to lean back and to realize that the master strategy is not in our hands, but is in the Holy Spirit's hands. He has been here these nineteen centuries, and if we will take the long historic perspective, we shall see that today the gospel is being preached around this world more than ever it has ever been preached in twenty centuries, and more people are currently hearing the gospel than ever was dreamed of even a century ago. In those capable hands, the hands of the Holy Spirit, lies the prime responsibility for witnessing to Christ. We may turn for a moment then to consider what this term coming means that our Lord uses so frequently about the Holy Spirit. Notice verse twenty six of chapter fifteen: when the Comforter is come. Look in the next chapter and verse seven: If I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you. And verse eight: and he, when he is come. And again in verse thirteen: how be it when he, the Spirit of truth, is come. This is a very interesting term. It is almost a technical term, and it will repay close consideration. The coming of the Holy Spirit, of course, took place at Pentecost. It is impossible to exaggerate, it seems to me, the importance and significance of Pentecost. Certainly, the coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost was connected with power, with the church's receiving power. Said our Lord to his apostles before he left them, you tarry in Jerusalem, you shall be endued with power from on high when the Holy Spirit is come upon you. So undeniably, and who would want to deny it anyway, the coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost brought power to the infant church. But we ought not to limit our thinking to Pentecost as being merely a means or a method that brought the church power. The coming of the Holy Spirit has a significance that far surpasses that one side of his ministry. What do we mean by his coming? When he is come. Wasn't he already in the world when the Savior was here? Well, in a sense he was, of course, for we notice that in chapter fifteen, uh our Lord tells his, in chapter fourteen, our Lord tells his disciples in verse seventeen, you know him, that is the Holy Spirit, for he abides with you and shall be in you. Notice the change of tense in that sentence. He abides, he already abides w- uh, with you, he shall be in you. The first part of the sentence reminds us that the Holy Spirit has been at work in the world ever since the world was created. It was his divine and almighty power that brooded over the darkness of chaos and brought this world into existence. It was he that illuminated and moved the patriarchs. He who, as the Old Testament quaintly puts it, clothed himself with Gideon and empowered Gideon and many of those saints to do great exploits for God. He was in the world, in a sense, working in the world. But if we are to understand what Pentecost means, we must be prepared now to envisage a sense in which, while the Holy Spirit had been working in the world, he had not come. For our Lord says it quite clearly in these chapters, he hasn't come yet. And if I don't go away, he will not come. It's important, therefore, I go away, and when I go away, I will send him, and he will come. In what sense come? We may help ourselves understand by taking the analogy of Christ's own coming. As we all know, Jesus Christ didn't begin to exist when he was born in Bethlehem. He is the eternal Son of the eternal God. Nor would it be true to say that he had not visited our earth before Bethlehem. There are a number of occasions in the Old Testament where we read of a figure called the Angel of the Lord that visited some of those ancient saints. Jacob wrestled with a man all night long. Samson's parents were given to see, uh, uh, the Angel of the Lord and realized that they had seen God face to face. And we are given to understand that what they saw was no other than the one we call the second person in the Trinity, who manifested himself to men in spirit form long before his incarnation. On the other hand, those appearances of Christ in the Old Testament, those Christophanies, as they are technically called, were not comings in the sense that Bethlehem was a coming. When Christ came to Bethlehem, it was a coming of a different kind. He came not now merely as a visitant in spirit. He came in human form, in a sense leaving heaven behind, permanently now leaving it behind, to come and live on earth in human form for thirty three years, in which thirty three years he was, so to speak, away from heaven. True enough, he was in constant fellowship with God, his Father, in heaven, but bodily, as far as his presence was concerned, he was not in heaven. He was away from the Father. He was here on earth, he had come in human form. And notice what that last phrase means. For a divine person to visit our planet in spirit is one thing. That certainly is a condescension. But to come and dwell in flesh, to be made flesh, to be made human, that is a distance imagina- unimaginably vast. That God, our very God, should overleap the vast chasm that lies betwixt man and God, and become man, truly man. That is a coming in a very special sense. Now our Lord, after having been here nearly thirty three years, is talking of going. He's going back to the Father in the sense that he will no longer be bodily present in this world. But when he goes, he says the Holy Spirit will come. Come permanently. Come to remain here. And not only to visit our world, as on occasions before he had visited him, visited it. And not only to visit the apostles and to be with them as they went around Palestine preaching the gospel, but to come in a sense similar to what Christ came. Not himself as the Holy Spirit to be incarnate, and yet to come and make his home in the believer, to take up residence in human forms, not one human form, but a multitude of human forms. To recur to our Lord's phrase, he said to the apostles, the Holy Spirit is abiding with you, but after this he shall be in you. If you won't misunderstand the term, it was a kind of incarnation, wasn't it? When the Holy Spirit came down to earth to remain here on earth, with his headquarters, so to speak, on earth, and to reside, not in a single human body as Christ did, but in the bodies of every believer who trusts Christ. That is a wonderful coming. And Paul the Apostle takes it up, does he not, in his epistle to the Romans in chapter eight, pointing how far the Holy Spirit has come, not merely into our world, I say, but into our personalities, to live within us who trust the Savior, not only to reside there as a guest, but as a working partner, coming to where we are, not only geographically and physically in this world, but coming to the point where we are spiritually and morally. Our distance from heaven is not to be measured merely in light years, is it? If it were, I still couldn't tell you how many light years off heaven we are. But our distance from heaven is to be measured also in the spiritual gap that is between what we are now and what God intends us to be when at last we are conformed to the image of his son. And who shall measure that distance? What a distance it is to come from dwelling, so to speak, in the Godhead, where all is utter perfection, and come and dwell in a human personality so immature, so null, so twisted, yet to dwell there and make his home there. The wonder about Pentecost is this, that the Holy Spirit has come to remain, to be in us, to come all the distance to where we are at this present moment in our spiritual state, and not to leave us until together with us he has trodden all the steps of all the journey home to God. In chapter eight, Paul reminds us that the Holy Spirit living within the believer intercedes. He helps alongside our infirmity, the Greek word means. Not so much helping our infirmity to grow stronger, though he does that, but helping our infirmity in the sense that we are weak. He comes alongside. It is like two draft horses in a yoke together, and the one horse is weak, but the other horse is strong and carries the bigger load. So when we start out to pray, to try and journey along the road of God's purpose, the road of holiness that shall lead us eventually to conformity with Christ. We are so weak, the Holy Spirit comes alongside and takes the bigger part of the load, and he prays within us. And whereas often we don't know what to pray for as we ought, we cannot ourselves see what the next step ought to be, what would be best for us next in life, to help us onwards in our pathway home to God. The Holy Spirit dwelling within us knows the mind of God, says Saint Paul, and he makes intercession for us according to the will of God. There is a delightful story in the Old Testament that may serve as a parable in this connection for the work of the Holy Spirit within us. You may remember that when Abraham was getting old, he started to look round for a wife for his son Isaac. He loved Isaac. Isaac was the darling of his heart. In Isaac was all the future of his race, so to speak. But Isaac showed himself a little bit slow in that he was getting on in life and wasn't yet married and didn't seem to take any notice of the girls either, which was a bit, uh, worrying for Father Abram, for he said to himself, now I shall have to do something about this, you'll see. Ha, now he set himself down to think, now I wonder, now a wife for Isaac, where would I find a wife for Isaac from? He had a look round at the girls in the neighborhood and decided that they weren't his sort, not by a long chalk. And then the idea hit him. Would it be possible, do you think, that God might move the heart of some girl way back in Abram's own home country, and so move that girl's heart that she would be willing to take the journey right across the desert to come to Isaac and, uh, be his wife? Hm. Big journey, of course. But there he'd made it himself. When God had appeared to him in Ur of Chaldees and shown him his glory, Abraham had stepped forth in obedience to God's call and had traveled to Palestine, not knowing whither he went. But then, I mean, could you expect a girl to take a similar journey across the desert, not knowing whither she went? And come all those many jour- those many miles to meet and then to marry a man she had never seen. Sounded a preposterous idea, really. But in the end, Abraham decided, yes, he would do that. He would, uh, he he he that was the purpose he would like to pursue, to get a girl from, uh, his own home country to come and be a a wife for Isaac. And what do you think he did, and how did he go about it? Well, I can tell you at once what he didn't do. He didn't, uh, send a map and a photograph to far off Ur of Chaldees saying, now, all you girls that might be interested to qualify, now look at this photograph. This is Isaac, my son. Isn't he wonderful? Now, any of you girls like to, um, come and be his husband? Right. Well, if you would, here's a map. Uh, uh, find your own way. We'll be here ready to meet you when you come. Knock on the door, and the one that gets here first will win. Anything like that? No, no, indeed not. What girl would ever have come on those conditions? No, Abraham sent the senior servant in all his household, chief steward, the one that would have been heir to all Abraham's goods if Isaac hadn't been the heir. He sent him with many beautiful gifts down to Mesopotamia. And when he came, of course, he gave glowing descriptions of Isaac and his wealth, and visible and tangible presents that, uh, might prove to the girl he had his eyes on that Isaac was all that he was made out to be. But when he put the question to the girl whether she would be willing to come with him across the desert to become Isaac's wife, then, of course, it was evident that she wasn't expected to come alone. But this servant who had come all the way from Abram's home down to where the girl was, was now prepared to take her, provide the transport in the form of camels and the know-how of getting across the desert, and stay with her step by step, step by step, and journey with her all the way across that desert until he got her home to where Isaac was. And God has a similar proposal to make to us, as Saint Peter would put it, a savior whom we have never seen. All we have is the glowing account in the Gospels and in the epistles inspired of the Holy Spirit. And we are offered marriage, if you will put it, for the New Testament describes it in that symbolic language, marriage with God's own son, to be part of his church, to be part of his bride. And they who say yes to this invitation of the gospel are invited to travel, not a literal wilderness, but a journey of life and on into an unknown and uncharted eternity. It is a miracle that millions of folk in this world, never having seen Christ, have nevertheless on those terms, as Saint Peter says it, come to love him, whom having not seen we love, in whom, though still we don't see him, yet believing we rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory. But praise God, we have not to find our own way across the world and up to God's heaven. The Holy Spirit has come, like Abram's servant came, and come to stay, come where we are, come right down to where I am struggling with my sins and difficulties, and come to take every step of the journey with me. Not only the journey of time through the years, but the journey of moral and spiritual progress, until at last he gets me home to God, and the great marriage supper of the Lamb takes place. Now we may well ask ourselves why it is, for our Lord affirmed it was so, why it is that Christ had to go away before the Holy Spirit should come in this sense. Perhaps we cannot, any of us, give the full answer to that question, but some things are apparent, are they not? Christ is God's last message to men. There will be no more messages after this one. As the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it in its chapter one, having spoken to the fathers in time past through the prophets in varying degrees and proportions and fashions, in these last of days, God has spoken unto us in his Son. This is the last message. There's never going to be another. The Holy Spirit's function is to be a witness to this message. The Holy Spirit is the last witness. Christ the last message, but not Christ the last witness. The Holy Spirit is to perform the function of being the last witness, to vindicate that message and demonstrate its truth. Secondly, we should notice what the message is. The message is Christ. Now, let me explain what I mean. It is not merely that Christ has brought us a message about God. That is quite true, he has done that. But in a special sense, Christ is himself the message. It is his birth, his incarnation, his death, his burial, his resurrection, his ascension, his coming again. This is what the message is. You will notice at once how different Christ is from, uh, other prophets and other religious leaders. Muhammad has a whole book, a holy book of ethics and teaching of this kind and another, but you could take Muhammad away, and still you would have the message, for Muhammad claims to be no more than a prophet who brought the message. You could take the Buddha away from Buddhism, it still leaves the message unaffected. But you can't take Christ the person away and leave the Christian message, for Christ is the message. We want to see that because there are many folks who think, yes, I agree with Jesus' teaching on the Sermon on the Mount, but I can't agree that Jesus is the Son of God. Well, then, of course, you haven't got the Christian message at all. There's very little in the Sermon on Mount that, in the Sermon on the Mount that is distinctively Christian. You can parallel most of it in the writings of the Jewish rabbis. The distinctive Christian message is Christ himself. And it was not possible for the Holy Spirit to come and witness to this message until the message itself was complete, and Christ had died for our sins, had been buried, was risen again, and demonstrated his tremendous triumph in his resurrection and ascension to God's right hand. It was essential first that Christ should go, for if he did not go, in that sense, there would be no accomplished message for the Holy Spirit to witness to. But when he is come, says our Lord, then he will bear his witness. That witness will be a twofold thing. It will be in the first place a witness to this world, and in the second place it will be a witness to the church. Of that witness we shall have to think in our next session.