John 16 Jimmy Draper

In chapter 16, the Bible did not have chapters and verses in Jesus' time. Jesus emphasized the importance of the Holy Spirit, who would testify about him. The early church relied on the Holy Spirit and faced persecution, but still spread Christianity. In the 4th century, Christianity became legal and partnered with the government, losing the power of the Holy Spirit. Since then, Christianity has relied on awakenings to advance. The Moravians were influential in inspiring global evangelism. Jesus warned his disciples of persecution and the dangers of prosperity. Persecution has never destroyed the church, but prosperity can lead to mistakes. Jesus warned that those who kill Christians will think they are serving God. This is still relevant today with religious fanatics. But chapter 16, now I just remind you that the Bible in the New Testament times did not have chapters and verses. In fact, it's quite impressive when you think about Jesus going to Nazareth and opening the scroll to Isaiah. He didn't have a chapter, but he had to be very familiar with where that was. Later several hundred years later, the chapters and verses were added. In this instance, we really need to go back to the 15th chapter to pick up the last phrase in the 26th and 27th verses. When the Counselor comes, the one I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from me, from the Father, he will testify about me and you also will testify because you've been with me from the beginning. So there are two things that happen here at the end of the 15th chapter. There's a huge section on persecution, which he's going to jump right back into here in just the verse 2 in the 16th chapter. But the 16th chapter describes for us the absolute presence of the Holy Spirit. So we really meet the Holy Spirit in a special way in this chapter. Now, let me make a couple of comments about this just to kind of let you know my mindset. I've been wrestling for a couple of years with a book about the Holy Spirit, and the early church moved forward on the wings of the Holy Spirit. The book of Acts tells us that it shouldn't be called the Acts of the Apostles, it's really the Acts of the Holy Spirit. And when Jesus was crucified and resurrected in Acts 1, verse 4, the disciples were ready to go shouting out that Jesus had risen, that he was alive, and Jesus said, don't do that. Stay here until you receive the promise of the Father. Well, the promise of the Father was the Holy Spirit. Verse 8 in Acts 1 says, now when the Holy Spirit comes, you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. Sounds like the Great Commission, doesn't it? Great Commission was that he would be with us to the ends of the earth. So here is my premise. God never intended for us to figure out how to fulfill the Great Commission. He never intended for us to try to figure out how to be a Christian, even though we have the Bible there to help us. I mean, you read the Bible, you'll find that there are a lot of differences of interpretation. What's the real interpretation? Manly Beasley used to say, the greatest heresy is the one that sounds the most like the truth. And the opposite of good is not evil, necessarily, it's the best. The Bible is there, and it's certainly worse than good. Best is better than good. And so the Holy Spirit had to come, we learn in this 16th chapter, but he had to come before Jesus would let the disciples go share the witness. Now, he said, when the Spirit comes, you can do that. And you chase history, chasing through Acts and into the history of the church. The church was an outlaw church. It was illegal to meet, to worship Christ. It was considered a cult. They had no trained leaders. They had no seminaries. They had no staff. They had no, any of the things that we have to help us in our life and in the things we do with the Lord and for the Lord. They had none of that. And yet, in spite of being illegal, they were persecuted. And not just persecuted, they were put to death. And the best, just think about this, an illegal cult evangelizing in a Roman empire, a thoroughly secular empire that worshiped the emperor himself, and the best you could promise a convert would be you're going to be wounded deeply and maybe killed. That would make it kind of hard to evangelize, wouldn't it? In spite of that, within 300 years, 400 years, the official religion of the Roman empire was Christianity. And they did that because they depended upon the leadership of the Holy Spirit. They relied upon the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, look at history. I've been looking at early church history for the last several years now. I have a seven-volume set by Kenneth Scott Adoretti on the history of Christianity. And it's amazing how many times in there the historian talks about the inner dynamic, the Spirit, the Holy Spirit. And for the first 300 years, it was a movement driven by the Holy Spirit, and they conquered the Roman empire against all odds because of the power of the Holy Spirit. Then something happened in the fourth century. In 312, Constantine, the emperor of the Roman empire, embraced Christianity. In 325, he was the moderator for the Council of Nicaea, and they produced the Edict of Milan, which officially made it legal to worship Jesus Christ. It did not become the official religion of the Roman empire until about 50 years later in 380. But with all the things against it, with the persecution, the threat of death, it was illegal. It was a cult. They conquered the Roman empire. How did they do that? Through the power of the Holy Spirit. Now I believe, and William O'Carver in his The Course of Christian Missions, which is a classic history of the missionary movement from the resurrection until he wrote that book nearly 100 years ago, he has some great statements in there about Christianity. But he makes this statement. He said in 325, when the Edict of Milan went out, which relieved the Christians from being illegal and allowed them to worship, it also did the same for other cults, considered cults, mystery religions, whatever. He said it was the biggest mistake that the Christian church ever made. He said because up until that time, they had depended upon the Holy Spirit. But now they had a partner, and that was the government, the state. And from 325 on, and especially after 380, the movement, the direction of the Holy Spirit in the Christian church is not nearly as powerful because they had compromised, and O'Carver says they had corrupted their ideals by joining league with the Roman Empire, and that has been the same ever since. We're still paying the price for the fact that Christianity made a move away from the Holy Spirit and used it to rely upon the government, and the government, without apology, because of the power and strength of the Christian movement, they tried to kill it and couldn't kill it. It didn't matter what they did. They were believers. They couldn't kill the Christian faith. It just kept on. So they finally figured if you can't beat it, join it. And so they joined with the Christians in a league, and it removed the power of the Holy Spirit. What I believe in what I'm doing in this book is that since that time, the advance of Christianity has been still on the wings of the Holy Spirit, but through what we call awakenings. They started in the Bible, Asa and Jehoshaphat. There was a revival that took place, an awakening that took place. Of course, Pentecost was an awakening and a revival of a meaning in the heart of the new faith. But you have so many appearances of God throughout history, all the way back into the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and especially you realize that in this past century, in the last hundred years, Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, has had nine movements of God, like happened in February. Nine times. And it's an amazing thing. But it was a movement of the Holy Spirit. The first great awakening that came in America, that was a global awakening, came right in the time. This country was born in the context of a revival. The colonies were the most dominant leaders in the colony were the preachers, because by and large, they were the best educated. They had the bully pulpit. And for 250 years, from 1633 on, the preachers preached every election day sermon. When they had an election, they'd bring the people, then would gather in the largest meeting place or wherever they could meet, and the preacher would preach to the people who just got elected and tell them how they ought to act. And then they preached to the people who voted and said, this is how you need to support them. This is what you need to do to help them do their job. That went on for 256 years. It went into the 19th century in Connecticut. It went into the 18th century in New England, in Boston, Massachusetts, in that area. But this country was not only founded upon biblical principles, it was in the context of a great awakening. Oh, I don't know how to tell you this, but during the Civil War, which was one of the bloodiest wars, in fact, it was the bloodiest war of the 19th century, there were revivals going on in both army camps. There was a spirit of awakening in both camps. Go figure. I mean, how does that happen? The point is, God has always moved through the leadership and the power of the Holy Spirit. And so, we pick up in this 16th chapter, really, the presence of the Holy Spirit. In a sentence, I've come to the conclusion that God did not want us to figure out how to do anything. He wanted us to have a relationship with Him, which, when we got saved, the Holy Spirit was planted in us, and build a relationship with Him, pay attention, and be obedient. And if we'll do that, we'll fulfill every demand and every assignment that He gave to us. But we can't figure it out. We're not smart enough. We don't have enough intelligence. We don't have enough willingness. Human ingenuity cannot take credit for Christianity. And we see that vividly here in the 16th chapter. The thing that held Christianity together was not the disciples. It was Jesus Christ. And He said, now, it's best for you that I go away. They didn't understand that. But the reason it was best, because there was going to be a new way. They'd been with Jesus physically for three years, but He was going to be gone, and He'd already told them about persecution. We just went through that, and we'll touch some of it again today. But they knew they were going to have persecution, and they were trying to imagine what it would be like to face that kind of hostile world without Jesus present. And Jesus said, I have good news for you. I'm going to go away, but it's best for you that I go away, because if I don't go away, the Holy Spirit can't come. And the Holy Spirit was the answer of Christ for the needs of those early disciples and for the early church. And frankly, what is missing in world Christianity today, especially in America, is that we're depending more on our creativity and our powerful statesmanship and our impressive orders and our creative thinking of organization and strategies rather than the Holy Spirit. Now, it's interesting that in the great awakenings, in the great awakenings, there was rarely any wild, extreme activities going on. It was just an overwhelming sense of God's presence. And we're introduced to that here in this 16th chapter. This is where we kind of get the groundwork for it. The Counselor, the Holy Spirit is called the Counselor, and He says that He will guide us into all truth. He will lead us as we deal with heresy. The main role of the Holy Spirit is to magnify Jesus. It's not to magnify the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the unseen presence. The focus is on Jesus Christ. That's what He did. And Jesus said, when the Holy Spirit comes, He's going to tell you about me, and He's going to remind you of everything I told you. So that's the role of the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit is going to witness about Jesus and call to mind everything that Jesus said while He was here. And the disciples were also given the assignment of magnifying Jesus. So the disciples and the Holy Spirit have the same assignment, magnify Jesus Christ. Perhaps the most significant leader in the late history of Christianity came in the 18th century, and it was among the Moravians. Now I'd heard of Moravian brethren most of my life. In fact, in our first little church down by Texas A&M, we had a family there who were Czech Moravian brethren. And they attended our church. They never joined the church, but they came. The Moravians were incredibly significant in church history. Fifty years before William Carey went to India, the Moravians had already brought the gospel to the Caribbean and to much of Europe and to many countries in the world. They were the pacesetters. The 18th century, the significant awakening in the 18th century was in 1727 in Hernhut, Germany. And it was a great movement of the Holy Spirit that literally changed the direction of Christian history at that time. Several things about that. A Moravian bishop named Boehner, I think it's pronounced, it should be pronounced Boehner because if I remember my German, the O and the E makes an A sound in German, but they call him Boehner, led John and Charles Wesley to Christ. John and Charles Wesley were preaching without being saved. They had no personal faith, but they were great preachers and they wanted to please God. It was Boehner. They both wrote in their journals that Boehner confronted them and challenged them. And when they looked at the matter of personal faith, they didn't have any. And both of them credit Boehner, a Moravian bishop, with the conversion experience that allowed them to become the spearheads of great movement, not only in England and the British Isles, but also in America. The Moravian brethren in 1727 were blessed of God by being led by a man by the name of Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf. He was a remarkable individual. In fact, one of the observers of that time wrote this. He says, It would not be going too far to affirm that Count Zinzendorf did more than any other man to redeem the 18th century from the reproach of barrenness in relation to evangelical teaching and work. It was Count Zinzendorf, German, and he was young. He was in his 20s, and he was very wealthy. The Christians were being persecuted in Germany, and so he welcomed them to his estate. He had a vast estate of land, and so he welcomed the persecuted Christians to come and be on his estate to escape the persecution that they were having, and was incredibly thoroughly devoted to Jesus Christ. He declared, I have one passion. It is Jesus, only Jesus. He declared famously that he prayed this prayer to the Lord, If you will be mine, I will be thine. He was a deeply spiritual man that was absolutely the brightest spot in that period of time. That great movement that started back in the 18th century planted a passion for global evangelism and missions in the hearts of believers. One writer said, During the first three decades after their spiritual Pentecost, that would have been in Hernhut in Germany, after the spiritual Pentecost, they carried the gospel of salvation by the blood of land, not only to nearly every country in Europe, but also to pagan races in America, North and South America, Asia, and Africa. That was 50 years before the beginning of what we call the father of foreign missions, which would be William Carey. It was 50 years before Carey, but Moravians had already done that. In fact, he marched into a group of Baptist leaders in England and had a magazine in his hand that was printed by the Moravians talking about their missionary activities. The historian said he slammed it down on the table and said, If the Moravians can do that, why can't we do that too? The Moravians were influential in inspiring William Carey, who later, 50 years later, went to India and spent his life there. Never came home. Died there. But it was the movement of the Holy Spirit in history. We can see those things all scattered through history, and it all started with the coming of the Holy Spirit. Now, let's just look at this chapter. Jesus is still talking to them. I have told you these things to keep you from stumbling. Now, the word stumbling there is in passive voice, and it means to give up one's faith or going astray. It can mean to be offended. It is a Greek word that we get our English word scandal from. And so it was a scandal. They were scandalized. John, in fact, has used this earlier in chapter 6, verse 61, where those who were kind of surface followers that followed Moravian because of his miracles were said to have turned away from him. Many of them turned away. They abandoned him. That is the word used back there too. So he wanted to keep them from stumbling. He said, I have done this to keep you from stumbling. And then he launches into a description of what is going to happen. He said, they will ban you from the synagogues. Now that means nothing to us. But let me describe it a different way. To say that he was banned from the synagogue did not mean he just couldn't attend the synagogue. It meant that he would be totally cut off from the synagogue, from his family, from his friends. Everything about his life would be changed because they had been banned from the synagogue. It would be the equivalent of a man in America being accused of treason. It was so serious. To be banned from the synagogue is to accuse you of treason against God. And so this was a very, very serious thing to be banned from the synagogue and to be totally cut off from Israel, from your friends, from your families. You know, interesting, today there are those in our society that believe that if you are wealthy, wealthy and wise, that is a sign of God's blessings. Or let me put it in another verbatim, if you have two Cadillacs in your garage, then that is a sign of God's blessings. It is interesting that the New Testament knows nothing like that. In fact, in fact, the sign of a believer in this passage that Jesus is talking about is persecution. And we don't know much about that. Persecution. Let me make another statement. Persecution has never destroyed the church. IMB, the Foreign Mission Board, International Mission Board, reported several years ago of meeting with some pastors in China. And they are still today under severe persecution in China. And one of the IMB personnel said, we are going to pray that you all will be free of your persecution. And they reported that the Chinese pastor said, please don't. He said, we are being persecuted, but that is my God's blessing on us. Please don't pray that persecution will cease. Persecution has never killed the church. Prosperity is what kills the church. And that is a principle that fits every area of your life. When I was at LifeWay, I had a wonderful chief operating officer who had an MBA from Harvard, had been president of several small oil companies. And he made the statement to me one day, he said, the most dangerous time for any country, any company, is when they have money. He said, that's when you make your worst mistakes, is when you have money. Now, translate that into the Christian life. The most dangerous time for us as believers is not when we can't pay the rent. It's when we have more money than we can spend. That's a dangerous time because you will always, if you are not careful, make the wrong decision on how to handle it. And you can see that working out. Think of all the companies in the last 15 or 20 years who have gone bankrupt in America because they had a spurt for about 10 years of incredible success and they geared up and hired more employees and built more buildings and before long, they could not sustain what they had hoped would happen and the company no longer exists. We need to be careful as believers when everything is going well for us, physically, to think that that's a sign of God's blessings. It may not be. I'm not saying He doesn't bless us with good things. He does bless us with good things, but you can't always put a dollar sign on them. And so anyway, Jesus is talking to them about what they are going to face. Then He uses an interesting phrase in verse 2. He says, in fact, the time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he's doing a service to God. The early Christians were persecuted by religious zealots who thought they were pleasing their God. Is that not happening today? In Islamic jihad done by fanatics that believe that they're doing God a service by calling for the death of the great Satan or those that they are opposed to, Jesus said, this is going to happen. He said, you're going to face death and those who are killing you are going to think they're serving God. He said, they'll do these things because they haven't known the Father or me. But He said, I have told you these things so that when their time comes, it's kind of interesting that Jesus often talked about, and we've seen it through the Gospel of John, the fact that when His time came, Galatians says that Jesus was born just at the right time, right on schedule, just at the right time. Jesus also, when Mary told Him at the feast about the problem with the run out of wine, He said, well, why is that a concern of mine? And He said, my hour has not come yet. My time is not here yet. It's kind of interesting, when this last week of His life on earth started in the Gospel of John, He then changed it from, my hour has not come, to, my hour has come. He was always talking about when the time was right. So what He's saying is that persecution has a life. It has a time. When that time comes, it's going to be there. When it's time for it to go, it's going to be gone. There is a time coming, He said. And so He tells the disciples that persecution does have a time, but it will be their experience. And not just persecution, but death would come, and it would be, I like what William Carver said, that there wasn't much to advertise the good thing about becoming a Christian when all you could promise was that you wouldn't be persecuted or die. But He said it did guarantee a regenerative membership. So I guess that's probably the case today, too. Billy Graham once said that he felt like 50% of church members were lost. And I'd have to agree with that, and I've told you this stat before. Do you realize that in Southern Baptist Convention, we have approximately 16 million, 15 million and some odd members. At our best Sunday, we only have 38% of our members in attendance. The average church member attends every three weeks. What if to be a Christian meant that we'd be persecuted, maybe killed? We've gotten so self-satisfied in our faith that we don't really take seriously why we're here. It's more than jumping pews and shouting and shaking your hand, speaking in tongues, healing, whatever it is. It's more than all the manifestations that have appeared throughout history. It's more than that. What Jesus, the thing that He is trying to ingrain in us, He wants a personal relationship with us. Christianity is not a religion. It is a relationship. The essence of Christianity is our relationship with God. I've gotten to where I put Jeremiah 9, 23 and 24 when I write notes, just put that on the bottom of the note. And it's two great verses. It basically says, let the one who boasts. Now, He doesn't say you shouldn't boast. But He says, let the one who boasts. Let the wealthy not brag in their riches. Let the wise not brag about their wisdom. You know, just let them brag, let them boast that they know me and that I know them. That's what Christianity is all about. It's knowing God and being known by God. That in itself is amazing. Let me talk to you about the Holy Spirit just a minute. Do you know we meet Him in the second verse of the Bible? In Genesis 1-2, we're introduced to the Holy Spirit. That's before Jesus is introduced. Jesus shows up in the third chapter when He's called the offspring of the woman. In Genesis 3-15, God is mentioned in that first verse, but the Holy Spirit is. What do you think He's doing? He is hovering over the watery depths. It's not that when God created the world, we talk about He did it ex nihilo, He did it out of nothing. Well, that's true because whatever was there, He did. But there was something there before He created the earth. It was called the watery depths. It was described as being darkness. The word hovering is a word that means to superintend. In other words, the Holy Spirit was superintending over the watery depths and the darkness, preparing it for God's creative Word. Now pause for a moment, and I wish I was smart enough to rattle off some really impressive statistics, but I can't do that. But just think of how intricate this world is organized. You know, we've got people going to the moon. We've got people circling the moon and space right now. And they do that because the universe is meticulously organized. You go in at just the wrong one degree off of the angle that you're supposed to enter the Lord's atmosphere, and you'll burn a spaceship up. Has to be just exact. Why? It's the way God planned it. God created it. We have two satellites that I've mentioned to you before launched 47 years ago, and they're now 15 billion and 12 billion miles in space still going. How can that happen? Because the laws of nature are God's laws, and He meticulously plans everything He does. Now bear with me for a moment. The hovering of the Holy Spirit over the watery depths was to prepare what was there for the hand of God, and that's what He's been doing ever since. The Old Testament mentions the Holy Spirit 65 times. The New Testament mentions the Holy Spirit 230 times. He's evident in both places. In the Old Testament, He's mostly resting upon people, and generally it's multiple people. Now, typically there are times when He acted upon a certain individual. In the New Testament, He's no longer on people, though those of us who know Him can tell you He can get all over you sometimes. But He knows us intimately, and He dwells within us now. And so the Holy Spirit is doing the same thing with you and me that He did with the watery depths before God created the earth. He was superintending the creation mass, the watery depths, so that it would receive appropriately exactly what God wanted it to be when He spoke the words that spoke these worlds into existence. And that's what He's doing with you and me. So we come to the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians, and we come to the gifts of the Spirit in Corinthians, and Romans, and the Holy Spirit. First of all, there are no spiritual gifts that belong to us. They belong to the Holy Spirit. And if it's a gift of the Spirit, then He's responsible for it. You don't have to learn how to use the gifts of the Spirit, because it's the Holy Spirit's gift. And He lives in you, and He will live through you, and He will tell you and guide you in how to use the gifts you have. The fruit of the Spirit, there are many gifts of the Spirit, but the fruit of the Spirit is singular. Fruit is singular. All nine of this fruit of the Spirit describe a mature Christian character. And so when the fruit of the Spirit comes, when we are saved and the Holy Spirit comes to us, He produces fruit, and it's Christian character. That's why there's so much emphasis on the things that we do. That's why John used the phrase of doing the truth, because truth is not just something you believe. It's something you do. It's some action that you take. It's putting into action what God has told you to do. And so the Holy Spirit is directing us just as meticulously as He created all the elements to make this universe what it is like, and all the complications, the intricacies, He wants to live in us the same way. And that's why Jesus said in the last chapter, verse 5, without me you can do nothing. Oh, by the way, God is three Persons. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. They're not separate. It's not three gods. They're one God. Three Persons. Now, that's way above our pay grade. I don't understand that. You don't understand that. There's no way to explain that. You can come up with some illustrations, but you can't explain how three Persons can be one God. It's counterintuitive. But that's the case. So when the Holy Spirit is in you, God is in you. Jesus is in you. What one of them says, they all say. Where one of them goes, they all go. They can't be divided. They can't be diminished in any way. Three Persons, equally all, equally God. So if you don't remember anything else I say, just remember that the Holy Spirit and God and Jesus are one and the same. They're all God, fully God. Oh, and the mystery even deepens when we realize Jesus was also fully man. So how do we understand that? That's beyond our comprehension. How could He be God and be fully man? Well, that's just who He is. We just need to realize that we are, as believers, we have God Himself planted in us. And He is there to magnify Jesus and to lead us into all truth. And truth is not just nice information that is scintillating to know. It's how we live, how we act, how we behave. And that is how Christianity has moved from the beginning. And its best days have been when it was totally dependent upon the Holy Spirit. We've allowed the Pentecostals to scare us away from the Holy Spirit. Some of my best friends over the lifetime of my ministry have been assembly of God and Pentecostals. Love those guys. They're great people. They know how to do worship. When I was at LifeWay, the general superintendent down in Springfield, the Assemblies of God, called me and said, Can I come see you? And I said, What do you want? He said, Well, we know how to do worship. We don't know how to do discipleship. Could I bring a couple of my vice-presidents and y'all kind of introduce us how we could do discipleship? So they came and spent the day with us, three of them. And they left with a big old box full of discipleship materials. One thing we had at LifeWay was good discipleship materials. You know, give them Experiencing God and Beth Moore and Priscilla Shire. I mean, all these wonderful discipleship materials and the Mind of Christ. I mean, we gave all those to them and talked to them. They're wonderful people, but they also have a tendency to believe that the Holy Spirit has something God doesn't have. And now, they never say that, but if you come to me and say that when you got saved you didn't get everything God had for you, you have to have a second blessing, that's just not true. When I got saved, the Holy Spirit came to live in me. Now, I may not understand it, and I may not realize it, but the Holy Spirit came to live in me. And if He's neglected, He'll wither up and die within me and it will have no impact on my life. So the admonition of the New Testament and of Christ is, build your relationship with God. Build your relationship with the Holy Spirit who is in you. Stay close to Him. Whenever He shows you something, do it. When He shows you you need to repent, repent. When He tells you you need to go somewhere, go there. Pay attention and then be obedient. That's what you need to do. So we try to split up God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The Bible never does that. That's because the Bible is not a systematic theology. We created systematic theology, which is a great thing, and we've had some wonderful theologians in Southern Baptist life and evangelical life who wrote great volumes on systematic theology. But the Bible is not a systematic theology. The systematic theology is to help us so that we can better understand it. And so we need to be careful when we begin to split the Godhead up and think, you know, we've got three different gods. No, no. We have one God who exists in three persons, which we cannot understand. But then He didn't ask us to understand it because we're not in a religion. We're in a relationship. And the confidence that that is true comes from our relationship with God who lives in us. That's the essence of Christian faith. All right, I have wandered way too much on this, but let me just quickly hit some high points here and we'll try to be through. In verse 7, Jesus said, I'm telling you, by the way, He does a lot of double amens in this chapter. And the King James always translated the amen, amen, which is the double amen, as truly, truly. And it's a way of saying, this is really important. Don't miss this. This is really significant. Don't pay attention. Well, there are about three of those here in this 16th chapter. And so He says in verse 7, nevertheless, I'm telling you the truth. You've got one there. It is for your benefit that I go away, because if I don't go away, the counselor will not come to you. If I go, I'll send him to you. And when he comes, he will convict the world of sin, righteousness and judgment about sin, because they do not believe in me. The sin he identifies that the Holy Spirit will convict him is of unbelief. The sin is the sin of unbelief, which nobody thinks, you know, if you don't do something, it's probably okay. Well, no, unbelief is bad. He'll convict the sin of righteousness and judgment about sin, because they do not believe in me, about righteousness, because I'm going to the Father and you will no longer see me, and about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been judged. Well, the bottom line of that is that Satan's been judged. The ruler of this world has been judged. So that's already taken place. He's been judged guilty. The standard by which he and we will be judged is righteousness. God is a righteous God and everything He does is righteous. So people say, well, why would a good God send somebody to hell? He doesn't. He's a righteous God. People go to hell because they choose to not believe in Jesus. And you say, well, what about the people who hadn't heard? Well, just read Romans 1. Everything about God that anyone needs to know, God has already revealed. This world is His world. And so even people who may never have heard about Jesus have heard enough that they'd respond to what they knew and respond to the truth of God that's revealed, then He'd give them more truth. That's what we're here for. We're here to help people have more light and more truth, more understanding. And so, convict the world of sin, the verdict will be delivered, and it will be a righteous verdict. And the sin, again, is the sin of rejecting God. And it would be, as I said earlier, like someone in this nation being accused of treason, like the young man in the National Guard that's facing those charges right now for putting classified documents online and putting in jeopardy many of the allies and the people that are really clandestine in this world. So it's a serious thing. True righteousness is produced when Jesus comes into our heart, and that's who God is. He is a righteous God. And Satan is defeated. Jesus says that at the very end. He may have won over Judas, and he may have won those people who railed against Jesus and accused Him of possessing a demon and ridiculed Him while He hung on the cross, but he lost the war when Jesus died and then when He was raised again. So Satan has been defeated. He is a defeated foe. But the disciples now were faced with not having Jesus around anymore. They couldn't imagine that. How are we going to stand in this evil world if you're not here? And so the presence of the Holy Spirit would be the answer to that, and He would begin His ministry and would shepherd their lives and a new faith through the centuries, even up until today. And He says in verse 12, He said, A lot of things I want to tell you, but I can't do that, but the Holy Spirit will take care of that. The Holy Spirit is going to straighten everything out. He's going to reveal truth to you, and that's a good indication of the harmony of the Godhead, Jesus and the Holy Spirit and God all mentioned in the same breath as being in agreement about this. That is a great truth. And the focus of the Holy Spirit is on Jesus Christ. The trouble with the disciples was their focus wasn't on the coming of the Holy Spirit. Their focus was upon the departure of Jesus. They were so self-centered, they couldn't think about anybody but themselves, and they were just overwhelmed by the prospect of living in a world without Him being there. And yet the Holy Spirit came. In verses 16-20, there's a little phrase that is mentioned seven times in five verses. The phrase is, a little while, a little while. The prophets used that phrase while they were talking about and referring to the coming judgment of God. Here it refers to the cross and the resurrection and to the events already mentioned in chapters 12 and 7, 12 and 14. The disciples' anxiety was very serious, and there was no hint. Jesus did not give them a hint that suffering wouldn't come. Such hardships are necessary for the communication of the gospel, and that's still true today. In verse 20, you have another double amen. This is important. Listen to this. He talks about weeping and mourning. What he's doing is referring to a Jewish tradition that when someone died, you had paid mourners who would come and weep and wail and cry and create a scene, trying to show sympathy for the family. That was a common part. So he said, you're going to have weeping and mourning. But then he uses an illustration of a woman in labor. Woman in labor. Verse, he said, I will not leave you. Let me find it here. What is it, 21? Yeah, 21. My eyes. Didn't you all have any trouble with your eyes? Okay. Well, I'm blank here. But anyway, he uses the illustration of a woman in labor, and he talks about sorrow and joy, and you women can identify with that. There's a lot of pain in labor, a lot of grief in labor, but when the baby's born, there's a lot of joy. Oh, by the way, we're going to have a new great-granddaughter Tuesday. There'll be a C-section, so it's already on the calendar. So Tuesday, we'll have our seventh, ninth? Wow, our ninth great-grand. So anyway, but he uses the illustration of a woman in labor, and that's to illustrate what they're going to go through. There's going to be a time, like a woman who's in labor, when you'll have great suffering, but don't worry, he said, you're going to see me again. When I'm gone, you're going to have grief, but you're going to see me again. And the disciples now have a new access to God. It's interesting that up until this time, the disciples have not been told to pray to God. In fact, he mentions that here. But when I'm gone, he said, you'll have direct access to God. That's why the Holy Spirit's coming, to give you direct access to the Father. And he said, there'll be no need for you to ask me anything, because I won't be here. You can ask God for yourself. And the interesting thing is that in spite of their weaknesses and lack of understanding, God still loved them. Isn't that encouraging? God loved them in spite of their performance. We were in San Antonio years ago. We had the largest kindergarten in the city of San Antonio in our church. There were no kindergartens in the public school system at that time. And San Antonio is a large Catholic town, and we had a lot of Catholic kids who came to our kindergarten. And we had a Catholic family who came and got saved and joined our church because their son, who was in kindergarten, went home and said, guess what they told me at kindergarten today? Parents said, what? They told me that God loves us even when we're bad. Apparently, that was not something they'd heard. But you know, that's the truth. Aren't you glad God loves us just because He loves us, not because we deserve it? Aren't you glad we get mercy and not justice? Don't want justice. Want mercy. Because none of us deserves anything but hell. And anything better than that, if it's bad, we don't want that. We want God's mercy. Where we no longer are guilty, we have the righteousness of Christ. Well, we're going to wind up here pretty quick. The disciples, in verses 29 and 30, the disciples were clueless. Jesus had told them and told them, and when He got through, He told them what He told them. And they still didn't understand. They did not understand the cross and His death. He had told them many times, but He usually talked in parables. And so He says here, I'm not going to keep talking to you in figurative speech. He said, now I'm going to talk to you real clear. The Holy Spirit will be real plain to you. It won't be confusing. They often misunderstood, and the Holy Spirit would clear up the confusion. And so they now see clearly that Jesus came from God, and that encouraged them. And then Jesus said, do you now believe? Do you now believe? It's an ironic question because human faith and full understanding don't always coincide. They don't always meet together. True belief must be followed by lives that reflect the genuineness of our faith. What are they going to do when He's in the tomb? What are they going to do when He's dead and gone? He says they'd be scattered, and they'd leave Him alone. I think that was a description of what happened when the disciples all forsook Him and fled, the Gospels say. And it's just again a reminder that Christianity is held together by Christ and not by us. And the last verse is a positive conclusion. Suffering will come, but you will have the peace of Jesus. He said, I have conquered the world. In spite of the terrible suffering, He had conquered the world and He brought them peace. The bottom line is, Satan is powerful, but God is more powerful. And Satan met his defeat at the cross, and the resurrection was a sign of what took place on the cross, that it was good and that Satan is judged. And so the Holy Spirit is presented in a dramatic way. And I would submit to you that the greatest need of the church is not for more competent leaders. It's not for better strategies. It's not for even more passion. It's for infusion of the Holy Spirit who lives in us to take control of our lives. And I'm speaking at the Pastors Conference next month in New Orleans, and they're using the fruit of the Spirit, and they've asked me to speak about self-control. That's the last fruit of the Spirit. And the truth is, that's an oxymoron, because we have no self-control. New Testament talks about us being filled with the Spirit, and the word filled means controlled. So our goal is not to be self-controlled, but it's to be Spirit-controlled, who is the only way. Remember, Jesus said, without me, you can do nothing. We have no hope. Jews had the Ten Commandments and couldn't keep them. Jesus had the Sermon on the Mount. We can't live without that either. But He put the Holy Spirit in us. Things we can't do, He can do. And so we need to keep our relationship with God active, warm, real, pay attention, be obedient. Soon He's coming back. Today would be a really good day for that. Just enough clouds. I told Caroline, I said, you know, I look and it doesn't look like there are any clouds in the sky, but everything's gray and fuzzy up there, you know. Can't see the blue of the sky. What a good day this will be. Every day we ought to walk out on the front and look up and say, about time. Do I hear the trumpet blowing? It's about time. Jesus said, you're going to have trouble, but it's okay, I've overcome the world, and you'll see me again. Now that's what it's all about. Father, just thank You that You love us in spite of us. Lord, You don't love us because of us, but always in spite of us. And I thank You for that. Thank You that even in our weaknesses, and even in our mistakes, even in our hesitancies, and even in our rebellion, You still love us. And You still come and empower us. And the Holy Spirit who lives in us will guide us into all truth and lead us in how we live, how we act, what we do. And we will praise You forever because of it. In Jesus' name, amen.