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[0:00] Music Mr. Lee has already pointed out that I have skipped verse 15 from last week to this week.

[0:18] ! So let me just tell you that verse 15 in John 14 says, If you love me, keep my commandments.! I want to get that in.

[0:30] We got it. And the Lord gives a command there. A number of years ago, we took our two granddaughters to Disney World.

[0:42] It was a nice $10,000 trip. And from there we went to the Atlantic Ocean, St. Augustine, Florida, which is named after St. Augustine, but they call it Augustine.

[0:59] And actually it turned out they'd never seen the ocean turn out. That's all we had to do. We just should have taken them to the water. And then we stopped at Silver Dollar City. See my youngest son who had a shop out there, a couple shops. And someone, I don't remember who, asked me, what's your goal in all that? I mean you're going all halfway across the country.

[1:20] And I said, well Diane and I are building memories for our granddaughters. And someday they'll tell their kids or grandkids, you know, what they did with us.

[1:32] So I guess the question we would ask here is, you know, what memories are we leaving behind for our children and our grandchildren? In at least one case in here, our great-grandchildren. I'm looking at Jerry when I said that.

[1:47] There's another word for memories, and that's legacy. And, you know, we should in part at least focus on our legacy that we're leaving for our children and our grandchildren and our friends and the church family.

[2:04] And by that, of course, in here I mean your Christian legacy. What's your testimony that people will talk about after you're gone? Jesus made promises to the disciples and through them to all who would believe.

[2:24] And that was his legacy. He left us four things to build our Christian life on. These four things will sustain us until the Lord comes back for us or we go to Him.

[2:41] And these four things will define our daily walk with the Lord. Some have called these four sources of power to live in the age that God has for us.

[3:00] And the legacy that He left us in the form of promises is this. The presence of the Spirit to indwell the church.

[3:12] The presence of the Son. The presence of the Father. And the presence of truth. He gave us true truth in that Word of God.

[3:23] And the first thing I want to speak about this evening is to look at the presence of the Spirit. The Lord has this to say.

[3:35] I will ask the Father. I'm in verse 16. I'm already covered 15. I will ask the Father. And He will ask the Father.

[4:12] Now the present ministry of the Lord Jesus. And that would be a good trivial pursuit question I guess. He has a present ministry.

[4:25] And I tell folks. Do you ever wake up at three in the morning and think, What's Jesus doing right now? Because He's up to something. He's active.

[4:37] Doesn't sleep or slumber. The present ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ is that of intercessor. And by the way, we're going to get to that when we come to John 17 in this series.

[4:53] It is what the great high priest does. Here Jesus asks the Father to send another helper.

[5:07] And that word helper in the Greek is difficult to translate into the English. I maintain that our language is not expressive enough to embrace such a word with another English word.

[5:23] But essentially it means one called alongside to help. And I think that's a pretty good word picture in our minds.

[5:33] The helper is one called alongside to help. Now in the Bible, this person, and that's a capital P by the way, is referred to as the helper, the comforter, the counselor, the exhorter, the intercessor, the encourager, and the advocate.

[6:01] An advocate we've studied before is the defense attorney who pleads our case before God's court of judgment. We have a pretty good system.

[6:13] Our judge is also our defense attorney. If you ever go down to criminal court, that's a pretty good system to have. Well, there is another interesting word used here in the Greek language.

[6:28] And it is a very specific word meaning another of the same kind. He's going to send another of the same kind.

[6:41] Now what's the Lord talking about there? The Lord makes a promise to the disciples. And through them to those who would believe down to December of 2016.

[6:57] It's still going on. But he makes a promise to send another that is like he is. Just like him. Very interesting language to dwell on.

[7:09] He'll send someone like himself. But this other will take his place and empower his work. Because we know that the Lord is soon going to depart, isn't he?

[7:26] We know he's going to be crucified. We know he's going to be buried. He's going to be raised again. We know ultimately he's going to ascend back into heaven. But he's going to send another of the like kind.

[7:41] He will be departing the band of followers. And the Holy Spirit will come. And we've of course studied that in the book of Acts. And read that I'm sure many times.

[7:51] But the Holy Spirit will come to entwell the church forever. Never leave us. Never forsake us.

[8:03] And never is a really long time in biblical terms. It's a long, long time. I always say we've got to be careful, I think, when we speak of the Holy Spirit.

[8:18] Holy Spirit is an interesting topic, an interesting study. One, I think, as Baptists, we've been scared off by some of the excesses of the extreme charismatic movement.

[8:31] The guys say they can make trees walk or make trains fly over kids. Kids, you know, that's from real life. We had charismatic here that told his kids that if you're out in the street playing in a car or truck came, they couldn't hit you.

[8:47] It'd be impossible to hit you. They'd fly over you. And I thought that's pretty dangerous to tell a little kid that. And we've had kids hit in this town.

[8:58] We've had kids killed in this town from that. But I think we need to be cautious when speaking of the Holy Spirit. I've heard well-meaning Christians refer to the Spirit of God as an it or a thing.

[9:16] And the cults hold to the belief that the Spirit, the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, is a force or a power in the universe.

[9:33] And I've got to tell you, some Christians seized on that phrase when the first movie Star Wars came out. And now, of course, there's been 492 episodes of Star Wars.

[9:46] But people went around in the church thinking they were blessing people with, may the force be with you, as a reference to the Holy Spirit.

[9:59] But he's not an impersonal force or power. The Holy Spirit is a person. He is a person.

[10:10] We refer to him as the third person of the Trinity. He is fully God. Co-equal. Co-eternal.

[10:20] With the Father and with the Son. One with them and yet distinct. But he is a person.

[10:32] Some have referred to him as kind of the unseen member of the Trinity. He, in some respects, the old Puritan just says he's in the shadows.

[10:43] But he's always working. He's always working. And principally, the Holy Spirit is revealing Christ Jesus.

[10:55] He's revealing Christ. Christ. I remember years ago, and we're going back 30 or 35 years, it was a show out of Virginia, church out of Virginia, charismatic. For reasons I can't explain, we got home from church that night, turned it on.

[11:09] It was on. We sat there and watched a little of it. And I got kind of fascinated. And I told him, don't change the channel. And I was keeping score. Because in 40 minutes, they never mentioned Christ.

[11:26] The Lord Jesus was never mentioned. But it was the Spirit of God, the power of His resurrection, the power that He gives you. It went on and on and on about the Spirit. And I can't remember who it was that I read that said it.

[11:40] It said, when you do that, you grieve the Holy Spirit. He is there to reveal Christ. And Him crucified. And I think that service was grievous to the Holy Spirit.

[11:56] Because He's there to reveal Christ to a lost world. And to build up Christ in the church. And so, some have referred to Him as the unseen member.

[12:09] I suppose we could say the Father is the unseen member also. No one has seen the Father but the Son. Now, the Spirit of God is sometimes referred to as the Spirit of Christ.

[12:23] He is the abiding presence of God in our life. While Jesus is away, interceding for us and preparing for us a place before the Father.

[12:38] And He ever lives to make intercession before the Father. The world is incapable of receiving the Holy Spirit because of their rejection of Christ.

[12:53] You cannot have the Father without the Son. You cannot have the Spirit without the Son, without Christ.

[13:06] And the world cannot know the Spirit because the world does not and did not know Christ. I hear people often, I believe in God, but I just don't believe in Jesus.

[13:19] Well, what kind of gobbledygook is that? Good Bible word, by the way. That's an impossibility. It's an impossible. And this is one of the reasons, maybe the principal reason, why unregenerate people cannot comprehend spiritual truth.

[13:38] I used to be amazed when I was a new believer. I assumed if you were a professor of religion, you had to be a believer. And then I heard some of these guys start misquoting Scripture.

[13:48] I thought, wait a minute, where did he get that? Well, of course, they're not. Unregenerate people cannot comprehend spiritual truth. Paul wrote that. A natural man, and that's the unsaved man, does not accept the things of the Spirit of God.

[14:08] For they must be spiritually appraised or spiritually obtained. Only the Spirit of God can reveal truth to us. And absent the Spirit.

[14:19] And, you know, I'm not saying a guy can't learn some morality from the Bible. Most laws are based on the Ten Commandments, which we now ban in the public square. And I'm not saying you can't learn some morality, you know, in reading that, but to know the deep truths of the Bible, the deep truths concerning Christ as the way, the truth, and the life, which we studied last time, that's foreign to the man devoid of the Spirit.

[14:46] I think that's one of the reasons that when the day of Pentecost arrived, the majority of the crowd said, these guys are drunk. They're drunk.

[14:58] And maybe I'm wrong to do this, Pastor, but I always thought Peter kind of indicted himself, says, we're not drunk, it's only 9 o'clock. Okay, Peter, but what if it was 8 o'clock in the evening? You know, what do you do then?

[15:09] I don't think he was saying they were all alcoholics. But they accused Peter and the others of being drunk. They were incapable of recognizing the Spirit of God at work.

[15:25] And by the way, the same people at Pentecost, the Jewish people, that couldn't recognize that the Spirit of God had descended, they were the same ones that couldn't figure out that God had sent the Messiah earlier.

[15:41] They rejected Him as well. And yet they should have known. They had the prophecies. Read Daniel and he'll tell you when he's going to enter Jerusalem. They had all that.

[15:52] But they didn't see it. They didn't have spiritual eyes to see it with. Do you want an explanation of the hostility, the rejection, an explanation for persecution?

[16:05] It is because the world has rejected Christ and failed to see the Spirit of God, the helper that He sent in His place when He returned to His rightful place at the right hand of the Father.

[16:24] Well, how is it then that the disciples knew the Spirit, as do all who truly believe? The answer is because the Spirit abides in every true believer.

[16:37] And, you know, over the centuries, the churches debated, well, is there a second blessing? And do you have this? And there was actually some pretty good guys that I think were wrong on that. R.A. Torrey, you know, he wrote a book about that, a second blessing.

[16:50] But here's the deal. He who has not Christ has not the Spirit. There's no black and white here. I mean, there's no shades of gray here.

[17:01] It's all black and white. If you don't have Christ, you cannot have the Spirit of God. Well, second, we have the presence of the Son. Verses 18 to 20.

[17:14] I will not leave you as orphans. Christ speaking. I'm not going to leave you as an orphan. I woke up one morning and I said, I'm an orphan.

[17:30] My father had died, then my mother died. And I thought, I'm an orphan. Then my sister died. I'm the last of my generation. Jesus says, I will not leave you as an orphan.

[17:42] I will come to you. Then He tells them, now remember, put it in context, fellas. We're a few hours from the cross. You all understand that, right?

[17:55] I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you. After a little while, the world will no longer see me. But then He adds to that depressing news, but you will see me.

[18:09] Because I live, you will live also. In that day, you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. So Jesus tells His children, He says, fellows, I'm leaving.

[18:28] And I can just imagine how they must have, in the pit of their stomach, felt. But though He is leaving, He says, I'm not going to leave you like you're an orphan.

[18:39] You're not going to be alone. He tells them the world is not going to see Him. And after the resurrection, only believers saw Him.

[18:50] There's no evidence that an unbeliever saw Him. I think when He ascended, when there's some 500 folks gathered, I think they were all believers. I don't think any unbeliever saw Him. And because they saw Him in post-resurrection, meant that they possessed eternal life.

[19:11] Because only believers, I believe, saw Him in post-resurrection. Now, believers would have a number of proofs of their being in Christ. They would see Him. They would be spiritually alive in Him.

[19:25] One day, they too would be raised from the grave. And it was then that they would know that Jesus was in the Father. That is a union the human mind cannot comprehend fully without the abiding presence of the Spirit of God.

[19:42] Only the Holy Spirit can reveal that truth to us. And Jesus carries this a step further and He tells them that He is in the Father. They will be in Him and He will be in them.

[19:58] And if He's in the Father and we're in Him, we're in the Father, aren't we? See how that works? And again, that may be more than we can handle.

[20:09] It's mind-boggling. Though through the Spirit, we are united to Christ. We are joined with Christ. Through Him, we are united to the Father.

[20:23] And I'll tell you, there's a great word in the Bible and sometimes when you're going through there, just mark it how many times it comes up. But often in Scripture, we, and that's the church, that's the true believers, are said to be in Christ.

[20:43] Two great words. In Christ. We can take comfort, I think, in one of my very favorite passages of Scripture, Romans 8.1, which declares there is now no condemnation for those that are in Christ.

[21:03] In Christ. I had the VOM board at my house a few weeks ago and they asked me to do the devotion I did and I talked about this passage. And those are all dear brothers in Christ.

[21:16] Sean, I'm sure you agree with me. But a lot of them are the Arminian, Wesleyan, and I'm talking about being in Christ and there is no condemnation. You know, what condemnation do you have if you're in Christ?

[21:30] And there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ. Now the death of Christ did not sever the relationship the disciples had with the Lord.

[21:43] That's an important point. Nothing was severed. I mean, you think back to when Moses and Joshua went up on the mountain and only Joshua came back.

[21:57] People were beside themselves. Moses is gone. What are we going to do? Joshua, same way. And of course, this is my paraphrase. It's not King James, but basically God said to Joshua, he said, look, I know Moses is gone, but I'm still here.

[22:15] God hasn't gone anywhere. He hasn't gone anywhere. Well, neither has the Lord. If it did not resever the relationship that the disciples had with the Lord, nor our relationship with Him.

[22:28] Now, they saw Him and then He's gone. We've not seen Him yet, have we? We've not seen Him yet. Nothing can separate us from Christ.

[22:41] Read about that again in Romans chapter 8 there at the end. The whole litany of things that are capable of separating you or I from Christ. And I'll just choose three. Nothing in life, nothing in death, nothing in all creation.

[22:54] What else is there? Nothing in life can separate you, nothing in death can separate you, nothing in all creation can separate you.

[23:05] What else is there? And then the passage speaks of the presence of the Father in verse 21 and following. 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.

[23:32] And then we're going to hear from Judas. And people say, wait a minute, I thought he was dismissed. Yeah, it's another Judas. And the Bible says, Judas, not Iscariot, said to him, Lord, what then has happened that you are going to disclose yourself to us and not to the world?

[23:51] And Jesus answered and said to him, if anyone loves me, he will keep my word and my Father will love him and we will come to him and make our abode with him.

[24:06] He who does not love me does not keep my words and the words which you hear is not mine, but the Father who sent me. Is it startling to anybody that a lot of that sounds like 1 John?

[24:20] Same human author. And guess what? Same divine author. They both wrote John and 1 John. Only those who obey the commandments of Christ can be confident they have union with Him.

[24:38] And I'm sure that creates a lot of comfort and a lot of hearts in here and maybe some consternation and a few like mine because I do a very poor job.

[24:52] But I want to stress, and I've done this many times, we are not saved because we obey.

[25:03] We obey because we are saved. That is an extremely important point. Obedience is never the cause of salvation.

[25:17] Obedience is the result of salvation. Because you don't have the Spirit of God which is the power to obey absent salvation.

[25:30] This obedience flows from the indwelling ministry of the Holy Spirit and is evidence that God truly lives in you and is your hope of glory.

[25:45] That's our hope of glory. And the Father loves us. And He has this special electing love for those who love His Son.

[25:58] He's calling out a people that will worship His Son for eternity. I get so every time I hear people, well, you know, God was lonely in heaven and He needed some people to come up there and keep Him company and that's why you don't sit Jesus.

[26:16] The Father is building the church. He's building worshipers that will worship His Son for eternity. That's who we are.

[26:31] And Jesus was very clear that those who do not honor the Son cannot honor the Father. Those who hate Christ hate the Father also.

[26:43] And, you know, that's really an indictment of the world of religions, right? that God under any name, whether Allah or Buddha or Hindu or Confucius or whatever, those who hate Christ hate the Father also.

[26:58] I hear we're sometimes accused of being exclusive. Well, we're that as a bad. Sure, yeah, we are. I also hear we're a bloody religion. Yes, we are. Because Christ His blood.

[27:12] And then at this juncture, Judas, one of the disciples, but not Judas, Iscariot, speaks up really in his confusion and we can't blame him for being confused, thinking that Jesus, the Jewish concept, we've studied that in here, Judas is sitting there thinking at any moment Jesus, who is the Messiah, will establish His kingdom on earth.

[27:41] That was the Jewish concept. You have the Jewish period, and the Messiah comes, and then you have, He establishes a kingdom, and you have the millennial reign of Christ, of the Messiah.

[27:58] And Judas no doubt thinks that's about to occur, and Judas couldn't understand how he would hide himself from the world. Far from that, he should be on a throne in Jerusalem, ruling with a rod of iron, ruling the whole world.

[28:14] Well, that was yet future in Judas' day, it's yet future in ours. But it's coming, and I think we're 2,000 years closer than Judas was. When's that going to happen?

[28:27] I don't have a clue. Tomorrow? 5,000 years? I don't know. I personally think we're closer to tomorrow than we are 5,000 years, but that's just personal.

[28:37] But Jesus was clear that he would not reveal himself to unbelievers. I mean, you look at when Jesus was in trial, and who was it?

[28:53] Herod that wanted to do some magic tricks? Jesus wasn't going to do any magic tricks for Herod. He was going to reveal himself. I mean, that's why I wasn't a Messiah, one of the many reasons.

[29:07] I would have said, I can do a magic trick. I'm going to cut your head off with spoken word here. You're just going to be rolling around. You know, that's just me personally. He wouldn't reveal himself to unbelievers from that point forward.

[29:24] The world rejected him. The world hated him. The world was going to murder him. And he made it very clear, by the way, that the world would hate us. And some guy will say, well, I don't feel very hated.

[29:36] Be more like Christ. It'll come. Trust me. It'll happen. Jesus also confirmed that they would have abiding in them the presence of truth.

[29:47] Verse 25 and 26. These things I have spoken to you while abiding with you, but the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you.

[30:09] I think there's an explanation for the New Testament. He's going to bring that to your memory. me. Jesus had publicly ministered for three years.

[30:21] He had been the sole source of truth for the disciples. He had spoken truth while he was abiding with him. I love what Dr. Schaefer says.

[30:32] He was true truth. He was true truth. They had seen and they had heard. That's again 1 John, the very first four verses.

[30:44] They'd handled, camped out with him. They had seen and heard the truth of God in every single thing he did and said. You know, he never gave a message that I need to make a correction.

[30:56] I said one thing that I probably went a little too far. I want you to know two men that Jesus never had to do that and Don's never had to do that. But other than that, even John MacArthur had to back up on something the other day.

[31:08] I was pretty amazed with that. They had seen and heard the truth in all that he did and said. And now he's going away. And it's got to be a burden.

[31:20] It's got to be heavy on their hearts. He had told them he would leave them though a source of comfort. And now he tells them he will also leave them a source of truth.

[31:34] He's going to leave them the source of ultimate truth and that would be the Holy Spirit of God, the Spirit of Truth. He's also known as the Spirit of Truth. Only by the saving ministry of Christ through the witness of the Spirit can people be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.

[32:00] Now the disciples who had been around for three years had seen and heard a lot of wonderful things. So much so that it would require the Holy Spirit to remind them of these things so they could record them in what we now know to be the New Testament.

[32:20] Those that wrote books of the New Testament. And that is one of the reasons we refer to the scriptures as inspired or God breathed. The Spirit breathed the Word.

[32:32] The Spirit then became the resident truth teacher. He does so by revealing the truth to believers and thus sanctifying them for the work of ministry.

[32:49] He does it for a purpose. Now some would argue in here I feel confident well I'm not a minister. I'm not a minister. We're all ministers.

[33:02] Most for good some for bad. But we're all ministers. And with this truth the disciples and those who followed are going to turn the world upside down.

[33:18] They're going to turn the world upside down. There was a pebble thrown in a large body of water by these guys and the ripple started and they're still going.

[33:31] They're still traveling throughout the world. And I've told you before everywhere I go I find believers. The gospel is so powerful it will find a way to penetrate the darkest areas of the world.

[33:43] And those ripples are still going outward. God is still calling out people for his namesake. Still doing it. Thank you.