SERIES: The Gospel of John
The Believer’s Spirit Guide
SPEAKER: Michael P. Andrus
Introduction: In John 16 we find ourselves listening in on an intimate chat Jesus is having with His disciples in an Upper Room the night before He is to be crucified. One of His greatest concerns is to convey to His disciples the fact that while He is going to leave them, He is not going to leave them alone. He will send the Holy Spirit to be their permanent and constant Advocate, to help them cope with their inadequacies, and to give them power to live godly lives and to witness effectively.
The Holy Spirit will also have a ministry to unbelievers, Jesus tells them, a work perhaps best described as “prosecutor,” for He will convince and convict the world of the sin of unbelief in Jesus,the need for the righteousness of Christ, and the certainty of coming judgment. Those who respond to this convicting work of the Spirit receive the free gift of salvation and become children of God. Those who do not will experience the same judgment as Satan.
That was the message we heard from John 16:5-11 last Lord’s Day. Today we continue examining the ministry of the Holy Spirit, this time from verses 12-15. I have entitled this message, “The Believer’s Spirit Guide.” We hear a lot about spirit guides today because New Age advocates, and those involved in the occult, promote spirit guides as the answer to the spiritual hunger in modern society. Frankly, some of this talk about spirit guides is just commercial hype, but some of it is real and extremely dangerous, for the only real spirits these people are contacting, if I read my Bible correctly, are evil spirits. But the fact is there is a Spirit Guide promised to every believer—and that Guide is the Holy Spirit. Listen again to the 13th verse of John 16: “When he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth.” If there’s ever a time when people need to be guided into truth, it is today.
I think it is extremely timely that this subject comes up now. Last Sunday I mentioned the scholars who recently concluded that Jesus said almost nothing that the Gospel of John claims He said. These liberal scholars are part of an organization called the “Jesus Seminar,” (though I could think of a more appropriate name for it). They have applied what they consider to be scientific, critical scholarship to the NT and have concluded that it is an unreliable document when it comes to historical accuracy. In fact, they took a vote on each and every statement attributed to Jesus in the Gospels to decide which were genuine and which were not. Not much of His teaching has survived—not the Lord’s Prayer, not the remarkable claim in John 14:6 (“I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but by Me”), and not the Great Commission. Then they eliminated any sayings that portrayed Jesus as claiming to be God or even Messiah. Gratefully, truth has never been decided by majority vote, so we don’t have to take a scissors to our Bibles just because the Jesus Seminar tells us to.
The fact is, right here in the Upper Room Discourse we have Jesus’ own answer to the Jesus Seminar. He tells us, first and foremost, that …
The Holy Spirit will guide the Apostles into all truth.
The immediate audience to whom Jesus is speaking is the Apostles, (I think we need to remember that), and while His teaching here does have some application to us (which we will note later), I believe the primary application is to the Apostles themselves. The work of the Holy Spirit which Jesus describes here is what will result in the writing of the New Testament in the decades after His crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension.
The Holy Spirit’s ministry of revelation will provide the Apostles the truth to record in the New Testament. The things of God which the Holy Spirit will reveal to them will come in three primary forms—history, doctrine, and prophecy—and all three are mentioned here in John’s Gospel.
1. He will remind the Apostles of historical truth. (14:26) Let’s start back in John 14:25, where Jesus is speaking earlier this same evening to His disciples and says, “All this I have spoken while still with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.” The key words here are “will remind you.” Why is it necessary for the Apostles to have the Holy Spirit remind them of everything Jesus spoke? After all, couldn’t they just write down from memory what they heard?
No, because the time gap between the events of Jesus’ life and the writing of the New Testament was too great. Jesus was crucified in April of A.D. 33, according to the best chronological studies. The first NT book (the Gospel of Mark) was not written before A.D. 45. That’s a minimum of twelve years after the events which he was reporting. John, on the other hand, didn’t write his Gospel until at least A.D. 65, and perhaps as late as A.D. 95. Thus, as many as 65 years could have passed between the death of Jesus (when John was a very young man), and his writing of this Gospel (when he was probably in his 80’s).
How many of you here could write in detail a conversation you had twelve years ago? How many of you even know where you were twelve years ago? Frankly, it’s not too hard to understand why skeptics like those in the Jesus Seminar doubt that we can trust documents that were written so long after the fact. I probably wouldn’t trust the documents either if I weren’t convinced of Jesus’ claim here that the Holy Spirit supernaturally recalled to the minds of the apostles the events and the conversations which they recorded in the New Testament.
I believe the evidence supports the fact that the Holy Spirit did indeed remind the Apostles of these things. Skeptics, of course, are fond of alleging many discrepancies between the Gospel writers because one of them reports a slightly different chronological order than another, or because one puts Jesus’ words in a different order from the others. I think an honest reading should drive them to the opposite conclusion. I would ask, “Where in the world could you ever find four independent accounts written from 12-65 days, much less years, after the fact which agree anywhere near the extent to which the four Gospels agree?” The few differences that emerge between the authors can generally be easily explained by the differing viewpoints which different people inevitably bring to any situation, or by the different purposes the authors had.
The only possible explanation, in my opinion, for the amazing historical consistency and accuracy of the Bible is that the Holy Spirit did exactly what Jesus promised here—He reminded the Apostles of everything Jesus had said to them.
Now turn over to today’s text, John 16:12, where Jesus develops further the Holy Spirit’s ministry of revelation: “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth.” Here Jesus is not speaking of the Spirit’s work of jogging the Apostles’ memory of historical events and conversations; rather He is addressing the Spirit’s ministry of teaching them doctrinal truth.
2. He will explain to them doctrinal truth. (16:12-13) Jesus says there are many deep theological issues He would like to share with His disciples before His death and departure, but their capacity to understand is too limited. However, that capacity will be supernaturally increased when the Holy Spirit indwells them and begins to teach them. Were these Apostles the kind of men who neededspecial divine teaching relative to the theology and doctrine of the Bible? I think so. After all, none of them were scholars; none of them had formal biblical training before meeting Jesus; most of them were ordinary laborers; and frankly, they were often rather dull of understanding.
For over three years Jesus had taught them one-on-one; He had taught them in parables; He had taught them through discourses; He had taught them through His miracles. But on even such a basic truth as His sacrificial atonement, His teaching often went in one ear and out the other.
I could imagine that had I been in Jesus’ place I might have said, “Oh, these dull, stupid disciples!” But thankfully, that is not His attitude toward them. While recognizing that they are dull, He promises to send the Holy Spirit to guide them into the truth that He had begun to teach but had not completed.
If we ask, “Did the Holy Spirit accomplish the job of teaching them the great doctrinal truths?”, the answer is, “Yes,” and the proof of it is our New Testament. How could a guy like the Apostle John, who was a fisherman by trade, become a great theologian and write a book like this Gospel without the help of a divine teacher? And when one examines the intricate and complex doctrine of election as found in Eph. 1 or divine sovereignty as found in Romans 8, or human suffering in 1 Peter, or the Second Coming in 1 and 2 Thessalonians, it becomes obvious that these truths could not possibly have a human origin; they must be the result of the teaching ministry of the Holy Spirit.
But as I said earlier there is still another kind of truth Jesus promises the Holy Spirit will reveal to the Apostles:
3. He will reveal prophetic truth. (16:13) Here is what verse 13 says: “But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come.” It’s that last phrase that we are particularly concerned with: “He will tell you what is yet to come.”
Have you ever wondered where the Apostle John got the information he recorded in the Book of Revelation? I know there have been those who thought he might have had a bad nightmare. But seriously, the source of the rich prophetic truths of the Bible is the Holy Spirit. In fact, John specifically claims that in the first chapter of the Revelation, verse 9: “I, John, your brother and companion in the suffering and kingdom and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus, was on the island of Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. On the Lord’s Day I was in the Spirit, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet,” and he goes on to reveal the fantastic prophetic truths we have in the Book of Revelation.
Jesus promises the Apostles that the Holy Spirit will have a ministry of revelation to them. It is that ministry that will provide them the content of the New Testament—history, doctrine, and prophecy. But the Holy Spirit will also have a ministry of inspiration with the Apostles.
The ministry of inspiration will enable the Apostles to record God’s truth accurately. (2 Peter 1:20-21, 2 Timothy 3:16) You see, it is one thing to know something in your own mind; it is quite something else to communicate it to others accurately. The Apostles will need divine help in both areas. If the ministry of revelation provides them with the content of the Scriptures, the ministry of inspiration will enable them to record that content flawlessly.
Just what are we talking about when we speak of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit? There are two NT passages which shed great light on the subject. The first is 2 Peter 1:20-21, and I encourage you to turn there. In this passage, written about 30 years after Jesus’ death, Peter is facing his own imminent death, and he is concerned lest some converts abandon the truths he has taught them down through the years. He assures his readers that he and the other apostles did not follow cleverly devised tales when they proclaimed the power and coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, but rather were eyewitnesses of His glory and majesty.
But then Peter turns to something even more solid and sure than eyewitness accounts—and that is the written word of God. Here is what he says, beginning in verse 20: “Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
Now the first item we need to clarify here is that the term “prophecy” does not always refer to predicting the future. Sometimes it refers to foretelling, but more often it refers merely to forthtelling. A prophecy in this sense is simply a Scriptural declaration or revelation. In other words, we could translate verse 21, “No Scriptural revelation resulted from a prophet’s own private interpretation of events or doctrine or prophecy. In fact, biblical revelation never had its origin in the will of man at all; rather men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
What does it mean to be “carried along” by the Holy Spirit? The word used in the original Greek is a nautical term referring to the wind which carries along a ship. In fact, it is used this way in Acts 27:15, where Paul is caught in a terrible storm. It says, “the ship was caught by the storm and could not head into the wind; so we gave way to it and were driven along.” When the wind drives a ship, it doesn’t affect the cargo; it doesn’t change the character of the crew; it doesn’t really even affect the ship itself, except to provide direction and impetus.
In like manner, when the Holy Spirit “carried along” the prophets and apostles, He didn’t change their IQ’s, He didn’t give them all identical vocabularies; He didn’t make perfect men out of them. He just gave them direction so they could record God’s revelation without error.
By the way, I believe there is an astounding parallel between the work of the Holy Spirit in the conception of the written Word of God and the work of the Holy Spirit in the conception of the Living Word of God—Jesus. When the angel Gabriel told the Virgin Mary that she was to bear a child, he spoke these familiar words, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.” That word “overshadow” is quite vague, much like the term “carried along” in 2 Peter 1:21. It tells us little about the actual process the Holy Spirit used in bringing about Mary’s pregnancy. But we do know the result: a perfect human being, the Son of God.
So here is the parallel: the Holy Spirit miraculously “overshadowed” an ordinary human being, namely Mary, enabling her to produce a perfect child, namely the Living Word of God, Jesus Christ. By the same token, the Holy Spirit “carried along” ordinary human beings, namely the Apostles, enabling them to produce a perfect book, namely the Written Word of God, the Bible. The former we refer to as “incarnation;” the latter we refer to as “inspiration.”
Now there is one more key passage for the Spirit’s work of inspiration, and it actually uses the term“inspired.” I’m speaking of 2 Tim. 3:16: “All Scripture is God-breathed (the KJV reads “inspired by God”) and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” The term “inspiration” would probably be better translated “outspiration,” if there were such a word, for it really tells us that the Scriptures are breathed out by God. If that is true, and if God is perfect and holy, then I would argue that the Scriptures must also be perfect and holy.
Now to summarize the teaching of these two passages and to complete our overview of the Holy Spirit’s role of inspiration as He guided the Apostles into all truth, I would like to offer the following one-sentence summary: “The Holy Spirit carried along the human authors of the Bible so that using their own individual personalities they composed and recorded without error God’s revelation in the words of the original manuscripts of the Bible.” This definition of inspiration leads us to our third point:
The result of revelation and inspiration is an infallible and inerrant Bible. I am one of those old-fashioned preachers who believes the Bible to be unique among all the books of the world because it alone is free from error. That is, I believe there are no doctrinal errors in the Bible, no historical errors, no prophetic errors, no scientific errors, and no moral errors. Where the Bible speaks clearly, the matter is settled for me.
Our definition, you perhaps noted, attributes inerrancy only to the original manuscripts of the Bible, because down through the centuries a few transcriptional and translational errors have found their way into our English Bibles. But this is not as big a problem as it might first appear, because in the vast majority of disputed passages, textual scholars can determine with a high degree of certainty what the original reading was. Furthermore, the few passages that are still up in the air do not affect any important Bible truth. Practically speaking I am quite willing to hold up this New International Version and claim that this book is the inspired, infallible, and inerrant Word of God.
If we had the time this morning, we could give a great many examples of how archaeology and history have verified the Bible in countless places, and how the suppositions of the skeptics have ended on the garbage heap. I have no doubt whatever that the Jesus Seminar will be a joke even among liberal scholars ten years from now, because that’s the history of Biblical criticism. True, there remain a few unanswered questions, and there are a few minor alleged discrepancies in the Bible that cannot yet be explained to our total satisfaction, but I will cast my lot on the side of this Book, because everywhere it can be checked out it has proven to be true.
I wish to share my strong personal conviction that the Holy Spirit’s ministries of revelation and inspiration, which I have taken a significant amount of time to explain this morning, were specialized ministries to the Apostles and prophets that enabled them to write the Scriptures. I do not believe the Holy Spirit is giving revelation today, nor do I believe there are any inspired prophets or apostles in the church today. Yet at the same time I believe the Spirit even today has an important teaching ministry, which brings us to the fact that …
The Holy Spirit also guides believers today into all truth.
How does He do so? Well, first, as we study the Bible, He serves as our ultimate guide into truth since He is the divine author of Scripture.
As the divine author of the Scripture, He is our ultimate teacher. Every time I open the Word, study it, and learn something new, I am being taught by the Spirit. I am not being taught directly and infallibly (as were the Apostles) but I am nevertheless being taught and guided into God’s truth by the Holy Spirit.
On the other hand, since the truth in this Book is the Spirit’s truth, no one can claim to have an interpretation from the Spirit if his view contradicts the words of this Book. About 15 years ago there was a woman in the church I pastored then who attempted to straighten out my thinking on a particular passage. It was very interesting because the interpretation she held was simply not possible according to Greek grammar (and, as you probably know, our English Bibles are only translations from the original Greek). When I asked her where she got her interpretation, she said she had prayed for it and the Holy Spirit had revealed it to her. I believe she was deceived, for the meaning she came up with denied the very words of Scripture which the Holy Spirit authored.
Do you see what I am saying? The Holy Spirit teaches me through this book, and He never teaches contrary to this Book. His normal way of teaching through this Book is to employ pastors, teachers, commentaries, study aids, and lots of hard work. As far as I know the Holy Spirit will not do word studies for you; He will not look up cross references for you; He will not outline the Scripture for you or prepare your BSF lesson for you. These things He expects you to do for yourself because God gave you a brain and a Bible.
In addition, most of us have good books to help us, and some people even have Bible study computer programs. Now I’m not suggesting for a moment that these tools have supplanted the Holy Spirit, but I am suggesting that just as God expects us to use the modern medical techniques has made available, so He expects us to use the modern aids for Bible study He has provided. Of course, if someone is mentally incapable or unable to obtain the normal tools for study, the Holy Spirit may very well step in and directly teach such a person.
As our indwelling guide, He convicts us of indifference to the Word, motivates us to study it, enables us to appreciate its significance, and helps us apply it to our lives. This is the ministry of illumination. That is, the Holy Spirit illumines believers to create in their hearts and minds fertile soil for the seed of the Word of God. I personally do not believe the Holy Spirit normally teaches the content of Scripture to believers. If He did, we would not need human pastors and teachers, and we would not need commentaries or Bible study guides. Most of our learning of Biblical truth comes through diligent study; in fact, we are urged to dig for it as for hidden treasure.
On the other hand, if we study the Scriptures independently, apart from the Spirit’s help, we will invariably find what we want to find, we will affirm our prejudices, and we will end up like the man in James 1 who “looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.”
There are several particular areas where we need this ministry of illumination. First, we need the Holy Spirit to convict us of the sin of indifference to the Word and we need His motivation to study the Bible consistently and diligently. Have there been long dry spells when we were indifferent to Bible study, or even Bible reading? Could that be the case right now? If so, we need the conviction of the Holy Spirit.
Secondly, are there times when we understand what the Bible is saying but ou fail to get excited or really appreciate its significance? What we need is the work of the life-giving Spirit to light us on fire and help us realize that we are reading the very Word of God!
Thirdly, are there times when we read the Bible, understand it quite well, and perhaps even appreciate it, but fail to apply it to our lives? We need the ministry of the Holy Spirit to help us live what we have learned. You see, we are all experts at seeing how Scripture applies to the person sitting next to us, but we need to know how it applies to us. That is essentially the ministry of illumination, and I believe we should pray for it every time we open the Word of God.
I rarely pray for the Holy Spirit to teach me the content of the Bible (unless I’m really stumped), but I often pray that He will keep me awake, be honest as I study, and most of all, live what I learn. My greatest problem has never been deciding what the Bible means; rather it is deciding to put it into practice in my life. I already understand a lot more than I obey. If that is going to change, it will only change as I pray for and submit to the illumination of the Holy Spirit.
There is a last point I would like to make this morning:
The result of His teaching and illumination is that the believer welcomes the things of God, makes sound judgments, and has the mind of Christ. Turn with me, please, to 1 Cor. 2:14-16:
“The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man’s judgment: ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ.”
Here Paul describes two different people—the unbeliever who doesn’t have the Holy Spirit, and the spiritual man, who has the Spirit of God living within him. The unbeliever comes to the Bible and sees nothing that interests him, except perhaps the opportunity to debunk what he reads. He isn’t motivated to study it; if he reads it, it sounds like foolishness to him; and even what he understands he refuses to accept. The reason is that the things of God are spiritually discerned, and the unbeliever does not have the capacity to discern spiritual truth. It’s kind of like driving without a car phone. The conversations are in the air all around you, but if you don’t have an antenna and a receiver you are unable to hear anything (which I consider a blessing!).
On the other hand, the believer who is indwelt by the Holy Spirit welcomes the things of God (that’s what the word “accept” in 1 Cor. 2:14 literally means); he makes sound judgments based upon the Scripture; and he has the mind of Christ. Friends, that is an amazing statement: “we have the mind of Christ.” What it means is that the person who is taught by the Spirit of God through the Word of God has access to all that Christ wants us to know to live a godly, fulfilled. and fruitful life.
There is another whole area of the Spirit’s guidance which I have not addressed this morning because it is not in view in John 15. That is the Spirit’s guidance in personal decision making. We will address that another time.
Conclusion: May I say to you that the Scripture is a gift from God, a book unique among all other books, and it seems almost impossible that one could overemphasize its importance. But there is a possible danger here. Sometimes we evangelicals treat the Bible as an end in itself. We study it as we would a textbook. We categorize and memorize the data we find in it. But we are in danger of forgetting that the purpose of the Scriptures is to reveal Christ to the seeking heart and mind.
James Montgomery Boice, excellent Presbyterian pastor and radio preacher, tells of a trip he took on behalf of the Bible Study Hour to Fort Lauderdale. His children, knowing he had seen the ocean, asked him to describe it to them when he returned. He writes,
“Imagine that when I returned home I said to them, ‘I did see the ocean. We checked into a Holiday Inn in Fort Lauderdale, and there was a big window there. I could look right out on the ocean. It was a lovely window. I measured it because I knew you’d be interested. The window was 3′ 2″ high and 6’6″ wide. It was made of double glass to keep the noise out. It was mounted in a metal frame. I looked clearly to see where it was manufactured, and I have the name of the company written down here. Also I noticed that the glass wasn’t fastened directly to the metal—it was mounted in a little rubber casing….” [i]
Well, if Boice had actually done that, his children would have been confused and bored real quick. The window is not the ocean. The window is there so one can look through it to see the ocean. That is what the Bible is to be for us. The Written Word is a vehicle to the Living Word.
Christians need to be reminded that an intelligent person can stand on this Book with no fear of deception because the Holy Spirit guarantees its truthfulness. At the same time, however, we need to be reminded that we don’t worship the Written Word; we worship the Living Word, the One who said in the Gospel of John, skeptics notwithstanding, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man comes to the Father except by Me.” Believe it, friend, because God said it.
DATE: January 16, 1994
Tags:
Holy Spirit
Revelation
Inspiration
Inerrancy
Illumination
[i] James Montgomery Boice, citation lost.