For This Reason 44

[HKHaugan]

For This Reason 44

The big deal today, if you can afford it, is to have a 'personal trainer.' That is, someone who assesses your physical condition and sets you on a program toward fitness. The trainer takes your measurements, asks about your diet, the hours you sleep and what your daily routine is. He then determines your muscle strength and stamina by giving you some simple body exercises. After this the trainer draws up a program based on your condition. The rest depends on your commitment, determination and self-discipline. It's a program geared for physical maturity.

Like all things physical there is a spiritual counterpart. There is a spiritual personal trainer. When we met Jesus as Savior and Lord He provided the Holy Spirit. That's where spiritual maturity starts. The Holy Spirit is the communicating person of God in the sense that He is the person of God who moves between persons, stimulates their mind, brings them together, touches their heart, motivates their spirit bringing form and life from God into everything that God designed to be alive.

Now I know I'm on precarious ground here when defining anything about God and especially the Trinity but I want to emphasize the importance of the Holy Spirit from Jesus' perspective as He talks about Him in Scripture. And if we are taking this particular stroll across the thin ice of human definition about Almighty God there is no other place but Holy Scripture to be our means of support for each step. After all it is the perfect revelation of God's mind, that is, the perfection from His side and not ours. If we have a problem with the meaning of Scripture it is not God's problem, it's ours. So we do the best we can giving it ascendency as we read its pages. Having said that let's move into Jesus' words about the Holy Spirit realizing it all can't be said in a brief chapter.

There is no better place to start than the Gospel of John. The purpose of the Gospel of John is to get us to think spiritually. That's what the first eighteen verses are all about. The invisible source of the universe becomes visible. He tells us that when he says “and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (1:14).” Later he writes “God is Spirit...(4:24)” From its very first words, “In the beginning was the Word....” John sees Jesus as the One who is both the mind of God and the words written in Scripture. Jesus is the mind, heart and Scripture in a physical body. He created everything and at the same time embedded meaning in it and even becoming part of it for our sake.

Creation is both seen and unseen. Just as we have five physical senses we have five invisible senses. And that's not all. We have supplementary means to accompany them which we will get to. Thus what is written in the Old Testament is spiritualized in the New. So again, everything physical becomes a vehicle for spiritual meaning. John leads us to see God's intention for us: to view the entire history and heritage from Adam until Jesus as a copy and shadow of spiritual reality that is finally identified and fulfilled in Jesus.

Before there was a beginning God already was.

When Jesus comes He is 'pre-Creation' spiritual reality in the flesh. He reveals there is a Kingdom of God of which He is both its King and its life. He is the One who is the will, wisdom and work of His Father through the Holy Spirit. Creation is His product and we are His spiritual images in it.

The baptizing prophet John identified how the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus like a dove. His anointed task was to prepare the Jewish people for the coming of Jesus as Messiah. He then would announce that Jesus must increase and his ministry decrease since Jesus would baptize with the Holy Spirit because He is the Son of God (1:33-34). When Jesus appears He brings a new and startling teaching. Every person must be born again but spiritually because no one can enter the Kingdom of God unless they are spiritually born. “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit (3:5-6).”

Then from Chapter 3 to 13 Jesus, in the power of the Spirit, teaches, performs miracles and brings a new way of personal interaction from one encounter to the next. Chapter 14 is where He begins to reveal the Holy Spirit as God the Spirit whose task it is to deliver the person of Jesus into the heart and mind of the believer. And those who accept Him have a new spirit within them, a born again spirit, the new spiritual person who lives eternally in the presence of God. The Holy Spirit baptizes us into Jesus. That's the good news for every person born in the world. We were all born to be reborn, to replace the sinful nature with our new spirit born of the Holy Spirit with Jesus as Lord forever. Jesus wants to make sure we understand the Spirit's purpose so He identifies the Holy Spirit as Counselor and the Spirit of Truth (14:16,26, 15:26).

But the question for us is about maturity; walking, growing and fulfilling our being an image of God. How does He mature us? Jesus is straightforward about this. He says, “I will ask the Father and He will give you another Counselor to be with you forever---the Spirit of Truth (14:16)...[who] will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you (14:26).” When Jesus announces His departure He tells His disciples, “Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you (16:7).”

Right here is where He gets really personal because the devil and his sin have done so much to ravage, separate and isolate people from God and one another. “When He [the Holy Spirit] comes He will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin, righteousness and judgment: in regard to sin because men do not believe in me; in regard to righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer; and in regard to judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned (16:8-11).” When Jesus said this He was assuring us He would be in the heart of each person because that is what the Holy Spirit's task is, to bring Jesus into direct contact inside each person's mind, heart and spirit to reconcile, renew and restore each of us. That's why I said maturity begins with the Holy Spirit.

Now the Lord Jesus takes us a bit further on the road to spiritual maturity as He continues His future guarantee of His presence in our growth. “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. He will not speak on His own; He will speak only what He hears and He will tell you what is yet to come. He will bring glory to mew by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you (16:12-15).” In Jesus we see the Father, Son and Spirit; in us His image---mind, heart and spirit and the spiritual dimension coming alive.

But for John the clincher is still to come. Jesus goes into deep prayer to His Father the night before He is betrayed. That prayer is the whole of John 17 where one verse stands out because He gives us one book, one set of documents, one personal training manual as the perfect vehicle to bring truth into us, Holy Scripture. Hear what He prays, “Father, sanctify them by the truth; your Word is truth (17:17).” The Holy Spirit will be that guide through each page to bring it alive and reveal something about Jesus that will touch us within so that we can become more like Him.

In the same prayer Jesus emphasizes the depth of a personal encounter with Him when He prays, “I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me (17:23).” Unity is a work of the Holy Spirit.

From this point on we want to look at the specifics of how Scripture is our maturation manual. Three things will take up our next chapter to move us toward a mature life as a disciple of Jesus, prayer, spiritual gifts and our family, the Body of Christ. Each speaks about experiencing the Kingdom of God right in the here and now with the Holy Spirit our personal trainer as we go.