In this sermon, the speaker begins by discussing how our initial introduction to someone can shape our perception of them. He then transitions to the topic of the Holy Spirit and emphasizes the importance of being filled with the Spirit. The speaker uses the analogy of irrigation to illustrate how the Spirit's influence can transform and bring life to barren areas. The sermon also touches on Jesus' announcement to his disciples about his impending crucifixion and the role of the Spirit in worship and personal transformation.

We have promised this evening to begin a series of two messages on the person and work of the Holy Spirit, but looking at it from a particular point of view, I guess you and I have had the experience over and over again of discovering that the way we were introduced to someone colored our thoughts of that person for quite a considerable time to come. And sometimes it was not a good thing, because the person who did the introducing was rather biased and managed in introducing us to someone to pass on a little of his bias, whether it was in favor of the person being introduced or whether it was in the opposite direction. Many a time I have expected people to act in a certain way because in being introduced to them, I had been given to understand this is how they will react to so and so. Only later to discover that they were not like that at all. We tend to read our prejudices into things and to pass them on, and this can be most detrimental to all kinds of personal experiences. But it's exceedingly detrimental in spiritual matters. It's very important that those who introduce us to the Holy Spirit convey the right impression of him, particularly to young Christians. If I may share a little experience here, I confess to my shame that among my first notions of the Holy Spirit, I bordered on thinking of him as a kind of super-conjurer. Now, you may laugh or you may cry, but this was due entirely to the emphases of the people who had introduced me to the Holy Spirit as a young Christian. Either he makes me dance, or he does something completely out of the ordinary and out of alignment with the ethos and atmosphere of the moment, or he is not present at all. And my carnal mind loved to think of him with his bag of tricks, open to those who had the key to fit and to open it up, so that he could come and do the strange phenomenon before our eyes. And if a preacher couldn't speak of some experience of this order, I carnally concluded that the man surely knows nothing about the Holy Spirit. It was a tremendous shock to me to realize that the most important aspect in the Holy Spirit's ministry relates to character. I remember it was almost a kind of second conversion to realize that the Holy Spirit's prime significance and meaning and motive in his ministry is to magnify and glorify the Lord Jesus and to bring him to birth in me, that I may grow up in the fellowship of the church and in the service of my Lord and become increasingly like him. That the Holy Spirit's main concern was moral and spiritual character building. I only refer to that because of the importance of having the right impression, of having the right introduction. And that is why I have chosen on these two Sunday evenings tonight and next Sunday evening, God willing, coming up to Pentecost, to ask ourselves the question and to try to answer it, how did the supreme introducer, how did the infallible introducer, introduce the parakeet, the Holy Spirit, to the first disciples? Now I suggest to you that if we can see how the Holy Spirit was introduced by our Lord, and then imbibe this teaching and make it our own, and then move on into the book of the Acts and into the Epistles, we shall possibly save many, many pitfalls in our Christian thinking and ultimately in our Christian experience. Now that's what I propose to do, albeit rather briefly and sketchily. But I want to look particularly at the portraits of the Holy Spirit, the word portraits of the Spirit, that we have in the Gospel according to St. John. This will bring us necessarily to look more at chapters fourteen to sixteen than any other section of John. But tonight we shall start a little earlier on. What did Jesus have to say about the Spirit in introducing him? Now the first main reference by the Lord Jesus Christ to the Spirit in John's Gospel is found in chapter three, verses five to eight. And there our Lord Jesus introduced him to his disciples and to others as the Spirit of Life, the Spirit of Life. And we The phrase Spirit of Life is Pauline. You will remember that. It is found, for example, in Romans chapter eight and verse two. The law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death, the Spirit of Life. But if the language itself, the title itself is Pauline, the truth goes back well beyond Paul, at least to John chapter three and our Lord's discourse with Nicodemus. Let me read to you these verses. And please let us focus particularly on the portrait, the picture that is here represented of the Holy Spirit. Jesus answered, I tell you the truth. I tell you the truth. I tell you the truth. Unless a man is born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. Flesh gives birth to flesh. I'm quoting from the New International Version. But the Spirit gives birth to Spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, you must be born again. The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit, born of the Spirit. Now clearly the main thought here, and it's the one thought that I want to leave with you, the main thought here is that of the Spirit as the producer of life. Flesh, said Jesus, can only give birth to flesh. No stream rises higher than its source. And simply to be born of the flesh leaves a person still outside of the kingdom of God. No human father can beget a child who is naturally capacitated to enter God's kingdom and to live in it. And serve Him within it. No one, no one at all. That requires another birth of which flesh is incapable. That requires another birth, another and altogether different birth. Notice a birth which is described here in two ways in this passage in John, from above, but then more specifically, a birth of the Holy Spirit. Now I'm going over the reference, I'm passing over the reference to the water and the Spirit. I'm not concerned with the water tonight, I'm concerned with the Spirit. Born of the Spirit, the Spirit takes the part of the Father in spiritual procreation. And it is because of His intervention that the person in a life, it is because of His ministry in a given life that that person comes into a spiritual renewal. And is born new, not of the flesh, but born of the Spirit of God. You should not be surprised, says Jesus, at my saying, you must be born again. Now that's the first reference and don't you think that it is significant. Life is basic. If you have not life, you can't have health. If you haven't got life, you have nothing else. Life is a basic prerequisite. And Jesus here is the King of the unseen and invisible but eternal kingdom of His Father. Jesus here speaks of those who become members of His kingdom, subjects of His rule and domain, as those who have been born not of the flesh, not simply of human parentage, but who have had a second birth of the Spirit. As sure as you have flesh given you by your father and your mother, you have a new spirit given you by the Holy Spirit of God. So you see, when we think of the Spirit, we think of the Creator. And this brings us into the realm of worship immediately, almost instinctively. You cannot think of such a sovereign and such a gracious, such a merciful act without beginning to be sensitive to the marvel of it all and the wonder of it all and the kindness of it in the purpose of God. The Spirit of life, that's the first reference. Now you have only to turn the page in the Gospel of John to chapter 4, and you come to another word portrait of the Spirit in which He is described as the Spirit who now produces not life, but worship. Not life, but worship. I've already referred to this. Perhaps I should have kept it until I came to this point. For here it is. The context, the setting is very familiar to us. Jesus is talking to that woman of questionable morality at Sychar as well. They've been together for some time and you remember this woman proved a little bit argumentative until Jesus showed her that He knew all about her troubles, her moral problems. And then when she discovered this she replied to Him, Sir, the woman said, beginning with verse 19, I can see that you're a prophet. And then she starts to argue religiously. It's an old way of going around things. You find many people that follow the path of this dear woman. They try to hide from truth for a long time, and then when you touch them on a raw moral spot, they want to argue about religious things and argue about spiritual things and try and hide behind a screen, a smokescreen of argumentation. And this woman did. And so she comes out. Our fathers, she said, worshipped in this mountain. But you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem. And then Jesus comes riding and stabs her right under the heart. You think it's wrong to say that. I'm talking about spiritual and moral stabbing. It was a real lancet that he got through. Jesus declared, believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem. Woman, he says, life is far too serious to talk about where you're going to worship God, either on this Mount Gerizim or down there in Jerusalem. It's neither here nor there. The time is coming when the place will be totally unimportant. As a matter of fact, he says, it has already arrived. You Samaritans worship you, do not know what. We worship what we do know, because salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming, and has now come, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. For they are the kind of worshippers that the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth. Now, we must overlook a myriad precious things to come right to the heart of the point that relates to our subject. What is the most important thing in worship? The most important thing in worship is that we worship God. It's the nature of the God whom we come to worship. What we do in worship and how we proceed in worship is to be determined not by our own fancies and ideas, but rather by the nature and the will of the God to whom we offer worship. And these are some of the prerequisites of worshipping that is acceptable. It must be, says Jesus, a worship in spirit and in truth. Now, I'm not so concerned with the truth tonight. We shall be concerned with the truth another time, but I'm concerned with the spirit. What did Jesus mean when he said they must worship the Father in spirit? There are two general interpretations of this. There may be more than two, but there are two particularly. One, that the reference there is to the spirit of a man. And the spirit of a man must be in the business of worship. Not just his intellect, not just his body going through the motions of standing and perhaps kneeling or even prostrating himself and sitting down again and going through the rigmarole yet again. It's not a matter of physical posture. It isn't even a matter of just mouthing words. All these are quite incidental. The main thing, according to certain interpreters, the main thing is this. A man's spirit must be in it. Now, whether this is the correct translation or not, the statement itself is true. A man's spirit must be in his worship, otherwise it isn't worship at all. But if that is the understanding, the proper understanding of the words here, then we are faced with the question, how can the spirit of a man who elsewhere, according to Scripture, we are told, is dead in trespasses and sins, how can he offer worship? A man who is dead in trespasses and sins cannot worship God. No, no. Well, before he can do that, you say, the Holy Spirit has got to give him life. So whether it refers directly to the Holy Spirit or whether it refers to the spirit of a man, ultimately, you see, you've got to come back to the Holy Spirit here. And it may well be an immediate and a direct reference to the Spirit. He that worships the Father must worship him by the Holy Spirit, as well as in the depth of his own spirit But I think that however we come to it, and I don't want to discuss the several alternatives in any detail, however you come to it, and however you interpret these words, ultimately the Spirit of God is the promoter of worship of God. You and I simply cannot produce real worship in and of ourselves. It is not given to any man to do it. We may aid, we may be the Spirit's agent, he may use us, he may cause us to influence others by our attitudes, by our words, by our prayers, and in a number of other ways. But ultimately, it's only the Spirit of God who can produce real worship. But now, Jesus' point is this. The Spirit does that. I am very challenged by the fact that Jesus is talking to a woman of ill repute. She hasn't really been inside a church yet. This is an evangelistic enterprise. But before he goes any further, he talks to her about this important thing of worship, taking up the thread that she herself had introduced. But he takes it through, and he says, yes, yes, you're quite right to talk about worship as such. It's absolutely important. You can only come to that by the work of the Holy Spirit. Brothers and sisters in Christ, it is so important for us to remember this. Your worship and mine in the sanctuary, for example, may be very largely determined by what the Holy Spirit is saying to us and doing with us on a Saturday night or in the home before we set out for church. Be sure of this. The Holy Spirit of God alone can produce worship. I have great respect for good music and good preaching and good listening as you have here. But let us put them all together in the most ornate setting that you can conceivably comprehend and add them together and multiply them a thousand times. They cannot produce real worship unless the Spirit of God is in the music, in the preaching, in every part and parcel of the ongoing concern. And He glorifies the Lord Jesus and takes the heart and the soul of a man and leads him out of himself to ascend into the hills of the Lord and enter the place of the Holy One, and there prostrate himself and lose himself in God. Do you know anything about the presence of the Spirit in your life, producing worship, stopping you in your tracks to adore the Almighty? God and His infinite grace and saving power. Let me hurry. There is a third before we come to John chapter 14. You have it in a third reference to the Holy Spirit. We have it in John chapter 7 verses 37 to 39. On the last and greatest day of the feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, If a man is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. Whoever believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him. By this He meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not yet been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified. Now I was not sure what title to give to this. In the first it is evident the Spirit who produces life. In the second it is quite evident the Spirit is the producer of worship. What is this? Really it's the Spirit producing service or, if you like, influence. Can we use that word influence? The Spirit is the one who enables me to be an influence for God as I continually come to the Lord Jesus and He fills me and saturates my life with a sense of the Spirit's ministry. Now you have to imagine here, of course, a thirst ridden person. This is basic to the passage. Somebody who is really thirsty. We don't know much about this in our land, however warm it gets here. We generally have something to drink not all that far away. But there are lands where people have their tongues hanging out for a drink of water or a drink of something to slake their thirst. And that's the environment here. You must imagine that in the background. You have to imagine a thirst ridden person coming to Jesus over and over again. Yes, time and again. That's involved in the verb. Who keeps on coming to me and each time drinking of the water which Jesus alone can give. A symbol of the Holy Spirit. Each time this person comes to Jesus he comes with a hunger and a thirst. And he comes with his thirst and Jesus quenches that thirst. And He gives him of the water of the Spirit to satisfy his need. So he goes away. But he comes again. He's thirsty and he comes back again. And this happens over and over and over and over again. And the result says Jesus this. That man becomes so saturated with the ministry of the Holy Spirit that out of him there will flow rivers of living water. He goes out into life and it seems as if there are streams of blessing flowing out of him in this direction and in that direction. They're like tributaries going everywhere. And his influence is moving here there and everywhere. And the desert is being transformed into a garden. It's the picture of irrigation in certain parts of Israel. In certain parts of the Kalahari Desert. They've been irrigating there over recent years. And some of you may know the kind of canals that go from a central stream that has been brought there. And they go everywhere. And wherever the stream goes, wherever the water goes, there is refreshment, there is greenery, there is herbage. But we're talking about people. Whosoever keeps on coming to me out of a thirst for me and the promises I have given, says Jesus, he will become so saturated and filled by the Spirit speaking of him under the image of water that out of him rivers of blessing will flow. I don't know whether or not our Lord Jesus and John in writing this whether they were thinking of that remarkable picture in the book of the prophet Ezekiel. Ezekiel is worth reading if it were only for the sake of this chapter 47 which describes a river and it begins to flow under the threshold in the temple of God. Do you remember it? And it comes out of the threshold and it goes down towards the Aravah and he describes the direction of the river flowing. Let me read you a few words. Talk about a prophetic image. Then he led me back to the bank of the river. He's seen something about the river already. I'm reading from chapter 47 beginning with second half of verse 6. When I arrived there I saw a great number of trees on each side of the river. He said to me, this water flows toward the eastern region and goes down into the Aravah where it enters the sea. Now notice. When it empties into the sea the water there becomes fresh. Now that's unimaginable. There is such potency in this water that comes from beneath the threshold of the temple that it completely changes the texture of the water in the sea, the saline sea. When it empties into the sea the water there becomes fresh. Swarms of living creatures will live wherever the river flows. There will be large numbers of fish because this water flows there and makes the salt water fresh. So wherever the river flows everything will live. It's a beautiful picture. Fishermen will stand along the shore from En-Gedi to En-Eglayim. There will be places for spreading of nets. The fish will be of many kinds like the fish of the great sea. Fruit trees of all kinds will grow on both banks of the river. Their leaves will not wither nor will their fruit fail. Every month they will bear fruit because the water from the sanctuary flows to them. Their fruit will serve for food and their leaves for healing. Have you got the picture? This amazing river starting under the threshold of the temple is going everywhere and wherever it goes everything is new. Life is new. Everything is fresh. Everything is revived. The desert has come to life again. Yes, but wait a moment. My text tells me not now in Ezekiel but in John, out of him there shall flow not a river but rivers. One is not adequate to describe the kind of blessing that the Holy Spirit of God is able to cause to flow out of the experience and the innermost being of a man or a woman who is in real fellowship with the Holy Spirit. Now that brings me to the last word portrait that I have tonight. And you find this in John chapter, chapters fourteen and fifteen. Fifteen and sixteen. I am referring to this title that Jesus there gave to the Spirit. A title which really is a kind of canopy to the whole of these three chapters. Another paracletos is the Greek word from which we have transliterated, the transliterated and anglicized term, paracletos. The Greek word is paracletos and I will use it so as not to get mixed up. Because in our English versions we have it translated as comforter, counselor, advocate and a number of other English terms. The reason for the variety of translations of course is obvious. The word is so rich that you cannot have one English word to do justice to it. Now you have this in John fourteen verse sixteen. I will ask the Father and he will give you another paracletos to be with you forever. In John fourteen twenty six. But the paracletos, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name will teach you all things and will remind you of everything that I have said to you. Again in John fifteen twenty six. When the paracletos comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father, he will testify about me. But you also must testify. For you have been with me from the beginning. And lastly in John sixteen and verse seven. But I tell you the truth. It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away the paracletos will not come to you. But if I go I will send him to you. Now you remember the background. Our Lord has dwelt with his disciples for over three eventful years. During which he has progressively proved his deity and his messianic calling and mission. And there were two things that were becoming progressively crystallized in their minds and convictions. That he was indeed the Son of God, that he was the promised Messiah. Now however he has just announced to them the almost unbelievable. That is unbelievable in their condition. He has hinted to it before many many times. But they never could take it in because they could not make sense out of it. Now however he has announced not simply that he is going to leave them. Not simply that he is going to leave them and he is going to die. But he is going to be crucified. He is going to be lifted up upon the cross. And then after that somehow or other he will fill in the details as the chapters move by. As the order of the passage proceeds. He is going beyond the cross. He is going away to be with the Father. He does speak of his coming back again in order to gather them to be with himself in due course. But he is going away. His disciples were stunned. It was a traumatic moment of the first magnitude. And on the face of it, it seemed to many of them it would appear to be the greatest let down in their experience. They had pinned all their hopes upon him. But now he was leaving and he was going to die. He was talking about death. Now it is against that background that our Lord unfolded the various strands of truth concerning the spirit. Which are recorded in these remarkable chapters. John 14, 15, and 16. His point was to prove that it was actually expedient for them that he should leave them. Now that they could not take in. But he said it is expedient for you. It is profitable for you. It is to your advantage that I am going. And he is concerned to explain that and to get them to see that really this is not a let down in going to be with the Father. He is going to fulfill a promise. And in that promise they will possess more than they could possess now with his physical presence among them. And when at that point they will enter into the experience of the Holy Spirit indwelling their hearts. He will never depart from them. That is the promise. Can I say three things briefly about this? First of all the necessity that required the coming of the spirit is reflected in the very title itself. This designation Parakletos means according to the Greek English lexicon it means quite simply one who is called to someone's aid. It is a simple thought. Our Lord built so much on such basic simplicities. I am going to send to you he says the power of Parakletos and the word means literally one called alongside to render help. Accordingly the Latin translators of the New Testament commonly translated it by the Latin equivalent Advocatus. Though they never took that to its logical conclusion and spoke of the Holy Spirit as an attorney or as we would say as a lawyer. They did not go as far as to say that. But they thought of the Holy Spirit as an advocate. The one who has come to stand alongside somebody in desperate need in a court of law to plead his case to say something on his behalf and to take up the cudgels in his favor. Without at this stage delving any deeper than that into the meaning of this very magnificent and very wonderful designation it will be appreciated that this very word reflects the precisely felt need of the disciples at that particular stage in their history. Though it also clearly represents the need of Christians generally at any time in our history. You see the physical withdrawal of Christ meant that there was a tendency and you will recognize these words from the context. A tendency to be troubled. Let not your heart be troubled. Jesus wasn't talking into the air he could see it. He could see their faces getting long. He could see them getting a little bit pale of the gulls. They were frightened. They didn't know what to make of it. And then he says to them look let not there's no reason for your hearts to be worried and harassed and overwhelmed by what's going to take place. There's no reason for it. I can see I can see the need in you but there's no reason for it. A tendency to be troubled to feel that you're comfortless or to feel that you're desolate. Actually Jesus caps it in verse 18 when he says using the Greek word orphanos from which we have our English orphans. I will not leave you orphans. Did they think of themselves as orphans then? Well probably that's the kind of thought they had of themselves. He has been their parent. He's been watching over them. He's been guiding. He's been the sheep the shepherd of the sheep. And he's been like a father to them. He's taught them. He's disciplined them. He's shielded them and sheltered them. He's been everything to them. But it seems as if now he's going away and they're going to be left parentless. Now it may be that some of us here tonight know the tragedy of being left thus desolate at a very early point in our life. And we have some dim sense of the horror of it. Of the traumatic nature of it. Of being left desolate orphans. Jesus says look here I'm not going to leave you orphans. You will not have the sense of being bereft. But I will send another paraclete to you and you will know that I am with you and the Father is with you. We will come to you and make our abode with you. We're coming in another form. The necessity that required the coming of the Spirit is reflected in the very title. They needed, they needed one alongside of them. But now the second thing I want to say about it is this. The ministry to be performed by the Spirit is likewise very clearly implied in this title. He's to act as paracletos. He's to act as someone alongside. But what exactly does this mean? I indicated earlier on in referring to the fact that there are many translations of this word that there is no one English word that does justice to the underlying Greek term found here in John's Gospel. Now that is true. Probably the one that comes nearest it, I mean the English word that comes nearest it, is the word as it was first I believe used by Wycliffe in the 14th century. The word comfort, but comfort meant something quite different to Wycliffe from what it means to us today. It's something very passive for us to be comforted. And I suppose in one sense we are passive in all this, but in Wycliffe's own words, in his understanding of the word for comfort, there was strength in it. To comfort was to put strength into somebody as well as to administer the kind of comfort that we generally think of. We think of someone who is bereaved and we go to help bring the comforts of the Lord to them, to comfort them. Now to bring out the difference of meaning in Wycliffe's rendering, I'll just give you one illustration. In Ephesians chapter 6 there is a statement be strong in the Lord. That's how it is in the King James Version, be strong in the Lord. Now Wycliffe translated that, be ye comforted in the Lord. So you see Wycliffe's comfort meant not just comfort, but comfort plus power. Comfort plus capacity to cope. Not just feeling okay for the moment, feeling my burdens leaving me, or feeling that I can manage just now, but more than that, feeling that I've got power, I'm in touch with power. And as stood in its own good sense then, the Wycliffeite word comfort comes very near to the mark of an English equivalent of the underlying Greek term that we have here. Whatever term we may choose to use, however, we need to bear in mind the indispensable ingredients that Wycliffe mentioned in passing, very briefly. The first ingredient is comfort in the sense of pacifying fear, and counteracting the tendency to panic. Comfort in that sense. Aren't you going to Rome? I'm going to die there because you are evading the cross there. Whether there's truth to this or not, I can't tell you. It may be apocryphal. It is said that Peter turned back on that Appian Way and went back to spend the rest of his days in Rome. Now whether that's right or wrong, I don't know. I'm just referring to it in terms of principle. If it is correct, a man had new heart, fresh spirit. There's only one place to have that that I know of. It's when the Paraclete comes in all his glory and fills and floods our hearts, and we keep on coming backwards and forwards to Jesus Christ, asking him to deal with us, asking him to teach us, and he saturates our inner man and floods the soul with the Spirit's influence. Lastly, the title reflects the disciples' need as known by Jesus, as well as the Spirit's competence and mission. And it also reassures the disciples of the continuity of the kind of blessing and help which they had received so far from their Lord himself. Now let me dwell on that last thing. Jesus is trying to tell them without spelling it out, that by the coming of the Paraclete, they're not going to lack anything, they're not going to miss anything, they're going to have another Paraclete just like himself. And I'm going to dare to interject here and say in certain senses better. Now you may lift up your eyes at that, but hang on for a moment. I will ask the Father and he will give you another Paraclete to be with you forever. I'd like you to take full cognizance of that little word, another Paracletos. Two things of special interest emerge from the use of this qualification at this point. In speaking of another Paracletos, it is clear that our Lord thought of himself as the original Paracletos. We do not often speak of this, but Jesus thought of himself as the first Paraclete, and that of course is all wrapped up in one of the early words in the gospel according to Saint Matthew. Here is Emmanuel come among men. Here is God coming to stand with men for men in the battle that has overcome and overtaken humanity. He's come onto our side. But let me move from that. In speaking of another Paraclete, however, Jesus made it clear as language could do so, that the Holy Spirit would be another Paraclete of exactly the same nature as himself. Now that is, Jesus assured them that he was not sending them an inferior Paraclete, that the Holy Spirit was in no wise inferior to himself. He was genuinely equal with Jesus in everything. Yes, in every respect, despite what I said earlier, to which I'll come before we close. Now all that is implicit in this one little word translated another. In the Greek language, there are two Greek words that are translated another. Let me illustrate. If I met the owner of a Rolls-Royce automobile, I would have and he came to me and he said, uh, I'm going to buy another car using the Greek word heteros for another. I would immediately know that he was going to buy a car that was characterized by its difference from the car he already possessed. Heteros is a Greek word that means another of a different kind. He's got his Rolls, now he's going to have a Ford or an Aston Martin or a Pontiac or whatever you've got. But the point is he's not going to have another Rolls, you see. Heteros means another of a different kind. But now if he said to me I'm going to buy another car and he used the Greek word alos for another, that would mean that he was going to buy a car exactly the same as the car he then had. He's going to buy another Rolls, bless him, I hope he'll give me one. But you see the value of the language. Now Jesus said, I'm going to send you another comforter, not a heteros comforter, different from me, but an alos paracletos. One who's exactly like me. He's of my nature, he's of my nature, he has my power, he shares my ability to think and to communicate and to do everything. He's divine as myself, he is powerful as myself, he is compassionate as I am, and I'm sending him to you. Jesus used that last word with reference to the coming paraclete, meaning that the promised one was in no wise inferior to himself. And the fact that Jesus has chosen to do this is advantageous to them, for two reasons. This is why I said that in one sense the coming of the spirit was something better than even the presence of Jesus himself. How can we say that? Whilst God was incarnate in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth, he could only be in one place at one time. When God comes down in the Holy Spirit, he will inhabit his body, the church. And he will be present wherever two or three are gathered together in his name, from north to south and east to west, from the beginning of time to the end of time, anywhere, any time of the day. There are no limitations, there's nothing that can keep him away. Isn't that advantageous? And the other is this, and he will be with you forever. Can you hear the heart of the Savior throbbing that he has to leave? Of course he felt it as they felt it. But he should go. They've become so accustomed to the physical form. But go he had, he must die. And then having died our sins on Calvary's cross ascend in his glorified body to the throne at the right hand of the majesty upon high, in our place there to intercede. That's why I say it was advantageous. And I believe that is why Jesus said, it is advantageous for you that I go away because if I do not do so, the Holy Spirit will not come. But if he comes, he will be in you, in your own bodies, in you and in you forever. And there will be no more parting. So my friends, this is where we end tonight. You go anywhere in the will of God and you may carry with you the fullness of his presence and the plenitude of his power. Because all that was in Jesus of Nazareth is now communicated by his other self, the blessed Holy Spirit of God. And he is in you. You don't need to go to a meeting to experience him. He's in you. He's in you. People around you may know nothing at all about him, but he's in you. And he's in you and with you forever. No withdrawal, no ascension of the Spirit, no going back of the Spirit, no going away of the Spirit. Ah, we may grieve him by our sin, but even then he's within our call by the grace of God. Don't you think that our Lord's artistry comes out again in this amazing dissertation which he introduces with this very pregnant and profound word, the title that he gives to the coming one who's going to take his place. May the Lord enable us at this time to prepare our hearts to celebrate what happened on that first day of Pentecost and to remember that the Spirit of God who came to remain is a Spirit who has not changed with the years. We need not fear. We need not feel that we are at the end of our tether. We are not. With him abiding in us, we are still able to say we are more than conquerors through him who loves us. Let us pray. Our Father God, we magnify your holy name that it is given us to read in your word of these precious truths concerning the one whom you sent into the world to take the Savior's place. We thank you for the Holy Spirit. Thank you for the beginnings of his work in our hearts as the Spirit of life. Thank you for the measure in which we are taught of him as the Spirit who produces worship. Thank you, our Heavenly Father, for any little measure in which we have seen the streams flowing through us and beyond us to bring divine influence to every arid circumstances. Grant that we may know what it is, therefore to walk in the fellowship with the Spirit and as with the Spirit so with the Father and with the Son until traveling days and battling days are over and gone. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.