John 14 No.3 Out out of the Orphanage

Read together from the Word of God from the 14th chapter of John's Gospel. We've been looking into this passage for a few weeks now, and those of you who've not been present during our earlier studies, nonetheless I think you'll grasp the main part of what I have to say later on as we get the context afresh for this very familiar passage of Scripture, which focuses our attention in the middle, appropriately enough, on the gift of the Holy Spirit. Here is our Saviour, and He is talking to His disciples in the upper room, and He's encouraging them.

John 14 verse 1, Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God. Trust also in Me.

In My Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you, and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with Me, that you also may be where I am.

You know the way to the place where I'm going. Thomas said to Him, Lord, we don't know where You're going, so how can we know the way? Jesus answered, I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.

If you really knew Me, you would know My Father as well. From now on you do know Him, and have seen Him. Philip said, Lord, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.

Jesus answered, Do you know Me, Philip? Don't you know Me, Philip? Even after I have been among you such a long time, anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father. How can you say, show us the Father? Don't you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in Me? The words I say to you are not just My own, rather it is the Father living in Me, who is doing His work. Believe Me when I say that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me, or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves.

I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in Me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father, and I will do whatever you ask in My name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. You may ask Me for anything in My name, and I will do it.

If you love Me, you will obey what I command, and I will ask the Father, and He will give you another counselor to be with you forever. The Spirit of Truth, the world cannot accept Him, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him, but you know Him, for He lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans.

I will come to you. Before long the world will not see Me anymore, but you will see Me, because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in My Father, and you are in Me, and I am in you.

Whoever has My commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves Me. He who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I too will love him and show Myself to him. That's the end of the reading from that very precious passage of Scripture.

He comes sweet influence to impart, a gracious willing guest, where he can find one humble heart wherein to rest. And his that gentle voice we hear, soft as the breath of air, that checks each fault, that calms each fear, and speaks of heaven. For every virtue we possess, and every victory won, and every thought of holiness are his alone.

Spirit of purity and grace, a witness beating sea, O make our hearts Thy dwelling place, and worthier Thee. We'll go to John's Gospel in chapter 14 for some moments. Our Savior talking to His disciples in a very critical time in their life and also His.

We come to our third study from this Paschal Address, the Passover Sermon, when our Savior has got His congregation, inverted commas, so to speak, in such an attitude that they're clinging on to His every word. You remember how they piled into that upper room, dirty feet, not one of them prepared to perform the task of a servant and wash the other's feet. And our Lord Jesus, true to His noble character, takes the apron, dons it, takes the bowl of water, goes round from man to man, and there's an absolute hush, only broken by the noise of the splashing of the water as they think He is doing that.

And then He speaks, you see. You can't speak to a group of people unless you've won the privilege of ministering to them by gaining their confidence. And this our Savior did in a most remarkable fashion.

And He delivers what has been referred to as this heart-warming, this heart-melting address. I was reading later last night from Hebrews, no need to turn to it, speaking of our Lord Jesus and His function as a pastor. Right at the end of that epistle, may the God of peace who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything, with every good for doing His will.

Now, this is what we're seeing, you see. It's the great Shepherd of the sheep. It's Savior of humankind, concerned for men, ordinary men with whom you can identify at a time when you thought that the situation might be reversed, for Jesus knows what's in front of Him.

That's what we're told earlier on in the preceding chapter. The horror of Gethsemane, the horror of Golgotha, all this is staring in His face. And yet He pastors them.

He ministers to their need. He addresses their troubles. He addresses their lack of guidance.

He says, don't let your heart be troubled. I am the way, the truth, and the life. He addresses their ignorance, shows the Father, have I been so long time with you, and you have not known me.

You see, He's ministering all the time to them, I, and to you, and to me. And there's something else that's on the horizon as far as they're concerned, which is causing them great distress. It is that He's going away.

Verse 33, preceding chapter, my children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now, where I am going, you cannot come. And He underpins it, doesn't He? In the first verse of this chapter, in my Father's house, many mansions, I go to prepare a place for you.

Now they loved Him. They loved Him with the deep love that a man can have for a fellow man. They loved Him as a great rabbi, as a great teacher.

They loved Him to the end that the thought of Him going was utterly unpalatable. And so He addresses that fear, as He addresses your fears. You see, it says in the Bible of our Lord Jesus, in all their affliction, He was afflicted.

We're so right to have sung, although I squeezed it in, that second hymn, what a friend we have in Jesus. Have we trials and temptations? Are there troubles anywhere? You see, it's to this man that you bring them, because there is none like He who has such a sensitivity to your need. It was the case in the first century, my dear brother and sister.

It's the case in the 20th century. And so our Lord addresses their particular fears. He's going to go away.

What will happen to them? What will happen? Will they be like orphans? You see, this is the possibility, isn't it? And so He latches on to their fear with the perceptions that are His, His intuition. He knows their heart. He's fully aware of what they're thinking.

Verse 18, I will not leave you as orphans, or as the A.V. puts it, I won't leave you comfortless. You see, there's nothing really that is more heartbreaking than the sight of a child without his or her parent, orphanless, or orphan, fatherless, motherless, going through the world, open to its hostility, open to its insensitivity. That's the problem, isn't it, with a little child? I've seen them so often on the streets of Karachi, Bombay, Calcutta, little boys, little girls who will follow you as though you're just a pied piper.

Now, are the disciples going to be like that? You see, with Him being withdrawn, where is their anchorage? Where is their hope? Well, He says, I will not leave you as orphans. Some of you are family people, thank God for it. I thank the Lord for every father who is ministering as a priest to his children and to his wife.

Your ministry, my brother, is greater in importance than the one that I exert from this pulpit here. Thank God that we have a community of folk who meet regularly in the tab, who are family inclined, and that includes all of us who are single as well. We have a concern for one another.

Now, where do we get this concern from? Well, you see, it's basic to the gospel. Why has the Lord Jesus come into the world? He's come to reveal who? The Father. Show us the Father.

Have I been so long time with you and you haven't known me? I am of the same essence as the Father. You see me, you see Him. There's no greater revelation of the Father than you see in front of me.

That's what the Savior was saying to these disciples. Now, if He goes away, He still has a concern for the family circle. Don't you see this? This is the reason why He speaks so much of Father, why He illustrates Father Himself, and why He's going to go on to bring in marvelous teaching in regard to the third person of the ever-blessed Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

If you love me, I will ask the Father, and He will give you another counselor to be with you forever. Some of you who follow the AV will again get the rendering. He will give you another comforter.

Now, in one sense, that is a good and yet an inexact translation. You see, our Lord Jesus is concerned to show us that there is a common denominator between Him and the Holy Spirit who is going to come on this earth. They're going to have a similar sort of ministry.

He's going to be taken from them. He's going to go back to Father, but He will release, He will cause, because He will ask Father for the presence of the Holy Spirit to so come on earth that it will be just as though He had never left. I will ask Father, and He will give you another comforter, another counselor.

The English language changes. You might not like to agree to that, but I'm afraid that there's no way in which you can argue against me. I've studied the English language far too much in my earlier profession for me to have any hesitancy at all.

You see, this is the problem with translations. You never get a translation that is bang up to date because language changes. Now, way back in John Wycliffe's day, they used the word comforter in a completely different setting to the way that we use it today.

A comforter comes from two Latin words, come and fortis, and the idea of fortis is strength, and the comforter is one who comes along to the dispirited person and he injects strength into them. Today, comfort, well, you generally use it in terms of bereavement. Someone has lost mother, father, husband, sweetheart, no matter, and a kindly friend comes along and offers comfort.

Now, in that sense, that is the ministry of the Holy Spirit, but it's far more than just twentieth-century comfort. It's the idea of the helper, the strengthener, the one who comes alongside. Now, who had done this for the disciples? Well, none so efficiently as our Lord Jesus, I will ask the Father, and He will give you another counselor, another strengther, another helper, who will be very, very much like me.

In fact, that the word another counselor so qualifies, the adjective another, so qualifies the word counselor, that it seems as though when our Savior says to one of the disciples, have I been so long time with you and you haven't known me, taking the question about the Father, so the Savior is saying the closeness, the correspondence between the Holy Spirit and myself is at that level. You see, Christians have two counselors. Did you know that? If you please, following the AAV, we have two comforters, not just the Holy Spirit, but the Holy Son of God.

That was His ministry. He goes to prepare a place. Now, in the very preparation, what is He engaged in doing? Well, Hebrews will tell you.

He's gone into heaven. What does He do in heaven? He ever lives to make intercession. That is His ministry as counselor, comforter, helper, and strengthener.

Right? But go to Romans 8, and the apostle Paul will tell you about the Holy Spirit residing within your heart. What does the Holy Spirit do? Well, He engages in prayer with groanings that cannot be uttered. So, here you have the bifocal ministry of the Son and the Spirit, the Son praying from above, ever lives to make intercession, the Spirit praying within our hearts in unutterable groanings, a correspondence of ministry between the Spirit and the Son.

You see, here in effect you have, although I don't particularly like the term because it's not a scriptural term, but it's a convenient one, you have the great doctrine of the Trinity. I don't like the word because it's arithmetical and it's academic, but nonetheless it helps us to appreciate that the Godhead whom we will never fully understand exists eternally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of the same essence, and yet they have a distinguishing function, distinguishing aspects to their personality. You can go no further than that.

You can't understand it in terms of human logic, but when your Jehovah's Witness knocks on the door and He says to you that there's only one God and Jesus is less than God and the Spirit is just an influence, one thinks, you know, of that dear man or that dear woman. They have not an inkling of understanding of these verses. If you've seen me, you've seen the Father because the Father is in me.

I will not leave you as orphans. Why not? Well, I'll ask the Father, and if you're obedient, He will send the Spirit. Submission to me will mean representation by me before the Father.

The Spirit will come, the Comforter, the Counselor. Ah, yes, that's what He says, but later on He says in verse 18, I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you when the Spirit comes, the Son comes, because there is this correspondence, you see, between the Spirit and the Son.

I say, you see, you can't see it in its depth, in its clarity. You can only accept it and experience it for yourself. You'll never logically be able to work your way around this.

Not that that should create any problem. After all, if God is God and you are just a finite being, then you would expect, as the Bible clearly defines, that God's ways are not our ways, His thoughts are not our thoughts, and we are but children groping in the fathoms of knowledge in regard to the great doctrine of God. But here our Savior teaches us that far from Him being alone operative in our salvation, that it's part of the ministry of the Father and the Spirit to come alongside the believer and to counsel and strengthen and help and instruct.

Now I ask you, my friend, do you know this sort of thing yourself? You see, the problem is that you can sing some of these great hymns and you can read these scriptures, and really it has no dynamic, direct effect upon you, and that's most unfortunate. For this reason, you are very much like the disciples. You need the ministry that Jesus was pinning in their minds so many thousands of years ago.

He's going away, and yet in one sense He's coming in a most remarkable fashion. He'll not leave them. You see, physically He has to leave them, doesn't He? And yet spiritually He's never going to leave them.

How did He leave this world? Well, He left this world in a very critical condition, did He not? Before long, the world will not see me anymore. What was the last glimpse the world had of Jesus Christ? By world, I'm referring to those people who were not His disciples, who had no affection for Him, no respect for His ministry. How did He leave them? Well, He left them as a crucified man.

There He was, blood-strained and bedraggled on the cross of Calvary, taking their shafts of abuse, if thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross. Well, believe in you, all the hostility and contempt of the Jews, and even of the Roman political machine, it was all directed towards Him. That's the last they ever saw of Him.

They're not the disciples. That's how the world got the final glimpse of the historical Jesus. Before long, the world will not see me anymore.

But you will see me? How did they see Him? Well, they saw Him in the great resurrection appearances. He never manifested Himself, did He, to a stranger. There were always people who were part of the family of the Father.

You see, they're in on the secret. This is a thing that the Lord Jesus has to identify time and time again. The unbeliever knows nothing of the Holy Spirit.

He ridicules the very concept of the Holy Spirit. He can do nothing else than that because, well, you see, he doesn't have a spiritual perception. But these disciples, increasingly, they will have this perception.

The Holy Spirit will come. The world, verse 17, cannot accept Him because it neither sees Him nor knows Him. You see, the ordinary person has no spiritual aptitude whatsoever.

You say, what do you mean by aptitude? Well, let me give you an example. Let's take a medical man. We have several doctors and nurses here.

Let's try and see a man through his eyes. You see, a doctor looks at a person far differently from what a pastor looks at a person. Let me give you an illustration.

I remember, many years ago now, going to the north of England and visiting a place just south of Blackpool. We were invited there to meet with a man who was a doctor, and his wife. He was also a preacher, and he was going to go out to South Africa.

And he wanted to know, especially from Rowena, my wife, who obviously has more knowledge of the South African scene than I have, and certainly than I had at that time, he wanted to know something about South African culture and so on and so forth. And so we spent a very pleasant weekend in his company and that of his wife. And I recall on Sunday morning, my wife sitting at the breakfast table, and the doctor, you know what these northern people are like, very friendly, very affectionate.

I'm not saying that the southerners aren't, I'm just saying that the northerners have an advantage. And he leaned across the table and he said in his northern fashion, let me have a look in your eyes. And very sensitively he opened my wife's eyelids wider, and he said, you're anemic.

And he got her some iron tablets, and obviously as a result of the treatment she was much better. Now I'd looked at her, seemed quite all right to me. He looked at her as a doctor.

You see, he had that aptitude. I don't suppose you can be a professional medical person without looking at folks somewhat differently than we lesser mortals look at people. Now let me give you another example.

Last Thursday I was foot-slogging around the Chelsea Flower Show. I went to that exhibition not as one of the exhibitors, but rather as someone who likes flowers. My wife was taking me around.

Now when I saw those flowers, I just see the colour. I love colourful flowers. I love the floral arrangements.

I'm always grateful to Joan and our friends who helped make these lovely displays in the tabernacle. But you see, if a botanist or an agriculturalist had been there, or someone into the realm of horticulture, he would have seen that show completely from a different perspective than I have seen it. You see, I don't have the knowledge that they have.

I'm not into horticulture. I'm not into medicine. I don't have that perceptive.

Now here is our Lord Jesus, and he's speaking about the Holy Spirit, the coming of the Spirit. And he says the world cannot accept him, the Holy Spirit. Why? Because it neither sees him nor knows him.

But not you. You're different. You have been with me.

I am the man of the Spirit, and you have seen him in me. And ere long, that Spirit of the Holy God shall be in you. I will not leave you as orphans.

I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. And they did, didn't they? Not only in the resurrection appearances, not only when our Lord Jesus was taken from this world and moved back to the Father's house, but when, with the eye of faith, they saw him taking that seat of authority at the right hand of God.

But in a very special, experiential, experimental way, they saw him at Pentecost. He went to the Father, and he pleaded that the Spirit might descend upon them. And as he had come from the Father, so the Holy Spirit may come into the world and take up residence within the hearts of those early believers.

And so he came. He came in the power of the Holy Spirit. He came to minister to them, to be their helper, to be their strengthener, to be their guide.

Isn't it marvelous that when he says, I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you, that it bears out the truth of a Puritan preacher who says, how precious that before we go to his place to be with him, he comes to our place to be with us. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth who takes up residence within the lives of those who confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Now, don't you see, my friend, that in the ministry of the Spirit, not only is there a correspondence between him and the Son, but there is a correspondence in ministry.

He is the Spirit of Truth. Now, what had Jesus earlier said to Thomas? I am the way, the truth, and the life. Later on in the high priestly prayer, as I'll show you in the rate I'm going through this, about twenty years' time, our Lord Jesus says, your word is truth.

Why does the Holy Spirit come into the world? Well, why did Jesus come? He came to teach the truth. Now, don't you see the moment when you acknowledge that Jesus Christ was your Lord and Savior, it was the Spirit of God playing upon your mental faculties, playing upon your whole personality that enables you to respond to this. If you were to read 1 Corinthians in chapter 2, you would understand how the Apostle Paul makes a distinction between worldly wisdom and the wisdom of God.

The world, by its wisdom, says Paul, didn't know God. Here were these Jews, you see, so religious. Here were these Greeks, and they were so infected with philosophy and academic knowledge.

But with the wisdom of the world, the Lord Jesus was not recognized. But the people to whom Paul is writing in 1 Corinthians, they were different. They had spiritual perception, and they came to an understanding of who Jesus was because the Holy Spirit had begun to take up residence in their lives.

He had opened their eyes to the truth. It's always the ministry of the Spirit. It converges with the ministry of the Son.

It converges with the ministry of the Father. Truth, understanding. You see, I have no time whatsoever for anyone who suggests that evangelicals can be people who are not engaged in Scripture, who are not combating the world with its philosophies and its doctrines, who are not up to date with the political state of the nations.

We are here to outthink the non-Christian. I am persuaded that the truth of the gospel is the most precious thing that there is in the world today. And I come to a realization that I have latched onto that truth because of the Holy Spirit within my heart, within my life.

He has done the education that Jesus predicted. He has continued the ministry that our Lord commenced. And both Son and Spirit are underpinning the will of the Father, who will have all men come to a knowledge of the truth.

It's so important that you and I appreciate these things. When our Savior is here directing His words to this little group of men, He's ministering to them. He's giving them strength and help so that they'll be able to cope when He's away.

And yet He's saying, although physically I am away from you, spiritually I will be as near to you as I have ever been. And that is the great distinction, don't you see my friend, between an academic religion or pure philosophy and the evangelical faith. It affects our minds.

I would go to the stake arguing that, that Christianity is the religion of a person who is thinking right. But it doesn't just stop there. I'm not a believer in God, as I quote A. W. Tozer, just because of a logical deduction from the text.

I do believe in the inerrancy of Scripture, but I do believe in the immediacy of God. How does God make Himself real to me? He does it by the empowering of the Holy Spirit. I will ask Father and He will send the Spirit, and the Spirit brings an awareness of God the Father.

And in that very awareness, I am embracing the Lord Jesus, because the Savior says, we will come to you. He identifies Himself with the role of the ministry of the Spirit. And so, you can begin to understand, as you get this picture, and I'm fast running out of time, how our Savior finds it necessary to endorse the doctrine of the Father and the community of His disciples as part of the family circle of God.

You see, Christianity is not fatherless. Christianity is a religion that takes its origin from the Father, Heart of God, thus those three parables that we looked into from Luke 15 some while ago, and thus my taking you from Luke 15 to John 14. This Heavenly Father has a great concern for you and for me.

He places you on planet earth for forty years, fifty years, sixty years, seventy years, not permanently, but in Father's house. When your life stops functioning on planet earth, when your body will no longer sustain life, you're taken to be with Father. That's a remarkable belief to entertain, yet it's true.

Jesus said, if it wasn't the case, I would have told you. But you see, you're not just looking for pie in the sky when you die. In fact, you're not even looking at it within that terminology.

You are called to experience Father now. How do you experience Father when the Son is away? Through the Spirit of the Son, who has come into this world because the Son asked Father, and the Father agreed to all that the Son asked Him. And so Father sends the Son, the Son performs His ministry, ultimately is delivered into the hands of Romans and Jews, is done to death on the cross, is brought back to life by the resurrection, ascends into heaven, and then the Blessed Spirit comes upon our earth and engages in the ministry of convicting people like ourselves, opening our eyes, giving us a spiritual aptitude.

Do you ask why it is that you see and your blood relative doesn't see? That's a remarkable question, isn't it? And the only answer is this, that you've been granted a spiritual perception. You're not better than they were in and of yourself, but God in His grace has dealt with you in such a fashion. He's opened your eyes.

There's a spiritual dimension that has become real to you, and you're beginning to appreciate more and more that though the Lord Jesus is away, yet in a very real sense He's present. Death no longer has any fear, for when the end of your life comes, you know that the Lord Jesus is there to catch you and to take you into Father's presence. These things, you see, the disciples needed to know.

Why? Well, otherwise they would have been as destitute as orphans, left alone in a hostile, unbelieving world. And Jesus said, no, fellas, little children. He uses that word in the 13th chapter, little children, when I go, don't get alarmed.

Father's still there. I'll be with Father praying for you, and I'll send you one who is as close to myself that it's virtually true to say that I've come back again, residing within your heart, praying within what's being prayed above for your spiritual well-being, so that you might know you're in the family circle. You're not left as orphans.

That, my brothers and sisters, is how I understand these verses. May God bless this meditation to your own heart. And next week we'll come back and deal with the following verses in that chapter.

We have a super hymn to conclude with on the final page of notes and news, so spread the tidings round, wherever man is found, wherever human hearts and human woes abound. Let me remind you that after the singing of this hymn, we come around the Lord's table, and at 6.30 we have ministering from the Lord to us, my brother George Verver. If you've never heard George Verver, then I invite you to come.

I rarely make such a comment from the pulpit, but I think he's one of the greatest men of God I've ever met in my life, and you would do me an honor if you come along this evening and listen to George unveil the burden of his heart for our fellowship. Oh, spread the tidings round. Father, we thank you for the gift of your spirit, and we ask that you will deliver us from a mere mental understanding of his person and his nature.

We pray that more and more we may open our hearts to take in residency of your spirit. Bless us as some take their leave right now, and might we know your presence during the remaining part of this day. For the Savior's sake, amen.