THE DISTURBING ROLE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
John 16:5-15
April 25, 2010
Third in series: “Are You Filled?”
I’ve got a few questions for you this morning. Are you ready? How many of you like to get speeding tickets? How many of you want other drivers to drive reasonable speeds on the streets near you or where your children or your grandchildren are walking and playing?
How many like having someone tell you that you’re fat? How many of you want to be healthy and to live a good long life?
How many of you like to be told that you’re wrong about something? How many of you have something that you enjoy doing and that you’d like to get better at, even if it means that someone will need to correct the way you tend to do some things?
While on the surface, most of us would say that we don’t like to get speeding tickets and we don’t want someone telling us that we’re fat and we don’t like it when someone tells us that we’re doing something wrong—but there are a lot of people who have what I’d call a “disturbing” role in our society—and we need them and actually want what they offer even though we don’t always “like” what they have to say to us! In some cases, we’re willing to pay them to “disturb” us! The more I thought about it, the more “disturbing” roles I came up with—people who sometimes have to shake us up or shake our world a bit to help us be the best we can be. I’m thinking about teachers, a physical trainer, a life coach, doctors, mentors, supervisors…the list goes on and on! Do any of you like to watch “The Biggest Loser” as much as my wife does? The trainers really rock people’s boats in order to help them and sometimes they make them downright mad in the process—but those same people sure are excited when they see the weight go off!
We’re in a series of sermons called, “Are You Filled?” as we explore the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives. In the Christian calendar, we’ve celebrated again the death and Resurrection of Jesus. Jesus had spoken the promise many times that when He left them He would send a Holy “Other” to be with them—that He would not leave them as orphans, that He would send a Comforter to be with them, the Spirit of Truth—and that this promised Holy Spirit would come to live in them and empower them for holy lives and holy service.
This morning, as we consider words of Jesus regarding the promised gift of the Holy Spirit to believers, we’re going to look at a role of the Holy Spirit that doesn’t always seem to at first bless our hearts! In fact, sometimes we get irritated and are resistant to this role of the Holy Spirit—because the Holy Spirit serves in many ways as the Holy Disturber of our status quo, challenging the way we see things and the way we live our lives.
Look with me at John’s Gospel, chapter 16, beginning at verse 5—
[Read John 16:5-15, NIV]
First, let’s talk about what Jesus meant when He said that the Holy Spirit “convicts the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment.” With the help of a few different translations, let me say it in a different way and see if that helps:
He will prove the world to be in the wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment (John 16:8, TNIV)
He’ll expose the error of the godless world’s view of sin, righteousness, and judgment (John 16:8, The Message)
He will convict the world of its sin, and of God’s righteousness, and of the coming judgment (John 16:8, NLT).
The key to understanding the passage is probably found in the word “convict.” The King James Version translates it “reprove,” but there are those who feel strongly that the wrong “reprove” is not strong enough. The original Greek word is a legal term that means to pronounce a judicial verdict by which the guilt of the culprit on trial is defined and fixed. It’s a serious and a definitive thing when someone on trial is “convicted” of a crime. It establishes the fact that, in the eyes of the law, they are guilty and are to be dealt with accordingly. The Holy Spirit is the prosecuting attorney who creates an inescapable awareness of sin so that it cannot be ignored and cannot be dismissed with an excuse.
Now you can see why I’d refer to this as “The Disturbing Role of the Holy Spirit”—because what’s being described here as a significant role of the Holy Spirit is more than just that of one who accuses a person of sin, but rather He brings to them an inescapable sense of guilt so that they realize their shame and helplessness before God. The Holy Spirit exposes the sin of the world—including the sin in my life and in yours! And in our humanness we’re not always so sure we like this dimension of the Holy Spirit! It’s so much like the role the prophet Nathan played in confronting King David with his sin in the Old Testament.
David had experienced the great favor of God. Early in his life he had been singled out as the one whom God had anointed to lead the people of Israel. When even his own family saw in David only a shepherd boy, God saw in David a king. With a gutsy innocence, young David took on the giant Goliath, whom all others were running from! David had a way about him that drew others to him—from the loyalty of those close to him to the crowds who saw hope in his integrity and in his leadership. The people rallied around David in incredible ways! God had surely anointed this man—and, as foreseen by the prophet Samuel many years before, David was eventually made king and experienced great success as the beloved King of Israel as he followed the ways of the Lord in such a way that people considered him a man “after God’s own heart.”
But in the midst of his incredible success and enjoying great popularity among the people and the favor of God, something happened inside David. While he seemingly had everything anyone could ever imagine having, it wasn’t quite enough. David gave in to sexual temptation and forced himself upon a woman named Bathsheba—who was married to one of the key officers in David’s army. When she became pregnant, David orchestrated the death of her husband and took Bathsheba to be his wife. And while David apparently was rather cavalier about the whole thing, scripture tells us clearly, “But the thing David had done displeased the Lord” (2 Samuel 11:27). Let me read the account to you, beginning at verse 1 of 2 Samuel 12—
1 So the LORD sent Nathan the prophet to tell David this story: “There were two men in a certain town. One was rich, and one was poor. 2 The rich man owned a great many sheep and cattle. 3 The poor man owned nothing but one little lamb he had bought. He raised that little lamb, and it grew up with his children. It ate from the man’s own plate and drank from his cup. He cuddled it in his arms like a baby daughter. 4 One day a guest arrived at the home of the rich man. But instead of killing an animal from his own flock or herd, he took the poor man’s lamb and killed it and prepared it for his guest.”
5 David was furious. “As surely as the LORD lives,” he vowed, “any man who would do such a thing deserves to die! 6 He must repay four lambs to the poor man for the one he stole and for having no pity.”
7 Then Nathan said to David, “You are that man! The LORD, the God of Israel, says: I anointed you king of Israel and saved you from the power of Saul. 8 I gave you your master’s house and his wives and the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. And if that had not been enough, I would have given you much, much more. 9 Why, then, have you despised the word of the LORD and done this horrible deed? (2 Samuel 12:1-9, NLT)
Nathan’s confrontation with David compelled David to acknowledge his sin and to repent of it. David was so convicted of his sin that he was consumed with a penitent spirit. He saw his sin for what it was—a sin against God and against others, and he begged for God’s forgiveness. And God forgave David, and while there were consequences with which David had to live, he experienced again the blessing of the Presence of the Lord in his life. Many of the Psalms found in our Old Testament were written by David and express the heart of one whose relationship with the Lord God had been wonderfully restored—but only because God had sent a holy disturber to David to expose the sin of his life for what it was. God would have done David no favors by letting him get by with this sin—and it was only by exposing it and forcing David to deal honestly with it that David was able to continue in the mission God had entrusted to him.
That’s what the Holy Spirit does in our lives! He exposes sin for what it is! Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would help the people of the world see that their refusal to believe in Jesus Christ is their basic sin. He made it clear that righteousness—the way of right-living—is established by God Himself. In other words, we don’t get to make up the rules of morality, determining ourselves what is right and wrong. And Jesus made it clear that judgment would one day be pronounced on each one of us.
Now these aren’t the kinds of things that seem to be popular in preaching today. I suppose people used to like “hell-fire brimstone” preaching—but about the only condemnatory preaching anyone likes now is if it’s aimed at someone else! And while the church may be afraid to step on anyone’s toes, the Holy Spirit clearly doesn’t mind stepping on toes at all!
Sometimes we have thought of the Holy Spirit as our conscience—guiding us from within by some sort of inner compass. And while there may be some merit to that way of thinking, the problem is that our conscience may not be set by God’s standard. Apparently the suicide terrorists who flew into the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon and who crashed a plane somewhere in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, were making decisions based on their consciences. They thought they were doing the right thing!
But I doubt there’d be one person in this room this morning who would say that the killing of several thousand people that day was directed by the Lord God. Their inner compass had been skewed by twisted thinking, as can be the case for all of us—and we need to make sure we’re keeping our inner compass in tune with God’s standards of right-living. That’s the Holy Spirit’s role in our world and in our lives! And while we may sometimes chafe when we become the target of the Spirit’s correcting, we ought to be grateful for this Holy Disturber of our status quo because He is the One best equipped to keep our compass properly aligned!
Why does God care about us being “convicted” of sin? Why does it matter to Him? Is He just trying to heap guilt and shame on us? Why would a loving God be so judgmental?!
I heard an interesting report on ABC’s “Good Morning America” this week. It was reporting on a trend among some families called “unschooling.” It’s about kids who stay home everyday, but they’re not homeschooled. There are no textbooks and no tests. There is no formal education taking place at all. They said that of the 1.5 million kids who are consider “homeschooled,” about 100,000 of those are actually “unschooled.” And for the parents who embrace this approach to child-rearing, the philosophy extends to other areas of their kids’ lives. They make their own decisions and they don’t have chores or rules.
The Massachusetts family profiled had two teenagers they identified as unschooled. The parents said that they want their kids to learn what they want to learn when they want to learn it. The mother was reported as having said, “The key there is that you’ve got to trust your kids to…find their own interests.” They said they didn’t have a need for a lot of rules, and the mother said she wasn’t concerned that her teenager daughter stayed up all night because “she’s getting everything done that she wants to get done.”
The Discovery Health cable TV channel chronicled the life of one young unschooled family, detailing a home in which the children faced no punishment, no judgment and no discipline. One of the parents said, “There is no hierarchy in our house, so there is no punishment, no judgment, no discipline. They get what they want for breakfast and eat whatever they want. It’s all a matter of what feels right to them.”
And I’m guessing that most of you by now are thinking to yourselves something like, “That’s a bunch of hooey! What is wrong with these parents?! Where are their brains?!” And I’ll have to admit that the report took my mind back to a family I once knew quite well—a family that didn’t want any rules imposed on their children and who resisted structure of any kind being imposed on their kids. And their kids were sharp and bright and creative, but they haven’t done much with their lives because their parents did them a tremendous disservice in essentially unschooling them.
I tell you all of this because I think we can hear reports like ABC’s report on unschooling and fairly quickly conclude that parents have a responsibility to guide their children’s education and character development. And I want us to understand that our Heavenly Father accepts such a responsibility for us, His children. He created us and loves us and wants what’s best for each of us—and so He has sent His Holy Spirit to us. And one of the significant roles of the Holy Spirit is to help us see right from wrong, to recognize sin for what it is, and to guide us into a better way. And as a good parent conscientiously guides their child’s education and character development, the Holy Spirit is doing us a favor when He corrects us! The permissive parents does his/her child no favors—for we must learn boundaries in life in order to experience life at its best. There is great freedom within boundaries, for boundaries protect us from that which can destroy us and others.
The Holy Spirit convicts us of our blind spots—like He did with King David through the prophet Nathan. When most areas of our lives appear to be strong and healthy, we may not be mindful of one dimension that is faulty—but it may be the very thing that can absolutely destroy us from within. The Lord understands our need for wholeness and integrity if we are to experience life at its best. One little hole in the wall may not seem to be a big deal until the other side of the wall is filled with water—then you begin to realize that one little hole in the wall is a big deal after all! The Holy Spirit points out our blind spots and helps us to see them for what they are.
Well, doesn’t this fly in the face of positive thinking? Some might think so, but to acknowledge the presence of sin in our lives and to determine with God’s help to do something about it is not negative thinking! It’s smart and it’s wise and it’s the course of action that offers us the brightest and the best of futures—now and eternally!
Our culture has become so consumed with political correctness and inclusivity that we fail to see sin for what it is. And that can set the stage for personal and societal disaster and defeat. Sin is sin whether we want to call it that or not! We can’t whitewash sin! You may clean up the outside of a pig and put a pretty bow around its neck and spray perfume on it, but a pig is still a pig, and given half a chance, it will go right back to wallowing in the mud like it was made to do.
So it is with sin, whether we want to call it that or not! Our refusal to acknowledge sin doesn’t change the reality of how God sees it—and part of what Jesus was saying is that the Holy Spirit, sent from God, will expose the error of the godless world’s view of sin and righteousness and judgment! God’s doing us a favor by this—and, if we’re wise, we’ll embrace it with all our hearts!
Our need is to acknowledge sin when God exposes it in our lives and to seek God’s forgiveness and to turn from sin TO purity and right living and Christlikeness. That’s positive thinking in the best sense of the word!
The truth is that there is great freedom in such an approach to all of life. There’s a wonderful statement made in 2 Corinthians 3:17, where the Apostle Paul wrote,
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. (2 Corinthians 3:17)
God wants each of us to experience great freedom in life—but we don’t experience that by doing our own thing and doing it our way, stepping on anyone else who gets in the way of us doing our own thing! We don’t experience freedom by the removal of all boundaries! No! We experience freedom within the very boundaries that protect us from that which would surely destroy us and others!
Your Heavenly Father loves you too much to let you destroy yourself and others without doing everything He can to get your attention—and so He has sent to us the Holy Spirit, to expose the error of the godless world’s view of sin and righteousness and judgment. And what He asks us to do is to submit ourselves to the scrutiny of the Holy Spirit—to embrace the guidance and correction of the Holy Spirit—so that we can walk in fellowship with God and live lives that are meaningful and purposeful and that make a difference in the lives of others.
God truly wants to come alongside each of us and help us to be at our best! So the important question before us is this: Will you welcome the Holy Spirit to come alongside you in this way, even if there are things He’ll point out that need correction? Let’s ask Him to do just that this morning…
