The Spirit Gives Christ

Today's Scripture

John 16:13-14 — "When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you."

John 14:26 — "But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you."

Romans 8:15-16 — "For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, 'Abba! Father!' The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God."

The Big Idea

On his last night, Jesus told his disciples exactly what the coming Spirit would do: glorify him. That single sentence is the test underneath every test in this plan. Whatever makes Jesus bigger, clearer, and dearer to you is the Spirit's work. Whatever makes anything else bigger — a feeling, a leader, a movement, yourself — is not, no matter how spiritual it looks.

Reflection

The Spirit's job description

It is the night before the cross. Jesus has a few hours left with his friends, and he spends a remarkable amount of them talking about someone they have not yet met. John 14:16-17 — "And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth." Then he tells them, piece by piece, what this Helper will do.

He will teach: "he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you" (John 14:26). He will testify: "he will bear witness about me" (John 15:26). And then the summary sentence over all of it: John 16:14 — "He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you." Four promises, one direction. The Spirit's entire mission points at Jesus.

Have you ever driven past a great building lit up at night? The floodlights are placed low, hidden in the bushes, angled upward. The whole point of the lights is that you never look at them. You look at what they light up. J.I. Packer used exactly this picture for the Holy Spirit, and drew the conclusion:

"The Spirit's message to us is never, 'Look at me; listen to me; come to me; get to know me,' but always, 'Look at him, and see his glory; listen to him, and hear his word; go to him, and have life; get to know him, and taste his gift of joy and peace.'" — J.I. Packer, Keep In Step With the Spirit

This is why every test we have learned this week works. John's test — does the spirit confess Jesus Christ come in the flesh? Edwards's test — does the work raise people's esteem for the Jesus of the Gospels? Paul's test — does it land on "Jesus is Lord," in love, building up his body? They are all one test wearing different clothes. The Spirit glorifies the Son. A "spirit" that glorifies anything else has just shown you its passport.

One question that settles the rest

So when an experience confuses you — a powerful service, a strange impression, a season of unusual feeling — you do not need a seminary degree to evaluate it. You need one question: did it deepen my attachment to Jesus?

Not your attachment to the feeling. Not to the leader who prayed for you, the conference where it happened, or the tradition that approves of it. To him — the actual Christ of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the one with a manger at the start and nail marks at the end. If you walked away trusting him more, obeying him more gladly, loving the people he loves — the Spirit was there, whether the room was loud or silent. The vehicle is not the test. The destination is.

This question is kind in both directions. It honors the quiet Christian whose love for Christ has deepened through forty years of ordinary sermons — the Spirit was in every one of them. And it honors the dramatic encounter that left someone devouring the Gospels for the first time — the Spirit was in that too. What it refuses to honor is any experience, loud or quiet, that leaves Jesus smaller than it left your appetite for the experience itself.

Paul describes how the Spirit changes people, and notice where the eyes are: 2 Corinthians 3:18 — "And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit." We become what we behold. The Spirit transforms us precisely by fixing our gaze on Christ — not by giving us mirrors, but by giving us a window. Irenaeus, a pastor in the second century who learned the faith from a student of the apostle John, said this beholding is what humans were made for:

"The glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God." — Irenaeus, Against Heresies

And C.S. Lewis warned what happens when the gaze turns inward — when spirituality becomes a project of monitoring our own experiences:

"Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

That sentence is worth keeping in your pocket for the rest of your life. Chasing experiences for their own sake is just a religious way of looking for yourself. The Spirit's gifts, leadings, and consolations are all "everything else thrown in" — they come with Christ, never instead of him.

Not a feeling but a family

But the Spirit does more than point at Christ from a distance. He joins you to him. John Calvin asked how a salvation accomplished two thousand years ago actually reaches a person today, and answered:

"The Holy Spirit is the bond by which Christ effectually unites us to himself." — John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

A bond — the living connection between you and the risen Jesus. And what flows through that bond, day after day, is not mainly ecstasy. It is assurance. Romans 8:15-16 — "you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, 'Abba! Father!' The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God." Abba is the warm Aramaic word for father that Jesus himself prayed in Gethsemane. The Spirit's deepest daily work is putting that word in your mouth — making the Father's love in the Son something you do not just affirm but inhabit.

Here is the gospel one last time, because everything in this plan hangs on it. You could never climb to God on the ladder of experiences, and you were never asked to. God came down. The Son lived the life you could not live, died the death your sins deserved, and rose so that his place in the family could be yours. The Spirit was then poured out — not as a reward for the spiritually impressive, but as a gift to everyone who belongs to Jesus. When God finally broke through to Augustine, after years of running, this is how he described it:

"You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness." — Augustine, Confessions

That is the Spirit's specialty: breaking through, and what he breaks through with is always Christ. Which means your standing with God never rested on the strength of your experiences anyway. Charles Spurgeon said it as plainly as it can be said:

"Remember, sinner, it is not thy hold of Christ that saves thee — it is Christ; it is not thy joy in Christ that saves thee — it is Christ; it is not even faith in Christ, though that be the instrument — it is Christ's blood and merits." — Charles Spurgeon, New Park Street Pulpit

On the days you feel everything, Christ saves you. On the days you feel nothing, Christ saves you. The Spirit's witness rises and falls in your awareness, but the Son's finished work does not move.

Ask him

So how should you walk out of these ten days? Not suspicious, and not gullible. Expectant — and anchored.

Jesus left an open invitation: Luke 11:13 — "If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" You do not have to earn the Spirit, work up the Spirit, or chase him from conference to conference. You ask your Father. And then you keep the command this plan began with: 1 John 4:1-2 — "Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God... every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God."

Hold those two commands together and you have the whole plan in one posture. Asking without testing made the Corinthian mess. Testing without asking makes the unexpectant church. But asking and testing — open hands, clear eyes — is what it looks like to treat the Holy Spirit as what he actually is: a real person, fully God, who can be grieved by our carelessness and quenched by our coldness, and who delights to be sought.

Ask boldly. Test everything. And measure it all by the one thing the Spirit cannot help doing, because it is what he was sent to do and what he loves to do: he glorifies Jesus. Where Jesus is growing bigger, clearer, and dearer — in a loud church or a quiet one, through a dramatic gift or a well-worn Bible — there he is. He has been on every page of this plan. He is with you as you close it.

Going Deeper

End the plan with a two-part exercise. First, write one sentence at the top of a page: "The Spirit's job is to make me love Jesus more." Under it, list the three things in your whole life that have most done that — be honest; they may be very ordinary. Thank the Spirit for each one, by name. Second, pick the one experience, leader, or movement you have been unsure about for ten days, and give it the final test: has it made Jesus bigger, clearer, and dearer to me? Keep what passes. Release what does not. Then ask the Father, in Jesus's own words from Luke 11:13, to give you more of the Holy Spirit — and trust that this is one prayer he loves to answer.