Life on Mission

The Holy Spirit wasn’t sent to assure us lives of comfort and ease. The Spirit doesn’t live in us so we can rest comfortably in our easy chairs doing nothing for the kingdom of God. The Holy Spirit comes to us, disciples of Jesus, to empower us for a mission that cannot be accomplished apart from his supernatural help. Jesus elaborates on the Holy Spirit’s role in verses 8-15. He highlights two ways the Holy Spirit advances his mission.

Jesus, the light of the world, exposes sin (cf. 3:19-20). With Jesus’s departure, the Holy Spirit will continue to expose sin, but the Spirit will also convict the world of righteousness. How do you convict a person of righteousness? Isn’t righteousness a good thing? Throughout the Gospel of John we find two types of righteousness. One type is the righteousness of man apart from God (self-righteousness), and the other is the righteousness of God. These two types of righteousness regularly came into conflict. For instance, in chapter 9 Jesus healed a blind man on the Sabbath. The Jewish leaders condemned Jesus and characterized themselves as righteous defenders of God’s law, but in reality they were more concerned with their own public image than with helping those in need. False righteousness—any attempt to earn God’s favor on your own—is always a temptation. When I visited Africa, I was invited to eat at the home of one of the local men. We sat in his backyard and ate a dinner of boiled yams and peanuts. At one point one of his daughters brought out a pitcher of water and began to pour us glasses. He stopped her, took my glass, and poured it out on the ground. She was doing her best to be kind to me, but her best wasn’t good enough. He knew if I drank that water, I’d get sick. Her gift of water was a polluted offering. God calls our best efforts to please him “polluted” (Isa 64:6). They’re unacceptable. They’re tainted by sin and will be poured out as worthless. No one can come to God based on good works.

The Holy Spirit convicts the unbelieving world of sin (v. 9), righteousness (v. 10), and judgment (v. 11). Their judgment about Jesus is wrong. Jesus urged them to “judge according to righteous judgment” (7:24), but they persisted in their unbelief and as a result would face the same condemnation Satan himself faced. The Spirit reveals to the world their sin, self-righteousness, and condemnation in order to call men and women to repentance and faith. The word translated “convict” (v. 8) has the goal of convincing a person to turn from his or her sin. How does the conviction of the Holy Spirit take place? How does he call the unbelieving world to repentance and faith? He speaks through the disciples. The disciples are the agents the Holy Spirit uses to call the world to repentance. Trace the flow of this passage:

So the Spirit convicts the world by empowering the disciples to bear witness about Jesus. The Spirit brings conviction to the world through the message of the disciples. God blesses this unique combination. His Spirit will take the gospel proclaimed by his disciples and bring conviction to the world. The role of the disciple is to faithfully bear witness to Jesus, and the role of the Holy Spirit is to make that witness spiritually effective. John Calvin wrote,

How can someone’s voice penetrate minds, take root there, and eventually produce fruit making hearts of stone into hearts of flesh and renewing the people themselves unless the Spirit of Christ makes the Word alive? (John, 372)

Jesus gives the disciples an impossible task. When they heard, they must have thought, There’s no way we can do that. People won’t listen to us. You said yourself they would throw us out of the synagogues. This is crazy! There’s no way we can make this work. They were right. There was no way they could make this work, but Jesus, through the Spirit’s power, would accomplish everything he promised and commanded. Everything good that has happened in Christianity is the result of the Holy Spirit’s power.

Maybe you don’t realize the Spirit’s power in your life because you aren’t busy doing things only he can accomplish.

But do you know what you can’t do without the Spirit’s help?

For you to be faithful to the mission to which Jesus has called you, you need the Spirit’s help.

At this moment the disciples must have questions. Jesus describes a mission that will take an entire lifetime and might require them to give their lives. He unfolds a new community unique in the way it lives together. Their minds must have been buzzing with questions: How will this look? What should we do? How will we make decisions? Jesus doesn’t answer their questions; he gives them a promise. The Holy Spirit will guide them into all the truth they need to know (vv. 12-15). The answers to their questions will come, but they will come through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God will indwell them and instruct them as they continue on their mission.

Jesus makes a promise overflowing with kindness and grace. He says the Spirit will “guide” them (v. 13). The only other time that word is found in John’s writings is in Revelation 7:

For the Lamb who is at the center of the throne will shepherd them; he will guide them to springs of the waters of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. (v. 17; emphasis added)

The Holy Spirit will guide the disciples to the refreshing springs of truth like a shepherd leading thirsty sheep to a cool, refreshing spring. The Spirit will reiterate and expand the truth taught by Jesus. The Holy Spirit declares the revelation of Jesus Christ to the disciples.

In the following chapter Jesus will talk about those who believe based on the word of the disciples, the Scriptures. This promise of the Holy Spirit’s guidance into truth takes a different form for us than it did for the first disciples. They were reminded of what Jesus had taught them personally. We get the teachings of Jesus through them. The Twelve chosen by Jesus were used to inscripturate—to put in written form—the truth of Jesus. Now we are brought to the truth by the Holy Spirit as we open up the Word of God. The Spirit works through the Word. The Word is his means of conveying the gospel and bringing conviction of sin. We should never look for spiritual truth apart from his Word.

We receive personal guidance from the Spirit as we read the Word he wrote. I wonder if the reason we don’t read the Bible more often is because we don’t want to be guided by the Spirit. Too often we want people to agree with us, to rubber-stamp the decisions we’ve already made. The Holy Spirit is no rubber stamp. He’s a sword-wielding, flame-throwing God. We need to come to him humbly and beg him to tell us what to do. Instead we often open our Bibles and treat the Spirit’s words like a buffet table, taking what we like and passing by the rest. He promises to guide us, but we must listen to everything he says. The truth can be hard to hear. Sometimes we’d rather be ignorant, even lied to, but the longer we listen to lies, the more painful the truth will be. The Spirit guides us into truth as we listen to him speak through his Word.