John chapter 16, reading from
verse eight. And it is the Lord that is speaking
once again to his disciples prior to his arrest and his going to
the cross. And he is speaking about the
Holy Spirit. And this is what he says. And
when he has come, he will reprove the world of sin and of righteousness
and of judgment. of sin because they believe not
on me, of righteousness because I go to my father and ye see
me no more, of judgment because the prince of this world is judged. I have yet many things to say
unto you, but ye cannot bear them now, how be it When He,
the Spirit of Truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth,
for He shall not speak of Himself, but whatsoever He shall hear,
that shall He speak, and He will show you things to come. He shall glorify Me, for He shall
receive of Mine, and shall show it unto you. All things that
the Father hath are mine. Therefore said I that he shall
take of mine and shall show it unto you. Amen. May the Lord
bless to us this reading from his word. Our Lord Jesus Christ
has spoken several times in these recent chapters. concerning the
coming of the Holy Spirit in chapter 14 and in chapter 15.
And now he does so again in our passage today. And these references,
as we have already seen, are clearly intended to comfort and
encourage the Lord's disciples in light of Christ's imminent
arrest, his crucifixion, his death, his departure or his ascension
to his father in heaven. So that the Lord anticipating
all the trials that the disciples have to go through is encouraging
them, is comforting them with the promise of the coming Holy
Spirit. And the Savior's method methodology,
if you like, the way in which he relieves his disciples' anxieties
is to repeatedly return to the ministry and the offices of the
Holy Ghost. And I think that emphasizes how
important, in the Lord's own mind and estimation, was the
coming of the Holy Spirit. In chapter 14, Jesus calls him
the spirit of truth. He does so here again in our
chapter today. He speaks of him there as the
one who leads Christ's church into all truth. In chapter 15,
Jesus spoke of him as his witness who will testify of him, of Christ. In today's verses, the Lord Jesus
again names him the Comforter, which is both his title and his
office, his activity. Comforting the Lord's people
is the Spirit's great work. We're going to talk today about
a number of ways in which the Holy Spirit's activities, the
Holy Spirit's role and his office is manifested in the church and
in the lives of God's people. But I want us just in the introduction
to nail down this point, that in all the ways that the Holy
Spirit deals with us, The principle, the first purpose of all is our
consolation. To use the word that we've already
hit upon earlier today, He suckers us. He comes to us to assist,
to help, to embrace, to surround, to protect. He is the comforter. Let me say that another way.
However, the Holy Spirit deals with you as one of the Lord's
redeemed children. He will bless that experience
to your soul. In the long run, you will be
comforted, even if for the moment the experience is harsh and painful
and troublesome. None of us enjoy trial, and yet
Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians chapter four of our light affliction,
which is but for a moment, and that it worketh for us a far
more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. Now what is the Holy
Spirit's work amongst us? It is the Holy Spirit who gives
spiritual life and opens our spiritual understanding to God's
dealings with us. It is he who initiates communion
between Christ and our soul. It is he who maintains that communication
on a spiritual level between Christ and the church. It is the Holy Spirit that brings
us through prayer to experience Christ's presence and help. It
is the Holy Spirit that ministers to us in meditation or under
the preaching of the gospel or in reading the word of the scriptures,
the word of truth in the Bible. When you hear the Lord speak
in his word, or when the Lord speaks through preaching, it
is the Holy Spirit who gives ears to hear and eyes to see
these spiritual things. Or when you feel liberty in prayer,
it's the Holy Spirit who helpeth our infirmities, Says Paul, for
we know not what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit
itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot
be uttered. So our prayer, what I'm going
to be stressing here is that every aspect and element of that
communication channel that is opened between God and man, by
which the Father, by which the Son ministers good things, His
goodness, His faithfulness, His blessings to His people, are
received by the Holy Spirit's dealings with us in our souls. When we face the great crises
and troubles of life, it is the Holy Spirit who applies the peace
that passeth understanding. It is the Holy Spirit that grants
comfort to our soul by reminding us and teaching us and showing
us that all these things act and work in the providence of
God for our eternal good. Even when we encounter those
hardest of experiences that generate the deepest losses and longings
of our lives, perhaps it's a bereavement, perhaps it's the loneliness that
flows from that. It is the Holy Spirit that teaches
us that we sorrow not even as others which have no hope. When
we rest in hope of eternal life and possess faith in Jesus Christ,
the faith that so many mock and so few embrace and so few understand,
it is the Holy Spirit who grants us this insight and this assurance. For ye have received the Spirit
of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself
beareth witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. In all these things, we are more
than conquerors through him that loved us. And it is the Holy
Spirit who ministers all these things, who gifts us, the joy
of the Lord. the joy that is unspeakable and
full of glory. And so when the Lord Jesus Christ,
speaking to his disciples, telling them on the eve of his arrest
and his trial and his crucifixion and his death, that the Holy
Spirit will come and telling them repeatedly when he has come,
all of the things that he will do for them, it is because the
Lord knows that the Holy Spirit is the one who will be that receptor,
that means whereby all the divine and spiritual blessings of God
will be received in the heart and awareness and consciousness
and understanding of the church and the people of God. It is
because the Holy Spirit does all this that it is blessed to
read these verses from John 14 and 15 and 16 and to observe
the Savior dwelling so extensively upon the Holy Spirit to console
and reassure his friends. It was God's ordained purpose
in the covenant of grace and peace that the Holy Spirit would
supply this office to his people, that he would come to the church
when the Saviour returned to his Father in heaven, his redemption
work complete. It was the Father's purpose and
the covenant of grace that the Holy Spirit would be sent to
help and to comfort and to instruct and to encourage and to dwell
with Christ's people. Are we not a blessed people all
round? We are everlastingly loved by
God the Father. We are eternally saved by God
the Son and we are constantly comforted by God the Holy Spirit. Here the triune God has shown
himself to be engaged and involved in the well-being of fallen sinners,
worms, created beings that rebelled and treated God despitefully. And yet here is God so totally
committed to us. in love and salvation and the
comfort of our souls day by day, that the eternal God, the all-powerful,
omnipotent, omniscient God is so engaged for you and me, brother
and sister. These were wonderful promises
that the Saviour gave to the apostles and gives to us with
them. There's such a fullness of joy
in these things for the church. I don't know whether you're just
like me, but often when something good is expected to happen, something
good is going to happen, there is as much joy in anticipating
the good as there is in the experience of it. Well, that's an element
here of God's goodness to us in these promises. We have the
joy of anticipating the fulfillment of Christ's promises. Then we
have the pleasure of experiencing the fulfillment of those promises. And in the way in which the Lord
has presented the work of the Holy Spirit in these chapters
14, 15, and 16, we also have the privilege of tracking and
tracing the ways of God in his continuous care towards the children
of promise. who are the object of his love
and in whom he delights. So whether it's in the anticipation,
whether it's in the experience, or whether it's in the measurement
and the tracing of these things, we are a sublimely blessed people. And the goodness of God is witnessed
in all his dealings with us. So the Lord Jesus Christ promised
his disciples, here in this sermon, in these words that he preached
and proclaimed to them, he promised that the Comforter, the Holy
Spirit, would come from the Father. He went to the cross, he died
for his people, he rose from the dead, and he ascended into
heaven. And thereafter, just as Christ
had said, the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost. We mentioned this
in a little note yesterday. In the Acts of the Apostles,
we read that the Holy Spirit came with a sound from heaven
as of a rushing, mighty wind, and cloven tongues like as of
fire and it sat upon each of them, that's the apostles, and
they were all filled with the Holy Ghost. And having come at
Pentecost, the Spirit also comes into the hearts of all Christ's
people in the work of regeneration and conversion. So we see that
initial blast, that initial coming of the Holy Spirit in promise
of Christ's words at Pentecost. But there is a repetition, there
is a continuation of that coming of the Holy Spirit into the lives
of God's elect, into the lives of those for whom Christ has
died, in their personal experience of grace, in what we call regeneration,
the new life, the new birth, and conversion. And this work
of the Holy Spirit is a transforming experience in the lives of God's
people. And it's that transforming experience
that the Lord is describing in our verses today when he tells
the disciples of the work of the Holy Spirit and what he will
perform in reproving the world of sin and righteousness and
judgment. And it's these three things that
we're going to think about for the rest of our time together
today. This reproving of the world of
sin, righteousness, and judgment. And this activity, this reproving
activity by the Holy Spirit is applied to God's chosen people. This is another example of John
using the word world to mean not every single individual in
the world, but the world of God's elect, both Jew and Gentile. And that's the sense that we
have in this passage as well. And let us remind ourselves,
this is not a fearsome thing. Like all the Spirit's dealings
with God's people, it is for our good, and it will usher forth
to our Comforter. It is, after all, the Comforter
who is coming and reproving the Lord's people of sin and righteousness
and judgment. So let us think together about
what this involves and what it means. Think of it like this. Think of it as the Holy Spirit
coming and exposing to us our sin. Showing us our need for
Christ and convincing us of the suitability of Christ as a savior. This is the work of the Holy
Spirit in reproving us. It's a spiritual work of conversion
in the lives of God's elect. Now, undoubtedly, some do find
the experience of conversion traumatic. especially if they
are brought through an extended period of conviction before discovering
cleansing and forgiveness in Christ. And that's not just in
that initial conversion experience, because we are being converted
all the time. And very often the Lord's people,
whether it's because they subsequently sin and have to be held accountable
for that, whether it's because we feel the rod of God's discipline
in our lives correcting us and steering us back into the paths
that he would have us walk in, or whether it is because We have
to taste the bitter consequences of our sin in our own life's
experience, as David undoubtedly had to in his. There may be some
enduring bitterness of experience in these dealings of the Holy
Spirit. Nevertheless, it will issue in
a comfortable experience. It will issue in us coming closer
to Christ, and that will be a joyful experience when we will have
a sense of burdens lifted, an awareness of guilt removed, and
the experience and the renewed experience of peace with God. So that the reproving activities
of God the Holy Spirit always are to be measured against the
standard of his comforting office, his comforting role in our lives.
Now the Lord Jehovah, does not bring his people to faith in
Christ without first revealing to them their need of the Savior. Let us accept that as a fact
of God's revelation. The Lord does not bring his people
to faith in Christ without first revealing to them their need
of a Savior. And this is a threefold work. He reproves of sin, he reproves
of righteousness, and he reproves of judgment. Or he convinces
of sin, righteousness, and judgment. And we're going to look at each
of these just now for a few minutes. And the first one is this. As
Jesus here explains to his disciples, the Spirit of God convinces us
of our sin and he shows us how we have offended God. He reveals,
the Spirit of God reveals to us the damning consequence of
rebellion and unbelief. Now, it is absolutely true that
all men and women, all boys and girls, are sinners and guilty
before the Holy God. And you may wonder if any honest
person needs to be told that. Surely we all know that we are
sinners. We all know that we have done
things wrong. We all know that we are not perfect
and holy and good in everything that we do. Surely no one thinks
that they're perfect. But here's the rub. This is the
difficulty. We're not honest people. We're
not honest folk. We not only kid others on about
ourselves, we deceive ourselves. We deceive others, we deceive
ourselves, and we try to deceive God. And we ourselves are deceived
by Satan. We're by nature blind to our
real condition and our real state. And consequently, we don't have
any concept of needing deliverance or needing salvation. We don't
have any awareness that we need to be cleansed from our sin.
That deceitfulness of heart goes right to the core of our being. The hymn writer that we often
quote, I don't think we've got one of his hymns today. Maybe
we have, maybe the last one is. Joseph Hart, he wrote this. To
understand these things are right, he's speaking about sin in a
person's life. He says, to understand these
things are right, this grand distinction should be known.
Though all are sinners in God's sight, There are but few so in
their own. All men and women are sinners
in God's sight, but there are very few who are sinners in their
own sight. And that is our state and condition
before the Holy Spirit reproves us of our sin. God's elect have
to be reproved. They have to be convinced of
their sin. And the Bible speaks of sin in
two ways. There's our original fallen state,
that is the rebellious nature that we inherit from our parents. they inherited from their parents
and they inherited from their parents right back to the beginning
in the garden when Adam by his disobedience ruined all his future
race. There's that corruption of nature
that is in us all and then There's the way in which that corruption
reveals itself in the things we say, in the things we do,
in the things we think. So that every part of us is polluted
and contaminated by deceitfulness of heart. Sin permeates all we
are and all we do. And the sin we all commit is a sin of self-righteousness
and self-justification. We tell ourselves we're good
enough. We try hard. We think of ourselves
as better than others. We compare ourselves to what
other people do all the time and we think, well, I'm not that
bad. And the nature of this deception
is that we never seek, nor can we because we are blind and dead
towards these things, we never seek the righteousness of God
and we never seek the righteousness of Christ. Therefore, the first
task of the Spirit of God is to convince us of our sin and
of our need. And what the Spirit does is he
draws back the tissue of lies that we tell ourselves and he
gives us a glimpse of how guilty we are under God's law and the
judgment that we deserve. And that's called conviction
of sin. Our own sin and our sorry state
convicts us. We see what we really are and
God's law convicts us because we understand how probing that
law is in our lives and it feels as if we have no hope and we're
going to be overwhelmed and we must be eternally lost and God
will judge us everlastingly. And it's a heavy and fearful
state. It's a heavy and fearful burden. Now, I don't want to get too
complicated here, but let me just mention this in case anyone
is wondering about it. Not all conviction is spiritual
conviction. There is a difference between
bitter personal regret, such as Judas Iscariot felt, even
to the point of self-destruction, and true spiritual repentance. The law of God does a pretty
good job of condemning sin on its own, even without the work
of the Holy Spirit. But that is not repentance unto
life. That is not a spiritual work. That is a legal work. That is
the law itself condemning people. and causing them to regret and
to an extent repent, but not spiritually, for the wickedness
that they have done. But this brings us on to the
second work of the Spirit, for there is more. to be done in
a sinner's life to bring them to a knowledge of the truth.
And this is the second work of the Holy Spirit. If the Holy
Spirit grants us true spiritual repentance, He also proclaims
the righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ. And He teaches
us how suitable, how needful, how essential Christ is for our
case. He teaches us how inadequate
we are of ourselves to please God and how deficient are our
good works. The Holy Spirit convinces us
to seek a better righteousness. So he convinces of sin and he
convinces us of Christ's righteousness. the better righteousness, the
righteousness which is of God's own making, which is God's own
righteousness and which is the only acceptable righteousness
in the court of heaven. So this conviction requires sinners
to hear the gospel and to learn of Christ. That's why we preach
as we do. That's why we are endeavouring
to send this message as far as it can go, whether we're preaching
in a building to those who gather or whether we're preaching by
this means to the ends of the earth, God willing. It is why
we preach the righteousness of Jesus Christ. It is why we declare
the gospel, the good news of what Christ has done for sinners. Most people don't care what Christ
has done because most don't know that they are sinners in the
hands of an angry God. But when a spiritually convinced
sinner discovers the way of life in Christ, That person desires,
that person seeks, that person longs for the perfect righteousness,
the complete cleansing, the divine acceptance, which only Christ
can give. That's what the Lord's talking
about in his sermon on the mountain in Matthew chapter five, where
he speaks of that blessedness of hungering and thirsting after
righteousness. That is the work of the Holy
Spirit. in the life of a convinced sinner that they need a saviour
and they hunger after that righteousness that Christ alone can give. And this brings us to the third
work of the Holy Spirit. He convinces of sin, he convinces
of righteousness, and he convinces of judgment. The Holy Spirit
gives the gift of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ so that salvation
can be said to be all of God's grace. He applies Christ's redeeming
blood to our conscience to cleanse and purify our hearts. He delivers the sinner from guilt
and fear and judgment because he shows the Lord Jesus Christ
to have had the victory over Satan. He gives us confidence
that Christ's death succeeded, that Satan has been defeated,
and judged and that the debt of our sin has been paid and
the burden is cancelled against us personally. That's the work of the Holy Spirit
too, in such a way he convinces us of judgment, that judgment
has been effected and that we are free and at liberty in Christ. And I want us to note something.
The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, does not force compliance. on God's elect. He persuades. And yes, it can be a traumatic
experience, but it is gently done. He makes the unbeliever
willing to trust Christ. And then when the gift of faith
comes, we do trust Christ. We are brought to that point
where there's nothing more that we want than to trust Christ. and he gives faith to Christ's
lost sheep, to trust in the Good Shepherd for salvation, who will
then lead us out in our Christian experience. Faith in Jesus Christ
is not a human creation. It's a gift from God. Salvation
is not of man's free will, as so many now preach. There's no
circumventing, there's no short-cutting the Holy Spirit's work. These
three stages must all occur. Elsewhere, the Apostle John tells
us in 1 John chapter 12 verse 13, sorry, in John chapter 1
verse 12 and 13, he says, but as many as received him, to them
gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe
on his name. Which were born, nor of blood,
nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of
God. Who is that that is speaking
of? God the Holy Spirit. We are born, born again, not
of blood, not of the will of the flesh, not of the will of
man, but by God the Holy Spirit. And Paul says in Romans chapter
9 verse 16, salvation is not of him that willeth, not of him
that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy. So here we see
this testimony, this apostolic testimony, that God the Holy
Spirit works this work in the hearts of God's elect to bring
them to that comfortable experience of forgiveness by the blood of
Jesus Christ. Faith is a spiritual quality
with a spiritual origin and it manifests itself in divinely
ordered ways. There is a way of life. And the
effector, the one who brings that to pass is God, the Holy
Spirit. And it is true that our individual
experiences will differ. There will be nevertheless repentance
and confession of sin. There will be a going to Christ
for cleansing. Our self-righteousness must submit
to God's righteousness. and the fear of judgment and
condemnation will be turned to joy. New life, a new creation,
spiritual growth. will follow as the Spirit ministers
a knowledge of Jesus Christ and wisdom of holy things to men
and women and boys and girls who have been so convinced of
sin and righteousness and judgment. This is called regeneration.
It's a new life. It's a new beginning. It's a
new creation. And the Apostle Paul writes to
Titus and he says that salvation comes to God's elect not by the
works of righteousness which we have done but according to
his mercy he saved us by the washing of regeneration and renewing
of the Holy Ghost. Here again is this Holy Ghost
activity in the life of Christ's people. The Holy Spirit works a sovereign
work consistent with God's election and he identifies and distinguishes
and gathers God's church from out of the world, out of the
world of Jews and Gentiles by reproving them of sin, by convincing
them of righteousness and of judgment. The apostolic preaching
that took place after the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost,
that apostolic preaching in Jerusalem and Judea and ultimately to the
ends of the earth, it wasn't just a random shotgun approach. It was purposeful. It was purposefully
directed by God the Holy Spirit according to his timing and in
the manner that he directed. and having discovered Christ's
sheep, the Spirit converts and nurtures and ministers to them
through firstly the apostles and then faithful men and preachers
and the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. He ministers and nurtures
the Lord's people wherever they are found. He supplies grace
and he prepares them for glory. The Holy Spirit doesn't speak
of himself. He speaks of Christ and he glorifies
Christ by teaching God's people the doctrines of Christ. Can
I say the simplicity of Christ? and also the deep truths of the
gospel. And it is the spirit of truth
who leads us into all truth. I'm going to wrap it up there
for today. I had one or two more things
that I was going to say, but time has beat me on this occasion.
And we will leave it there. It's such a full subject to think
upon. And I trust that the Lord will
bless these thoughts to us at this time. Amen.