Thursday, October 07, 2010

The Comforter

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."
Acts 1:8

Once a person understands that he is condemned before God, and that God made a way for him to be declared righteous regardless of his sin, there should be a feeling of overwhelming gratitude in that person’s heart. He will be grateful to God for forgiveness, grateful to Christ for his sacrifice, and grateful to the law for showing him the way to grace. This gratitude alone should lead to a desire for the things of God and holiness.  But God does not leave us with just gratitude. He provides us with help to live a new life.

The Promise

Jesus did not just die on the cross to take the punishment for our sin; He rose from the dead so that we could live a life pleasing to God. This is another reason that God saves us; so that he might fulfill a promise:
He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit.[1]

Near the end of the last chapter, we talked about how Paul spoke of ‘the new way of the Spirit’, which superseded the old way of the written code. The Jews had the law of the old covenant which was given to show them God’s standard for living. Jesus fulfilled that law, dying upon the cross and rising from the dead, establishing a new covenant. So what governs the life of a new covenant believer?

God prophesied through Jeremiah that a time would come when the written law would be superseded by a new covenant:

"This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel
       after that time," declares the LORD.
       "I will put my law in their minds
       and write it on their hearts.
       I will be their God,
       and they will be my people.”[2]

So God has now written His law on our hearts and minds by giving us the Holy Spirit. He lives in us, teaching us right from wrong. We need no longer look to the written code to know what sin is, God dwells within us and tells us what sin is. And since we are set free from the written code, sin can no longer use it to create contrary desires in us. Though we still struggle with the flesh, we are not left powerless in that struggle.

The Purpose

The work of the Holy Spirit has a wonderful effect in the life of the believer. He gives us power over sin, power to live a holy life, and the power to understand spiritual truth. But we need to understand that God did not give this gift simply for our own betterment. He betters us through the Holy Spirit so that we may serve his purposes with our new lives.

We have a fantastic clue as to why we receive the Spirit in the promise that Jesus made to his disciples at his ascension:

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."[3]

The power, abilities and gifts that we receive as a result of the indwelling of the Spirit do not have our improvement as an end. They improve us so that we may live lives that are glorifying to God. And God wants us to glorify him for the purpose of witnessing to our world.

God creates in us a new set of desires when he gives us the Spirit. If He dwells in us, our minds should no longer be absorbed by the things of this world. “Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires.”[4] We should be absorbed in the furtherance of God’s kingdom through everything we do, as this is the desire of the Spirit.

This is a good test to see where we are at with God. What are our minds set on? Are we more concerned with our homes, marriages and families than we are with the kingdom of God?[5] Are we preoccupied with the temporal things of this world or the eternal things of God?[6]

These are important questions. Jesus said "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God."[7] Since God gives us the Spirit to make us fit for service, what does it mean if we are looking back to the world? Paul adds this: “You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ.”[8]

If we are not fulfilling the calling of God because we have no desire to fulfill it, we may not have the Holy Spirit dwelling within us. If we do not have the Spirit, we do not belong to Christ. If we do not belong to Christ, we are not saved. If you have little desire for the things of God, I suggest that you review the past several chapters and test yourself with the law of God. Maybe you have never been led to Christ by the law so that you may be justified by faith. It took me twenty-two years of floundering around before this truth got a hold of me and set me free from the law and on fire for the kingdom.

The Power

Jesus told the Jews who believed him, "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.”[9] Holding to something indicates that we have grasped it to begin with. Many think that we have a discipleship crisis in the American church today – that we have done a poor job of teaching converts. In truth the problem might actually be that we have done too good a job of teaching the unconverted. The prevalence of apathy in the church toward the word of God, fellowship and prayer leads me to believe that our churches are actually packed with unbelievers. They are not really disciples because they have never been given the kind of teaching that they can hold to. There is no hunger or thirst for God’s righteousness because the appetite for these things has never been whetted by the knowledge of God’s saving power.

You cannot disciple an unregenerate person; the unspiritual mind will never grasp spiritual truth. At best you can create a religion of self-righteousness by teaching religious dogma, but you cannot teach the saving knowledge of Christ. Jesus, quoting the prophet Isaiah, said of the unbelieving, “You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.”[10] This is a perfect description of many in our churches today. Salvation is the foundation of discipleship; without true saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, which cannot be taught, you cannot be a disciple. Trying to disciple an unbeliever is literally like whipping a dead horse. It is pointless. And it can cause great damage to the church.

When we look at the church today, we often wonder what has happened to it and how it has become so much like the world. I firmly believe it is because so many in the church today made decisions for the Lord without experiencing the power of God which lies in the gospel truth. They have had a religious experience without ever having been saved. We teach and teach and teach and they are ever hearing and seeing without ever understanding or perceiving. Paul foresaw the state of the church today when he wrote to Timothy:

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power.[11]

It would be easy to think that Paul is not writing about the church in this passage if it were not for the fact that he lists many things here that he would never expect from those in the world. He goes on to tell Timothy that people which behave in this way are “always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth.”[12] It is not a lack of teaching that leads to this kind of behavior, but a lack of the acknowledgment of God’s power. We need to invest in the gospel and expect the miracle of salvation rather than perpetuating religious training.

How could the 21st century discipleship model have worked in the early church? We say the ideal discipleship ratio is one teacher to one disciple, with one to twelve being about the maximum (based on the twelve disciples of the gospels). On the day of Pentecost there were 120 Disciples gathered in the upper room when the Holy Spirit descended upon them. Peter began preaching to those gathered in Jerusalem, and within hours about 3,000 people were saved![13] When you do the math, this would make each of the original 120 disciples, newly inhabited by the Spirit themselves, responsible to disciple 25 others. Within a few days, more than 5,000 would be added, making each responsible to disciple at least 70 others!

It is intriguing to me that Luke described these 3,000 as having been ‘added to the church’, not simply responding to the message. In the modern church, we have come to expect that about 90% of those responding to a mass invitation will fall away. In other words, by modern standards, of the 3,000 that responded to Peter’s message that day, we would expect 2,700 to walk away from their decision to follow Christ. Apparently there was a zero percent fall away rate in this case. We know what became of these converts, because we read in the following verse that “They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.[14] Evidently they somehow understood what it meant to be disciples right from the start. How could that be without intensive follow-up and discipleship programs?

The answer undoubtedly lies in the response of the people to the message that Peter preached that day. Scripture says that those who heard were “cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’”[15] This is not ‘heads bowed, eyes closed’ evangelism; these people have clearly recognized that they are in desperate need of God’s mercy. Peter preached without compromise in the expectation that the power of God would save people. When people are genuinely saved and the Spirit dwells within them, they are hungry for the things of God and will desire learning, fellowship and prayer. They will devote themselves to these things. Is that not discipleship?

The word ‘disciple’ does not appear in the New Testament after the Book of Acts. In the epistles, salvation and discipleship are spoken of synonymously. This makes sense when you consider that after the resurrection and ascension of Christ, the Holy Spirit was sent to disciple those who believe. The words of Jesus bare this out: “But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.”[16]  During his earthly ministry, Jesus was discipling people who were yet to be saved and receive the Spirit. After the Spirit came, things changed drastically in the church, with the Spirit becoming the primary teacher, counselor and comforter. Paul echoes this fact when he tells Timothy that “God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.”[17]

In no way does this mean that we should abandon the teaching of new believers. The word disciple means, literally, a learner or pupil. We must teach new believers from the scripture so that they can have an understanding of the greater mysteries of God; the deeper truths of scripture. But this should be something that they eagerly desire so that teaching, rather than being simply an inculcation of religious principles, becomes a lifelong passionate search for divine truth. Learning the things of God should be something they devote themselves to with sincerity, not religious obligation. This kind of devotion can only come as we are diligent to accurately share the first and most important revelation that any believer encounters, the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

I know that what I am suggesting here is radical. I can imagine that some are thinking I only want to get out of having to disciple people, and I do. In place of all the emphasis on discipleship in the church, I would rather we expend our energies preaching the gospel in the power of the Spirit with the expectation that God saves and the Spirit creates disciples. This is difficult for us to embrace because we cannot build a program that manifests the power of God to radically change lives, and we don’t know how to deal with truth that cannot be packaged in practical terms. We prefer to keep on pretending that the Spirit is behind our ‘relatable’ teaching because it keeps us in an earthly realm where we can produce documented (though worldly) results. Unfortunately, it also keeps us from entering the realm of eternal truth where the power of God that actually changes hearts and lives resides.

 The fact is that we have no control over the saving power of God, but if we could begin to preach in the power of the Spirit we might once again see that power unleashed to revive the modern church as it once built the early church. The most important thing we could possibly teach in our churches today is how to preach the biblical gospel clearly and accurately. There can be no other answer to the apathy of the church than the true saving and keeping power of God, which brings us full circle to Acts 1:8 wherein Jesus promised to send the Spirit to make us powerful witnesses in the world. We have tried virtually everything else to build the kingdom without success, and until the day that we welcome the power of God as a reality again, Christianity will continue to struggle as mere religion. The gospel has been, from the beginning, the antithesis of religion, not an entrance into it.

Conclusion

Please don’t get the idea that I think any of this is easy to accept. I know it isn’t. I can almost guarantee that as you have read these things you thought the same thing I first thought when I discovered them; that’s all well and good, but it’s impossible!

In a sense you are correct. The kingdom of God is impossible. The teachings are too hard to understand. There is an expectation of complete reliance on God which our human nature abhors. There is absolutely nothing at all practical about any of it. Our part in all of it seems very inconsequential, and that does not satisfy our desire to take credit for our works. No matter how well we understand grace there is a part of us that wants to earn our salvation. That is of our flesh.

I would also bet that, like me, there is a part of you that not only wants to believe it, but does believe it. There is that part of you that knows that the scripture is right beyond question, even though it often does not seem to make sense. Listen to that part. That is the wisdom of God that “calls things that are not as though they were.”[18] That is the Comforter speaking.


[1] Galatians 3:14
[2] Jeremiah 31:33
[3] Acts 1:8
[4] Romans 8:5
[5] Luke 18:29
[6] 2 Corinthians 4:18
[7] Luke 9:62
[8] Romans 8:9
[9] John 8:31
[10] Matthew 13:14
[11] 2 Timothy 3:1-4
[12] 2 Timothy 3:7
[13] Acts 2:41
[14] Acts 2:42
[15] Acts 2:37
[16] John 14:26
[17] 2 Timothy 1:7
[18] Romans 4:17