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Christ is risen. He has risen indeed. Hallelujah.
Jesus says, “I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice and no one will take your joy from you.”
You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints, two sermons that Jesus has for us today, first regarding the Holy Spirit and then regarding a joy that can’t be stolen, which is quite amazing.
The first thing Jesus says, and this is leading on from how He had been speaking to the disciples before the gospel reading from John 16, He said, “I’ll send you the Comforter, the Spirit of truth, who will convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment.” In fact, Jesus says that it’s a good thing that I’m going from you because if I didn’t go, the Holy Spirit wouldn’t come, but because I’m leaving, the Holy Spirit will come.
So Jesus, and it’s an amazing thing to remember, this is on Maundy Thursday, Jesus is looking past his death, past the suffering, past his death, past his burial, even past his resurrection and past his ascension, all the way to Pentecost, and he says that’s the aim and the goal. That’s the good part. That’s the blessing.
Jesus is saying, all this that I’m suffering, all this that I’m doing, all this agony and trouble and all of this is for the goal, at least one of the goals, but the chief goal and the thing that Jesus is talking about here is so that He can deliver to you the Holy Spirit. That’s the reason for the suffering, the reason for the dying and the rising and the ascending into heaven and sitting down at the right hand of the Father so that He can send forth the Holy Spirit into the hearts of His faithful people, the Spirit of truth.
Now I have heard Lutherans accused as a pastor in seminary, even before seminary, even when we were thinking about becoming Lutheran. One of the accusations against the Lutherans was, well, you know, the Lutherans, they don’t talk about the Holy Spirit very much. And, in a way I believe it, in a way I think that that accusation might actually be true. In a way I don’t think it is, but there is a way that, you know, if you were to just ask people, what does the Holy Spirit do? What is the work of the Holy Spirit? Why does the Holy Spirit come?
I think that the conversation in the last 150 years in the church has been hijacked. So, most people think that the work of the Holy Spirit is to kind of make us go crazy. The Holy Spirit comes and you sort of lose your mind or you lose control. Now the extreme example is the guys on TV who are blowing on people and waving their jacket around and they’re all falling over and laughing uncontrollably and barking like dogs and all that. That’s called even being slain in the Spirit. That is not biblical. There’s nothing in the Scriptures about that.
But even, I think even if we sort of absorb this idea that the Spirit takes us away from our vocation, takes us away from our calling, the Spirit comes along and sort of drives us this way and that very impulsively, that’s not the teaching of the Scripture. But I think because we’ve sort of let that teaching stand, here’s how the Holy Spirit acts, then we sort of don’t know what to do with it.
Let’s just say clearly that this is not, the Holy Spirit does not come so that you would lose self-control. In fact, St. Paul says that the fruit of the Spirit, remember, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. So that when the Holy Spirit comes, He’s not taking away control of ourselves. That’s what the evil spirits do when they possess someone.
No, the Holy Spirit comes and gives us the gift of self-control. The Holy Spirit especially comes to help us in the work of our calling. This is, I think, the amazing clarity that the Bible gives to us, and we should simply recover this and rejoice in this, is that the Holy Spirit… when the Lord gives you an office, or when the Lord gives you a vocation, or when the Lord gives you a calling, He promises to give you the Holy Spirit to help you with that calling and that office.
So next week, for example, we’re going to have five of the young students of the Word come to be confirmed. They’re going to confess their faith and then I’ll lay my hands on them and I’ll pray that they receive the Holy Spirit. Now do they have the Holy Spirit already? Yes, they’re baptized. No one can say Jesus is Lord apart from the Holy Spirit.
So why do we pray that they would have the Holy Spirit? Because now they’re entering into the office of a public Christian, of a confessing Christian, of a communing Christian, and we’re praying that God the Holy Spirit would come and help them according to their office. Or if you’ve been there when pastors were ordained, the pastor comes forward and all the other pastors come up and they lay their hands on them and they pray that the Holy Spirit would come, and the people sitting in the back say, remember, we probably should have called a pastor who had the Holy Spirit already.
Well, he has the Holy Spirit, he’s baptized. In fact, we pray especially for seminarians that God, the Holy Spirit, would bless them in their vocation of studying the Word. But now, when a man enters into the office of preaching, who could do that without the Holy Spirit’s help? Who could be a servant of the Lord and of His Word and of His people without the Holy Spirit guiding and giving strength and wisdom?
So we pray that the Holy Spirit would come to help those who are in the office to do the work of the office. It’s the same reason the pastor lays his hands on the bride and the bridegroom when they’re being married and says may God give you the blessing that he gave to Adam and Eve in the garden that you may please him in all your life so that now as a husband or as a wife we pray that we would receive the Holy Spirit to do the works of our calling.
This should be our daily prayer that God would fill us with his Spirit to give us the wisdom and the courage and the strength needed to do what the Lord has appointed us to do: to be a Christian and to confess his name in the world, to be a Christian and repent of our sins and trust that the Lord Jesus is our Savior, to be a good and faithful husband or wife or child or grandfather or grandmother or student or teacher or worker or boss or neighbor or friend.
The Lord has given you all of these callings and he hasn’t left you alone. He’s given you a Spirit so that you can begin to love and serve and work according to His good will. That’s what Jesus says. It’s a good thing that you go away because if I didn’t go I wouldn’t send the Spirit but because I’m sitting at the right hand of the Father I’m going to send forth the Holy Spirit who will teach you.
The Holy Spirit teaches us the things that we can only know by the Spirit. Number one, that we’re sinners, that our sins offend God, that we deserve His wrath and punishment, and that Christ has died for our sins, that Christ is our Savior, that Christ is our Redeemer, that Christ has opened paradise for us. And then the Holy Spirit gives us wisdom to live according to our callings.
Now how does this work? This has come up a couple of times in the last few months where people have said, Pastor, how is it that the Holy Spirit comes to us? It’s hard to answer that question, but I can give you a picture. I picked up this picture from Martin Luther and I hope this is helpful. The picture is that our hearts, our bodies and souls are like the tabernacle in the Old Testament. Do you remember how Moses received the instructions for the tabernacle? There’s the outer court and then there’s the tabernacle itself.
If you can imagine your body is like the outer court and your soul is like the tabernacle. So that we have an inner life and we have an outer life and those two things are related to one another. How you feel in your body affects how you feel in your heart and what you think and feel and what you hope and dream and what you’re afraid of all in the soul that affects your body as well. They’re interacting with one another.
But remember in the tabernacle there were two rooms. There was the outer room, the holy place. That’s where the showbread was and that’s where the candles were, the lampstand. That’s where the incense altar was burning. And then there was the Holy of Holies, that inner room that was dark, covered by the curtain. The only thing that was in there was the Ark of the Covenant, and the priest would just go in there once a year on the Day of Atonement with the blood of the Lamb and the blood of the bull for his own sins and for the people’s sins and pour it on the altar.
If you could think of your soul in some ways as it has two parts, and the outer part is what we normally refer to as the soul, but that inner room, that Holy of Holies, that’s the Spirit so that all of us have a place in our hearts for God to dwell. Now if we don’t believe in Christ, if we’re unbelievers, that Spirit is an empty Spirit. The lights are out. There’s nothing going on there.
But when you’re baptized, God the Holy Spirit takes up residence in your own heart. You become, remember how Paul says it, your bodies are the temple of the Spirit, and so the Holy Spirit comes there, and the Holy Spirit is now living inside of you. You’re a Christian, which means you have the Spirit, and the Spirit has you. And the Holy Spirit is there to amplify the Word of God in your own heart and in your own conscience, to amplify the Ten Commandments so that you know that you have sinned and offended God and at most especially to amplify the gospel so that the Holy Spirit testifies in your own heart the very thing that you’re hearing me say to you today that all of your sins are forgiven.
And so we have the testimony of the Spirit and we rejoice in that and we pray over and over in our lives that God would fill us with the Holy Spirit. This is our hope, it’s our joy that we grab onto this. This is what Jesus is saying. It’s good that I leave because I’ll send you the Spirit of truth. He’ll guide you into the truth. He doesn’t speak on his own authority. What he hears from me and from the Father, he speaks to you. He will glorify me, says Jesus. He’ll take what’s mine and declare it to you.
So we rejoice that Jesus has given us the Spirit. And may this be our daily prayer that God would fill us, that God’s Spirit would fill us, give us repentance and courage, wisdom, strength, compassion.
The second part of Jesus’ sermon is the little while sermon. It comes up seven times in the text, a little while. Jesus says, “A little while and you won’t see me, a little while and you will see me, and I’m going to the Father,” and the disciples say, “What is he talking about, this little while?”
Well, we know it’s just going to be a little while and they’re not going to see him because in a little while, just in something like 20 hours from then, Jesus is going to be dead and buried. And for three days, they won’t see him until a little while, on the third day, he’ll be raised from the dead, risen from the dead, and that will change everything.
Jesus says, “For a little while, you won’t see me and you’re going to be full of sorrow.” In fact, the words there in the Greek are so emphatic, it’s about the most emphatic Greek you could think of to describe your joy. Anyway, Jesus says, this is verse 20, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament. You will mourn. You will wail. You’re going to be pouring out your tears for a little while. And then, and then, your sorrow will be turned into joy.”
This is talking about the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Now, I want you to notice something here. And I think this is maybe the main thing in the text, the main thing that Jesus is getting at. He doesn’t say that your sorrow is taken away and replaced with joy, as if they’re sorrowful for a little while and then something happens to where their sorrow is thrown out and then joy is given to them.
No, he says, “Your sorrow will be turned into joy.” The same thing that gives you such great sorrow will, in a little while, give you the greatest joy. And Jesus gives the example of a woman giving birth to a child. He says it like this: “When a woman is giving birth she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she’s delivered the baby she no longer remembers the anguish for joy that a human being has been born into the world.”
The same thing that causes a woman in labor so much trouble is the same thing that gives that woman so much joy—the baby—and that’s what that’s the analogy that Jesus is using. Now what is he talking about? What is it that gives them so much sorrow and then gives them so much joy? It’s Jesus, and specifically, it’s Jesus’ death on the cross, his cross, his death, his suffering, his blood, his agony. The disciples see Jesus crucified and they’re filled with sorrow. They’re weeping and they’re afraid and they’re crying, but then Jesus is raised from the dead and they realize what this means.
They realize that his cross and his suffering was the point all along. That His cross and His suffering is their confidence. His cross and His suffering is their hope. His cross and His suffering is their life, and their peace, and their glory. Do you ever think how strange it is that we have all over the place crosses? We wear crosses around our neck. We have crosses in front of us all around here. When the kids come to chapel, I have them count all the crosses, and they can’t count that high because there are so many crosses.
And don’t you think it would be strange if someone had no idea what Christianity is and they walked in here and they said, “Why do you have so many crosses?” And we said, “Well, because that’s how our God died.” Why do you have that up there? Why do you have that picture? Because Jesus is raised from the dead and that means that the cross now has the power to save, the power to forgive, the power to redeem, the power to atone and to cleanse and to wash, and to rescue, and to deliver, and to save so that our sorrow, the death of Jesus, is turned into our joy.
And that joy, says Jesus to you, cannot be stolen. There’s a lot of things that people can steal from you. They can steal your wallet, they can steal your car, they can steal your house, they could probably steal your shoes and your clothes. They even stole Jesus’ beard from His face. But they cannot steal your joy because they cannot undo the cross of Jesus. They cannot undo His bleeding and dying, His being laid in the tomb and being raised on the third day. It cannot be undone.
Jesus is for you the crucified Savior, and that stands no matter what. Not even death can steal that from you. In fact, death will bring you from one joy to another. You will weep and lament, Jesus says, for a little while, but then, in a little while, you will see me, and you will rejoice, and no one will take that joy from you.
That, dear saints, is how it is with us. Jesus has given you this joy, the joy of knowing that he’s not angry with you, the joy of knowing that your sins are forgiven and the joy of knowing that one day when you breathe your last you will open your eyes and you will see his face and on his face is not a scowl but a smile because Christ was crucified for you. Christ suffered, bled, and died for you. Christ was buried for you and Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Hallelujah. And this also for you. God be praised. Your hearts will rejoice and no one will take your joy from you. May God grant it for Christ’s sake. Amen.
The peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.
Please stand.