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In the name of Jesus. Amen.
Dear saints, the Lord Jesus kept His promise to send the Holy Spirit to comfort her. And the Holy Spirit came on Pentecost and continues to come. The Lord Jesus from His exalted throne continues to pour out on us and all the world his blessed holy spirit who makes us holy. And that’s what we want to think about today. The holiness that the Holy Spirit works in us.
Now, that holiness is not, as we might first think, a life full of overflowing good works. I think that’s how we normally use the word holy in common conversation. But it seems like it’s maybe not even a good word to call someone holier than thou because they’re busy kind of showing their works before all of the world. But compared to the holiness of God, our sins shine in stark relief. In fact, the very fact that God is holy is first for us bad news. Because His holiness is like a bright, shining, consuming fire. That’s how it says it in Hebrews. The Lord’s word is a consuming fire. His glory is a consuming fire. So that God is holy is first bad news to us because we are not.
We are unholy. We are sinners. We are violators of God’s laws, breakers of God’s commands. We have not lived like we ought to have lived; we have not loved God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength, and we have not loved our neighbor as ourself. We in fact have to come into the presence of God confessing that we’re sinners. In fact it’s not just sinners, we’re poor miserable sinners. I remember one time I was teaching a confirmand about confession and a poor miserable sinner and I remember she said, Pastor, I don’t think I’m a poor miserable sinner, I’m actually pretty good at it. Okay, we’re really good sinners.
We’re perfecting the art of sin. We’re breaking God’s commandments and even convincing ourselves that we’re not. And so here is the first work that the Holy Spirit does. Today and always in our own hearts He comes to us to show us our own sin, to convince us of our own sinfulness. This is what Jesus said when he said, I will send the Holy Spirit who will convict the world of sin. Now, it is an amazing thing that we have to be taught our sin by the Holy Spirit. But it’s true. We do.
And the Holy Spirit comes to us and he teaches it. He holds the law of God up in front of us like a mirror so that we see ourselves in stark relief and we say, we confess. In fact, we come to the end of ourselves. And we say I am not holy. I am not good. I am not worthy of God’s presence. But then the Holy Spirit does his second great work. He brings to us our Lord Jesus. He brings to us the good news of His crucifixion on the cross. He brings to us this thing that we could never ask for or imagine or deserve, he brings to us this promise, that all of those sins of yours, all of those broken commandments, all of those broken promises, all of those failures to love, all of the heap of nonsense that we’ve collected in our own resume of disobedience.
All of that is died for by Jesus on the cross, all of it is suffered for already by His death, all of it was carried by Him, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world and the Holy Spirit brings to you your Lord Jesus who has carried your sins, borne your sorrows, walked away with your grief so that He can bring to you this promise that all of your sins Dear friends, all of your sins are forgiven. They’re died for already. Jesus has won the day. He has conquered death and hell and the devil and your sin. This is the good news of the gospel. And we wouldn’t know it except for the Holy Spirit.
Remember, as Jesus promises, the Holy Spirit will come upon you and you will be my witnesses to the ends of the earth. So the Holy Spirit carries this word of the gospel out into every corner of the world from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria to the ends of the earth all the way to Austin, Texas. It’s amazing. It gets this far. But it’s even here. This promise that the Lord is not angry. That his holiness is not a consuming fire for you anymore, that there is a way open for you into life everlasting by the wounds of Jesus Christ our Lord.
And so the Holy Spirit comes to us to make us holy by faith, holy by repentance, holy by the forgiveness of all of our sins, so that we can refer to one another and we can speak to each other as saints, that means holy ones. Not because we’ve achieved it, but because the Holy Spirit has done it. He’s washed us and cleansed us and justified us. It’s beautiful. So the first work of the Holy Spirit is to make us holy with the righteousness of Christ.
And then the Holy Spirit comes to strengthen also our holiness of love. And this holiness also has two kind of shapes in life. The first is that we love each other, and especially I want us to make note of this, that the Holy Spirit comes upon us especially for the various different vocations that He’s called us to. For all of you confirmants today, you’re going to come up here and you’re going to confess the faith and pastors are going to lay their hands on you and pray for the Holy Spirit because you’re being placed into an office.
I think the best way to speak of it is the office of public Christian. That you’re to know, and the whole world is to know, that when you get up on Sunday morning and you leave your house and you come to this altar or to another altar that confesses this doctrine, and you come up here to eat and drink the body and blood of our Lord Jesus, you’re proclaiming the Lord’s death until He comes. You’re making a public confession. You’re saying, I’m with Jesus and He’s with me. You’re putting your name on the doctrine and the confessional so that you now have this calling to be a witness.
And it’s a little scary because remember that Greek word for witness is the word martyr, which has a lot of I suppose scary implications, but that’s why you Confredans are about to take the martyr’s vow. It’s a pretty incredible thing that you’re about to say. And all of us who have been confirmed have said it already. Would you rather will you endure everything, even death, rather than fall away from this Church and confession? And by the Holy Spirit you’ll say yes with the help of God. It’s an amazing thing!
So that the Holy Spirit comes to give you this office, and He will support you in it. David and Patty yesterday, the Lord Jesus gave you the office of husband and wife, and so for that office He’s given you His Holy Spirit. For the work of office. And for all of you who are married, if your children, if you have children, if your grandparents or your grandchildren, the Holy Spirit has also been given to you specifically for that work of office. It’s a marvelous thing.
It’s what and especially at Pentecost we think about how the Holy Spirit is poured out for the office of preaching, which is a good thing. That this work here, preaching the gospel, is done not by my own strength. I promise you, dear friends, that I, Brian Wolfmuller, would have destroyed this a long time ago. But the Holy Spirit comes. And gives strength.
And not only does he give strength for the office of preaching, he also gives strength for the even more difficult office of listening to the sermon. I told the early service that it’s much harder to listen to a sermon than it is to preach one. I know that because I tried to listen to one one time and it was tough. But to think that you have the Holy Spirit to help you to hear the word of God, to hold on to the word of God, to trust the word of God through all of the difficulties of this life, the Holy Spirit is helping you to love and to serve and also to suffer.
Peter says, this is 1 Peter chapter 4 he says when you’re suffering don’t be afraid as if it’s only you who are suffering but know that when you suffer for the name of Jesus that the spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. Or Paul says it like this that we count it all joy when we suffer because we know that our suffering produces patience and our patience produces character and character produces hope and hope doesn’t disappoint us why? Because the Holy Spirit has been poured into our hearts so the Holy Spirit helps to work in us love and patience in the midst of suffering That we would be, I suppose, following in the footsteps of our Lord Jesus who suffered without opening his mouth and endured all things for the sake of His beloved.
So the Holy Spirit, dear saints, is making us holy. He’s making us holy by showing us our sin and showing us our Saviour and that holiness is the righteousness of justification that will give us boldness to stand before the Father on the last day afraid of nothing because all sins are forgiven. We can live and die with boldness. The Holy Spirit makes us holy.
And then the Holy Spirit is working this holiness also. That we would start to love one another and serve one another, and suffer with patience in life until the Lord brings us to the end. Now all this means (and we can finish with this thought) that we need the Holy Spirit. Apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, there’d be nothing good. Apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, we wouldn’t know that we’re sinners, we wouldn’t know that we have a Savior, we wouldn’t even begin to know what it means to love.
But we have the Holy Spirit. And here’s the promise that I want to press into your hearts this morning. Jesus after he teaches the Lord’s Prayer in Luke 11 He says, ‘You who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children; how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to all who ask.’
We, dear saints, you have that promise. If you ask the Father for the Holy Spirit, the Father will give you the Spirit. And in that confidence we live and in that confidence we love and in that confidence we trust and suffer and die and live forever. So may God pour out on us His holy spirit and make us His holy people. May God grant it for Christ’s sake. Amen.
And the peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.