God’s Promises

RIVERSIDE INDONESIAN FELLOWSHIP
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God’s Promises

Riverside Indonesian Fellowship
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2021 · 28 November 2021
I am convinced that the most ignored, the most misrepresented, the most dishonored person in the Trinity is the Holy Spirit. That is a form of taking the Lord’s name in vain, which is a violation of one of the Ten Commandments. The Holy Spirit is regularly spoken of with irreverence and foolishness. All of that shows us a lack of worship, and a lack of worship is sin.

It’s severe to violate the law of God, as God warned His people in Deuteronomy 28, what would happen to them if they didn’t worship according to truth. The modern evangelical church shows little interest in the glory of the Holy Spirit, third member of the Trinity. The true glory of the Holy Spirit is very often unknown. The text before us opens up our understanding to the true ministry of the Holy Spirit.

John 13 through John 16, provides for us a revelation from the Holy Spirit of what Jesus said to His disciples on the last night before His arrest and crucifixion. This was Passover on that final week of our Lord’s life and ministry. Our Lord spends hours with the eleven remaining disciples. What we have in John 15 and 16 is the teaching that He gave them while they were walking through Jerusalem.

All of this is profound truth. It is the legacy of Jesus to His disciples, and beyond them to all of us. We know that because all these promises extend past those eleven men to all believers. In John 17, we have the prayer from our Lord to the Father and in that prayer, He declares that He wants the Father to fulfill all that He has promised, not only for the eleven, but for all who will believe in the future.

So these are the promises that the Lord has given to all believers through all time. Now it started out as a night of love. He loved them infinitely as only God can love. And in the opening the emphasis is on the gifts and the promises that that love generates. Those amazing promises to us all through life and into heaven where He has prepared a place for us. It was then a night of love.

However, we saw in John 15:18 the word “hate,” that is used many times till verse 25. Love is the expression of God toward His own. Hate is the expression of the world toward those who belong to God. At the same time that we are loved by God, we are hated by the world because we’re not of the world. The world belongs to Satan. We’re hated because they don’t know God.

God pours out all blessing on us; while the world pours out all its anger and persecution on us, even to the degree where believers through history are killed. There are about 100 million professing Christians in the world today under some form of persecution; most of it from 41 Muslim nations. This is not surprising; this is not new. We’re not surprised when persecution begins to develop here.

The evil one hates God, Christ, hates the Bible, hates the gospel and hates believers. Now our Lord is saying to the apostles and us, “I’m warning you about hostility and persecution.” How will those promises be fulfilled? And how will we be able to reach this hostile, hating, persecuting world with the gospel, which is our mission? The answer to that our Lord has given, it is the Holy Spirit.

John 14:16, “I will ask the Father, He will give you another Helper that He may be with you forever. That is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it doesn’t see Him or know Him. But you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you.” The Holy Spirit will be the one who will fulfill all the promises. The Spirit of God, will be with you and in you forever.

And in John 16:7, “But I tell you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away. If I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you.” What Jesus is saying is, it is better to have the Holy Spirit in you than to have Me with you. And what will be the ministry of the Holy Spirit? John 16:13 says, “But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth.”

The ministry of the Holy Spirit is to bring back again to you everything that heaven has promised. For example, in John 14, the Lord said he was going to heaven to prepare a place for us. How will we be sure that we will get to heaven? And the apostle Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:5, “Because He has given to us the Spirit as a guarantee, the Spirit as a pledge.” The Holy Spirit will reiterate this.

In John 14:12, our Lord promised greater works, not greater in kind, but greater in extent, that His people would do than He did in three short years in the land of Israel. “But who will empower us to do those greater works since the Lord is leaving?” In Ephesians 3:16, Jesus says that He will fill us with His Spirit, and in verse 20, so that we’ll do abundantly above all we can ask or think.

In John 14:13 -14, our Lord promised that as we pray in the will of God, all our needs will be met. How is all that going to happen? Romans 8:26-28 says, “The Holy Spirit makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered, for the saints according to the will of God. So that all things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose.”

In John 14 the Lord promised divine presence. Jesus said, “I will be with you.” “The Father will be with you.” How is that going to happen? It is becoming a reality because the Holy Spirit is coming to dwell in us: the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of God. He brings the Trinity to us. 1 Corinthians 6:19 says, “You are the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God.”

The Holy Spirit will take all the promises of the Lord and make them real possessions that operate in the life of the believer. Galatians 5:16 says to walk in the Spirit. Live our daily lives in the sensitivity to the Spirit of God. Galatians 5:22, “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, and gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control.” The Holy Spirit is the one who delivers all the promises of God and Christ.

Where is the power going to come from so that we can be obedient? 1 John 3:23-24, “This is His commandment, that we believe in the name of His Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as He commanded us. 24 By this we know by that He abides in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us.” We are believers because we keep His commands, because the Holy Spirit is in us, empowering us.”

And our witnessing part: what about that? Acts 1:8, “But after that, the Holy Spirit comes upon you. You shall be witnesses unto Me in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the whole world.” It’s the Holy Spirit doing the convicting in the heart of the sinner, and it’s the Holy Spirit doing the empowering of the message in us. The Holy Spirit comes down and operates on behalf of believers and unbelievers.

And the Holy Spirit is bringing the promises to us, and the Holy Spirit is empowering our witness, and the Holy Spirit is doing all those things that fulfill the promises of God. But He is, at the same time, making us more like Jesus Christ.” 2 Corinthians 3:18 says, “We all are being transformed into the glory of the Lord, from glory to glory, by the Spirit of the Lord.” This is the work of the Holy Spirit.

Now with that as a background, let’s look at our text. John 15:26 – 27, “But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, that is the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify about Me. 27 And you will testify also, because you have been with Me from the beginning.” This is about testimony. So the question is in verse 26: “How do we hope to have any success?”

And the answer is, “Because the Helper comes, and you will testify, empowered by the Holy Spirit.” This powerful promise is that all that heaven sends down to us is dispersed to us, revealed to us, empowered in us by the Holy Spirit. All Christian witness and testimony is to the world. The hostile, godless, Christ-rejecting, Christian-hating world. That is the subject here.

The world essentially is the kingdom of darkness. They’re under the power of the prince of the air. They are the children of Satan. But our responsibility is to “go into all the world and preach the gospel.” If anybody loves the world, the love of the Father is not in Him. James said, “Friendship with the world is hostility toward God.” So we are aliens in this world. We don’t love the world.

We are the conscience of the world. We are alien to the world. We indict the world. We speak of sin to the world, and we speak righteousness to the world, and we speak of judgment to the world. And it would be hopeless for us to do that were it not empowered by the Spirit affirming that in the heart of the sinner. The world is our mission field, and the world is passing away.

Will we be penalized for our testimony in the world? Lots of people have been through all of history. We could be penalized relationally, we could be penalized economically, we could even be penalized in terms of our very existence. Will the world retaliate in anger? Yes. But we can’t lick our wounds in self-pity and withdraw into the safety of just the community of believers.

Romans 10 says, “Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. But how will they call on one of whom they have not heard? And how will they hear unless somebody tells them?” God saves through the power of the Holy Spirit, but the message has to be preached. Acts 1:8, “You shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the world.”

That’s what the church does corporately. But even as an individual, the reason you’re not in heaven now is so that you can be a witness here. The Lord puts your perfection on hold and tolerates you and me, just so we can do what we need to do here, which can’t be done in heaven: tell the world the gospel. So our testimony is to the world. We know that they can’t be saved without the truth.

Christian witness and Christian testimony is of the Son. Jesus says, “I will send the Helper to you, the Holy Spirit of Truth, who proceeds from the Father. He will testify about Me, and you will testify also because you have been with Me from the beginning.” Starting with the apostles and going beyond the apostles to today, the message from Jesus Christ is, “You will testify about Me.”

So Christian witness of the Son is to the world. The world’s hatred is focused on Christ, and yet He is our message. “They hate Him without a cause,” it says back in verse 25. The world on its own has no interest in Christ. “They love darkness rather than light, that’s why they don’t believe,” back in John 3. They don’t believe the gospel because they love their sin, they love the darkness.

But we don’t change anything. We can’t shift it off of Christ. It’s not a social message about living a better life, or helping poor people, or feeding hungry people, or stopping sex trafficking, or whatever other things are thrown around by all kinds of folks, who think they’re fulfilling the Great Commission, but are not. All of those things are not our calling. Our message is Jesus Christ.

So, you must know about His eternal deity. You must know about His humanity. You must know about His virgin birth, His sinless life, His substitutionary death on the cross, His bodily resurrection, His ascension, His exaltation, His coronation, and His triumphant return. We give testimony to the Lord Jesus Christ as the Savior of the world and the only hope there is for heaven.

At the end of Scripture, at the book of Revelation, you are reminded as Revelation starts, of the subject of our testimony. Listen to how John begins, “The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show to His slaves, the things which must soon take place,” and He sent and communicated it by His angel to John, who testified to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ.

John ends up as an exile on the Isle of Patmos. In Revelation 1:9 it says, “Because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.” It was his testimony of Jesus that got him exiled. It was the testimony of the other apostles concerning Jesus that caused them to be martyred. Revelation 12:17 says, “Satan will make war with those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus.”

Revelation 19:10 concludes with this: “The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” In other words, “The testimony of Jesus is the content of preaching.” Our message is not political, it is not social, it is not relational, it is not moral: it is Jesus Christ and Him crucified and risen again. And in Acts 1:8, “You shall be witnesses to Me.” Christian testimony of the Son is to the world.

The Father gave verbal testimony: “This is My beloved Son; listen to Him. This is My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased,” at His baptism and at the transfiguration. So when you give testimony to the Son, you are repeating the testimony of the Father. You are honoring God. Nothing is more honoring to God than for you to proclaim Jesus Christ as His Son, The Father says, “This is My Son.”

Verse 27, “And you will testify also.” Those who had been with Him from the beginning, the eleven, were actually the ones the Holy Spirit used to write. Along with their associates, they wrote the New Testament. But all of us beyond them are called to be those who testify concerning Christ. Listen to 1 John 4:14, “We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world.” Let us pray.



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