“And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, Whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him. You know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Yet a little while and the world will see Me no more, but you will see Me. Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you.” John 14:16-20
Devotional Thought For The Day
While being raised and indoctrinated in empiricism – that system of thought which assumes that nothing can be known outside of the natural world, what can be seen, “proven” to exist by repeatable experiments and demonstrations, and explained by natural causes – I found these assertions of Jesus to be difficult. How can one “see” the Holy Spirit of truth, or “see” Jesus following His ascension? Indeed, the experience of the disciples following the resurrection of Jesus shows us that even these witnesses to the resurrection only “saw” Him for brief periods of time, and following the ascension only the apostles Paul and John actually “saw” Jesus, one time for each, and these were in visions. Oh, and Stephen saw Jesus just before his death by martyrdom. Aside from this there is no certain evidence of Christians in general “seeing” Jesus in an empirical manner. Yet Jesus asserts that we will “see” Him and will certainly “know” the Holy Spirit Who dwells within those who are truly believers in Christ.
What I have experienced empirically within the “visible church” is a few individuals who claimed to have seen Jesus – but to date every one of these people has “proven” by their own confession that their teaching is heretical and that they are not really believers in Jesus but believers in themselves. So I have generally shied away from these words of Jesus, and kind of assumed that we are supposed to sort of live alone as Christians in the world, with only a kind of objective, aloof, and distant presence of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. And I have met many people who claim to have the Holy Spirit, and claim His guidance and His witness within them, who spout and assert many things contrary to the certain Word given to us by the Holy Spirit in Holy Scripture, the Bible. And we often have a great inner certainty about things which later proves to be in error; our sinful nature and demonic suggestion makes our inner subjective musings quite fallible and misleading. It is not that the Holy Spirit is not in us; I have always believed that. It is just that we struggle to grasp – without empirical evidence – the significance and practical benefit of such indwelling of the Spirit of truth, and our non-empirical “seeing” of Jesus personally and visibly.
The apostle John points the way to grasping what Jesus intended. He wrote: “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. [1 John 4:11-13] This is affirmation of what Jesus said: “Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, you have done it unto Me.” [Matt. 25:40] The once popular song of Peter, Paul, and Mary had it just right: “Do you believe in something that you’ve never seen before? But there is love.” In this manner we do see Jesus, and we do know the Holy Spirit of truth, when we observe love and when we truly love – love in a manner that is in keeping with God’s Word, His commandments, of which love is the fulfillment [John 14:15; Rom. 13:10]. And remarkably, miraculously, we do see this love and engage in it, although often it seems like coming upon a beautiful flower in the desert.
So, although we do not “see” the presence and the love of God in the kind of empirical ways that we desire, we nonetheless live our entire lives within His presence and love. Jesus does not leave us as orphans; He does not leave us alone to foist about and make it on our own. Quite the contrary, He speaks to us through His Word, the Bible, and through those whom He has appointed to minister His Word and blessings to us, and through the objective and visible means to which He has verbally attached His love, mercy, forgiveness, and presence – Baptism and His sacramental meal of Holy Communion. And we would have no thoughts of Jesus, of our Heavenly Father’s love, of all of the promises God has given to us for this life and the next, apart from the presence and indwelling of the Holy Spirit of God, and certainly no faith in Jesus. And so it is surely the truth that because Jesus lives, we too live. And love is the evidence that enables us to know that Jesus has fulfilled His promise to us of the indwelling Holy Spirit, and that Jesus is in the Father, and that we are in Him, and that He is in us. It is certain that we are not alone, and that we are not left as orphans!
Prayer For The Day
Dear Lord Jesus, grant us Your peace and joy in the certainty of Your presence and of the Holy Spirit’s presence. Preserve us from the bizarre perversions of those who claim closeness to You and inspiration of Your Spirit, but who by their confession, teaching, and living demonstrate ignorance of You and spiritual death. Preserve us also from that callousness of spirit that thinks of You as being aloof. Thank You for adopting us in Your great love, and for all of the blessings of Your presence, for not leaving us as orphans. Amen.