Today on Summit Life with J.D.
Greer. What the Holy Spirit does is he manifests God to you. The fullness of the Holy Spirit is those times when he takes the attributes of God and he manifests them to you. He makes you feel them. Here's the definition I've given you of the presence of God. The presence of God is when the Spirit of God makes the attributes of God come alive to you. Welcome to Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer.
I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. You know, in some churches you'll hear a lot of talk about God the Father and Jesus Christ, but then the Holy Spirit seems to kind of get pushed to the side. In other churches, people focus so much on trying to hear from the Holy Spirit that they'll interpret anything as a sign from him and push aside everything else.
So which side is more biblical? What is the Holy Spirit's role supposed to be like in our churches and in our lives? Pastor J.D.
Greer unpacks those questions today on Summit Life as he continues our new series called Rushing Wind. Grab your Bible and pen and let's get started. John 14. I want to take you to the place where Jesus first described his disciples, the Spirit-filled life. John chapter 14, beginning verse 16. On the night before Jesus died to his disciples, Jesus said, 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.
Now, stop real quick. Dwells, what tense verb is that? Present tense. Who is Jesus talking about right there? He dwells with you, present tense. He's talking about himself. For he dwells, you know him because he already dwells with you and will be with you.
That's future tense. That's a reference to the Spirit, and that's a little bit confusing, and that's kind of the whole point. We'll get to that, all right? Verse 18. I will not leave you as orphans.
I will come to you. Verse 19. Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live, and that day you will know that I am in the Father, and you in me, and I in you. Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me.
He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him. Verse 22. Then Judas, not Iscariot, you know, it's just like, hey, not that one, you know, a different one. So Judas, not Iscariot, Judas, not Iscariot, said to him, Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us and not to the world? Verse 23. Jesus answered him, if anybody loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and we will make our home with him.
Verse 25. These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you, but the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. Now, I see two major things in that passage. First of all, I see that Jesus tells us who the Holy Spirit is, number one, and then number two, what the Holy Spirit does.
So that's what we're going to talk about. Number one, who the Holy Spirit is. You'll notice in verse 16, he is described as another Helper. Jesus here uses the word for another, alas, which meant I will give you another Helper, another of the same kind. Specifically, another of the same kind as Jesus, which meant God. This is a reference to the fact that the Spirit is God, just like Jesus is God, which is, of course, a reference to what we call the Holy Trinity. Now, I realize that the Trinity is an exceptionally difficult doctrine to understand. Three in one.
One in three. The one in the middle died for me. The one in the end lives inside me. However you've got to understand it, the point is not for you to be able to dissect the Godhead the way that you would in math equation, the point is for you to experience and behold God as he revealed himself. That's who he is.
Right? Number two, what he does. I'm going to list five or six things here for you over the next several minutes, depending on how much time we, oh, who actually believes that?
I'm going to do all these for other, we've got time for them or not. Number one, number one, he inspires and he illuminates. That's in verse 26. He inspires and he illuminates. Verse 26, he will teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance that I have said to you.
Now, that is two different promises there to two different groups of people. To the apostles who were hearing this live, this is a promise of inspiration. Everybody say inspiration.
Inspiration. Jesus was promising that the Holy Spirit would bring back to the minds of the apostles everything that Jesus had said flawlessly and help them record it so that future generations could have a record, a reliable record of the things that Jesus said, taught, and did. The Bible, you see, is simultaneously the work of man and the work of God. You say, well, how could that be?
How could it be the word of man and the word of God? Here's an analogy I use. I've got four kids, as many of you know, and my youngest, our first son, just turned two recently, and has been slow on everything, including learning to walk. And I think that's because his sisters carry him around everywhere, but he's just getting to the place where he can start to walk. And you know how kids are when they walk. They do that kind of awkward toddle thing where they got their, you know, their little gangly legs are all walking around.
They're always falling. If I were going to have him walk on this stage from point A to point B, there's no way that I would just let him do it. So what I would do is I would hold his hand and we would walk together, all right? So whose feet are the ones that are actually taking the steps? His. But who determines where exactly he goes?
Me, because I'm holding his hand. The Holy Spirit promised that while it was the words of men that were being written down, he was guiding the destination that those words got to. So the bottom line is what you hold in your hands is a reliable record of what Jesus said and did.
That's very important for you to understand because, you see, it would have done us no good for Jesus to have come to earth and die for us and raised from the dead if we did not have a reliable record to be able to base our lives upon. So for them it was a promise of inspiration. For you, okay, now, that verse 26 is a promise of illumination.
Illumination. The Holy Spirit is no longer revealing new things to us. Do not come up to me and say, this morning in my quiet time the Holy Spirit told me something that Jesus said 2,000 years ago and everybody forgot to write down, okay? I am not going to believe you.
And there are a lot of people that will do television programs about you if you say that, but I am not going to believe you because that's not happening anymore. But the Holy Spirit is helping us to understand what is already there. That is a process called illumination. Everybody say illumination.
Illumination. You might think, if you're new to Christianity, that you've never had any interaction with the Holy Spirit, but you have if you believe that Jesus is Lord. 1 Corinthians 12, 3. No man can say that Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit, which means that if you come to a place where you're convinced of the Lordship of Jesus, that's not something you came up with on your own.
The Holy Spirit put that in you. Philippians 2, 12. It is God who works in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure, which means if you desire to know God, that's something the Holy Spirit did inside of you.
2 Corinthians 2. If you have spiritual interest, genuine spiritual interest, Paul says that's not something you came up with, that's something the Spirit of God put inside of you. The natural man does not perceive the things of the Spirit because they are spiritually revealed. The Spirit of God has to communicate to us. So if you have any spiritual interest at all, the Holy Spirit has been at work inside of you doing this. Illuminating, teaching, clarifying, bringing these things to mind for you. He brings Jesus' words to us, to our remembrance in a time of darkness, in a time of darkness. If you're a believer, Romans 8, this is what it's talking about when it says the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. In a time of darkness, he whispers to you, you are mine. This is what David was talking about in Psalm 23 when he said, when I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will feel no evil because you are with me.
You're rotting your staff. They comfort me. You anoint my head with oil.
My cup overflows. Goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. You restore my soul. He is talking about the Holy Spirit bringing to remembrance that he is a child of God in the midst of a dark time. The Holy Spirit brings Jesus' words to remembrance to you in a time of temptation. It means when you are in that hour of temptation, he's the one that's speaking those warnings into your heart, speaking the word of God to you, speaking the promises of God, giving you clarity.
He brings his words to mind to you when you are sharing Christ with people. Luke chapter 12, Jesus is telling his disciples, he's like, hey, the hour's gonna come when you're gonna be dragged in front of courts and they're gonna put you on trial for your life. Don't you worry in that moment about what you're gonna say.
You don't need to have a speech prepared. You don't need to carry a systematic theology volume in there with you because I will, through my spirit, in that very hour, give you the words to say. Y'all, how many times has that happened to me?
And not being dragged in front of courts like he's talking about there, but when I am sharing about Christ or testifying about Christ, him put into my heart exactly at the right moment the word that that person needs to hear. It used to really paralyze me about sharing Christ because I thought what a lot of you think. I'm gonna like, you know, go ahead and throw it out there and they're gonna ask me a question that I don't understand and we're all gonna look stupid.
So I'm just gonna keep my mouth shut and avoid the awkward situation. You ever get like that? And then I learned, I can't remember exactly how I learned this, I think somebody taught it to me, I learned what I now call the Michael Jordan philosophy of Christianity. They asked Michael Jordan one time if he knew exactly all these sick dunks that he was gonna do, you know, before he started to drive. He's like, nope, I just jump and decide in the air. And so for me, I'm like, you know, I just jump out into the situation the Holy Spirit has put me in and while I'm in the air, God communicates to me whatever sick slam dunk he wants me to throw in this person that I'm talking to.
That's what he's talking about. He brings his words to remembrance to you when you are sharing Christ. Now here's what I've learned over the years. The Holy Spirit cannot bring to your remembrance during those times things that you have not already put in your heart. That's what the word remember means, right? He can't bring to your remembrance things you have not pre-membered, you know, I guess that's how you say it. You gotta remember it before he remembers it. You gotta put it in there.
He cannot bring, he cannot fire bullets that you have not loaded into the magazine, right? Which is why I'm so grateful for a Christian mom and dad who forced me to go when I was a kid to this little club at our church called Awanas, which we still have at our church now, right? Where basically we dress up kids in paramilitary uniforms and make them memorize scripture and give them badges so that they'll do it so they have more badges than the other kids. That's why they do it.
But you know what? My philosophy of parenting is in part that I'm right now trying to cram them so full of the Bible that when life rattles them they just spew out God's word. When life cuts them they bleed God's word. I'm stuffing them like a pinata so full of God's word that when life whacks them one day they're gonna spill out God's word.
I can do this all day, these analogies like that, okay? God only brings to memory what you have put in, which is why parents you got to have your children learning the word of God. It's why we offer these programs. It's why you parents need to get your kids involved in our student ministry because they're going into college into a time of darkness and a time of temptation and the Holy Spirit cannot bring to their remembrance what you have not loaded into them during the years that you have with them. It's why you got to get the word of God inside of you. So that's one is he inspires and he illuminates.
Number two, he manifests God's love to believers. That's in verse 21. You see verse 21 it says that the Holy Spirit will manifest.
The word manifest is probably not a word that you use much in day-to-day language, but it means to make known. It means that it becomes real to. It means it makes you feel. It's what Paul is talking about in Romans 5-1 when he says the Spirit sheds abroad the love of God in our hearts.
It's like he pours it over us. There are times when God's love becomes so real to me. It's just in a moment I feel it. It washes over me. That's the Holy Spirit manifesting himself to you. It's never happened to you.
Here's an analogy I've used over the years. You know, getting to go back to my kids. You know, sometimes I look at my kids and my kids have this problem is that they are ridiculously cute. I, you know, anyway, but I'm sure I'm not biased at all. But I'll look at one of them but I'll look at one of them sometime and, you know, I look at them and I just get overcome with this fatherly emotion.
Right? You know, my dad's what I'm talking about. I look at their kids and I'll pick one of them up and I'll throw them up in the air and I'll spin them around and I'll, you know, I'll blow a razz, you know, in their neck. And I've got pet names for all of them and they got pet names for me. And just in that moment, you know, one will grab my cheek and say, oh, daddy. Now, in that moment, before that moment, they knew that they were my kid. They knew that I was committed to them. They knew that I loved them. But in that moment, they feel it in a different way.
Would you not agree? The fullness of the Holy Spirit is those times when he takes the attributes of God and he manifests them to you. He makes you feel them. Here's the definition I've given you of the presence of God. The presence of God is when the Spirit of God makes the attributes of God come alive to you. I get that definition really out of Exodus 34. You know, when Moses tells God, God, I want to see your glory. And God says, you can't because it'll kill you. And Moses said, pretty please. And God said, okay. And so he shoves him into a mountain and covers him up with his hand.
Remember this story? And then he passes by Moses and it says that Moses was able to see the hinder parts of God's glory, which nobody really knows what that means, including me. All right. But as he's passing by, Exodus 34 says, this is very important, that God declared his name to Moses, declared his name. I, the Lord, and Jehovah, I am a compassionate God. I show mercy to my people. Yes, I am a God of judgment and wrath, but I have absorbed that wrath in the place of my people. And that was the presence of God to Moses. It was a felt sense of the attributes of God. What the Holy Spirit does is he manifests God to you.
Has that ever happened to you? Jonathan Edwards, one of my favorite theologians, he lived in the 18th century. Not a touchy feely guy, mind you, okay?
I mean, just a full-on nerd. It's really difficult to read this guy, and he wrote in English. But Jonathan Edwards made this statement. Listen to this. Sometimes only mentioning the name of Christ or an attribute of God will cause my heart to burn within me. Suddenly God appears glorious to me. When I enjoy this sweetness, it seems to carry me outside of myself.
I cannot even bring myself to take away my eye from this glorious object. Again, this is not a touchy feely guy. This is not Bob Ross.
This is not a happy tree, okay? You know what I'm talking about? This is a theologian who could articulate the doctrines of God better than anybody that America has ever produced. He's not talking about something less than doctrine or even different than doctrine. He's talking about something more than doctrine. He's talking about when the Spirit of God takes the attributes of God, the love of God, and makes them so real that you can taste them and you can feel them. Has that ever happened to you? Something like, what about when I can't feel it?
Sometimes I feel like God's not anywhere around. He's still there. I'm going to show you that in a minute. In fact, I'll show it to you right now. Number three.
Number three. He is our counselor, verse 16. He's our counselor, verse 16. The word translated as helper in verse 16 is the word paraclete.
Not paracletes like soccer, but paraclete. Now, it's a really difficult word in English to translate, and we honestly don't have a great word for it. Some of your translations, if you're reading the old King Jimmy version, King James, you'll notice it says comforter, but that makes the Holy Spirit sound like he's a quilt or something, which, you know, I just really like that translation. Some translations say counselor, and I don't really like that translation either because that makes the Holy Spirit sound like he's like a marriage counselor, or, you know, no offense to Brad Hambrick, our marriage counselor here, but it makes it sound like he's a marriage counselor, or even worse, a camp counselor. You know, like, you know, somebody bouncy, trying to have fun all the time.
You know, socks pulled up way too high, trying to be cool. You know, and I don't think that's the image that the Holy Spirit is, or Jesus is trying to give to us either. Paraclete literally means somebody who stands beside you to speak for you. Para means, in Greek, alongside of.
Kaleo means to speak. So a paraclete is one who stands alongside of and speaks to you. And remember the word another. Another means he's just like Jesus was to the disciples. Jesus walked alongside of them, calling out to them the promises of God, speaking to them the words of God, helping them to see things the way that God saw them. That's what the Holy Spirit does to us. So, for example, when you go through a time where your heart begins to condemn you, and we all go through times where our heart condemns us, and our heart says you are guilty, you are worthy to be condemned, you are too messed up in order for anything to work out, God is displeased with you. 1 John says that when our hearts condemn us, God the Spirit is greater than our hearts. So that in that hour of condemnation, yes, when our heart rises up to condemn us, the Holy Spirit in our hearts says, Romans 8, 1, there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, and that is a louder word than the word that your heart is speaking. When you are a time when you feel like you are unbelievably filled with guilt and dysfunction, Isaiah 1, 18, God puts that word in your heart and says, though your sins are as scarlet, and they are like scarlet, I'll make them as white as snow.
Though they're red like crimson, I will make you like wool. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things have passed away, all things have become new. When you go through a time where you feel abandoned, my God, and we all go through times like that, isn't that true, where you feel like everything is going wrong, you feel like you must be out of God's purview, the Holy Spirit drops in your heart, Hebrews 13, 5, I will never leave you or forsake you. Isaiah 43, when you walk through the waters, I will be with you.
When you walk through the rivers, they will not overwhelm you. When you pass through the fire, it will not burn you, and through the flame, it will not touch you. This is the Holy Spirit walking alongside of you, calling out to you the words of God, the love and assurance of his love. This is what Paul meant when he said the Spirit bears witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God. Another dimension of him being our counselor is what he says to God on our behalf. He stands alongside of us and calls out to God on our behalf, not just to us, but he calls out to God on our behalf.
Think counselor in this sense like a lawyer, your legal counsel. Now again, he is another counselor, which means the first one was Jesus. Jesus is our advocate before the Father. Before the throne of God above, I have a strong and perfect plea, a great high priest whose name is love, whoever lives to plead for me. That's what we're talking about when we sing that song. He is our advocate before the Father. He stands by the Father's side, and he advocates legal counsel with God for us.
Now, I've told you that for years, I never really knew what exactly that meant. I thought it basically meant that Jesus was standing before God doing something like this, like standing up in front of God going like, I know, I know, seriously? Would you give the guy one more shot? Could you give him a little leniency?
I mean, I know he screwed up again, but just one more time, God the Father, would you please, you know, not zap him for his sin, just give him a little grace? And that never brought me a lot of comfort because I didn't know when I was going to come to that point where Jesus was like, I am not going to the Father again about that one. You are embarrassing me, son. I ain't doing it. I ain't doing it.
I ain't doing it. I am not going to the Father again. Or when the Father would be like, seriously, that's six years, same sin? It's time that we teach this guy a lesson, and we just like zap him for his sin. That didn't bring me a lot of comfort, but Jesus is not standing before the Father right now pleading for leniency. Jesus is standing before the Father right now as my advocate, pleading for justice.
And what he's saying to God is something like this. You cannot punish JD for that sin because you punished me for it. And it would be unjust of you to give two penalties for the same sin. I took it in his place. That means you give him forgiveness because you gave me wrath. You've got to bless JD, not because he deserves it, but because I am worthy to be blessed and because I gave him that as a gift.
I took his sin in condemnation. He got my righteousness and my blessing. So I stand before the throne right now to demand that you give to him that which is coming to me. Before the throne of God above, I have a strong and perfect plea, a great high priest whose name is love, whoever lives to plead for me. Jesus is a counselor who demands God's blessing for you. The Spirit is another counselor who, get this, right now, right now, is representing you before God from your heart, demanding that God give to you the blessings and the goodness that Jesus has purchased for you.
Even when you feel like God is far away, the Holy Spirit is present and praying for you. What an encouraging message from Pastor JD Greer on Summit Life. We began a new teaching series this week called Rushing Wind.
And if you happen to join us late today, or if you want to share this message with a friend, visit us online at jdgreer.com. The message from today is titled The Forgotten God. JD, okay, at only two days in, can you tell us a little bit more about what this series Rushing Wind is all about? Your Rushing Wind is a series in which we take a look at the often neglected member of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. He is the one that brings to us the abundant life that makes our connection with God intimate and that shares with us his heart and his mind. You know, the Bible tells us that apart from the Spirit, there's really nothing that we can do spiritually that makes any difference. And so for many people, it's his energy, his strength, and his power that's what's missing in the Christian life. Now, I know, of course, you've got a lot of Christians that focus on the Holy Spirit above everything else, but a lot of others treat him more like a theory than a person.
It was always said growing up that, you know, a lot of people, their Trinity was God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Bible. The Holy Spirit is supposed to be an important part of your life. For both of these groups, God wants to show us that the Spirit-filled life has more in store for you than you can imagine, but it's a Spirit leading that is attached to the foundation of the Word and the centrality of the Gospel. Now, during this series, we're going to hop around the New Testament a little bit. So to help guide you through the teaching, I've created a 20-day devotional that's called Rushing Wind that'll just go along with the teaching that will help you kind of keep your roadmap and where you are in Scripture and also help you dive in just a little bit deeper. I think it'll be a blessing to you, and so I'm delighted to be able to offer it.
I'm Molly Bidevich. Thank you so much for joining us today. Some people think of the Holy Spirit as something you experience during worship, when the music crescendos and you get a surge of emotions. But Thursday on Summit Life, J.D. Greer explains that the Holy Spirit's role in your life is way bigger and way more real than just getting goosebumps. And be sure to listen Thursday as we continue our study of the Holy Spirit on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.
