Text:  John 16:5-11                                                                                                        W Pentecost

The Work of the Spirit

            In the name of him who gave himself for us, body, blood, and Spirit, dear friends in Christ:  Making a major motion picture is a huge undertaking, as I am sure you are aware. But you think about it the scope of it: identifying and scripting a suitable story, putting the project and staff together, finding supporters to front the capital investment, casting the actors, preparing the sets, all the logistics involved with the filming crew, the publicity, makeup, lights, sound, music, special effects … for most of us it’s enough to stagger the imagination. Suffice it to say that it takes tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of highly skilled man-hours to get the final product into the theaters.  But when all that work is done, it’s all reduced to about 120 minutes worth of show time.  All you actually see in the end are the actors and the story their parts tell.

And all those other people who worked so hard to bring the film to you? The only thing you ever see of them is their names scrolling by on the screen for a couple seconds after the show is over.  Who are they? No one ever recognizes them on the street.  No one ever asks for their autographs.  They get no appearance on talk shows, no fan clubs or advertising contracts ... and I suspect for the vast majority of them, that’s just fine.  They like work they do and at least they know their critical roles in the completion of the final film.  They’re more than content to let the glory go to the high visibility jobs like actors, directors, and producers.

But you know, these days, especially when they’ve produced a major blockbuster, the filmmakers have discovered that people are hungry for more – and more importantly, that they’re willing to pay for it.  So now, about year or so after they have released a film for sale on home video, they release it again in the “special collectors’ edition”. And what that means is that addition to the movie itself, you get another disk containing all sorts of extras like a collection of humorous outtakes and bloopers, various interviews with the actors, certain scenes that were filmed but cut from the final edition, and so on; but most of it is all the behind the scenes stuff:  the technical end, how they did the special effects, and the nuts and bolts of how they actually made the film.  And believe it or not, seriously dedicated fans of a particular film will sit there and watch 30 hours or more of such stuff.  And by so doing, they learn all about what it took to make it possible to actually view the final picture – all those people doing all those jobs you never even think about when sitting there watching the film itself.

            Which brings me to the person and work of the Holy Spirit of God.  Today, the feast of Pentecost, is his special day – the day we celebrate his coming to the church and his ongoing work in it.  He’s always there; always present and active in our lives doing things that are absolutely essential for us to receive God’s salvation; but usually all we ever see of him is his name in the credits after an Introit or Psalm when we recite the short ascription of praise called the Gloria Patri; that’s the line that goes,  “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit ...”; but even then, he’s always billed in last place.  Who exactly is he?  What does he do?  We understand who the Father is.  We know who the Son is.  But how much do we really know about the Holy Spirit?  And why don’t we hear more about him?

            Well, we don’t hear a lot about him precisely because he is the “behind the scenes” operator.  If we thought of life in this universe as a motion picture, then the story of our creation, redemption, and salvation was written, directed, and produced by God the Father.  The star is none other than God the Son who came to earth in the person of Jesus Christ. But we would never have heard and believed the story, nor would we have been able to see and know its star, Jesus Christ,  without the Holy Spirit doing his part.  His part is to bring the Gospel to us and work faith in our hearts so that we believe it. He points us to the cross of Jesus, and turns our hearts so that we trust in the Atonement that Christ made for our sins.  And like the vast crew of unknown workers who help a make motion picture, he does his part (and does it well) principally by directing the attention and the glory to the main actors – even though his own part is no less important. 

            A consequence, however, of the Holy Spirit’s relative silence about himself, is that he remains something of a mystery to us. This has led to quite a bit of confusion throughout the history of the church caused by people who have used their own ideas to try to fill in the answers to all the questions they might have about him.  The result has been any number of false doctrines that range from extremes such as denying that there even is a Holy Spirit on one hand, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and some other cults do, to the opposite extreme of focusing almost entirely on the person and work of the Spirit to the practical exclusion of everything else as is done by certain other groups.  When this happens, Christ and the redemption he earned for us on the cross gets pushed into the background and is sometimes effectively lost through neglect.

            But Scripture does not leave us in the dark about this subject; and today’s readings reveal much to us about who the Spirit is and what he does.  In the lesson from Joel we hear of God’s promise to send the Spirit and to pour him out on all his people.  The reading from Acts tells us of the fulfillment of that promise on the first Pentecost.  And in the Gospel reading, Jesus tells us exactly what the Spirit is coming to do, and how he is going to do it.  Regarding the work of the Spirit, Jesus says, “He will convince the world regarding sin and righteousness and judgment.”  Three important tasks:  let’s take them one at a time.

            First, “He will convince the world of sin”. What does that mean?  An illustration will work best here – one that I know I’ve used before; but it makes the point very well.  A few years back, I was listening to a radio program called “Open Forum”.  It’s on a Christian Family Radio station that is broadcast from Shenandoah.  It’s one of those programs that allow listeners to call in and ask their questions to the Bible teacher who hosts the show.  Well, one poor guy called in and said, “Please, you’ve got to help me.  For the last fifteen years I’ve been studying my Bible – I’ve been through it cover to cover several times.  And I’ve been praying constantly night and day that God would save me from all my sins and make me a Christian.  But it hasn’t happened yet.  I’m terrified that I will die like this, still in my sins.  I need to know what more I can do.  Can you tell me?  Or is it too late?  Should I just give up?”  You could hear in the man’s voice how desperate he was.

            Sadly, the show’s host simply told the man to keep praying and to do it harder and more earnestly.  He indicated that the reason the man’s many prayers had not yet been answered was that he was not yet sufficiently sincere.  He was holding something back.  He really didn’t want to surrender himself to the lordship of Jesus Christ; and until he did, God was not about to give him the Holy Spirit.  Now, if I spent weeks thinking of ways to spiritually sabotage this poor fellow, I don’t think I could have come up with a worse answer.  It was like the man was drowning in a lake and calling for help and someone threw him an anvil to hang onto.

            Here was a man who believed he had to do something to prepare himself to receive the Holy Spirit, when in fact the Holy Spirit was already hard at work in his life convicting him of his sin – that’s why he wanted to be saved so badly.  That’s exactly what Jesus said the Spirit would do first:  convince people of their sin.  Everyday as this man read the Scriptures, the Spirit was working through the Word to show him how far short he fell of God’s standard of perfection. And his desperate prayers only proved that he knew he was incapable of obeying God’s law.  He knew how sick he was with sin – and that knowledge comes only from the Holy Spirit.  Those without God’s Spirit don’t think they have any sin to be ashamed of, and they certainly aren’t afraid of God’s coming judgment.

            The mistake that both this man and so-called Bible teacher made was thinking that there was something that they could do to cause God’s intervention.  “If I studied harder, or prayed harder, or tried harder, or something, surely then God would be moved with compassion and save me.”  But as we confessed together a short while ago, “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to him; but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, [and] enlightened me with his gifts ...”  You see, the same Spirit who convinces us of our sin, who proves to us how unrighteous we are, then shows us the righteousness that Christ earned for us when he suffered, died, rose from the dead, and ascended to his Father.  That’s the second work of the Spirit:  to convince of righteousness – not your own, but Christ’s.  The Spirit shows those whom he convicts of sin that God already had compassion on you and saved you, it had nothing to do with something you did, or could possibly do to prepare yourself. That’s what this man needed to hear.

            It’s the heart of the Gospel itself.  And just as the Spirit works through God’s law to convince us of our guilt, so also he works through the message of the Gospel to create the faith that holds onto the salvation Christ earned for us.  This drowning man needed the life preserver: “Here’s what Christ has already done for you.”  And when the words are spoken, it’s not like just throwing a life ring and hoping that the victim reaches for it, it’s more like the Spirit swims out in the message to the victim and puts it on him.  More accurately, it’s like the drowning victim is unconscious, incapable of responding, and has his lungs full of water.  When the message of the Gospel comes, it’s like the Spirit swims out, puts the life preserver on, and gives mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.  He actually breathes spiritual life into an unresponsive body dead in sin.  When he does, it creates a new life given by God.  It’s an eternal life created and sustained alone by the faith given by the Holy Spirit.  It’s just as Jesus said in last week’s Gospel reading:  “This is eternal life:  to know the true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.”  It’s by knowing and trusting in the Son and what he did for us that the Holy Spirit convinces us that we now stand with Christ, and in his sinless perfection, before the throne of the Father.

             The last thing Jesus tells us the Holy Spirit will do is to convince us of the judgment. What that means is that we who have been convicted of our guilt and then declared righteous in Christ are not going to be abandoned to return to our former condition.  Most of us are painfully aware of the weakness of our fallen human natures.  We can say, “I know I’ve been declared righteous in Christ by faith today”; but deep inside we wonder about tomorrow.  We know that Satan still has powerful influence in our lives.  We know our natural inclinations to do and think things that are opposed to the will of God.  And we wonder, “Will I be one of those who remain faithful unto death?  Or will I be one who gives up somewhere along the way?  Where will I stand in the final judgment?”

                 And here’s where the Spirit performs the work of keeping us in the true faith. How?  The same way he created our faith to begin with:  by convicting us anew each day of our sin, and turning our hearts to trust in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.  Again, it’s like we confessed earlier:  “ ... he richly and daily forgives all my sins and the sins of all believers.”  By doing so each day, he reminds us that when Christ died, the power of Satan over us was destroyed.  And when Christ rose triumphant, Satan was condemned.  Because of this, we needn’t fear the coming judgment or wonder what it’s outcome will be.  The Spirit is at work to assure us that we will share in the final victory.

            And throughout it all he remains behind the scenes doing his work.  But like the crew that puts together a motion picture, even though we rarely focus our attention on the people themselves, we do see and experience the results of their work.  And we see the work of the Spirit in our lives every day, creating and sustaining the faith in which we now stand, and in which we will stand in the Last Day, when “he will raise you and all the dead, and give eternal life to you and all believers in Christ.”  On that day, and every day, may we join all God’s people in praising him and saying,  “Glory be to the Father who created us. Glory be to the Son who redeemed us with his blood.  And glory be to the Holy Spirit who sanctified and kept us in the true faith, and gave us eternal life.”

Soli Deo Gloria!