(Isaiah 40:27-31; John 16:7-15)
One of the key words in our passage from John is the word translated “Advocate.” The Greek word here is parakletos, which has been turned into the English word “paraclete”; some of you may have heard that word at some point. It’s not really a translation, and if you try to use it, people usually think you’re weird. Either that, or they ask, “Didn’t you mean to say ‘parakeet’?” So just trying to use an English version of the Greek word doesn’t work very well, but I understand why some people do it, because this is another one of those words that doesn’t really have a good English translation. Our Bible versions try words like “Helper,” “Advocate,” and “Counselor,” and of course the King James Version used “Comforter,” but none of them really does the job.
The Holy Spirit is working in us to empower and equip us for outreach—making connections and building relationships with people who don’t believe in Jesus—to lay the groundwork for evangelism—communicating the gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God—so that people will come to faith in Christ and become his disciples, who will then begin to do the same thing wherever they go. To that end, the Holy Spirit is our Helper/Counselor/Advocate/Comforter/Encourager/Strengthener/Guide, and so on. If “Inspirer” were a word, we could call him that too. He is the one who is with us to testify to us, and to testify through us to the world, about who Jesus is and what he has done and why it all matters.
Note, one, what this means for our mission as Christians and as the church: our first priority, if we go where Jesus sends us and the Spirit leads us, is out into the world to seek and save the lost. Ahead of worship, and of taking care of each other? Yes. The latter is certainly important, which is why the apostles raised up the first deacons in Acts 6, but even there we see it wasn’t first on the list. As for worship, that isn’t part of our mission, it’s the source of our mission. True worship focuses our eyes, our minds, our hearts, and our trust on God, and thus opens us up to the guidance of the Holy Spirit; and where the Spirit points us first is out into the world. It was easy for the church in America to lose sight of that when the world around us looked pretty Christian, but those days are gone. We have a mission field just beyond our front door.
Two, while the mainstream American church in recent years has tended to think of evangelism in terms of attracting people with a certain sort of church experience and focusing on their felt needs, Jesus is talking about something quite different. This isn’t about being seeker-sensitive; it’s more a matter of challenging people to seek Jesus in the first place. The Holy Spirit bears witness to Jesus by putting the world to shame about sin and justice and judgment. He brings conviction, not as a prosecutor seeking a legal verdict, but but in our minds and hearts. You’ll note, by the way, that the NIV has “righteousness” rather than “justice”; we’ve seen before that while these are two separate words in Hebrew, the Greek has one word for both. This world calls good evil and evil good, and it has sought to redefine justice and corrupt judgment to feed its own desires; the Spirit confronts it with its guilt in a way that cannot simply be ignored.
Jesus in his ministry on Earth drove people to commitment—either for him or against him. No one ever looked at Jesus and said, “Meh. He’s OK, I guess.” With all due apologies to the Doobie Brothers, no one who knew him ever said, “Jesus is just alright with me.” He didn’t intend to allow anyone the safety of that response. He told people the truth so purely and relentlessly that either they threw away their pride, repented of their sin, and gave him their lives, or else they tried to kill him. No other stance was possible, because he presented the human ego with a rival with which it simply could not peacefully coexist. The Holy Spirit speaks to us, and through us, whatever he hears from Jesus, and so he carries on that same work.
As noted a minute ago, Jesus says three specific things. First, the Holy Spirit puts the world to shame for its sin in refusing to believe in Jesus. As New Testament scholar D. A. Carson puts it,
The world’s unbelief not only ensures that it will not receive life, it ensures that it cannot perceive that it walks in death and needs life. The Holy Spirit presses home the world’s sin despite the world’s unbelief; he convicts the world of sin becausethey do not believe in Jesus. This convicting work . . . is designed to bring men and women of the world to recognize their need, and so turn to Jesus.
Some listen. Others refuse that recognition, unwilling to admit they’re wrong, and either turn and run from Jesus, or else choose to attack.
Second, the Holy Spirit puts the world to shame by revealing that its understanding of what is right and just is false, corrupt, and pitifully inadequate. To quote Carson again, “One of Jesus’ most startling roles . . . was to show up the emptiness of [the world’s] pretensions, to expose by his light the darkness of the world for what it is.” Because Jesus has left this world and is no longer here to do that, the Spirit carries on that work in us, empowering us to live as Jesus lived so that his light shines through us to expose the darkness of the world around us and the emptiness of its claims of justice.
Third, the Holy Spirit puts the world to shame by proving that it’s bowing down to a false judge, for the prince of this world is a liar from the beginning. At his command, the world judged God himself, who is perfectly good and perfectly innocent, to be the worst of sinners, and put him to death. By his resurrection, Jesus proved that judgment to be utterly wrong, the maximum possible error. By that error, the prince of this world stands judged and condemned, and the judgment of the world which follows him is shown to be “profoundly wrong and morally perverse.”
When we think about evangelism, then, we need to realize that our good news for the world doesn’t begin with “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” The American journalist and cynic H. L. Mencken once said, “Journalism largely consists in saying ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew Lord Jones is alive”; similarly, many modern American approaches to evangelism consist in saying “Jesus died for your sins” to people who never knew they had any, and have no real idea what Jesus dying has to do with anything anyway. The message of Jesus is only good news to people who’ve accepted the bad news. That’s why prostitutes liked him better than Pharisees did—the bad news wasn’t news to them—and it’s why the bad news is where the Spirit begins.
I’ve been encouraging you to be praying for four non-believers, and asking God to open up opportunities for you to share your faith with at least one of them. Sean Johnston has added to that the suggestion that at least one of those four be an enemy of yours. I want you to have an eye toward inviting one of those for whom you’re praying to come with you to our Christmas Eve service. But as you’re praying, be open to the Spirit of God and asking him to tell you what to say, and remember this passage from John; be aware that before you can share the good news of new life in Christ, the Spirit may first call you to be the bearer of bad news about sin and justice and judgment.