You’ll turn with in your Bibles, please, to John chapter 14, beginning at verse 13. Jesus tells his disciples, ‘Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything in my name, I will do it. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. 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. Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my father and I will love him and manifest myself to him.
Judas, not Iscariot, said to him, ‘Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself and not to the world?’ Jesus answered him, ‘If anyone loves me and will keep my word, my father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine, but the father’s who sent me. 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. Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled. Neither let them be afraid.
You heard me say to you, I am going away and I will come to you. If you loved me, you would have rejoiced because I am going to the Father. For the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you before it takes place so that when it does take place, you may believe. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray.
My father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the promises of Jesus. Those truths that we rest and rely our entire hope upon. Promises which we know have been fulfilled and which we know are being fulfilled even now in our lives by the presence of that helper whom you have sent to us. Help us to be honoring him with all of our thoughts and the meditations of our hearts as we listen and hear for you speak in Jesus name. Amen.
Continuing on after introducing the fact of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth as being a distinct person of the Godhead who’s equal to and united with both God the Father and God the Son. And after describing him as another helper or another pariclete like himself, Jesus will next describe and explain more about the work and role of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus said, ‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments, and I will ask the Father, and he will give you another helper to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth,’ explaining that he was going to go ask the Father to give us another paraclete to be with us forever. And this additional paraclete would be someone who would dwell with us and dwell within us.
Now obvious to us, Jesus was talking about a spiritual indwelling. However, this still remains a very mysterious and challenging thing for us to understand. How can another person, even a spirit, dwell and live within us? And just listening to that, it sounds insane, doesn’t it? Clinically insane, like someone who’s been diagnosed with multiple personality disorder.
So to better understand this idea rightly and to help us discern how the disciples and the early Christians would have interpreted this, we shall consider the ancient philosophical sphere and certain popular streams of thought.
The 4th century BC Greek philosopher Plato and his philosophers believed that people are what’s called tripartite beings, that a whole person, the human soul, is comprised of three distinct elements. The first element was our ability to reason, what we would call our mind. This included all of a person’s thoughts, their thought processes, as well as all of their knowledge and understanding.
The second element is our spirit, which they understood as being the first of two principal motivating forces for a person. This spirit included things like our sense of honor and duty, our emotions, and all of our ambitions. The third element was our appetite, which is similar to what Paul considered as our flesh, or our body as being our physical nature. This element was the second motivating force: a physical motivation that’s driven by our ordinary physical needs, our wants and desires, our yearnings for things like food, drink, and our other pleasures for our good things, as well as for sinful things.
Alternatively, Plato’s successor Aristotle suggested that people are simply bipartite beings comprised of just a body and a soul, one that’s physical and one spiritual component. Although neither portion in their mind could have an independent or separate existence from the other, they were inexorably united and merged. That philosophy, though, ultimately terminates in final personal annihilation, nothingness.
Meanwhile, during the late 1st century and early second century after the life of Christ, the heresy which was known as Gnosticism arose along with its many derivatives, some of which still continue today. Many of these Gnostics held to the opinion that the physical nature is something wicked and evil; well, it’s only our spiritual nature that is good. They believed that we need to be freed from our physicality and that a purely spiritual existence is the ultimate good and their eternal reward.
But the view of orthodox Christians is that since the Lord God created everything, and he created everything good and very good, there is nothing intrinsically evil about our natural physicality. So, similar to Aristotle, we affirm a bipartite anthropology, affirming that the human person consists of a body and a soul. But unlike Aristotle, we believe that the human body and the soul can and will be separated for a time until they’re ultimately reunited on the day of resurrection when all of humanity will stand before the judgment seat of God.
Likewise, the first century Jews of the second temple period would have also agreed at least on this point with Christians concerning this bipartite nature. But these different views and perspectives about the composition of the human person do not explain what we should think or understand about having the Spirit of truth, God’s Holy Spirit, dwelling within us.
Although we are aware that during the first century there was some kind of knowledge and even systematic theology regarding the possession of persons by demonic spirits and the ability to exercise these evil spirits, the historian Josephus attributes the knowledge of it to King Solomon, claiming that the information had been preserved and was being utilized by the Jews for centuries. He even goes on to describe details of their practice. Likewise, the gospel record affirms the fact of such Jewish tradition, because remember Jesus rebuked the Pharisees after they charged him with consorting with Beelzebub, asking them if I cast out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your sons cast them out?
Furthermore, the gospels contain so many instances of Jesus expelling demonic spirits as well as him giving authority to the 12 to do the same. So, we know that Jesus’s disciples already had some understanding about this kind of spiritual dwelling and spiritual possession.
But just to clarify the point, Christians do not believe that we are possessed by the Holy Spirit. Make sense? We are certainly not possessed like how the Gerasene demoniac was possessed by Legion. Yet, however, we are nevertheless possessed by God as his chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, and a people for his own possession. We belong to him, but we are not possessed in the same sense of being operated or controlled like a puppet.
Now, I think that the best way to describe how we become indwelt by the Holy Spirit is found in Matthew 12, where Jesus describes an ordinary person who’s been delivered from demonic possession and one who has not yet perhaps been filled by the Holy Spirit. Matthew writes that when the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest but finds none. Then it says, I will return to my house from which I came.
And when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in good order. Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. This description suggests and implies several things that we do not often think about or pause to consider, perhaps things that we take for granted.
First, demonic possession is a real thing. It was not simply how the first century interpreted mental health problems. I would even argue that many of our modern recognized mental health issues are purely demonic in their nature and effect, like narcissism, some bipolar disorders, even though they may not necessarily be called such.
Second, demonic possession was a much more commonly discussed concern during the first century than we often think about or realize, and that should make us wonder and consider whether it ought to be a bigger concern for us today. I would suggest that we dismiss this strong probability at our own peril and to our spiritual detriment. But I would also caution us against attributing every issue, whether it’s something mental, medical, or just mere misfortune, to the influence or effect of demonic powers.
Now, in Jesus’s parabolic example here, he describes humanity as being like a kind of empty vessel, a house or a home that’s like a spiritual mobile home or popup camp, also described as having a tremendous capacity that’s available to be filled. This is implied by Jesus saying that one evil spirit would go off and bring back seven more spirits more evil than itself; they are there to dwell, and where once the person had housed just a single demon, now they would be home to eight. Who wants to increase their household by that much? Anybody got that much space?
This parable suggests that the demons consider us their property. They claim ownership over us, with the demonic spirit referring to the person as my house. And then, after the demonic spirit would be expelled and evicted, their former host would metaphorically and spiritually get their house in order. The person’s life and quality of life would be improved and even restored to its original condition to how they were before being first possessed.
But if and when the demon would return, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. This enrages them so much that in possessing them, their new condition is made to become even worse than it was before. So essentially, the image that’s being described is like that of a homeowner who has undesirable, unwelcome, and uninvited roommates that are just unwilling to leave on their own accord.
This homeowner is unable to force them out. These people just take over the whole person, abusing them without any care or consideration, ruining and wrecking everything, dragging them into ever deepening depths of sin and depravity. They need to be forcibly removed. These demons need to be forcibly removed by another stronger force, a power and ability that belongs to Jesus Christ, to God alone.
But having had that image of this sad, unfortunate, and pitiable state described to us, we can also use it now to better understand the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. If we continue using the same spiritual metaphor of a house, because after that demonic spirit is evicted, Jesus describes the house as being empty, swept, and put into order. This is suggestive of an empty home, one that’s vacant but prepared and ready for a new occupant to move in.
But such spiritual renovations of being swept and put in order is just the first step in the process of sanctification, although it’s a step that may be echoed or emulated, it cannot be perfectly copied by the worldly walk. I mean, similar results—not the same—similar results may be achieved through countless self-help, self-improvement methods and practices that the world promotes. They may also produce a fairly clean domicile, but it will not be as perfectly clean as when God cleanses it for us.
Consider the difference between your own ordinary house cleaning and your more fervently detailed annual spring cleaning, or compare it against the cleaning that’s done by hired maid service. Honestly, none of us—nobody—keeps their home as super and span as we wish we would, or imagine that we do. Do you remember the last time that you washed your baseboards? Of course not.
Likely such worldly methods will get us, and maybe keep us feeling clean enough to get along with, to feel reasonably comfortable in, and maybe let us feel confident enough to invite company over for dinner. But there’s always something that’s going to remain dirty. There will always be some kind of ick for a white glove to find, and that is a sad product of our sinful, fallen humanity. But not so with Christ’s cleansing. Not so with the Holy Spirit.
When the Holy Spirit is preparing to move in, not only are the floors mopped, windows wiped, walls washed, counters cleaned, shelves dusted, and the trash taken, but he also runs ozone through all of the textiles and fabrics to remove odors. He shines UV light throughout the house to disinfect every possible surface. Even hospital rooms do not get cleaned this well. This entire space must be made to become perfectly clean, perfectly pure, and perfectly perfect because the sovereign Holy One is moving in to stay.
And so this analogy really describes our regeneration by the spiritual eviction of undesirables, our sanctification through this spiritual cleansing and renovation, and our adoption by God through his coming to dwell with and dwell in us. Altogether, this analogy should be enough to convince us that we can never make ourselves clean enough, never make ourselves right enough, so that we will feel comfortable enough to want to invite Jesus to come into us and to come into our life. No matter how much self-improvement, no matter how much self-cleaning, we cannot help but be embarrassed about our spiritual condition, whether or not we’re willing to admit it.
Therefore, we do not need Christ’s help for us to be made clean. We don’t need him to help us; we need him to do it all. And this metaphorical cleansing of our spiritual dwelling is a consequence of Christ’s atoning work, making us to be holy and to be perfect as the Lord God is, making us like Jesus. And only after a person is made to be clean and pure, only then will the Holy Spirit come and dwell within you. Only then will the Father and the Son come and make their home within you.
So that now, in effect, there are four persons dwelling within every Christian: the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and the Christian person. Yet still, even by our union to Christ, we retain our own personalities, our own individuality, and uniqueness. Our regeneration, our being born again, anathen, is the totality of our renewal and restoration, our purification and sanctification. It culminates in our being indwelt by the Holy Spirit.
And so now, instead of being possessed by eight or more finite demonic spirits, a Christian is indwelt by the Holy Spirit and the two other persons of the Trinity, the infinite, omnipotent, and omnipresent God. Terms matter because possession—as the demons do—implies control, whereas indwelling implies unity and relationship. So when a Christian is filled and indwelt by the Holy Spirit, those demonic powers cannot gain entry. That’s why we can say that Christians may be demonically oppressed, but we cannot be demonically possessed any longer.
Demonic forces can still be our belligerent tormentors; they can be a nuisance and a pain to us, but their power over us is broken. Ultimately, they will flee from us like other trespass.
Looking ahead to the day of Pentecost, Jesus turns and explains what this second paraclete will do when he arrives. After Jesus asks the father to send, Jesus said, ‘These things I’ve spoken to you while I’m 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.’
The ‘these things’ that Jesus references here could merely be understood to describe this one single evening’s conversation as a time of prophecy. But the historic church has understood this as being a reference to the entire corpus of Jesus’s teachings. Jesus further qualifies the name of this paraclete, this helper, as being the Holy Spirit, which is why we use the names Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth, the Spirit of God, and the Spirit of Christ all interchangeably.
Then Jesus told them that the paraclete, the Holy Spirit, would do two very specific things when he came to them. He would teach them all things and he would bring to their remembrance all that Jesus had said.
Now, this does not suggest that the Holy Spirit would grant the disciples perfect knowledge and perfect understanding about every possible subject, much less teach them as if by magic. The disciples would not suddenly become Mensa-qualified geniuses. They would not suddenly know everything. They would not have the entire content of the internet downloaded into their brains as if they’re in the movie The Matrix. They would not suddenly become omniscient.
Instead, the all things that we should understand and expect the Holy Spirit to teach them would be all things that are necessary for faith and for godly living. So from the first thing, we expect that the Holy Spirit would teach them everything they needed to know in order to do the evangelistic work they were being called to do.
We expect that the Holy Spirit would embolden them through the gift of understanding to preach Christ crucified and to preach the good news about the grace of God being granted to human sinners by the resurrected, glorified, and ascended King, Jesus Christ, God the Son, the Logos Theos. We expect that the Holy Spirit would teach them how to read, interpret, and apply the sacred scriptures to all of life following the same method and model as Jesus.
From the second point, we expect that every other believing eyewitness to Jesus would be helped by the Holy Spirit to remember and to repeat what they had seen, learned, and understood as part of their testimony and to help them in their sharing of Christ with others around them. We further expect that the Holy Spirit would help them to remember and recall everything that Jesus said and taught as appropriate, relevant, and whenever needed.
We expect that through this remembrance and under the inspired influence of the Holy Spirit, the apostles Matthew and John would go on to record Jesus’s works and words in their gospels as primary sources, having heard Jesus themselves. Likewise, the other disciples, the apostles, followers, and eyewitnesses of Jesus would be able to remember all that they saw Jesus do and everything they heard him say so that they could also be sources for the writing of Mark’s and Luke’s gospel.
But now, now that there are no longer any living eyewitnesses to Christ living on earth, what does this promise mean for us? It means that similarly we should expect that the Holy Spirit dwelling inside of Christians continues to still teach us all things necessary for our faith and life, teaching us to know Jesus better by recognizing, understanding what is correct, good, and true, and helping to keep ourselves away from what is false and opposed to God.
We do not expect him to teach us these things through a divine download from the cloud, but by giving us the strength and determination to persevere in our study of scripture and our other godly works, by helping us to understand the finer points of practical theology as needed, by helping us to retain the things we learn and to wisely apply them to our lives.
We expect the Holy Spirit will bring to remembrance all the knowledge, understanding, and wisdom that we have gained, that we have heard from our Sunday school teachers, from our Bible study lessons, from our fathers or mothers, and even from our pastor’s most long-winded and least entertaining sermons whenever it is needful and helpful for us.
And we believe this because the Holy Spirit is all of those things that the term paraclete describes: a helper, comforter, counselor, defender, intercessor, and encourager. He comes alongside us and does all of these things for us. The Holy Spirit is our helper, our comforter, encourager, our counselor, advocate, and intercessor. He comforts, encourages, and counsels us through his teaching.
By him bringing such spiritually good things to our remembrance, he advocates and intercedes for us by perfecting our prayers and bringing them up before the Lord, by giving us the courage to confess our sins, the strength and ability to contritely repent of them, the earnest desire to mortify those sins, and the endurance to persevere and live lives of holiness to the end.
That’s not all. The Holy Spirit is also the one who gives us, the one who establishes within us the peace of Christ, as Jesus told them, ‘Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you.’
Remember, Jesus said that he would ask the Father to give us the Holy Spirit, making the Holy Spirit Jesus’s gift, making all of the comfort, encouragement, counsel, and help that he gives to us through our faith and trust, Jesus’s gift for our good welfare. The indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit as Christ’s gift for us is the means by which Jesus gives us his peace in this life.
The Holy Spirit is the one who applies to us the benefits of our justification before God, our adoption by the Father, and our sanctification. The benefits of which, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism teaches, are the assurance of God’s love, peace of conscience, joy in the Holy Ghost, increase of grace, and perseverance to the end.
Jesus also gives us the Holy Spirit, not as the world gives. The Spirit is not given us as a reward for the good deeds we’ve done. The Spirit is not given by Christ in the hope that we might do something good with his help. Instead, he is given to us with the expectation and certainty that we shall.
Nor is the Spirit given to us as a gift that may be taken away or stolen. He is being given, and our receipt of it is permanent. There is no taking him back, no taking him away from us. Just as the Lord has given us to Christ as his inheritance, so too Christ gives us the Holy Spirit as ours, as part of our portion in him.
Lastly, to better understand how they should feel about all of this, Jesus told the disciples, ‘Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, I’m going away, and I am coming to you. If you loved me, you would have rejoiced because I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I.’
He told them, ‘Don’t be anxious. Don’t be scared.’ Although considering what we know is coming, and considering all that Jesus has been saying during that one evening, we really should not blame them for feeling anxious and fearful. But rather than criticizing or chastising them, as it may seem like from some translations, Jesus reminded them that they have just not been understanding correctly.
And after having told them that he was leaving, but that he was also coming back, Jesus said, ‘If you love me, you would have rejoiced because I’m going to the Father.’ He told them that they should be happy that he was leaving because he was leaving them to go to be with God their Father.
But that does not mean that they could not or should not also be sad that he was leaving them, but rather that their sadness should not and must not outweigh or overshadow their joy for him. Like Jesus, as Christians, we should be happy and excited, having great anticipation when we ourselves know that we are about to be with our Father in heaven.
But that does not preclude us from being sad about leaving this mortal life and all of our family and friends and other loved ones. The disciples just were not understanding what Jesus’s impending death would mean for them, his restoration, and his exaltation, because they did not understand the truth or the fullness of his divine condescension that’s experienced by the incarnation.
So we today are more blessed because we do have that opportunity to understand there was yet another reason that should have caused them to greatly rejoice at the thought of Jesus leaving them to return to the Father. They should have been rejoicing because by going then, he could ask their heavenly Father who sent them the Holy Spirit to be their paraclete, to be another paraclete—not as Jesus’s replacement, but to be the paraclete who would remain present there with them and with us forever.
Now that we’re understanding more about the person and the work of God, the Holy Spirit, for our life as Christian believers, how should we be responding?
First, when we pray, we should remember that we are always praying in Jesus’s name. This means that we must only pray for what Jesus would pray and pray as Jesus would, only praying in accord with God’s revealed will. This understanding should govern all of our prayers, our praises, our confessions, our thanksgivings, our supplications, and even our impartations.
Second, if we truly love Jesus Christ, then we shall keep his commandments, and we shall be loved by God. We shall not do whatever God prohibits, and we shall do their positive opposite. But we must not ever think or assume that our obedience is what earns us God’s love. Always remembering that it’s our faithful response to his love that proves our love and devotion.
Third, we should trust to the hope of our faith that because Jesus lives, so shall we live, and that the Lord God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, shall reveal themselves to us and shall dwell with us forever in this life and in the eternal life that’s yet to come.
Fourth, we should rest in the knowledge that if we are loving God, then we only do so because he first loved us. We shall rest knowing that we may know that we do actually love him and that he loves us by how we seek to obey his commandments out of our sense of devotion and love and not from fear.
Fifth, we shall know that we are loved by God and that we love him in return because he has clearly revealed himself to us. We know and believe that Jesus Christ is the Lord God, our Savior, and our King. We believe the evidence of his works, the testimony of his word, and the witness of the Holy Spirit who now dwells within us.
Sixth, we shall live in peace. We shall not fear eternity. We shall not be anxious about what comes next after this present mortal life. We shall know and live confidently, trusting in Christ and all of his prophecies. We shall rejoice and celebrate for our Christian brothers and sisters when their lives pass while also mourning our loss in the present, remembering that our temporary loss is their eternal gain.
But even though we’ve been given this confidence about our eternal future, there are still plenty of things in this life that cause us to fear, worry, or become anxious. The Holy Spirit can help us to remain at peace through those things that go against our remaining sinful humanity, helping us to pray for our enemies and to forgive our persecutors.
The Holy Spirit is the one who helps. He is the one who helps us to do so. Whenever sinful anger arises within our hearts, the Holy Spirit is the one who helps us to quench it through forgiving, through listening, and through seeking reconciliation and restoration to wholeness. He leads us to find peace again.
When our personal problems become so overwhelming and we begin to feel anxious, he is the one who helps us to set aside our sinful pride and humbly ask others for help. So we know that the Holy Spirit is the one whom we can always depend upon as our guide, guardian, and friend. He is our counselor and our encourager. He is our paraclete, and we as Christians can do nothing that is worth doing without him in our lives.
So pray to the Lord in Jesus’ name. Ask God to give you more of himself, to fill you with more of his Holy Spirit, to dwell with you and to dwell within you more comfortably as his own. Thank Jesus by asking our Father to send us this wonderful paraclete. And finally, praise and appreciate the work of the Holy Spirit within you and upon your life. Thank him that you are not who you once were, that you are not possessed or influenced by those spirits that once inhabited your life.
Ask him above all else to reveal Christ to you and to help you remember that Jesus and our Father in heaven loves you. Amen.