Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Eric Alexander: On the first evening of Easter Day, this little group of disciples—trembling, frightened, disturbed, and bewildered men—met together behind closed doors because of their fear of the Jews, we read in verse 19. And Jesus comes suddenly amongst them and makes his presence known and begins to speak to them and reminds them of his death, that he died for their salvation.

And then breathes upon them the breath of the Holy Spirit and sends them out into the world to be his messengers. In so many ways, it's the perfect description of what every service of worship ought to be, if you think of it: the Lord's people gathered together and the Lord himself suddenly manifesting himself to them and breaking through barriers to come and show himself in the midst of them.

And then beginning to address them and to bring before them symbols of his dying love, to show them again the costliness of the salvation that he had won for them, breathing his Spirit upon them and bringing joy into their hearts. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord, then sending them out into the world to serve him and represent him. That really is what every gathering for worship ought to be, and it's a remarkable representation of it in this little scene that we have in the middle of John 20.

But I want us to look particularly this evening at the three things that Jesus says to his disciples in that upper room, and I want us to listen to them as the three things that Jesus says to us today. Because they are, in a real sense, the threefold commission that Jesus gives to his servants as he did on that first Easter Sunday evening. I'm encouraged to remember that these were just the most ordinary of people to whom he addressed himself. These were not special spiritual giants of some kind, but just ordinary men and women who had experienced a particularly sharp form of failure in their own personal lives.

And Jesus comes to them and meets with them and turns their attention in three particular directions. He brings to them, first of all, an experience of peace. The words of Jesus, you notice, "Peace be with you," which he repeats in verse 19 and in verse 21, are the traditional Hebrew greeting. This is the way that Jewish people would have greeted each other, and in many places still do today. But on our Lord's lips, these words are not just a greeting or a wish. They are the bestowal of a gift from Jesus.

And so it is really an experience of peace that he is bringing to his disciples. And it is one of the commonest things that you find in the New Testament: that what Jesus does wherever he goes is to bestow peace upon those whose lives he touches. Whenever he comes and lays hands upon people or brings healing to them, again and again, the comment that he makes is "Go into peace." It was the promise he made to the disciples earlier on in this Gospel of John. "In the world," he says, "you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world. In me, you shall have peace."

And of course, it was this that the apostles went out into the ancient world preaching. They preached peace by Jesus Christ. You get it in the epistles where the benediction that Paul regularly bestows upon his readers is "grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." It is the result of justification that God has brought to us in Christ. "Being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ."

So God is called indeed in scripture the God of peace, and Christ is said to be our peace, and the Holy Spirit brings us the fruit of the Spirit, which is not only love and joy but peace. Now, in a special sense, Jesus is bringing the gift of peace to these disciples in two particular areas where their need was greatest. He was bringing peace to their troubled minds, because you will notice that they were meeting together in this upper room with the doors locked for fear of the Jews.

They were men and women who had deeply troubled minds. They were filled with a great sense of anxiety. They were bewildered about everything that had happened to them in these last days, and their minds were troubled, precisely in the sense that so many of us experience the reality of a troubled mind. The original word that's used appears to mean a mind that is rather like the restlessness of the troubled sea, that it is unable to be at peace.

And the disciples were experiencing this sort of thing, and so many of us know the reality of this—a dispeace within our minds so that we have anxiety and care and distress of mind. And Jesus comes and addresses that condition. Now, it is undoubtedly true that there is a primary peace that Jesus creates between us and God before even he creates peace between us and our neighbors. But it is also true that one result of the peacemaking Christ, who by his death has achieved our salvation, is to bring an inward condition of peace.

The God of peace produces the peace of God, which garrisons our heart and mind. And that is a condition that the believer ought to know. It is something that Jesus gives to us, not just wishes for us, but actually bestows upon us: the gift of peace in our minds and the banishing of this sense of the troubled sea that causes our minds continually to be in distress and movement and never really to find peace.

So it was peace to their troubled minds that Jesus first brings. But I think that even more deeply, he was bringing peace to their guilty consciences. And we come nearer to the heart of the New Testament meaning, and indeed the biblical meaning of peace here. Because there is no question that these disciples were in this upper room having heard the word of Jesus' resurrection—or the rumor, as it would have been to them then—and they were experiencing the reality of guilt within their spirits.

They had betrayed him. They had deserted him and fled. They had disbelieved him. They had, in so many ways, stained their own lives by the way that they had responded to the Lord Jesus Christ. And many of them would have been experiencing a great sense of guilt. And they might have expected Jesus to come into their gathering and to look upon them and rather than saying "Peace be with you," to say "Shame upon you."

But he comes and pours what is like a healing balm upon their conscience and says, "Peace be with you." And after he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. And of course, you do not need me to point out to you what the significance of that is: that precisely what our Lord Jesus had been doing by his death on the cross was achieving peace for guilty consciences. For bringing those who by their sin had alienated themselves from God and had lost all reality of peace with God, he was bringing them afresh the gift of peace for their guilty conscience.

Now, throughout scripture, this is something that God has spoken about again and again. It is peace that the Messiah will bring. It is peace that is God's ultimate gift of salvation, and it speaks of a wholeness that God produces in all the fractured spoiling that sin produces in our lives. And here he is, the Lord Jesus himself, bestowing this gift of peace upon these men and women with troubled consciences. And it is his dying love that produces it.

There are occasions when many of us need to gather together simply for this purpose, you know. We need the reality of what it means for the balm of God's grace to speak peace into our troubled, guilty conscience, and to enable us to know what it is to receive the healing of God's peace flooding our souls and purifying our conscience. And it is a reality that Jesus obviously was eager to bring on that evening. Of course, there is such a thing as a cheap peace.

The prophet spoke of it frequently, you know, when they said that there were false prophets who would cry to the people "peace, peace," when there was no peace. And it is possible for us to quieten our conscience simply by trying to forget about our sin or by minimizing it or something of the kind. But here Jesus displays to the disciples the costly, infinitely costly basis on which he was bringing them the peace of God that passes all understanding.

And it is when opening our hearts to him, as Peter had to do a little later here, and acknowledging the true condition of our hearts before God, that we're able to find in the wounds of Jesus peace that is beyond understanding. Now I need to pause for a moment and ask you if you really know what that peace is, the peace for troubled minds that Jesus gives, that personal experience of the peace of God standing guard over your heart and mind, and the reality of peace in a guilty conscience by which sin has been dealt with and purged away and every sense of hostility with God has been broken down and we are at peace with him.

The disciples' meeting with Jesus that evening produced precisely that. I have no doubt whatsoever that there are many of us in church this evening who need the same reality in our own lives in the simplest of ways and yet in the most profound: the peace of God standing guard over our hearts and our minds. John Newton, the great slave trader and preacher of the gospel who became a slave of Jesus Christ, once wrote in one of his letters that he had found the deepest peace with God and from God. "When I ponder much," he wrote, "on the glories of my redeemer as he died on the cross, peace appears to flow," says Newton, "from Calvary."

So it was for the disciples. They had an experience of peace. But the second thing Jesus spoke to them about was about a mission to the world. In verse 21, we begin to discover that Jesus is not only concerned about the disciples' need and he ministers peace to them. He is concerned about the world's need. And how does he show that concern? Well, you notice how simple it is again. In verse 21, he tells the disciples that his burden for the world is met by two events.

One is by the Father sending him into the world, and the other is by his sending the disciples into the world. "Again, Jesus said to them, 'Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.'" Now that actually is the second time you may recollect that Jesus has spoken about this within hours of each other. The first of them was in his address to the Father, when in John 17 and verse 18, he prays for his disciples.

"They are not of the world," verse 16, "even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world." And Jesus now fulfills that prayer by saying to the disciples, "As the Father has sent me, I am sending you." So you notice that he not only issues a command to the disciples to go into the world, he also supplies a pattern by which they should go into the world.

And the really amazing thing is this: here is Jesus meeting these so recent failures who had forsaken him, and now he comes to them and says to them, "Just as the Father sent me into the world, so I am sending you into the world." Now we can understand the Father sending the Son as the vehicle of his grace, as the messenger of salvation, as the servant who would fulfill his will. There is really no difficulty in us grasping that the Father should send the Son because of his burden for the world.

But that the Son should send us into the world precisely as the Father sent the Son is overwhelmingly astonishing. What an amazing privilege this is, my Christian friends, that God is giving to us: that just as the Lord Jesus is sent by the Father into the world to achieve our salvation, so the Lord Jesus sends us into the world to proclaim that salvation. And he sees an entire parallel between the two things.

And this, of course, is the very key to Christian witness and Christian service. This is the basis from which we are to think about it. It is not that we go through some kind of course by which we are enabled to bear witness to the Lord Jesus Christ. It is that the Lord Jesus sends us precisely as the Father sent him. Now you see the amazing dignity that this brings and the amazing privilege it gives to us, as we are conscious that we are going into the world day by day as the Lord Jesus was sent into the world by the Father.

Now how did the Father send the Son? There are so many answers to that question. Let me simply give to you one or two of them. He sent him, of course, primarily with authority from heaven. And the very authority of God the Father rested upon the Lord Jesus Christ, so that the way that he regularly speaks, as we've often found here in John's Gospel of God the Father, is "Him that sent me." It is his continual consciousness of God the Father and his relationship to him.

"I do not do my own will but the will of him that sent me. The words I speak are not my own, but the words of him that sent me. I do not do my own works but the works of him that sent me." And that, of course, was Jesus' way of pressing his authority upon those that he were listening to him. And here Jesus is saying, "In the same way that the Father sent me, I send you into the world." It is an amazing thing.

The apostle Paul has grasped something of it when he describes us as ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We plead with you in Christ's stead, be reconciled to God. Do you see what this means, my dear friends? That when we are bearing witness to the Lord Jesus Christ in the world, we have all the authority of the living God within us and behind us as we bear witness. That's what takes timid, frightened souls as we find ourselves so often to be, and brings a new note of authority into our witness.

As the Lord Jesus was sent by the Father, so he says, "I send you." But you notice the second way in which Jesus came: not only with authority, but with humility. He came as a servant, divesting himself of the majestic glory that he enjoyed with the Father in heaven, making himself of no reputation, taking upon him the form of a servant, and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself. This is the pattern of the Lord Jesus sending into the world. He is sent as the servant figure.

And the great characteristic of his relationship with others is not that he lords it over them, but that he gets down and washes their feet. Now, this picture of servanthood is the picture of the witness, the ambassador of the Lord Jesus. A very interesting picture this, you see: that you get the dignity and the authority of the ambassador alongside the humility of the servant. And this is the pattern that we are to follow as we are sent by Jesus into the world.

So all forms—let me say to you as clearly as I can—in the service of God, whether it is merely personal witness or public witness of whatever kind, all forms of self-display and self-conceit and self-interest and self-glory are abhorrent to the God who sent his Son in the form of a humble servant. "We are," says Paul to the Corinthians, "we are your servants for Jesus' sake." "This is how I send you," says Jesus. And if we won't go in that form, he will not send us.

With authority, with humility, you know there is another thing that I greatly want to grasp, and I scarcely know how to put it. But I think the best way of putting it is: in some sense with an identity, certainly with an identification with those to whom he is being sent. Do you notice this? The Lord Jesus did not stay aloof from sinners when he came for our salvation. He did not send messages from heaven or post things to people below.

He came down and identified himself with sinners where they were, in order that he might bring them salvation. You will know that as a term of reproach, they said, "He is the friend of sinners." But you and I know that were he not that, we would have no hope whatsoever in the world. It is because he has come down to where we were and identified himself with us that he was ready to touch lepers and let prostitutes touch him, that he became known as the friend of sinners.

Of course, the ultimate identification was in his death on the cross, whereby Paul says in these mysterious words, "He became sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him." Now, I don't know how to describe this kind of evangelism, and therefore I want to read to you some words that were written by John Stott. And he too is in difficulties to know how to describe it; that encourages me a little.

"I find it difficult," he says, "to know how to describe what I am thinking about. But if I were to choose one word to express it, it would be 'friendship' as opposed to 'aloofness.' If Jesus was the friend of publicans and sinners, we must be too. Without doubt, there is a ministry to strangers, like distributing tracts to passers-by and signing checks for human need. These things are right, good, Christian, and responsible. And yet, it is service at a distance. It is the kind of service Jesus could have given if he had remained in heaven. But he 'earthed' his service, and so must we.

The most Christian context in which to offer service or share the gospel is friendship. No other kindness necessitates anything like an incarnation—an entering into another person's world. The cross-cultural missionary knows this. The missionary who goes to another country in which another language is spoken and another culture dominates has to learn that language and absorb that culture. It takes him years and tears and sweat. We need to take this more seriously.

There are many who translate the Bible into the languages of the world. But who in our own nation is translating the gospel into the cultures of the world? For all evangelism is at least in some part cross-cultural, even if we stay in our own country. There is a gap to be bridged, and we need to bridge it through friendship." It's what Tom Allen, who used to preach from this pulpit years ago, once called "gaining the right to speak to people about Christ."

And you can see what he meant. What he was meaning was that I was ready to show that I was interested in people, not just as fish to be put into my goldfish bowl, but as real people for whom Christ bled and died, so that I might be able to speak a genuine word to them. And that takes time, of course. I remember vividly being at a university mission which I was invited to conduct in a certain part of the United Kingdom—not here.

And when I went, I always remember that people in the Christian Union had bombarded the university with notices and sent everywhere information, put up bills; they'd gone to all sorts of expense in advertising. And yet scarcely any non-Christians came. And I remember speaking with a group of them one evening and saying to them, "Why do you think it is that so few non-Christians were here?" And one of them said, "Well, I think the answer's very simple. We don't know any."

And I think that was precisely the truth. So easy for us, isn't it? Never to learn to sit where they sit, to bleed where they bleed, to hurt where they hurt, and to enter into their skin, as it were. So much easier to hand a tract and say "God bless you." But friendship is a very costly form of evangelism. And I have little doubt that that is what the pattern of Jesus' service implies. Finally, he gives to them not only an experience of peace and a summons to service, but he gives to them the power of the Holy Spirit.

Verse 22: "And with that, he breathed on them and said, 'Receive the Holy Spirit.'" Now there are people who ask the question—which seems to me to be scarcely central—does this mean that Jesus is bestowing the Holy Spirit on the disciples here, and then the Holy Spirit was also bestowed upon them on the day of Pentecost? I think that there are various answers to that question, and it doesn't really matter too much which of them is right.

One of them may be that what Jesus is doing here is giving them a foretaste of that outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, which appears to have been the occasion when they were transformed and filled and empowered and sent out for service. But the fact is that the power of the Holy Spirit is referred to here for the simple reason that Jesus recognized that they would be utterly unable to fulfill this mission without the power of the Holy Spirit.

He himself—do you remember?—and he is simply doing what happened in his own experience as he was summoned by the Father onto the field of service. When he arose from baptism, the Holy Spirit descended upon him and anointed him for service. And he is speaking of the same thing. Just as I was anointed by the Holy Spirit, he says, here is the anointing of the Holy Spirit for you. For the simple reason that without the power of the Holy Spirit operating in their lives, there would be no hearts opened to the gospel, there would be no blind eyes made to see, there would be no stubborn, rebellious wills subdued to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Because only the Holy Spirit can accomplish in people's lives what we are seeking to do. How we need to be persuaded of that. There are so many things that we can do in serving God left to ourselves. And I really mean we can do them left to ourselves. You can convince people intellectually, if that's your gift, and bring them to the place where they are intellectually acknowledging that the Christian gospel is true. You can do that left to yourself.

You can move people emotionally left to yourself, if that's your particular gift. But I tell you the one thing that not one of us, however multiplied our gifts may be, can do, and that is to regenerate those who are without Christ and bring them into newness of life. Only the Holy Spirit can do that. And my dear friends, what we are interested in is raising men and women from the dead into newness of life. We are not merely concerned with intellectual conquest, although you will not imagine that I think that that's unimportant.

We are not merely concerned with emotionally moving people. We are concerned with spiritual resurrection, and only the Holy Spirit can accomplish it. Now, that's the primary reason, I think, that Jesus says to them here, "Receive the Holy Spirit." And they need to recognize this as we do ourselves this evening. Of course, the corollary of that truth is as logical as any proposition could be in logic, and it is that the primary evangelistic method is prayer.

If this work in which we are engaged and to which God calls us is the work of the Holy Spirit and only he can do it, then prayer is of the essence of our witness, not on the periphery of it. Now, you may well be saying to yourself, "He has managed to work towards a quarter past eight and he's going to miss out this tricky verse at the very end." Well, you're wrong because I do want to say a word about it. This strange statement in verse 23: "Receive the Holy Spirit," says Jesus.

"If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven. If you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven." That, of course, is a very difficult thing that Jesus says, because what it appears to mean is that it gives to the disciples, to the disciple band who were there, the authority and the right to bestow or to withhold—do you notice?—forgiveness of sins, the kind of forgiveness that by the bestowal of his peace he has brought to the disciples. Now, I think there are a number of considerations that we need to have in mind as we try to understand this.

One is that more than the apostles were present when Jesus spoke to them in this upper room. You will notice that in the upper room the disciples were together in verse 19. Now, that word does not apply to the 12. In verse 24, do you notice the two are distinguished? "Now Thomas, called Didymus, one of the 12, was not with the disciples when Jesus came." The disciples and the 12 appear to have been a different company of people. And if Jesus is giving this authority to forgive or to withhold forgiveness, then he's giving it to a much wider company than just to the 11.

The second thing is that if you interpret scripture as you ought, so as to fit in with every other part of scripture—that is, that one isolated part of scripture should not contradict the general trend of scripture—then you will discover that the general trend of scripture is to say this: that only God can forgive sin. That's what Jesus himself is proving, you remember, when the four men let their friend down in front of him and he says to him, "Your sins be forgiven you."

And they say, "Who can forgive sins but God only?" And Jesus says, "Right, but which is easier: to say to this man 'your sins be forgiven' or to say 'rise and take up your bed and walk'? But that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sin," he says to him, "rise, take up your bed and walk." In other words, he is proving that he as the Son of God has power to forgive sin. But it is underlining the truth that only God can do that.

The third thing that we need to recognize is that there is absolutely no instance anywhere in the rest of the New Testament after this incident of anyone of the disciples conferring upon anybody the forgiveness of sins or withholding it. They did preach forgiveness with assurance and authority, and they were able to say to them, "Your sins are forgiven for Jesus' sake." But that was a different thing, and I think that's what Jesus is giving to them: not the authority of a priest to forgive sins, but the authority of a preacher to proclaim the forgiveness of sins.

And the point is, of course, that this is what the world so desperately needs. And Jesus sends his disciples out into the world in order that forgiveness resulting in peace with God may be proclaimed to all kinds and conditions of men. So this evening, as the Lord Jesus himself comes to make himself known to us in his word, as he bestows on us the experience of peace and calls us to a mission in the world, what we need like them more than anything else is the power of his Holy Spirit, that we may be what by and large we are not at the moment in the world—and that is effective witnesses for Jesus Christ. May God make us that, and begin with me. Let us pray.

Our heavenly Father, we thank you for your word and for your Son and for his words. And we pray that we may both hear and heed them for the glory of your name. Amen.

Mark Daniels: You're listening to Hear the Word of God with the Reverend Eric Alexander, a minister in the Church of Scotland for over 50 years. To access more Bible teaching from Reverend Alexander, visit hearthewordofgod.org where your generous contribution will help us sustain and grow this ministry. That's hearthewordofgod.org.

You could choose instead to mail a check to this address: 600 Eden Road, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 17601. Or call 1-800-488-1888. This program is a presentation of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. I'm Mark Daniels. Thank you for listening. Please join us again next time for Eric Alexander and Hear the Word of God.