Gospel in Life

Guest (Male): Welcome to Gospel in Life. What keeps your faith from unraveling when trouble comes your way? On the night before his crucifixion, Jesus told his disciples to not let their hearts be afraid. Today, Tim Keller shows us how Jesus offers a new kind of confidence that is rooted in something far more secure than our circumstances.

The reading for today is taken from the book of John, chapter 14, verses 16 through 26. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him because it neither sees him nor knows him, but you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live.

On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them. Then Judas (not Judas Iscariot) said, "But, Lord, why do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?"

Jesus replied, "Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Anyone who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me. All this I have spoken while still with you. But the advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you." This is the word of the Lord.

Tim Keller: Let me just underscore Abe's request for you to come to that town hall. These town halls are going to be very important this year. I can remember some turning points in the history of Redeemer very often happened when people came together. In a worship service, we're doing the main thing we do as a church. In town halls, we talk about the things we do in the church, and it'd be very important that you make it. Besides that, there will not be any championship football next Sunday, I guarantee. No distractions.

Where Jesus Christ is equipping his disciples to go out into the world the night before he dies. It is John chapter 13 to 17. We're spending the entire year looking at this passage. But chapter 14 is special in this way. Whenever in the old tales, if they were going to send people out on a quest or a journey, they always gave them special gifts with special powers. George MacDonald in the late 19th century wrote two very well-known fairy tale books. One is called The Princess and the Goblins and the other is called The Princess and Curdie.

In the first one, Irene gets a little magic ring that has an invisible thread attached to it that if you follow will always take you to safety. In the second one, Curdie gets the ability to touch somebody's hands—hold a hand or shake a hand—and immediately discern the person's true character and plans. These are ways in which our heroes get what they need in order to face the foes and to complete their quest.

Actually, that's what Jesus is doing in chapter 14. He's sending his disciples, and that is us, out into the world, and he's giving them mighty gifts—mighty gifts with special powers. Of all the gifts that he gives, the greatest gift is the one we just have been reading about. I do not feel under any real pressure to tell you everything there is to know because this will keep coming up. This subject will keep coming up. But here is the first time we actually can address it. Jesus Christ gives his disciples and to us the gift of the Holy Spirit, which is the greatest gift possible.

Let's see what we learn even in this passage about who the Spirit is, what the Spirit does, and why the Spirit can do it. Who he is, what he does, and why he can do it. First of all, who he is. I have already let the cat out of the bag with the title of this heading. The Spirit of God, according to the Bible, we are going to learn two things. Number one: the Spirit is a person. The Spirit is not just a force, not just an energy. The Spirit is a person.

Greek nouns are assigned a gender—masculine, feminine, neuter. The Greek noun for Spirit is neuter, but that does not matter. Jesus Christ deliberately breaks the conventions of grammar by continually referring to the Spirit as "he." You can see it five times in verse 17. The Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him because it neither sees him nor knows him, but you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. So the Spirit is a person. That is as emphatic as possible that Jesus can make it. Not just a kind of energy force or a force field.

But another person. Another like what? Jesus uses this word. We will get back to it. He says, "He will give you another. I am going away, and he will give you another." It means another like Jesus, which is an astonishing thing to say. In fact, here is what is really interesting. The whole point of this discourse is Jesus keeps saying, "I am going away, I am going away, I am going away." And now he says in verse 16 and 17, "But the Spirit will come. The Father will send him, the Spirit." So, I am going away and he is coming.

Then in verse 18, he says, "I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you." I am going away, he will come, but by the way, when he comes, I will be coming. The one who is not me is bringing me. Or another way to put it is, and he says it right here, "The world will not see me anymore, but you will see me." Why? Because the Holy Spirit is the way that Jesus Christ is present with us in not a bodily form and therefore not in a visible form.

The Holy Spirit is a person, the Holy Spirit is a divine person like Jesus, and the Holy Spirit in some ways is certainly not Jesus but in other ways brings Jesus. In fact, let's press it a little further. Down in verse 23, Jesus actually goes so far as to say, "My Father will love them and we will come to them and make our home with them." Here is what we have: I am taking you right to the precipice, right to the edge of the doctrine of the Trinity, but do not be afraid. I am not going to push you over into it.

We are not going to go into the doctrine of the Trinity here, but you need to see this is the kind of material from which the biblical doctrine of the Trinity comes. What is the biblical doctrine of the Trinity? It is unique of all the religions of the world. Christianity teaches that we do not have one God in one person who just takes different forms in different times. Nor do we have three gods in three persons. We have one God in three persons—Father, Son, Holy Spirit—who are all equally divine and who know and love each other.

For our purposes, there are so many implications—wonderful things to talk about—but that is what I said, I am not pushing over the precipice into it. Instead, here is the thing you need to know: when you get the Holy Spirit, you get God. That is the reason why Jesus is able to say, "Because I live, you also will live. He will be in you, and therefore you get the very life of God in you." So that is who the Spirit is, and it has implications, as we will see, for what the Spirit does.

What does the Spirit come doing? In verse 26, "But the advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name." He comes—this isn't the only thing he does, but the point is, among other things, the Holy Spirit is an advocate. Many of you know that if you go to different translations, this translation is the 1984 edition of the New International Version. Where you have here the current edition of the New International Version, in my Bible it says, "the counselor, the Father will send the counselor, the Holy Spirit." In yours, it says the advocate. Sometimes it says the helper, sometimes it says the comforter.

Whenever you get to a word that every translation translates differently, you know you have got a richness of meaning that is impossible to get across into one English word. I would frankly vote for the advocate. If I was going to choose one word, I would say that was my favorite for a lot of reasons, but we still have to reflect a little bit on it because obviously it has too much richness just to give you one word. What is the Greek word behind the word advocate or counselor or comforter? It is a pretty famous, important Greek word in the New Testament: parakaleo or paraclete.

Even there, you can hear that there are two parts to that word, and what is weird about it is they almost work against each other. Kaleo means to call, but it means to summons or declare. It is kind of a confrontive word, kind of in-your-face, it is very assertive. But it starts with the prefix para, which means to come alongside, which you see in our English words like paramedic or paralegal. If kaleo is a confrontive word almost, para is a supportive word, it is a sympathetic word.

Parakaleo seems to be both confrontive and supportive. You say, "How in the world can you combine those two in one person?" The answer is there are two different ways that I think you can. One is there could be an advocate who confronts others for you—a defense attorney, as it were. So the person is confrontive, but for you. The person is arguing with other people for you, making a case for you, arguing to others for you. That is a defense attorney.

But there is a second way you could combine the two: not a defense attorney, but a sober companion—the friend of an addict. Because a sober companion and a friend of an addict argues with you for you, confronts you for you. A defense attorney confronts other people who might harm you for you. But a sober companion confronts things inside you that could harm you for you. The sober companion argues with you for you. One kind of advocate is a defense attorney, one kind is a sober companion. One kind is arguing against others for you that could harm you, and the sober companion is arguing with things inside you that could harm you.

I am here with some really good news. If you are a Christian, you believe in Jesus Christ, you get both. You get both kinds of advocates. You get the first advocate and the second advocate, and they are both divine. It is an astonishing claim, and by the way, not one I think that most Christians think about. Probably I am already using a lot of terminology that you are not used to, even if you have been a Christian or in the church for a long time. Yet it is an incredible gift, it is a mighty gift for our quest. We get two advocates.

The Holy Spirit is the second kind. Who is the first kind? I will get there in a minute, that is my third point. But we are still in the second point. What does the Holy Spirit do? The Holy Spirit is an advocate. That is, I am going to say according to the Bible, one of the things—not the only thing the Holy Spirit does—is he confronts you, he argues with you for you. He argues with things and confronts the things inside you, but always for you. He is for you.

Romans chapter 8:15-16. In Romans chapter 8:15, it says this: "God has not given us a spirit of fear, but he has given us the Spirit of his Son who comes into our hearts crying, 'Abba, Father.'" Crying—there we go, here's the Holy Spirit speaking, crying, yelling maybe. But it says instead of fears, our hearts are subject to fears, but God gives us the Holy Spirit who comes in and cries, "Abba, Father." What does that mean? Verse 16, I think, explains it. In verse 16, it says, "The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God."

Paul, when he writes this, is evoking a picture because the word bears witness, and you can even tell in the English translation, which is good, that Paul is using a term that means expert testimony in a trial. In fact, star witness expert testimony in a trial. So here, in just a stroke or two, Paul is essentially getting us to imagine a picture. The picture is there is a trial, and you are on trial. You are accused, and you are losing. Where is this trial? It is in your spirit.

The Spirit bears witness with your spirit. In your spirit, you are afraid, you are feeling guilty, you are feeling like a failure, whatever. There is a trial going on, there is an accusation, and you are losing. And then in comes the Spirit with expert testimony that you are a child of God. You say, "Well, that is an interesting idea." There is another very famous place where that happened, as it were. At the baptism of Jesus Christ, the heavens were ripped open and the Holy Spirit descended like a dove. He does not just descend like a dove, and God was heard to say, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."

So you see that is the Spirit's job. You are sinking under doubts and under fears, it is in your spirit, and you are in a trial and you are losing, thinking, "I'm a failure, I've done this, I've done that wrong." And in comes the Holy Spirit and says, "No, you are his child. You are loved. He is well pleased with you." The job of the Holy Spirit is to come and argue with you, is to come and confront you, especially as 1 John 3:20 says: "When our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts." How does God overcome the condemnation of our hearts? With the Holy Spirit. When our hearts condemn us, the Holy Spirit is greater than our hearts.

Human beings do not like the idea of salvation by grace. Every religion in the world rejects it and says you are saved by living a good life. Even Christianity, though it teaches we are saved by grace, Christians do not want to believe it. Our hearts do not want to believe it. Why? Partly pride, but partly calculation. Because you know if you have been good and you have tried your best and you said your prayers and you get to church—surely God owes you something.

And that way, even Christians deep in our hearts, when we become Christians, even though we say, "I believe we're saved by grace," your heart does not believe that, does not want to believe it, and operates as if it is not true. It basically operates saying, "Well, because I've done this and I've done this, surely God owes me something." That is how you operate down deep, and then you actually get out in life, you do fail, and bad things do happen, and you mess up, and then you are in despair because deep in your heart you actually do not believe you could be a child of God. The Holy Spirit comes in and says, "Yes, you are." You are loved. He comes crying, "God is your Father."

But a good sober companion does not just tell a friend who feels worthless that you are loved. It is also sometimes you have to confront the person. The Holy Spirit's job is not just to confront our hearts when they accuse us; the Holy Spirit has also got to confront our hearts when they tempt us. Because sometimes we go astray because we are underconfident in the love of God. But sometimes we go astray because we get a kind of spiritual overconfidence, and we say, "I can have this sin, it's really not a sin, or I kind of deserve it, or I can ask for forgiveness later." You get a kind of spiritual overconfidence.

When the Holy Spirit sees our hearts being enticed by sex, money, or power, or other things, what does he do? There is an interesting place in James chapter 4. James says, "Don't you realize that friendship with the world is enmity with God?" And then he says that the Spirit of God within you longs intensely. It is not an easy word to understand, but I like the commentators who say what it is saying is that when the Holy Spirit sees the world enticing you away, it longs to bring you back. He longs to bring you back and he says, "No, no, no, no. You cannot go there."

The Holy Spirit's job is to be your sober companion, is to say, "You're looking for love in all the wrong places, you're trying to earn your salvation, you don't believe you're really loved, you're not living as if you're loved, and stop it. You are loved. God says, 'You are my beloved child, in whom I am well pleased.'" Have you got that in your life? And if you say, "Well, I don't know how that actually works," the hints are here. He is the Spirit of truth and he is a person. When you hear the term "filled with the Spirit," if you think of the Spirit in personal terms, you can think that is a little bit like a gas tank being filled up with gas.

But if he is a person, how do you get filled with a person? The answer is you get filled with a person by listening to the person, by spending time with the person, by talking with the person. And it says he is a Spirit of truth. You know Hebrews chapter 4:12 says the Bible, the scripture, the word of God is alive and active like a two-edged sword that penetrates. Do you know in Ephesians 6 it says that the sword of the Spirit is the word of God?

Think about this. If it is the job of the Spirit to confront you, to deal with your doubts and your fears and your guilt and your underconfidence and your overconfidence, if it is the job of the Spirit for him to come in and shake you and say you are loved, what is his ammunition? How does he speak to you? And the answer is the sword of the Spirit is the word of God. The Bible. He brings the truths of the Bible home to the heart, so it melts the heart and it gets rid of the coldness and it gets rid of the fears, doubts, hubris, and hardness.

So if you say, "I'd love to have the work of the Spirit in my life, I'd love to have him as the second advocate," then you have got to know the Bible. Because the more of the Bible you know, the more ammunition you are giving your sober companion. And it is all the ammunition of love. The sword of the Spirit is the word of God. But more specifically—and now here is our third point—why is he able to do it? Why is he able to do this? And the answer is: the work of the second advocate is to apply the work of the first advocate to our hearts.

It is not just that he applies the Bible in some kind of general way. Jesus says in verse 16, "I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate," which means he is the first one. And then down in verse 26, it says, "the advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you." There it is. The work of the second advocate is to take the truth of the first advocate—the gospel, his being, his person, his work, his teachings—and Jesus is the first advocate. It is the work of the Holy Spirit to take the work of the first advocate and apply it to your heart.

What is the work of the first advocate? This text does not tell us, but we cannot understand the power of this text unless we go to places where it does. John himself wrote the Gospel of John, but he also wrote three letters in the Bible: 1, 2, and 3 John. And in 1 John, he explains what he means by the word advocate here. In 1 John chapter 2, verse 1, he says, "My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One."

We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. In Hebrews 7 and Romans 8, it says that God the Father sits on the judgment seat of the universe and Jesus Christ the Son intercedes for us. He argues for us, he makes his case for us, he intercedes for us. So here is Jesus, here is John, the writer of Hebrews, and here is Paul, all saying that the work of the first advocate is for Jesus Christ to stand as an advocate before the bar of God and the justice of the universe and be our defense attorney.

Let's unpack that for a second, but first let me just say this. We're talking here about something very mysterious, something very deep that happens in the Godhead through the work of Jesus Christ on the cross. How can a holy and just God embrace unholy and flawed human beings? How can a holy and just God—don't you want a God who believes in justice? Well, then how can God give us things we don't deserve forever? Something has to happen on the inside of God to enable that to happen, for his justice and his holiness and his love to be reconciled. That happens on the cross.

But what we are being told here is the best way for us to grasp the wonder and the power of it is to understand this metaphor: the metaphor of Jesus Christ standing before the judgment seat of the universe, interceding on our behalf. That is the metaphor the Bible is asking us to ponder. There are two parts to it. The first part is this idea that there is a judgment bar of the universe, before which we all stand accountable. And that is not an easy sell today. It is not an easy sell at all.

We live in an era that says that is the way people used to believe. People used to believe that there was a judgment seat outside of us, some standard that we are all accountable to. It might be the law of God, or Plato's realm of ideas. But we used to believe that there was a kind of external set of moral absolutes that we are all accountable to. But we do not believe that anymore. We believe that all moral discrimination and intuitions come from inside. We decide what is right or wrong for us, and therefore guilt is nothing but psychological.

It is a subjective feeling you have, which you can get rid of if you just change your views. There is nothing out here that objectively makes us guilty. Friedrich Nietzsche thought the whole idea of guilt would go away when people stopped believing in God. Freud knew better, and in his great and very gloomy book, Civilization and Its Discontents, he says it is kind of weird. Even when you deny guilt and say it is all in your head, all that seems to do is drive it in deeper. And it still affects your life, but you do not have a word for it anymore, so you actually do not have any way of dealing with it.

Freud was pretty smart about those things, and here is the fact: it has not gone away. Mental health experts will tell you, even though fewer people believe in God, it does not go away. There is still a sense that we are not what we should be, and no matter how hard we try to change our psychology, we cannot get rid of it. There still is a sense that what the Bible says is true: there is a bench of justice, a seat of justice before which we are all accountable, and nobody on the final day will be able to stand before that bar of judgment and pass the test.

The second part of the metaphor is this: if you are a Christian, the minute you become a Christian, Jesus Christ stands as your representative, as your defense attorney, before that bar of justice. I have got to tell you, when I first became a Christian, I read about this, that Jesus Christ stands before the judgment seat of God and intercedes for us. But I really had no idea what that was. It sounded kind of strange and almost like there is something weird going on here. I really didn't understand it. But I think about five or six years into my being a Christian, I read an outline of a sermon by a man named Charles Hodge, who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary in the 1840s.

It was a chapel talk on the intercession of Christ, and it just changed me. First of all, he said this idea that Jesus is an advocate or a defense attorney means at least two things. It means that he appears to the court, not you, if you're a Christian. And secondly, he has got an infallible case. If you go to trial because you've been accused of something and you get a great defense attorney, you're in good shape because the court doesn't really see you, the court sees your attorney. If your attorney is eloquent, savvy, or succeeds, you do too. As Charles Hodge says, you're lost in your advocate.

And that means at least this: that means that all your flaws, if you're a Christian, all your flaws, all your sins, all your stains on your soul—they don't appear before God. Those perfect eyes of the Judge of all the earth who see through everything and see everything you've ever done and see every thought you've ever had—when they see you in Jesus Christ, they see nothing but the perfect beauty. You are lost in your advocate. That is the first thing that I learned from Charles Hodge.

The second thing I learned was this: a good defense attorney is up there not just hoping and pleading that the judge and the jury will somehow let his client off, but the lawyer has a case. Charles Hodge says it is not the job of the attorney just to hope that somehow they will let the client off. The attorney has to come in and say, "My client should be acquitted because of the law." And Jesus Christ is not up there begging for mercy. Jesus Christ is demanding justice.

That was something that was an absolute game-changer for me. I always thought that Jesus Christ interceding for me meant that every day Jesus got up and went up to see the Father and said, "Father, I represent Tim Keller here and because of our relationship, would you please give him a break and just overlook it one more time?" And I thought the Father was saying, "Well, all right, okay, one more time." And even with the Son and the Father, you wonder: how long can that last? It didn't make me feel very confident.

But then Charles Hodge came along and said: Wait, listen. Hebrews chapter 12 talks about the blood of Jesus Christ speaking. When God comes to Cain in Genesis 4 after Cain has killed Abel, what does God say to Cain? He says, "The blood of your brother Abel cries out to me from the ground." The blood of Abel was crying for vengeance, for punishment, for retribution. But it says in chapter 12 of Hebrews that we come to the blood of Jesus Christ which speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. The blood of Jesus Christ is crying too.

Jesus Christ every day stands before the Father and says, "My people have lied, my people have cheated, my people have failed again today, my people have been selfish. And Father, the wages of sin is death, but I have paid those wages. They have incurred debts, but I have paid their debts. Here's my blood. And it would be unjust to have two payments for the same debt. And therefore because I have died, I demand acquittal for my clients. I'm not begging for mercy, I'm demanding justice. It would be unjust for you not to receive them." That is an infallible case.

And don't you see? The more you are able to understand the work of the first advocate, the more powerful the work of the second advocate in your life. The second advocate will come and teach you all things and remind you of everything Jesus has said and done. When I saw what Jesus Christ has done for me, the Holy Spirit now had more ammunition. His sword was far sharper. The Holy Spirit can come in and say, "You are loved. See how unconditionally you are loved? See how radically you're accepted? Stop trying to save yourself. Stop trying to look for love in all the wrong places. Stop working yourself to death."

He is confronting you until you are filled with the light and glory. There was an 18th-century preacher who when he was still a teenager had a weird experience. He saw an old woman who everybody was standing around her bed, and she was dying. They thought she was unconscious, and they were standing around her bed saying what a horrible life she had. Two husbands died on her, she was constantly sick, and she is dying without a penny.

And just before she died, she opened her eyes—she had heard them—and she said, "How can you call me poor? I am rich and today I will stand before him bold as a lion." If she had a little more breath, she could have said this: "I lost two husbands, but I have the one husband that can never die. I have no money, but I have the real wealth that nobody can take away from me. And I've been sick, but Jesus Christ long ago dealt with the only sickness that could really kill me, which is my sin. And therefore I will stand before him bold as a lion." The second advocate was telling her about the first advocate's work.

Believe in Jesus Christ. Ask God to accept you because of the work of the first advocate. Receive the Holy Spirit, and let the Holy Spirit talk to you about the work of the first advocate. Give him ammunition. Study the word of God. Learn the gospel so that you can live all of your life bold as a lion. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the wonder of this promise and the greatness of the gift of the Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit, have power in our lives, get glory in our lives, and show us the glory of the first advocate, Jesus Christ. In his name we pray, amen.

Guest (Male): Thanks for joining us here on the Gospel in Life podcast. If you were encouraged by today's teaching, you can help others discover this podcast by rating and reviewing it. And to find more great gospel-centered content by Tim Keller anytime, visit gospelinlife.com. Today's sermon was recorded in 2017. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were recorded between 1989 and 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.