(I was asked to give a 2-3 minute word on the marriage of the Spirit and the Word in our Servant Leaders gathering yesterday. I didn’t use notes. So this is a partial re-creation of that word, plus a few more thoughts I might have shared had I had more time – all taken from the gospel of John).
Joshua asked me to share for a few minutes regarding our ongoing pursuit of a healthy marriage between the Spirit of God and the written Word of God here at The Well – Los Osos.
Jesus said in John 6:63, “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.”
John the apostle said of Jesus in John 1:4, “In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men.” In this man Jesus was the God life, the supernatural pure and holy divine life – sometimes called eternal life in the Scriptures. Anyone exposed to Jesus when He walked the earth knew there was something very different about Him. Being around Him caused people to see and know and feel things they had never seen, known or felt before because the way He spoke and acted and responded to people and situations was unlike anything they had ever been exposed to before.
When we read all these references to eternal life in the gospel of John (John 3:15 being the first one) we tend to think of that ultimate destiny – heaven that it is our inheritance when we die. And certainly it includes that. But it is much more than that. For instance when John said in John 3:36, “He who believes in the Son has eternal life..” he meant that the believer has it now, not just when he dies. It is a kind or quality of life (the God life) that is imparted to us by faith through His precious cleansing blood.
When Jesus said in John 10:10, “ … I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” He was speaking of the present, not just the future.
But it is the Spirit who reveals this abundance of supernatural life and who gives us thirst for it and who helps us learn to walk in it; and it is the Holy Spirit who helps us see and accept that our flesh, our ways, our own thinking, our education, our common sense, etc. are of no avail when it comes to seeing His kingdom purposes established in us, in those we care about, in our cities, etc.
If you are familiar with the context of John 6:63 you know Jesus had just told a crowd of disciples that unless they ate His flesh and drank His blood they had no life in themselves. And soon after saying “it is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life” many of the bigger crowd of His disciples discontinued following Him. Especially since included in His words were those that required any disciple to eat His flesh and drink his blood.
We tend to speak critically of all the mistakes and blunders Jesus’s 12 disciples made in their first few years following Him, but to their credit – when Jesus said hard things, and seemed to intentionally offend the crowds and their religious leaders, the 12 continued to follow Him because as Peter says towards the end of this chapter when Jesus asked if they too were going to quit following Him, Peter spoke for them saying, “Lord to whom could we go, You alone have words of eternal life.” (John 6:68). I don’t believe Peter just had heaven in mind when he said this.
Jesus’s every word – every day of their journey with Him affected them in ways no one’s words had every affected them before. Do you remember in John chapter 7:32 when the Pharisees and chief priests were so jealous of and so afraid of the increasing crowds following Jesus that they send officers to arrest Him and destroy Him what happened to them? Vs. 45 tells us, “The officers then came to the chief priests and Pharisees, and they said to them, “Why did you not bring Him?” (They clearly had the authority to do so and they were no fan of Jesus. I believe they fully intended to follow those orders). But listen to their answer, “The officers answered, “Never has a man spoken the way this man speaks.” (vs. 46). Jesus’s every word was life giving especially to those who had ears to hear.
One of the things I love about the Holy Spirit is He knows how to help us get from A to Z in our journey with Jesus. He knows how to help us understand in time the hard or complex things He sometimes says; He knows how to help us accept and appreciate the hard things He does and the unusual ways in which He does them; and He knows how to help us keep following Him when others decide to stop following Him. He knows how and is zealous to methodically wean us off anything and everything that keeps us from experiencing the abundance of life He wants to impart to us every day – so that He can teach us to treasure His every word in our heart – and so He can give us greater and greater understanding and appreciation for words that others stumble over and use as excuses to go their own way.
Thankfully many of Jesus’s words are clear and straightforward and are very comforting and reassuring. The Holy Spirit is faithful to lead us to those words when we need them as Jesus assured His disciples in those last hours with them before He was betrayed, “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all thins, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you.”
But I want to suggest this afternoon that we need the Holy Spirit to help us understand and appreciate the hard and the complex and the difficult to understand words of Jesus as much as we need the others; and the same Holy Spirit will gladly give us understanding of those when we learn to lean on Him and look to Him and patiently wait for Him to bring understanding and revelation.
“It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.”
As we pursue the marriage between the Spirit and the word, I want to especially encourage all of us today to give ever greater attention to the very words of Jesus. They cannot be separated from the abundance of life He came to give us. I’m glad to hear that some of you are seeking to read the whole Bible in a year. But may we especially prize and pursue the very words of Jesus. There are none other like them!
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