Once upon a time, there was a mother who had a son. From the time when he was six years old, she would encourage him every day to make his bed. And every day, he didn’t make his bed.
Years passed. Then one day, when he’s 18 years old and in grade 12, his mother walks by his bedroom with a hamper full of clothes. She glances to the side and sees that his bed is made. She is so surprised that she drops the hamper of clothes.
She is filled with curiosity over what might have caused this dramatic and long-desired change in her son’s behaviour and she can hardly wait for him to get home from school. When he arrives, she asked him, “Why did you start making your bed this morning?” He replied, “Well, it’s because I was watching a YouTube video where a guy was making a speech, and he said, ‘If you want to change the world, start by making your bed.'”
That night, when the woman’s husband came home, he can hear her weeping in her bedroom and crying out, “Why, why, why?”
Now, that story was entirely a work of fiction, and any similarity to anybody living now or in the past was totally coincidental. But it makes the point and the point is this: why is it that when we have knowledgeable people around us who love us and they repeatedly try to impart their wisdom to us, we don’t receive it, but when a random person says the exact same thing to us once, we go, “Oh, yeah, that’s a really good idea. I’m going to start doing that one today.”?
Well, I didn’t have an answer to the “Why?” question. But there is an important issue behind that question and that issue is wisdom. Wisdom is more than knowing information, it is knowing how to use information wisely. And wisdom is important at all times, but it’s especially important during tough times. During tough times, we often face some kind of a crisis where we have to make a serious decision, perhaps with life-changing consequences. As we make that decision, we need is wisdom. But then the question is, whose wisdom are we going to trust, ours or God’s? To help us reflect on that question, let’s look at John 16:1-15. If you have a Bible or a Bible app nearby, I invite you to turn there now.
Jesus’ Warnings About What His Followers Will Experience
This passage is again set on the night when Jesus was betrayed and within hours he will be going to the cross. It’s a night where the words Jesus says carry a huge amount of significance. He has washed the feet of his followers to model servant leadership. He has told them that one of them will betray him. He told Peter that he will deny Jesus three times. And he has promised his followers the Holy Spirit.
Jesus has told his followers some hard truths, and some of those things are very upsetting for his followers to hear. So Jesus goes on to say, “I told you these things so that you won’t abandon your faith, for you will be expelled from the synagogues. The time is coming when those who kill you will think they’re doing a holy service for God. This is because they have never known the Father, nor me” (John 16:1-3).
What is Jesus saying here? He is telling his followers that they are going to be persecuted for their faith in Jesus Christ. And this persecution is going to take two forms. One is a social form of persecution. When someone is expelled from a synagogue, as Jesus said would happen to his followers, that means is the expelled person will be cut off from the community of faith of which they were a part, that group of people who supported them, loved them, encouraged them, and with whom they shared common beliefs. They will be cast out and kicked to the curb.That’s one kind of persecution Jesus’ followers will face.
But there is also another kind of persecution in the future—physical persecution—and this still happens today. Right now, in many parts of the world, people who follow Jesus can be and are being killed because they believe in Jesus as their Savior. One of the important things we’re doing together as a congregation is to help rescue at least some families from that situation through our settlement ministry. But even in Canada, there’s a kind of subtle form of this kind of persecution. If you’re working at a job and you start being threatened with the loss of your job because you are a Christian, and you need that job to provide for your body and your family’s physical needs, that is a form of physical persecution because the consequences will harm you physically.
And not only does Jesus tell his followers that they will face persecution, he also says this: “Now I am going away to the one who sent me, and not one of you is asking where I’m going. Instead, you grieve because of what I’ve told you” (John 16:5-6). Human life being what it is, we will all experience grief at some point. And there are many different kinds of grief. There’s grief over the loss of a dream, grief over the loss of a relationship, grief over the loss of health, grief over the loss of a loved one, and grief when we must face our own mortality, as all of us will. But the grief that Jesus is talking about here is a very special kind of grief. It’s the compounded grief we feel when we grieve and it feels like God is absent.
It’s easy for us to trust that God is with us when the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and everyone around us is healthy and wealthy and wise. But it is quite another thing to believe that God is with us when us are in the depths of the darkest valleys. And that’s the kind of grief that Jesus is talking about here.
So there are two major challenges every follower of Jesus will face: the challenge of grief over God’s absence and the challenge of facing social and physical persecution. Those two things will happen to us. You can count on it. But we do not need to face those challenges on our own. In fact, we dare not even try because if we attempt to face persecution or grief over God’s seeming absence in our own strength, it will crush us. And one of two things will happen: either we will be devastated, or we will abandon our faith in Jesus, saying the cost is too high.
The Holy Spirit Will Convince Us
Jesus goes to explain why we don’t need to face these things on our own. He says, “But in fact, it is best for you that I go away because if I don’t, the Advocate won’t come” (John 16:7). As we saw in last week’s reflection, he’s referring here to the Holy Spirit, and some translations use the word advocate, others use encourager or helper. And the key point he is making is that if he doesn’t go away, the Advocate won’t come. If he does go away, then he will send the Holy Spirit to his followers.
What does Jesus mean? With his death on the cross and his resurrection, and then his ascension into heaven 40 days later, Jesus is going to be at the right hand of the Father, co-ruling with him as his co-regent, his Crown Prince. In that position of power and authority at the right hand of the Father, as we saw last week, Jesus is our Advocate with the Father. (Jesus is the First Advocate and the Holy Spirit is the Second Advocate.) Whatever we ask in Jesus’ name he will do because he wants to glorify the Father. Also, because he at the right hand of the Father, Jesus has the power and the authority he needs to send the Holy Spirit upon all believers. That happened happened on the day of Pentecost, which we celebrated a couple of weeks ago.
The result for us is that we live in an “in-between” time. We live in the time after Jesus’ ascension into heaven at the right hand of the Father after Jesus paid the full cost for the redemption of all creation. But all of creation hasn’t been fully redeemed yet. That will happen at some point in the future when Jesus comes back to this world in a visible way to complete the redemption of all creation. When Jesus comes back, he’s going to raise us from the dead, make our old dead bodies new again, so they’ll never get sick, never die, and we will live with Jesus in the New Heaven and Earth forever.
And during this in-between time, we need the Holy Spirit. We need the encouragement, the comfort, the strength of the Holy Spirit to help us trust that Jesus not only paid for our sins and defeated death for us, but that he is going to come back to this world in a visible way and make us and all things right. The Holy Spirit does all of those things for us. That’s why Jesus said it good that he’s going. We need the Holy Spirit to carry us through this in-between time.
But the Holy Spirit does even more than help, encourage, and comfort us. Jesus continues, “And when he comes, He will convict the world of its sin and of righteousness and of the coming judgment. The world’s sin is that it refuses to believe in me. Righteousness is available because I go to the Father, and you will see me no more. Judgment will come because the ruler of this world has already been judged” (John 16:8-11).
Let’s dig a little deeper into Jesus’ words. Jesus is saying that the Holy Spirit is the One who convinces us and others about three very important things. And those things are sin, or in other words, what is wrong; righteousness, or in other words, what is right (and God is the One who is right, not us. We like to think we’re right, but we’re wrong, and God is right); and finally, judgment, which is consequences for right and wrong, or we can even see it as the straightening out of all that’s wrong to make those things right.
The reason why this work of the Holy Spirit, this convincing or convicting work, is so very important is that if we’re not convinced by the Holy Spirit about what is wrong, if we’re not convinced by the Spirit about what is right (that is God), and if we’re not convinced by the Spirit that there are going to be consequences for right and wrong, then there is no way that we will ever reach out to God. And that’s really what we need to do—to reach out to God.
Jesus goes on to say that “But when he, the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own. He will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come” (John 16:13). So the Holy Spirit will teach us God’s truth. Now, this is not truth primarily in the sense of knowledge, which is how we usually think of it, though it is that. It is truth in the sense of how we live our lives. It’s truth in the sense of walking with God. And as we walk in the truth and live in the truth, then our lives will glorify the Father and the Son because the truth that we’re living in comes from them.
What Does This Mean for Us?
It means first and foremost that we need to be prepared to pay a cost for following Jesus. Here in the Western world, we may not like to hear that, but it’s the truth. There is a cost for following Jesus, and it’s a high cost. It’s so high that the cost will feel like death to us. The cost may be the approval of people from whom we seek validation. The cost might be some kind of special status or position, or it could be a financial cost. But whatever the cost is, know this, dear friends, it is a cost associated with our old life. And the reason why the cost of following Jesus is so painful is because we are attached to our old lives and we want to hang on to them. But the death of our old life is the cost that we need to be willing to pay to follow Jesus.
And what happens is this: as we stand there at the very end of all our personal resources, perhaps confronted with our own mortality and nothing in our hands that can do about it, we are driven into a deeper reliance on the Holy Spirit. In that deeper reliance, the Holy Spirit convinces us of the greater life we have in Jesus. It’s kind of like us wanting to keep eating cornflakes when Jesus is offering us prime rib at the finest restaurant in town. But we need to let go of the cornflakes before we can receive the prime rib.
“I Never Want to go Back to the Prayer Life I had Before Cancer”
Between June 2020, when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and May 19, 2023, when he passed away, Timothy Keller kept as active as he could, given his health challenges. He wrote a book and did various other things, including giving interviews. During one of those interviews, he said, “I never want to go back to the prayer life I had before cancer.” Timothy Keller had cancer twice. The first time was thyroid cancer when he was in his 50s, and he said that going through that experience helped him learn how to pray the Psalms at a deeper level. Specifically, he learned how to meditate on the Psalms.
For example, if we look at Psalm 103, verses 1 to 2, it says, “Praise the Lord, my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name. Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits” (Psalm 103:1-2). Who is the psalmist talking to? He’s not talking to God. He’s talking to his own soul, saying, “Do you get it? Do you understand what God is saying here? Do you realize the gifts God is promising to you in his word?” That’s what Timothy Keller learned to do during his experience with thyroid cancer – to read God’s word, meditate on it, and then pray. Before that, he would just read God’s word and then pray, but his first bout of cancer helped him to realize the importance of meditating on God’s word.
Then, at the age of 69, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which, if you have any kind of medical knowledge, you will know is one of the worst cancers to get, and your lifespan is usually measured in weeks after your diagnosis. And the gift that his second bout with cancer gave him was to realize how mortal he was and to start praying with an awareness of that mortality. In this interview, Keller said,
“I wish I’d been able to understand how mortal I am without getting cancer. Psalm 90 says, ‘Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.’ I know what that means now. There’s a breakthrough in the way you look at everything.”
“There’s no way to get where I am now without going through the doctor saying you’re going to die from there. I wish there had been, but there wasn’t. But I’m glad I am where I am.”[i]
And so, dear friend, the challenge that I want to leave with you today is quite simply this: to practice meditating on God’s word and let the Holy Spirit speak God’s truth to your soul. Amen.
[i] Justin Brierley, “Tim Keller: ‘I never want to go back to the prayer life I had before cancer,’” Premier Christianity (Internet; available at: https://www.premierchristianity.com/interviews/tim-keller-i-never-want-to-go-back-to-the-prayer-life-i-had-before-cancer/14736.article; accessed June 9, 2023).
(This message was shared at Walnut Grove Lutheran Church in Langley BC on June 11, 2023. For more information about WGLC, please go to wglc.org.)
Farewell to Shadowlands 