Thanks, Adam. Morning, everyone. It’s good to be with you. Look forward to uh just our worship was amazing this morning. Again, it’s just uh just a privilege to be able to stand together and sing together and uh praise God together. And it’s uh it’s good to do it with all of you this morning. I took uh Charlene, my wife, she’s still recovering from a broken leg. She came out of the rehab hospital yesterday. She’s now at my daughter’s house. And so things are looking up. She’ll eventually get home. So we’re in this section of the Gospel of John. Uh mostly it concerns Jesus pending departure. He’s going away. He keeps repeating that. And it’s kind of like we’re seeing someone off at the airport. This is someone we very much love. We’re going to miss terribly. Once they’re gone, we know we’re we’re never going to be relate to relate to them anymore in quite the same face to face way that we’re accustomed. But before they go through security and out of our sight, they have some deep words of comfort and assurance and instruction to leave with us. That’s the relationship of Jesus and his disciples in the upper room. And one thing Jesus is very clear about is that he’s going to a place where he’s going to be able to offer them infinitely more help and support uh than if he had remained with them in Palestine. 1964, Nelson Mandela was taken to a special prison on Robin Island off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. Island was where he would spend the first 18 of his 27 years in prison. It’s a brutal place as a way of degrading the black prisoners. They were issued boyish short pants while the white prison population had regular long trousers. Mandela had a cell that was just 6 feet long. He’d lay down, his feet would brush up against the concrete one side, his head would touch the other, and the blankets that were provided were very thin, inadequate for keeping out the cold. So Mandela and his fellow prisoners, they all slept fully clothed. Their their meals came to them in metal oil drums, and the bathroom was just uh cold seawater showers. Mandela was allowed to have one visitor and receive one letter every 6 months. So his wife once came for a halfhour visit and then she wasn’t allowed back for the next two years. News from the outside world was almost non-existent. Mandela once found a newspaper on a bench and he was caught reading it in his cell. As a punishment, he was given 3 days in isolation with no meals. But he was a leader among his fellow inmates and he lobbied successfully for better conditions over time. And this wasn’t measured in days or months but in years. Eventually, meals improved and mail improved and they received some board games and a deck of cards and eventually the men were allowed to even study and earn degrees. As he grew older, Nelson Mandela was able to plant a small garden uh from which he provided his guards with his best onions and his best tomatoes. He did everything he could while he was incarcerated to help his fellow prisoners make their situation more humane and more livable. But when he was released as a 72-year-old man 1990 and then elected president of South Africa in 1994 following South Africa’s first multi-racial democratic election. That’s when he was in a position where he could do the most good for the most people including his fellow prisoners back on Robin Island. It had been hard for him to even leave them after nearly two decades with them. But rising to the presidency gave him far more power, far greater opportunity to do them good than if he’d remained in prison with them. Jesus was telling his disciples much the same thing in the upper room. For 33 years, Jesus, he was a citizen of eternity. He had been living in this once perfect world that had become dank and stuffy and filled with violence and injustice due to the corrupting influence of sin. a world whose monarch the Bible refers to as the god of this age, the ruler of the kingdom of darkness. And in our passage in verse 30, as Adam read, Jesus refers to him as the prince of this world before quickly adding, “He has no hold on me.” So, Satan has a limited temporary authority over a vast prison-like experience for all of humanity. And that once included Jesus himself, the son of God, the one accustomed to ruling the entire universe. Jesus told his men in the upper room that he was going back to assume his rightful place at the right hand of his father. Place from where he had power to do infinitely more good for his followers than he could ever do while on earth. So last week we saw in John 14 how Jesus told his friends that with his pending return to his father in heaven, they were going to be enabled to do greater works than he could on earth. More than that, Jesus said he was going to supercharge their prayer lives in a way they couldn’t imagine. Jesus said, “Whatever you ask, I’ll do as they offered their requests in his name, seeking the ultimate glory of his father in heaven.” But it gets exponentially better for the original disciples in the upper room and for us as Jesus goes on to explain an even greater and more personal resource that he provides to everyone who has faith in him. Now, I feel I need to give a trigger warning at this point because I I’m about to tell a cute grandkid story. And if like me, you’ve ever been cornered by someone trapped in a conversation where they want to tell us all about their grandkids, something amazing they did or said, my eyes are darting around the room, just looking for a way of escape. Do we really want to hear about someone else’s grandkids? Everyone thinks their grandkids are special. Statistically, that’s impossible. Statistically, nearly 50% of all grandkids are below average. So, if you have below average grandchildren, I don’t, but but if you do, that’s just the way math works. Anyway, trigger warning. I have a 5-year-old grandson who started kindergarten this September. He’s going to a French immersion Catholic school. He’s learning lots of new things. He came home one day and he was demonstrating to my daughter how to make the sign of the cross. So he lifted his finger and he said, “In the name of the father and the son and the whole experience, the whole experience.” It’s probably not the most precise theological way to describe the uh the Holy Spirit, but it’s actually it’s not half bad when you think about it because without the Holy Spirit, you and I wouldn’t have any living active experience with God and with his son Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit is a delicious living presence of God in our lives. Not someone we just know about in our heads, but someone we know experientially through our companionship during the day. The Holy Spirit really is for us the whole experience of life with God. So let’s look at how Jesus initially presented the person of the Holy Spirit in the upper room to his disciples. He says, “I will ask the Father and he will give you another counselor to 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 he will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you.” This is one of the first of several references that Jesus makes concerning the Holy Spirit in that upper room discourse which spans John’s John chapters 13-17. And the translation I just read from the New International Version identifies the Holy Spirit as the counselor. Another popular version, the English Standard Version, calls him the helper. Other English versions such as the King James refers to him as the comforter. All those English translators are trying their best to convey the essence of two Greek words that Jesus used a lone pericle. Some English translations just give up on trying to convey the exact meaning in English and they just simply leave it. I will ask the father and he will give you another pariclete. Now that word pariclete comes from a verbal root that describes someone who’s called alongside you. Perah means alongside and calleo means to call. So together it describes a particular kind of ministry that the Holy Spirit brings to our lives. An excellent commentary in this passage is provided by Don Carson. He doesn’t much like the word comforter because it makes the Holy Spirit sound like a quilt or or a person at a funeral who says sorry for your loss. And he goes on to say counselor is not horrible but it’s not awful. But we don’t want to think of the Holy Spirit as like a camp counselor or a marriage counselor. And calling the spirit the helper has the disadvantage of possibly thinking of him as our assistant, as somewhat in even subordinate or inferior. No English word is perfect. But many commentators feel that the the best term for the Holy Spirit as Jesus is defining him is the advocate. an advocate, someone who’s called to come alongside us, to represent us, and to speak for us. So, if you’re a new immigrant to Canada and you come in and you’re unfamiliar with the customs and the language, you’d benefit from having an advocate who will walk you through the paperwork and the procedures, getting established, getting some ID, a health care card, applying for housing. If you’re going to court to face someone who has wronged you, who’s hurt you, you might want someone from victim services to sit next to you in court to be with you as you have to testify in front of your defendant. An advocate is someone who will fearlessly speak the truth both to us and on our behalf. The one who’s called to come alongside. So a pariclete is not someone who’s out in front of us saying, “Come on, keep up. Catch up.” And they’re not proddding us from behind and telling us to get going. A pariclete is content to come alongside us. Our advocate comes to a powerless person and deals on our behalf with the powers that be. Now also that advocate has the cander to look us in the eye and tell us when we’re doing something dumb, something ill- advised, something sinful, something evil. And don’t we all need someone like that in our lives? The pariclete loyal to us to the end. He’s for us in the very strongest sense. He’ll argue on our behalf. He’ll defend us against our enemies. He’ll also confront us with our own stupidity. He’ll tell it like it is. He won’t let us get away with damaging ourselves or damaging other people. The one who walks along beside us, he’s not shy about arguing on our behalf with our detractors or arguing with us when we’re straying off base. So in verse 26 of our passage, Jesus tells us that the pariclete he’s giving us will honestly communicate with us everything we need to know. He says, “He will teach you all things, will remind you of everything I said to you.” The Holy Spirit is the great communicator, our teacher, our defender, the one who internally convicts us. He warns us against wandering away from Christ like dumb sheep. And he makes the external case on our behalf before anyone who would condemn us. When Jesus says in verse 18, I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you. He’s saying that we’re not left with this permanent sense of bereiement now that Jesus is in the heavenlies. The Holy Spirit’s intended to fill that relational vacuum that Jesus leaves behind. You know, in the third book in CS Lewis’s Narnia series, The Horse and His Boy, a boy named Shasta, he has a series of very harrowing adventures, and he finds himself all alone in the dark, feeling that he’s the most unfortunate boy who’s ever lived. Everyone else he’s ever known seems to be in a better and safer position than he is. And as he feels sorry for himself, tears begin to roll down his cheeks. At that moment, he discovers that something or somebody is walking beside him. It was pitch dark. He could see nothing. And Lewis writes this. He says, “The thing or person was going so quietly that the boy could hardly hear any footfalls. What he heard was breathing. His invisible companion seemed to breathe on a very large scale. And Shasta got the impression that it was a very large creature, and he’d come to notice this breathing so gradually that he really had no no idea how long it had been there. And it was a horrible shock. When he could bear it no longer, the boy said in a low whisper, “Who are you?” “One who has waited long for you to speak,” said the thing. Its voice was not loud but very large and deep. And the boy felt the warm breath of the thing on his hand and on his face. And that breath was completely reassuring. See what Shasta was experiencing, what CS Lewis was conveying was this presence of Alen the lion, the great Christ figure in the Narnia world. And in a time of great need, the boy was being given the gift of presence. And that’s what the gift of the pariclete, the gift of the spirit is to us. We sang a number of songs this morning that really relate to the presence and the Holy Spirit coming into our lives and moving among us. Hope you have a sense when you leave the house in the morning that someone’s with you and someone’s beside you and there’s there’s kind of a warm breath at your side. That delicious presence of God in the person of the Holy Spirit’s right there. On a sunny day, you might see your two shadows merge. He’s with you all the way and he’s not going to go anywhere. The presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, it’s not something we can easily explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. Jesus said, “I will ask the father. He’ll give you another advocate to be with you forever, the spirit of truth. The world, meaning people unconnected with Christ, cannot accept him because it neither sees him nor knows him, but you know him for he lives with you and he will be in you.” You know, how do you explain the real tangible presence of God in your life to someone who has no receptors for that sort of thing? How do you explain to an outsider the electricity of worship? You know, they pick up the wire and they feel no current. And we pick that same wire up and we feel a tingle. And this morning, we sing and we pray and we listen to the word of God. We’re convinced both intellectually and experientially that God’s here with us in the spirit. He’s listening to us. He’s moving among us. He’s dwelling within us. That divine voice that we feel it’s coming from inside the house. And we we just know what that feels like. We just know that. We know. Jesus says in verse 21, “He who loves me will be loved by my by my father. I will love him and I’ll show myself to him.” Another version says, “I’ll love him and manifest myself to him.” And the Holy Spirit really is God’s manifest presence in our lives. And sometimes we might experience that manifest presence in ways that are a little spooky. There’s some highly unusual circumstances that send shivers down our spine or maybe bring tears to our eyes or make us laugh with joy and wonder. When we read about the fruit of the spirit and the gifts of the spirit in the New Testament, we become aware of God’s manifest presence. the fruit of the spirit. He’s rearranging and reordering our character, the things that we love and most desire and putting them in right proportions. And that’s in terms of the gifts of the spirit. I believe in the entire range of spiritual gifts that’s talked about in the New Testament. There’s the normal more normal gifts of things like leadership and hospitality and serving and wisdom and knowledge and also the gifts that seem less normal to us but are perfectly normal to the Holy Spirit. Speaking in tongues and interpreting a message in tongues and miracles and prophecy and healing, prompings and intuitions that we feel, specific situational guidance that we get from time to time. We have special dreams and visions that seem to mean more to us than a regular dream. 1 Corinthians 12:11 says, “All these are the work of one in the same spirit and he gives them to each one just as he determines.” So that manifest presence of God in the person of the Holy Spirit sprinkled among us here this morning. In many ways, Holy Spirit is not just something we experience individually, but we experience the Holy Spirit greatly when we corporately gather together and start mixing our gifts with one another. So perhaps the most I think the most regular way that we find ourselves interacting with the Holy Spirit is just when we pray throughout the day. CS Lewis’s boy whispered to that thing beside him, “Who are you?” And the reply he received from that invisible one was one who has waited long for you to speak. And perhaps our clearest and most regular encounter with the Holy Spirit occurs every time we pray. We just seek to interact with that delicious presence of the living God, the pariclete who walks beside us, who is with us and who is in us. Says the world cannot accept him because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him. He lives with you and in you. Of course, this this talk of the pericleletes like a fairy tale to an outsider to all but to all who have placed their faith and trust in Jesus Christ alone for their salvation. Our advocate that manifest presence of God’s always at our side. If you don’t think you’re experiencing the Holy Spirit as Jesus speaks of him or or you think that your experience of the Holy Spirit is less than what uh your brothers and sisters in this room have, be assured that Jesus promise is that the pariclete sets up permanent residence in anyone who’s received Jesus Christ by faith. And there’s no Christian who has less of the Holy Spirit than any other Christian. So in saying that there are some ways that we can cooperate or fail to cooperate with the Holy Spirit’s ministry in our lives. We need to understand the Holy Spirit is not like a Star Wars force. It’s a person and the Holy Spirit relates to us in highly personal ways as he conveys to his disciples that he’s going away yet sending them their pariclete. Several instances in our passage this morning that Jesus makes the connection between love and obedience. Notice how often this comes up. He says in verse 15, “If you love me, you’ll obey what I command.” And in verse 21, “Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he’s the one who loves me.” Verse 23, “If anyone loves me, he’ll obey my teaching.” Verse 24, “He who does not love me will not obey my teaching.” So, not only is our love for God closely tied with obedience, our obedience is also closely tied to our experience of God. Whoever has my commands and keeps them, he’s the one who loves me. He’ll be loved by my father. I will love him and I’ll show myself to him. I’ll manifest myself to him. So, as with every other relationship you and I ever have, we shouldn’t expect closeness or intimacy or a manifest presence if we’re sabotaging the relationship. The Holy Spirit, he’s not like some desperate person with few friends who always wants to hang out with us no matter how little regard we have for him. 1 Thessalonians 5:19 tells us that we can quench the Holy Spirit, like throwing water on a fire through disobedience, through not listening to and paying attention to his voice. And also in exceedingly relational terms, Ephesians 4:30 tells us that we can grieve the Holy Spirit. It’s another way of emphasizing that our thoughts and behaviors can deeply offend the one who dwells within us. This is not salvation by works. This is not, “Oh, I’d better obey or else God’s going to abandon me.” That’s not how it works. God doesn’t abandon his children. But how can a parent be close to a child who won’t do anything that the parent wants him to do? It’s the child who’s choosing against intimacy and against relationship. And if you and I, if we make no efforts to be sexually pure and faithful in our marriage and honest in the way we speak to others and content with what God has provided for us and kind and loving toward people and aiming to bring justice to the powerless, if we just blow off the things of God in scripture, if we fail to honor and respect God as our father, then we fully expect his manifest presence will elude us. Holy Spirit hasn’t departed from us. We just don’t feel his touch in the same way anymore. Instead, we’re urged to turn from our sin. We’re urged to adjust our pace to the pace of the Holy Spirit. Galatians 5:25 says, “If we live by the spirit, let us also keep in step with the spirit.” Galatians 5:16 repeats that thought. Says, “I but I say walk by the spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.” So when we get out of step with the spirit, out of sync, you know, we try to run ahead or we lag behind. As a result, we just don’t sense his presence as we once did. And we’d be the ones to blame for that. The spirit’s presence in our lives is always best realized when we give him the honor and obedience that’s due him. So, one last thing this morning. Did you pick up in verse 16 that Jesus told his followers that his father and he were providing another advocate, another pariclete, which begs the question, who’s the first pariclete? Who’s the first advocate provided for us? And it’s quite obvious in John 14 in the context that when Jesus says he won’t leave his followers as orphans, but he’ll provide another advocate, the first advocate is referring to himself. The gospel writer John gives it away in his first letter of 1 John 2:1 says, “My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anyone does sin, he has we have an advocate, a paricle, one who speaks to the father in our defense, Jesus Christ, the righteous one.” The 19th century theologian Charles Charles Hodgej once gave a chapel message on what it means for Jesus Christ to be our advocate. He fleshed it out that Jesus is the one who represents us before the bar, before the court. He said that Jesus is not standing there on our behalf pleading for mercy, saying, “Uh, Doug is certainly a repeat offender. He’s a recidivist. did the same thing last week and the week before that and the week before that, but I’m pleading on his behalf that you just give him one more chance. I’m falling on the mercy of the court to let it go this time. And Hod says that’s not what it means for Jesus to be our advocate. He doesn’t plead mercy for us. His case is based on the law. Says, “Father, your honor, you are just. Sin demands payment. This brother of or sister of mine has sinned. He or she is not has not loved God with all their heart, soul, and mind and strength. They haven’t loved their neighbor as themselves. They have sinned. Their sin must be paid for. But Father, here’s my payment. Look at my broken body. Look at my blood that has been poured out. I have paid it. It would be unjust to require two payments for for the same debt. I’ve paid for it. Therefore, I’m not pleading for mercy. I demand a quiddle for my brother or sister because I have paid for their sin. They cannot be required to pay for their own sin. There can cannot be any condemnation for them. So, I just demand a quiddle. I’m not pleading for mercy. Mercy was already extended through my death on the cross. I’m simply representing my client as their advocate, seeking that the law be upheld, that justice be observed, and that my client be set free. Jesus, our first ad. That’s what it means for Jesus, our first advocate, to go to court for us with an airtight case. And we cling to what Jesus accomplished for us on the cross, accepting the payment for our sin against himself, transferring his righteousness to our permanent record. When our faith settles on that transaction, that’s when the second advocate, the Holy Spirit, comes and makes his home with us and in us. You and I, we walk out of that courtroom with an amazing sense of peace. Verse 27 of our passage this morning, Jesus gives over his followers a bit of a benediction. He says, “Peace I leave with you. My peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled. Do not be afraid.” So, we fellowship this morning not with a sense of anxiety and wondering about our status before God. We come and we can sit in peace in the name of the father, the son and the whole experience, the pariclete, the advocate, the holy spirit with us and among us and around us and inside us. So our goal, our job is just to keep in step with the spirit this week and enjoy that delicious and real presence that God provides in our lives. So let’s take some time to pray. Holy Spirit, we read in Romans 8. He prays for us all the time. And we want to thank God, I think this morning for the pariclete who is with us and in us might want to think about any ways that you may this week have have quenched or grieved that spirit and his work in your life. And praise God for the church, the body of Christ. This is where the fruit of the spirit and the gifts of the spirit are best realized as we gather together corporately. Just take a moment. This is your time with God knowing that the pariclete is inside you. Take some time to uh communicate with God and then I’ll close us off.