Proof

Sermon by Lead Pastor, Nate Levering

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hello and thank you for joining us on the Sierra Bible Church Sermon of the Week. We hope you enjoy this message by Pastor Nate Levering.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Thank you, Charlene. Some of you know, uh, we've been in uh this series talking about the Holy Spirit. We titled it Unfamiliar Stranger, uh, because many of us are reading uh together and studying some small group material by uh a Tyler Staten who wrote a fantastic book and we're kind of journeying to it's been one of the funnest, funnest? It's been one of the funnest. We'll just go with it. Small group studies, just to get together each week and to hear about how God's moving and stirring and speaking to those around us, has been just amazing. I remember uh thinking about how we would do this series and saying, let's spend some time uh with the words of Jesus, specifically as he is in the upper room the night before he would go to the cross and give his life for us. Because it's in those moments that Jesus begins to, on a number of very specific occasions, one of which we are going to look at today, talk about the role of the Holy Spirit. So he gives some direction. We've talked about this. I'm going to the Father. Uh, when I get uh to heaven, when I step into this other dimension where the Father is, we will send this Spirit to be with you. And in the Spirit, the Father and the Son, we're gonna meet with you and be with you and walk with you. And then there are some specific things that the Holy Spirit is tasked to do in the world, the season that you and I find ourselves in. This particular passage, maybe you've read it before, uh, maybe you've studied it before, maybe you've taught it before. I just remember reading it, thinking that is one of the most magnificent, beautiful, just it's a cool thing. Jesus is like, man, when the Holy Spirit comes, he's gonna, you know, prove the world to be wrong. And I already, I'm leaning in, like, oh, this is what the Spirit's gonna do. Man, it's talking about sin, he's talking about righteousness, he's talking about judgment with sin because you don't believe in me, with righteousness, because like you're not gonna see me any longer with judgment because the ruler of this world now stands condemned. I think, what a beautiful passage, Jesus. I have absolutely no idea what you're really talking about, but this is gonna be fun, and it will be fun, I hope. Uh, that's where we're going uh this morning as we try and unpack what it is that Jesus has to say. And I think some of the most beautiful words spoken and the way he puts it together and invites us to believe is true about the work of the Holy Spirit. And really, we are believing and praying that would be true in our own experience of the Holy Spirit even today. I want to start uh with a question that I was asked in a setting about 20 years ago. I was uh sitting under a speaker, his name was Donald Miller. Maybe you've read some of his stuff before he wrote this like kind of cult classic called Blue Like Jazz that lots of us read. If you were in college, you read it probably during that season. He's written some other books on parenting and things. And so he was giving a speech to a bunch of us at a youth ministry gathering at one point, and uh he was talking about story. He was talking about what makes a good story, what is sort of the backbone, the foundation and framework of every story if it's a human story. So I want to ask us the question that he asked us some 20 years ago, and I think you'll see how it applies in just a few minutes. Here's the question he asked us. Okay, before I ask us the question that he asked us, I want to ask you another question. He asked us this one as well. If you were to think about, and I need a little bit of feedback on this, so I'm trying to own this question. If you were to think about a story, uh a TV series or a movie that is sort of like your go-to. It's just like, man, you feel like sometimes you cry, maybe you feel like singing. If if ever you're sitting around, people are talking about movies they love or stories, books they've read. This is the one you're like, have you seen fill in the blank? What is your like story? What's your go-to? What's your like this is my story? I get it. It just works for me. It should work for everyone. Everyone should love and watch this as often as I do. So, what comes to mind when I share that? What stories? Just throw one out there out loud so we can hear it and critique it. We're gonna publicly critique you in a second. It's great. I get it every week. You'll love it. What? It's a wonderful life. Oh, you shared someone else's? Okay, feel free to share someone else's. That's good too. What top gun? What caddyshack? All right, that'll work. What was another one I heard over here? The sound of music? Oh, we all just felt something, right? Should we sing? Jimmy will lead us from the back. And a resounding what? Gone with the window. You guys are on some epic ones. Man, first service was struggling. I mean, we're in some beautiful what?

unknown 5:18

Phantom of the opera.

SPEAKER_01 5:19

Phantom of the opera. Okay, we're done. My turn now. No, great stories, right? And so when we think about these, we ask why is it? One of the things that Donald Miller was trying to help us connect with is the reality that when we watch or see or read something that resonates in a particular way with us. Like if we're maybe sitting next to our spouse watching the same thing and we're a blubbering mess, and they're like giggling. And like, are you missing the bits because we're wired differently? What Miller said is that all of us have a particular story that grabs our heart, and for a particular reason, Brian wants to be, you know, top gun. That's why he loves that movie. As do I, right? I mean, there would be nothing cooler. But here's what he said: he said this that the in light, think about your movie, your play. What three questions must you answer in order to tell a good story? And here's what he said: he said that every story, if it's a human story, will answer three questions. These are not questions, this is a little tip into the sermon, that Hollywood came up with. These are stories, these are questions, excuse me, that are written on the human heart, that the human head is asking, because of the context of the story that we all find ourselves in. Now they're making a lot of money on it, but these are our stories written on our hearts. Here's the the three things he said. He said, what's every every story, every good story, every human story will answer these three questions. What's wrong, what's right, and who wins? So think about your story, run it through the grit. What is wrong? Is there some kind of this is where the conflict builds? This is where the tension or the urgency of the story, right? If it doesn't grab you, if there's nothing that needs to be resolved, you and I will yawn and take a nap. But a story that resonates with who we are as humans will draw us in in many ways because we can begin to see ourselves as a part of the solution. What is right? There will always be a sense with which the hero sort of comes up, or at least the right way of thinking, that there might be a tip, a righteousness, a putting together of the story in a way that makes sense, in answer to the question, what does goodness look like? What would it look like to have these? You know, oftentimes if it's what's wrong is this broken relationship, what's right is restoration. It's coming back together. And so the question is, what would that look like? It's it's the development of a moral vision. And then lastly, who wins? Who wins? Any of you guys read the last chapter of a book first? Never because you want to draw in, right? You want this sense. I I kind of do at times because I don't have time to read everything, but sometimes we just got to read the end and figure the thing out. But the question in every good story of who wins will drive our sense of hope. Will justice, will love prevail? Does the sacrifice required to solve the what's wrong justify the story? Another way that we might say this, and just another version of these kinds of questions, we'd run them through our grid of our movie or movies or stories. What is broken? The story will start. What is beautiful? What is the coming back together? Is there a lasting hope? We begin to kind of spin it into sort of our language. We might ask questions like this what corrupted the world? What kind of person can set it right? And will darkness finally lose? The other day I uh was out mowing my lawn. I'm listening to uh this great book. Uh it's about this old gentleman that moves into uh a small town and begins to relationally sort of put people back together. And I'm mowing just brrrrr, you turn, brrrr, you-turn, brrrrrr. I could do this all day. We have a big yard, and I'm like literally weeping, hoping my neighbors don't drive by and wave. And Wes is like, what's Nate? He's crying and watching I so resonate with the answer to questions because this is how I see or view the world. It's the narrative that I find myself in. It it drives me emotionally. You can even type into Google, which I did. Hey, the average Hallmark movie, how does it answer those three questions? And it'll say, here's the deal: broken relationship, busy people. There's an answer, there's an answer. We're drawn in relationally to how these questions work. Again, because they are not simply questions of every good story, they are questions of the human heart, of the human story. You and I are searching foundationally and by way of framework for answers to those three questions. Every child you're raising or have raised is searching for answers to those three questions. What's wrong? Why does it seem almost unmistakably so to all of us that that the way things are is not the way things were meant to be? What would right even look like? And why does right look so different from this side of the West versus that side of the East? Is it really just a social question? What kind of person could put the story back together? And then lastly, is there any hope? Is there any hope? These are our questions. Okay, so with those three questions in the backdrop, imagine how fun it was for me to be reading a commentary by Dale Brunner, and he translates the same passage in John chapter 16 in this way. He says, This is the sort of underlying teaching that Jesus is making about what the Holy Spirit is promised to do. So here's how he uh spells out this same text. He says, This, when the Holy Spirit arrives, which Jesus has already said is going to be better for you than when I was here, which is kind of hard to get our minds around at one level. But when the Holy Spirit arrives, this is what he will do. He will prove or expose in the text that we read earlier how wrong the world is about three things. You want to know what those are? The first one what is wrong? Sin. What is right? Righteousness, and about who wins in the end. And Jesus says the Holy Spirit will come and he's gonna teach about sin, what's wrong, about righteousness, what is right, and about judgment, who wins. This is the Bible's answer to those three great questions. He's not just going to teach, he's going to prove. This word prove kind of has two angles, two sides of a coin, if you will. The one side is he the Holy Spirit's going to expose our um our wrong narratives. So if we believe the answer to those questions to be a particular way, that is the sort of anti-gospel, or it's whatever sort of the culture that we live in answers those questions outside of the gospel's answers, the Holy Spirit is the one that sort of will eventually expose the false narratives that we are living in. So it um bring up Matthew chapter seven, real quick, uh David. Here's what the Holy Spirit will do. Everyone, Jesus says, who hears these words of mine and does not do them, this is in Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, will be like a foolish man who builds his house on the what? The sand. Okay, so your foundation, your understanding of the answers to the narrative questions are sand, not rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell. And great was the fall of it. Great was the fall. Part of what the Holy Spirit will do is expose our false narratives. Sometimes that will happen when we hit the proverbial wall, when we run out of excuses, when we burn out, when we hit rock bottom, when we, like the prodigal son in Jesus' famous story in Luke 15, when we have run to the end of the sort of answers to the story that culture gave us, or we're driven by our own ego. We we sort of are done trying to answer those questions the way we think they should be. And there's that moment in the prodigal son story where he comes to his senses and he turns and he looks back for the Father. This is that moment when the Holy Spirit says, where you've been going, how you've been answering those questions is wrong. And he gives us room and grace to repent and to turn and to change. He will prove that which is wrong. We were at a wedding last night and uh they were playing. And if you're like 53-ish like me, what you realize when you go to these young kids' weddings is they play like our music. And so everyone's dancing to this incredibly brilliant song called Ice Ice Baby. And one of the younger ones was like, This is such a cool song, or whatever. And I'm like, that's like it's like a hundred years old, like I am. And they're like, No, it's not. And I'm like, I think it was written like 1990. And they're like, No, it's not. And so we could have just gone, yes, it is, no, it's not. Yes, and but what did he do? He pulled out his phone, he's like, I'm gonna prove to you who's right. And so he typed it in there, and yes, 1990, baby. Come on, our era. This is what the Holy Spirit would do. Sometimes it gives us a long leash, right? Because you've had that and you've run it. You thought the answer to those questions were very different than what the gospel invites us to consider. In my day and age, again, I'll just own this as a 53-year-old. I think that the the narrative that the Holy Spirit was trying to expose, that culture was telling people like me, was the right answer to those questions, what you might even call like this consumeristic narrative. In other words, what's wrong with the world is I don't have it or I don't have enough of it. Right? I mean, billion-dollar marketing companies are are trying to help us realize that we're not the reason we're not happy is because we don't have it. And so, as consumers, what's right look like? Well, I need to get a credit card so I can get it. That's the narrative. That's how I answer the question. Who wins? Like the one that has it is clearly winning. Nowadays, for our younger students, the one my kids are growing up in, it's much more of an identity narrative. It's it's very much about who you are. Look at the movies that are coming out, look at the stories, look at the books. It's like, man, if somebody tells you who you are, they are the evil. You own your identity, you find out who you are. And again, the Holy Spirit, Jesus says, will come into the world in every season, in my season, in the next season, to prove, to shake, and prove whether or not that house is built on rock, Jesus truth, the gospel, or on sand. He will expose what is wrong. The second way that Jesus, or that the Holy Spirit will do that, and we've been talking about this in weeks past, and so I won't spend much time on it, but not only will he expose what our lives are built on, our answer to these sort of narrative questions that are in all of our hearts is to not just expose what's wrong, but to point to who is right. And over and over in this text, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit's gonna point to who? To him, yeah, to Jesus. Thank you. Good job. Half the time the answer is Jesus. So if I ever ask a question you throw out Jesus, there's a decent chance you're gonna get it right. And some people just say Jesus no matter what the question is, and I always just laugh. But in that case, yes, the Holy Spirit is saying, hey, I'm gonna point out what's right. All of us, right, doesn't take long to consider how to know or spot the counterfeit, but it's simply to know that which is true. And so as we know Jesus, it's it's easy if we know the words of Jesus, if we walk with Jesus, it's much easier for the Holy Spirit to point out those places where our story is a kind of anti-Jesus gospel story in the way that we pray, in the way that we live, in the way that we answer these questions. So he will not only expose these places we get it wrong, he will point to Jesus. If we look at the text, he says this in that uh, I think it's verse 16 or chapter 16, 13, is Jesus says this when he, the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. Just previously, Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. The Holy Spirit's going to guide you into truth. He will not speak on his own, he will only speak what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. What Jesus is doing in this moment is he's saying, There are a few events happening in a few hours, and the Holy Spirit, part of his role, is to bring up in the lives and the stories of people like us those events to crystallize and clarify the answers to these three questions, namely the death and the resurrection of Jesus. This is what the Holy Spirit desires to do, not only sort of prove the world wrong, but to point to Jesus and Him on the cross and him at the resurrection as the answer to these questions. He says he's gonna do this to the world. Sometimes I think we think, well, the world's out there. And what commentators will always point to in this text is this that yes, that's true, and we ought to pray for the world that's chasing in sort of a godless fashion the answer to those questions with their lives, that the Holy Spirit would come, that he would prove them wrong, that they would come to know Christ, they would understand. But what's also true is that even for Jesus believing, Jesus knowing people like you and I, there remains a bit of this kind of worldly thinking or understanding that the Holy Spirit can come and give us clarity around, invite us to repent in areas where we are wrong. One of the most sort of famous pictures of this, if you have your Bible, you can flip it over to Matthew chapter 16. This is a text I absolutely love to teach, uh, at least the first half. But let me put the two together. Jesus is with his disciples. Uh, this is a few days uh before the upper room uh scenario that we're looking at in the book of John. Now, Jesus with his disciples asked them this question. We've walked through this before. He says, Hey, who do people say I am? They have a couple of different answers for them. After that, he's like, Well, who do you guys? Who do you think that I am? What's your answer? Do you remember who gets it right? Who? Peter. Peter's like, you're the Messiah, the Son of God. And in one of those rare moments, Peter gets it right on his first shot. And Jesus is like, you're right. And then he says, Hey, you know, that wasn't revealed to you because you like understood something in the scriptures or the stars, but because the Spirit of God showed you, He taught you. And you know, at that moment, Peter had to be thinking, like, yeah, boys, come on. That's what I thought. I'm not falling in the water now. I'm the one that got the answer right. Let's go, people. And he's probably like, I would be maybe thinking, I got one right. Jesus sort of compliments him that way too. But look a little bit further down, just after this, Jesus tells the disciples in the same setting that he's going to go to Jerusalem. He's going to suffer at the hand of the elders and the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and he's going to be killed and on the third day be raised to life. Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. Never, Lord, Peter says. Peter gives us a pretty good picture of us. We get it. You're the Messiah. You're the Son of God. You're the hope. You're the answer. You're the righteous. In the meantime, we find ourselves arguing. We find ourselves trying to take back. We find ourselves living out of these sort of human concerns. And my hope is as we look at the way Jesus invites us to get it right, we will experience the Spirit of God sorting out for us possible ways in our own lives where we're chasing human concerns and not living in the truth of the gospel. That the Spirit will say, Hey, no, no, you're getting that one wrong. You're off there. Repent, come back, see this the way I see it. So how does Jesus walk us through these? Or how does he say that the Holy Spirit will walk us through these? Maybe it's better to put. So he says three things, right? Sin, righteousness, judgment. What's wrong? What's right? Who wins? So the first one he says around this idea of what is wrong. He says, the Spirit will come and convict about sin. And then he gives another little sort of addition to his original teaching. It goes, where's is the verse up there, David? Verse 9? Here we go. About sin, Jesus says, because people do not believe in me. So if we didn't really know what Jesus meant by sin, righteousness, and judgment, he's going to Jesus lean in and say, here's a little bit of context in understanding what I mean by this word sin. He says, here's the deal. You get it wrong about sin. The world gets it wrong about sin. And then Jesus says, here, let me clarify this for you. It's because people do not believe in me. What does that look like for me? What's that look like for us? When do I get it wrong about sin and not see Jesus for who he is? You see, sometimes I talk about my sin, and it sounds more like I made a mistake than I rebelled against a holy God. I turned my sin into something that sounds like bumping my head. Like oops. And I don't get it right. Sometimes we talk about Jesus as one who first and foremost, or primarily, came to like give us a picture of what life is meant to be and how it was meant to be lived. Sometimes for us, we we lean into to Jesus and we we we believe in him, but we believe in him as one that's almost like this therapeutic Jesus to make us feel better, to listen to us when we're hurting, you know, pat us on the back and say, you know, it'll be okay. Friends, the Holy Spirit's come to tell us when we're wrong about sin because we don't see him clearly. First and foremost, this was a slide that David snuck up there. I do not need a better example, I do not need to feel better, I do not need someone to deal with my enemies. I am a sinner in need of a savior. Now, hear me on this. When I get to know Jesus as the savior that saved me and people like me from my sin, I begin to find the freedom in his grace to align without this sort of drive of guilt, but being pulled by the love of the spirit to his life. Actually desire to step in to his better way, his example. I I when I, as a sinner in need of a savior, know Jesus as savior, I actually experience the depth of his love in those places where I had probably already declared myself unlove, a bull. And when he loves me in that place, it undoes me in a way that no therapeutic Jesus could do, but a savior came to show. But I begin to learn to love as Jesus invites me, my enemies, when I get it right about the sin in me and the need for a savior, for the need for a savior. So, how um then he answers the question? That's the answer to the question, what is wrong, first and foremost? I am. What is right, he answers this way. So, and again, this kind of tricky language, but hopefully I can kind of pull it out and give you what this sort of best thinkers think Jesus is saying here. He says this not only are we wrong about sin, we get it wrong, we are also wrong about our righteousness. And Jesus says that this Holy Spirit's going to come and teach us about righteousness. And then he adds this, because I am Jesus going to the Father where you can see me no longer. Okay, what in the world is Jesus talking about? What is the Spirit going to guide us into? Two quick things. The first thing is this uh that most people think what Jesus is saying when he says, I am going to be with the Father, this is kind of a mic drop moment for Jesus. He says, My sort of career on earth is done. I am Jesus saying that which is right or righteous. It's not a particular way, it's not, you know, getting all the right answers, it's me. He says, I'm going to be with the Father, only one that is righteous. This is Jesus saying. They would have known this, that if you are leaving here to go be with the Father, what you are putting yourself sort of on equal footing with the perfect, holy, eternal God. What Jesus says is if you need an answer to the question, what is right? I am it. The second thing he says is goes a little bit beyond the truth that he is righteous, but where you and I can find righteousness. And this invites us right into the story. He says, I'm going to be with the Father, I am righteous where you can see me no longer. How can I experience righteousness? It's in him. It's in faith in him. This will require faith. You're not going to see me. It's not going to be walking around with me. It's not going to be, you know, powing around as one of the disciples. It's going to be trusting the one you can no longer see. It's when you put your faith in who I am. Let me ask you this question. How would you answer this question? Are you righteous? Okay, so if I just said, hey, take the next minute or two, turn to the person next to you and answer this question. First ask them, are you righteous? And have them answer. How would you answer that question? What? Chris wants to answer. Are you righteous? Come on. What? You're made righteous, which means you I am righteous. Okay, I'm with Chris. I knew he'd answer that way. He's very wise, knows his stuff. Some of you would say no. And all of you go, I'm not exactly not everybody, but how do I answer the question? Jesus says we are going to get it wrong. There will be parts in us, and whether that's the devil lying to us, the culture we're raised in, our own flesh, you'll get it wrong about righteousness. If someone asks you, are you righteous? The answer with Jesus is yes, help me out. Okay, the answer is yeah. Like that's like, okay, that's hard to say. I understand that. And I don't even know what you did last night. And it's still hard to say. But we get it wrong. Why? Because oftentimes I will answer that question based on sort of a comparison. So I'm like, well, yeah, I'm kind of righteous because at least I know Mitch, and he's a little less righteous than I am. I mean, if you get to know him, you may not know him like I know Mitch. And so comparatively, we think I'm a little more righteous than others. Or we think it's it's our righteousness is in our effort. And we some of us go back the last 24 hours and we sort of put it on a scale, righteous, not righteous. As if somehow our stuff, it it sort of balances the scale. And again, the Holy Spirit will say you're getting it wrong. You're wrong about righteousness. Righteousness is Him. And it's when you put your faith in Him that you can say confidently to the person next to you that knows your unrighteousness that yes, Jesus declared a truth over me. When the eternal God says you're righteous, not because of your actions, not because of your effort, not because you got yourself to church, awesome. That's all in response to a God who came and said, I will make you righteous. When you put your faith in the one who is. So you can stop striving. You can stop wondering. You can say, I'm tied by faith to the one who never changes, the righteous one. That's the answer to the question: what is right? You are in Christ. You are by faith in what He's done, not by your consistency, not by your attendance. You are righteous. This is what the Spirit wants to declare and wash over us. Jesus then says this, right? Or the Holy Spirit, sin is disbelief about the person of Jesus. Righteousness is the person of Jesus, and it's found by faith in a person, not a percentage or a particular practice. Righteousness comes only from faith in Jesus because he doesn't change, neither does my standing in him. Okay, lastly, this great question: who really won? And I love Jesus' answer. You know, this again, he's the day before the cross here. And he's already like, it's done. Like it's it's been written, it's happening, there's no turning back. I'm not excited about, I mean, even praying a few hours that the Father would take the cup away. But let me tell you about the events of the next few hours. Because right here on this human, right here on this earth, I'm gonna answer the question. So that people like you and I don't have to wonder. Jesus says this, the Holy Spirit will prove the world to be wrong about judgment because the prince of this world now stands condemned. I love how Dale Brunner puts it, um, it has such application, I think, in our lives. And here's what Dale says He says, the paraclete, Holy Spirit, the paraclete is that that Greek word we've talked about, the the advocate, the helper, the encourager, the friend. Holy Spirit will encourage the church, here's our role, to live and preach and teach, that the victory is won, and that the Lord has risen and reigns. All appearances to the contrary, notwithstanding, Jesus is convinced as he leans into his disciples in this moment that the big trial between right and wrong, justice and injustice, sin and righteousness is being held this weekend at the cross. And on the third day when the earth shakes and he walks out of the grave, the ruler of this world will be soundly condemned. It won't always feel like it, it won't always look like it, you won't always live like it, but that is the truth. The gospel answers the questions of the human heart. Jesus said the Holy Spirit came to teach you in areas where you're wrong about sin, about righteousness, and about judgment. See the world as it is. Let him teach us, let him guide us, let's be quick to repent. And then let's be that church that lives and teaches and preaches the good news that it's in him we are made right. And that all the striving, all the suffering, all the challenges will be worth it. When one day we stand with the one who reigns. What's wrong? I'm a sinner in need of a savior. What's right, I can be when I put my faith in the one who is. Who actually won? Jesus did.

SPEAKER_00 37:15

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