The Testimony Of The Spirit
John 15:26-16:4
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
St. John 15:26-27 26 “But when the Helper comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify of Me. And you also will bear witness, because you have been with Me from the beginning.
Dear fellow redeemed in Christ our Lord… As we learned on Thursday at our Ascension service, Jesus ascended into heaven, not to be separated from His Church on earth, but to work more closely with His Church. He ascended in order to be present in every place where His Gospel is rightly preached and His Sacraments are rightly administered. Christ ascended to the right hand of God and reigns as King; and He is building His kingdom, not with His own hands or with His own mouth, but through the testimony of His witnesses. As He told His eleven apostles on His Ascension Day, “But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” (Acts 1:8)
He told them basically the same thing already on the night before He died – the words you heard in today’s Gospel from John 15 and 16: “The Spirit will testify. You will testify. And you will suffer for it dearly, and you will pay for it with your lives.” It’s not a terribly uplifting prophecy, is it? And yet, here we are, some 2,000 years later, still confessing the apostles’ testimony as professing members of the one holy Christian and Apostolic Church. How could they testify, knowing how it would go for them? And how can we confess their testimony knowing just how dangerous it is?
Well, let’s see what our Gospel has to say about it. Jesus tells His disciples, “But when the Helper comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify of Me.” The Holy Spirit is the “Helper,” the Comforter, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father. He would help them; He would guide them into all truth; He would teach them the truth; and He would help them to teach it to others.
He will “testify of Me,” Jesus says, and that gets to the heart of the Holy Spirit’s work. He wasn’t sent to fill the apostles with good feelings or with some nebulous “spirit-witness.” He was sent to “testify,” to bear witness to what He had seen. That’s what a witness does; he testifies to what he has seen with his own eyes and what he has heard with his own ears. The Spirit testifies to what He has seen with the Father, whom no human being has ever seen or can see.
And that’s why we need a witness. He was sent to testify of Jesus: to bear witness to His divinity, to His humanity, to the fact that all of history – past, present, and future – revolves around Him as the Savior sent from the Father to save poor sinners from sin, death, and hell. He was sent to testify that the Father truly is pleased with Jesus’ sacrifice and is eager to forgive everyone who believes in Him. He was sent to testify that Jesus does indeed reign at the right hand of God. That is the testimony of the Holy Spirit.
In verse 26, Jesus said, “And you also will bear witness, because you have been with Me from the beginning.” Now, pay attention to this and be careful not to fall into the common trap of reading every Bible passage and imagining that Jesus is speaking directly to you. Jesus says, “you also will bear witness, because you have been with Me from the beginning.” That’s not you or me. We were not with Jesus from the beginning any more than we were there when they crucified our Lord; we were not with Him at the beginning of His preaching ministry. So, this particular word from Jesus only applies to the eleven apostles that were with Him from the beginning. They were the ones who were to go out and bear witness; they were the ones who would testify to what they had seen with their own eyes and heard with their own ears. Their testimony trumps all other testimony, because they were with Jesus from the beginning. They heard it all, they saw it all, they witnessed it all firsthand, including His suffering, death, and, mostly importantly, His resurrection.
The apostles did, indeed, testify by preaching throughout the world. But their testimony would be useless to us if they hadn’t written it down, because, you know what they call it in a court of law if you heard someone say something about what someone else said? It is called ‘hearsay.’ It doesn’t count.
But the apostles did, in fact, write down, under the Spirit’s inspiration, the things that you and I were to know. That testimony does count. It does hold weight. And that is why the New Testament Church so thoroughly investigated whether or not a book was written by an apostle or under the direct supervision of an apostle, because they were the ones whom Jesus chose and sent out to be His witnesses and who had the promise of the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit, just as the prophets of the Old Testament had.
The reliability of the inspired Scriptures – the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments – is something that we may take for granted here, but we shouldn’t. Trusting in the reliability of Holy Scripture is rare and becoming rarer. From Genesis to Revelation we have the only firsthand witness that God has left for us; we have the testimony that trumps all other testimony; we have the truth that must be believed, or else we make God out to be a liar, because the Holy Spirit was the one who inspired these witnesses.
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Upon hearing these words of Jesus, the apostles found out that it would not go well for them on earth. They would be excommunicated by the Jews, and they would be killed, and they would suffer everything in between. And they would not suffer these things because they were too mean or foolish in the way they presented the Gospel. They would suffer for one reason alone: that those to whom the Apostles would be preaching did not know the Father or Jesus.
The apostles were warned ahead of time: this is what it would mean to be Jesus’ witnesses. And they did it anyway. They knew they would suffer horribly, but it didn’t stop them. That itself is a testimony, and it is the reason they are called true martyrs. Their preaching and their willingness to face excommunication and torture and death are testimonies to the truth of the Gospel, testimonies to the reality of Jesus’ resurrection and to the sure hope of this life not being all there is. They knew and believed the hope of an inheritance in heaven that far surpassed any earthly gain they could possibly hope to see.
Well, here we are, some 2,000 years later. We are not witnesses like the apostles were, but we still have the testimony of the Holy Spirit and of the apostles. Next week we will celebrate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. The Holy Spirit was poured out and now remains with us until Christ comes again, and His work is inextricably connected to the Word He inspired in those apostles, linked to the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments. Here the Spirit abides and testifies: “Yes, you were made God’s child through Holy Baptism. Yes, He loves you. Yes, He will make all things work together for your good. Yes, the Holy Scriptures are reliable.” That is the Spirit’s testimony.
But since we weren’t there with Jesus in person, we are not properly called “witnesses,” and we do not, properly speaking and in that same sense, offer “testimony” to the world. In all the New Testament, Christians are not called upon to “testify” about Jesus. In fact, there is a different word to describe what we are called to do, and that word is “confess.” We are called to confess, to say the same thing God says. We confess who Jesus is and what He has said. We confess the apostles’ testimony.
St. Paul writes in Romans 10:9-11, “If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. Whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame.”
Even so, there will be consequences for confessing the apostles’ testimony. We know that. The apostles were martyred; they were put to death for their testimony about Jesus. Many since then have been targeted and killed, not even for preaching the Gospel, but simply for their confession as baptized Christians. A while back, 22 Christians were slaughtered by ISIS in Egypt, just for being known as Christians. And last week a Canadian pastor was hauled off Gestapo-style and thrown into jail for conducting the Divine Service for his flock.
Dear fellow redeemed, this persecution will continue, and it will grow worse. Jesus has told us ahead of time. But it’ll be OK. That is what Jesus wanted His apostles to believe, and that is what He wants us to believe, too. It’ll be OK. Jesus was OK after He suffered, and you will be, too. The persecution of Christians will result in praise for the Holy Trinity and in a life that is far better than this one for all who remain faithful until death. As David wrote in Psalm 27:1, “Yahweh is my light and my salvation; Whom shall I fear? Yahweh is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?”
The Lord Christ reigns at God’s right hand. We will confess the apostles’ testimony, whether that means loss of income, loss of friends, loss of job, loss of home, loss of freedom or loss of life. We will confess – we GET to confess – because we have the promise of the Lord Jesus that all we lose here will be replaced by incomparably more when we join Him at God’s right hand. As Martin Luther teaches in A Mighty Fortress, “And take they our life, goods, fame, child, and wife; let these all be gone, they yet have nothing won. The kingdom ours remaineth.”
Our good and gracious God sustains us here in His Church with His Word of salvation and forgiveness, and with His holy, precious body and blood given in the Sacrament of the Altar. All the power and comfort of Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection is delivered to us here in His gifts. His suffering for your sin was for you; His death for your sin was for you; His death-defeating resurrection was for you; His ascension was for you; and He is most certainly coming again to take you Home to be with Him in righteousness and purity forever.
Until then, we have His Spirit and all the help we will ever need. That is what we will celebrate next Sunday at Pentecost, the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise – His promise to send the Helper, the Comforter, the Holy Spirit. The apostles couldn’t have accomplished anything without His help and wouldn’t have dared. But with His divine help, they could and did. And, by the grace of God so will we.
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
