Text: John 16:5-15
Date: Easter V +5/6/07
Every Sunday in the Prayer of the Church we pray that Almighty God would “inspire continually the holy catholic Church with the Spirit of truth,” and would grant “that all who confess [His] holy Name, may agree in the truth of [His] holy Word.” We pray that first petition because Jesus promised that He would send the Spirit of truth. We pray that second petition because there are those who confess the Name but do not agree in the truth. Even as we confess that we “believe” in the things that we cannot see, so do we continually pray for things such as agreement in God’s truth, the existence of which are not always evident or are continually threatened by the divisions of ignorance, false teaching or unbelief. Pontius Pilate was only the most famous one to utter with contemptible unbelief and mockery the universal question, “What is truth?” (John 18:38). Unlike at the founding of our nation all the way up until about 50 years ago, when God and specifically the Judeo-Christian religion were part of the very fabric of the public square and discourse, that fabric has been quickly deteriorating under the wear and tear of secularism and the tyranny of relativism to the point that most people today believe there is no such thing as objective truth applicable to everyone, there is no one true “church” on earth, and there is no such thing as “right” or “wrong.” In such a world the words of our Lord we hear today ring hollow, and our Easter proclamation of the resurrection of Christ is pretty much ignored and considered as but the remnant of an out-of-touch tradition—nothing to get too excited about any more.
The ministry of the Holy Spirit of Christ, according to our text, consists in these three main themes, to “convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment.” It’s been the main theme of the truth from the beginning, these three important items that underlie everything else—the cause of all suffering and death, the only true hope that exists, and the reality of the spiritual warfare that is behind every war and conflict, every crime, every hatred, every division and every unkind word: the devil, “the ruler of this world.”
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