A Supreme Companion

As someone who loves Jesus reads the things He said to His Followers on the night before He was crucified it is difficult, if not impossible, to miss the paradox of it all. He’s preparing these Men for His death. At the same time He’s setting the stage for an entirely new and phenomenal era. He’s told them that, as they “trust” Him, they will find they’re doing what they’ve seen Him do and on a new level. “If you love me,” He said, “you will obey my commandments.”

Obviously the things He’s describing are superhuman if not supernatural. What kind of love is it that holds someone as Great as He is so dearly that it gives rise to a life completely like that of the beloved? Certainly not any variety of human love we know about.

But we needn’t hesitate. What He promises next unveils the most important truth of His Message. “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, who will never leave you. He is the Holy Spirit, who leads into all truth.” The gift of the Holy Spirit is God’s guarantee that what He promises will take place in and through us. This person, the Advocate, is none other than the Spirit of God Himself. We first met Him at Creation; actually before it began. “Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. God's Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss.” He, “like a bird,” “brooded over a murky, muddy abyss.” A lifeless abyss. Nothing. And stirred out of that nothing life. This is the “Spirit” God will bring to us as we are given the role of Christ in our world.

Any one word we have to describe the “Spirit of God,” fails to fully explain His role and the nature of our relationship with Him. The Greek word John uses to capture what Jesus said that night literally means “someone called alongside you to aid you.” But it also means “someone who pleads another person’s case before a Judge; an Advocate.” Such a person pleads our case before God Himself. He is an “intercessor.” He “helps” those to whom He is sent. Ultimately the Holy Spirit comes to take the place of Christ with us; to lead us to a deeper knowledge of the truth; to give us divine strength; to develop in us the qualities; the character of Jesus Himself. This “love,” for example, which moves and enables us to please Our Lord, is the same “love” Jesus has for us.

Saul of Tarsus – later Paul the 1^st Century Preacher – wrote about the Spirit’s influence in Christ’s Followers. Just in case you’re inclined to see what Paul wrote as out of the “Upstairs Room” context remember this. Jesus Himself called Saul of Tarsus to be His Follower. Several years after that dramatic call this man – now Paul – appeared before the other Men Christ had called and told them of 3 years he spent with Jesus, in the desert. He told those men what he’d learned from the Master. When they’d heard what he claimed he’d heard from Jesus, they “extended the Hand of Fellowship” to him. They accepted him as one of them. That man wrote, in an early letter to new Christ-Followers in the Roman Province of Galatia, about something he’d learned from Jesus. “The fruit of the Spirit,” he wrote, “is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” This is the kind of person the Spirit, our “companion, advocate, intercessor,” and “guide,” makes of us. Followers just like Jesus. So like Him, in fact, that people are inclined to say things like, “those folks have been with Jesus;” “that woman is truly ‘Spirit-filled;’” “they are genuinely ‘godly’ people.”

This Spirit, our “Supreme Companion,” “The Spirit of God Himself,” will empower us to change our world; to bring amongst its ruins “the Kingdom of Our Lord and of His Christ.”