Sunday After Ascension
.
Alter Christus
Isa 65:17-25, Ps 21:1-6 and 24, 1 Pet 4:7-11, John15:26-16.4
In my last couple of weeks in Houston I got together with various friends of long standing. One of them, named
Harry, is a retired pastor and Bible college professor who now teaches three classes at the Southern Baptist megachurch he and his wife Sharon attend.
Harry was railing against the sad state of biblical literacy of the people in the pews. Teaching the Book of Acts, he reached ch. 11 and began class that day by asking, by way of review, in what chapter the Holy Spirit first appears. Blank stares. Well, in what chapter is the church formed? More blank stares.
The answer to both questions, as Harry knew as well as he knows the rapture is coming, is ch. 2. But is it? I thought back on my ordination exam for presbyter. Archdeacon Payne, my examiner on church history, asked when the church began. “At Pentecost,” I said.
Are you sure?
Uh oh. Apparently not. “Well,” I said, “I guess you could say it began in Jeremiah 31, when God proclaimed the New Covenant He would establish with His people.”
Are you sure?
Now I’m beginning to sweat. And trying not to squirm. “Well,” I said, “I guess you could say it began in Gen 3:15, when God says the Seed of the woman will crush the head of the seed of the serpent.”
The next voice you will hear is that of Bishop Grote: “Works for me.”
“Whew! Me, too.”
So, contrary to what Harry and maybe you and, not long ago, I might say, the church did not begin at Pentecost.
One thing is for certain, though. Acts 1 describes the Lord’s ascension and in ch 2 the Holy Spirit enters the
creation in a new and powerful way; immediately, many come to saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
The Lord had said that He must depart so that Another could come. On this Sunday After Ascension, we find ourselves in that small crevice between our Lord’s departure to His Father and the Spirit’s arrival in the creation. We will do well to consider how these two Persons of the Godhead are related.
Martin Luther called the Holy Spirit alter Christus, another Christ. But of course the old Reformer liked his Rhine
wine and that good German beer and he did exaggerate a bit now and then. Did Luther go too far? He did not. Luther captured very well in that phrase the stature of the Spirit as Scripture presents Him. The Christ and the Spirit are equally Persons of the Godhead. What’s more, they are intimately associated not only in their Personhood but also in their
work.
It sometimes appears in Scripture that the Christ needs the direction and even the power of the Spirit to accomplish His work, as when He is led by the Spirit into the wilderness to face the temptation of Satan or when He returns by the power of the Spirit into Galilee. At the synagogue in Nazareth, He reads from Isaiah 61, where it is prophesied that the Spirit will
come upon Him. Elsewhere, we read that the Christ has or gives the Spirit, as though the Christ is the more potent of the two. In our gospel reading for today we find that our Lord sends the Spirit. Further that He sends Him from the Father.
But when we take a step back and view the Bible as a whole, we see without much difficulty the Christ and the Spirit
working hand-in-hand for the salvation and sanctification of the people of God. Their missions are woven like fine silk into a seamless whole. The Spirit has come into the world to complete the work Christ began, to convert and indwell and edify those the Father has chosen from the foundation of the world. He equips us for the mission to the world our Lord has assigned to us. To this end, the Bible tells us, the Spirit fills us.
It is truly a mysterious thing, this filling of the Holy Spirit. I heard a story of a prayer meetin’ in East Texas. Now some of you have never been to East Texas so let me put you in the picture. My sister married a man from there and has lived there for more than 30 years. She says you know you’re in East Texas when you start seeing refrigerators in the front
yard. Now you’ve got the scene. There was present at this prayer meetin’ a man known to many as one who had claimed the filling of the Spirit a number of times, only to – as they say in East Texas – get backslid. And, yes, that’s as bad spiritually as it is grammatically.
At the prayer meetin,’ this fellow got himself worked up into quite a lather and then began moaning, “Fill me, Lord, fill me with thy Holy Spirit.”Whereupon a woman across the aisle chimed in, “Don’t you do it, Lord; he leaks!”
Now, what this scene lacks in decorum it makes up for in theology. Our Lord does fill us with His Holy Spirit. Our creed tells us the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son. And, like this backslid fellow – but hopefully not too
much like him -- we do leak. To put a fine theological point on it, the Holy Spirit is incarnate in us. Like our Lord Jesus – if not in the same way -- He takes on human flesh.
Arthur W. Pink, a preacher and theologian of the last century, identified 18 points of correspondence between the advent of the Christ and the appearing of the Spirit, alter Christus, another Christ. I cannot be expected to cover all 18 of them in the mere 2½ hours allotted me today, but this incarnation is one of them.
God the Son took on flesh; so does God the Spirit. Listen to the sublime symphony that is the concert of the Persons of the Holy Trinity. The Son takes on flesh when the Spirit “overshadows” Mary. The Spirit takes on flesh when the Father and the Son send Him to dwell within each of us who find salvation in the Son so that we might be reconciled to the Father. The Son sends the Spirit to indwell His saints. The Spirit will deliver those saints to the Son on His return in glory.
Can it be that some still do not discern truth and beauty in the snowflake symmetry in God’s word?
I find myself aching to beg forgiveness of the Spirit. The Son had no human father and thus the flesh He inhabits has known no sin. The Spirit takes up residence in the likes of me, a sinner begotten in sin, soaked in sin, striving for sin. And still He yearns to be my Comforter.
While my Lord sits at the right hand of His Father and intercedes for me, the Spirit does the dirty work; He inhabits the damp, moldy places within me and intervenes against me. He remains locked in mortal combat with my flesh, waging war for my sanctification.
Is that any way to treat God? And yet He delights in this grim toil. He would till forever this contaminated soil to present to the Father the spotless spoil of one soul won back from sin.
The Christ suffered His flesh to be torn on the cross that He might spill forth blood mixed with water to sprinkle us and cleanse us of sin. The Spirit indwells our sin-torn flesh that He might anoint our wounds with his healing oil and preserve us unto righteousness.
Maltbie D. Babcock wrote No Distant Lord:
No distant Lord have I,
Loving afar to be,
Made flesh for me He cannot rest
Until He rests in me . . .
Ascended now to God
My witness there to be,
His witness here am I because
His Spirit dwells in me.
Our Lord earned the right to send the Spirit into the hearts of sinners. He earned it on the cross. When He offered to His Father satisfaction for your sins and mine He purchased the privilege of bestowing His Spirit on us, as John the Baptist had foretold: “He shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”
Christ became a curse for us when He shed His blood. The oil of the Spirit – that’s a frequent metaphor in Scripture -- follows the blood of Christ to make the redeemed of the Lord fit for God’s service. We may enter into the presence of God anointed for the service of God.
Because God’s perfect plan called for His Son to return to His side and intercede for us, Another descended into this sin-stained creation to complete the work our Lord had begun in us. And by His power, we can proceed in the work God has assigned to us.
Like it or not, this is who the Father has made us, witnesses to the risen Christ and temples of the Holy Spirit. We are purer in God’s sight than we are in our own mirrors because the blood of the Lamb has cleansed us and the oil of the Spirit has anointed us.
As most of you are aware, I spent too much of my life in locker rooms. Until I went straight several years ago, I interviewed and wrote about high-profile athletes. I know things that would make you cringe, or worse, if I told them to you. Suffice it to say that when young men who are full not of the Holy Spirit but of themselves become millionaires many times over, more than mischief prevails.
These young men were not unaware that kids looked up to them as heroes. When they did decidedly anti-heroic things, and those things became public knowledge, they fell back on lines such as, “Ain’t up to me to raise your kids.”
Ain’t it? What they could not escape, no matter how they rationalized, was what should have been the sobering fact that one doesn’t get to choose whether he is a role model or not. Once a kid looks up to you, Bubba, you’ve got the job.
Still more are we without excuse. We are Christians not because of any power of our own, any merit within us, any talents we can claim to glorify us. We are sinners saved by grace and even our faith is a free gift of God bestowed on some for a reason we may never comprehend.
But we do know the purpose. Our Lord tells His apostles the Spirit will testify of Him, “and you also will bear witness.” To that end, the Holy Spirit will teach us all things we must know. To that end, we have the filling of the Holy Spirit, whom we are commanded not to grieve. If we do not know why we are chosen we do know that we are chosen.
And we know our mission, bearing witness of our Lord. St. John tells us that a day will come when “whoever kills you will think that he is offering service to God.” We have had such an easy time of it, you and I. But now God’s enemies are on the march. I am not a prophet of doom and I do not pretend to know God’s timing.
But neither will I stick my head in the sand. Our children and certainly our grandchildren may confront a world vastly different from the one we have known. Not all religion is good or right or true. Some with a faith that far outstrips our own – but a poisoned faith – will attack and murder the followers of Christ even as they bellow the name of God.
They will advance in the resolve that they are serving God when they are instead rallying to the cause of Satan. They will see themselves as crusaders, guardians of righteousness. I don’t make this stuff up; it comes straight from the word of God.
One thing we must teach those who come after us is the message of v 4: This persecution is not a sign that God opposes them – even if He is visiting His vengeance on an apostate land – but the outworking of His perfect plan.
God deals with people on a covenant basis. Righteous Daniel and his friends went into captivity in Babylon along with their apostate brothers.
And we must tell our sons and daughters that the Holy Spirit will not abandon them. Under the Old Covenant, the Jew received the mark of circumcision in his flesh as a token that he belonged to God.
Under the New Covenant, we have so much more. We have not only water baptism as the covenant sign but also the baptism of the Holy Spirit as the covenant seal.
It is then incumbent upon us to make our Lord’s interests our own. Here is where our human will comes into play. We can choose to serve the flesh or the Spirit, the self or God. “Be not drunk with wine but be filled with the Holy Spirit.” Be not drunk with pride, lust, power, riches, rich food . . . anything that crimps the space for the God within us.
Do not grieve the Holy Spirit by desecrating His temple which is your body. If you would live for Christ, live by His Holy Spirit. If we love God we will love the God who dwells in us. God shapes us with His two incarnate hands, the Son and the Spirit. When we remain supple, we are the clay He forms into the likeness of the Son. When we harden ourselves, we become brittle and we break.
If you have had a teenager in the house you likely get the picture – except this time we’re the goofy, hard-headed, high-strung kid. God’s commandments are in place not because He needs to rule but because we need to serve.
There remains one thing to be said before we celebrate our communion with our Lord. Francis Schaeffer spoke of what he called the “final apologetic,” or defense of our faith. After we have cited God’s work in creation, after we have extolled His work of redemption, after we have proclaimed His revelation in His written word and in His living Word, we have one last argument to make to a skeptical, sin-stained world.
It is our love for one another. As we await that glorious day when we are united with our Lord, we can rejoice in our love for one another because the Holy Spirit came into the world and lives this day in each of us. Amen.
.
.
Alter Christus
Isa 65:17-25, Ps 21:1-6 and 24, 1 Pet 4:7-11, John15:26-16.4
In my last couple of weeks in Houston I got together with various friends of long standing. One of them, named
Harry, is a retired pastor and Bible college professor who now teaches three classes at the Southern Baptist megachurch he and his wife Sharon attend.
Harry was railing against the sad state of biblical literacy of the people in the pews. Teaching the Book of Acts, he reached ch. 11 and began class that day by asking, by way of review, in what chapter the Holy Spirit first appears. Blank stares. Well, in what chapter is the church formed? More blank stares.
The answer to both questions, as Harry knew as well as he knows the rapture is coming, is ch. 2. But is it? I thought back on my ordination exam for presbyter. Archdeacon Payne, my examiner on church history, asked when the church began. “At Pentecost,” I said.
Are you sure?
Uh oh. Apparently not. “Well,” I said, “I guess you could say it began in Jeremiah 31, when God proclaimed the New Covenant He would establish with His people.”
Are you sure?
Now I’m beginning to sweat. And trying not to squirm. “Well,” I said, “I guess you could say it began in Gen 3:15, when God says the Seed of the woman will crush the head of the seed of the serpent.”
The next voice you will hear is that of Bishop Grote: “Works for me.”
“Whew! Me, too.”
So, contrary to what Harry and maybe you and, not long ago, I might say, the church did not begin at Pentecost.
One thing is for certain, though. Acts 1 describes the Lord’s ascension and in ch 2 the Holy Spirit enters the
creation in a new and powerful way; immediately, many come to saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
The Lord had said that He must depart so that Another could come. On this Sunday After Ascension, we find ourselves in that small crevice between our Lord’s departure to His Father and the Spirit’s arrival in the creation. We will do well to consider how these two Persons of the Godhead are related.
Martin Luther called the Holy Spirit alter Christus, another Christ. But of course the old Reformer liked his Rhine
wine and that good German beer and he did exaggerate a bit now and then. Did Luther go too far? He did not. Luther captured very well in that phrase the stature of the Spirit as Scripture presents Him. The Christ and the Spirit are equally Persons of the Godhead. What’s more, they are intimately associated not only in their Personhood but also in their
work.
It sometimes appears in Scripture that the Christ needs the direction and even the power of the Spirit to accomplish His work, as when He is led by the Spirit into the wilderness to face the temptation of Satan or when He returns by the power of the Spirit into Galilee. At the synagogue in Nazareth, He reads from Isaiah 61, where it is prophesied that the Spirit will
come upon Him. Elsewhere, we read that the Christ has or gives the Spirit, as though the Christ is the more potent of the two. In our gospel reading for today we find that our Lord sends the Spirit. Further that He sends Him from the Father.
But when we take a step back and view the Bible as a whole, we see without much difficulty the Christ and the Spirit
working hand-in-hand for the salvation and sanctification of the people of God. Their missions are woven like fine silk into a seamless whole. The Spirit has come into the world to complete the work Christ began, to convert and indwell and edify those the Father has chosen from the foundation of the world. He equips us for the mission to the world our Lord has assigned to us. To this end, the Bible tells us, the Spirit fills us.
It is truly a mysterious thing, this filling of the Holy Spirit. I heard a story of a prayer meetin’ in East Texas. Now some of you have never been to East Texas so let me put you in the picture. My sister married a man from there and has lived there for more than 30 years. She says you know you’re in East Texas when you start seeing refrigerators in the front
yard. Now you’ve got the scene. There was present at this prayer meetin’ a man known to many as one who had claimed the filling of the Spirit a number of times, only to – as they say in East Texas – get backslid. And, yes, that’s as bad spiritually as it is grammatically.
At the prayer meetin,’ this fellow got himself worked up into quite a lather and then began moaning, “Fill me, Lord, fill me with thy Holy Spirit.”Whereupon a woman across the aisle chimed in, “Don’t you do it, Lord; he leaks!”
Now, what this scene lacks in decorum it makes up for in theology. Our Lord does fill us with His Holy Spirit. Our creed tells us the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son. And, like this backslid fellow – but hopefully not too
much like him -- we do leak. To put a fine theological point on it, the Holy Spirit is incarnate in us. Like our Lord Jesus – if not in the same way -- He takes on human flesh.
Arthur W. Pink, a preacher and theologian of the last century, identified 18 points of correspondence between the advent of the Christ and the appearing of the Spirit, alter Christus, another Christ. I cannot be expected to cover all 18 of them in the mere 2½ hours allotted me today, but this incarnation is one of them.
God the Son took on flesh; so does God the Spirit. Listen to the sublime symphony that is the concert of the Persons of the Holy Trinity. The Son takes on flesh when the Spirit “overshadows” Mary. The Spirit takes on flesh when the Father and the Son send Him to dwell within each of us who find salvation in the Son so that we might be reconciled to the Father. The Son sends the Spirit to indwell His saints. The Spirit will deliver those saints to the Son on His return in glory.
Can it be that some still do not discern truth and beauty in the snowflake symmetry in God’s word?
I find myself aching to beg forgiveness of the Spirit. The Son had no human father and thus the flesh He inhabits has known no sin. The Spirit takes up residence in the likes of me, a sinner begotten in sin, soaked in sin, striving for sin. And still He yearns to be my Comforter.
While my Lord sits at the right hand of His Father and intercedes for me, the Spirit does the dirty work; He inhabits the damp, moldy places within me and intervenes against me. He remains locked in mortal combat with my flesh, waging war for my sanctification.
Is that any way to treat God? And yet He delights in this grim toil. He would till forever this contaminated soil to present to the Father the spotless spoil of one soul won back from sin.
The Christ suffered His flesh to be torn on the cross that He might spill forth blood mixed with water to sprinkle us and cleanse us of sin. The Spirit indwells our sin-torn flesh that He might anoint our wounds with his healing oil and preserve us unto righteousness.
Maltbie D. Babcock wrote No Distant Lord:
No distant Lord have I,
Loving afar to be,
Made flesh for me He cannot rest
Until He rests in me . . .
Ascended now to God
My witness there to be,
His witness here am I because
His Spirit dwells in me.
Our Lord earned the right to send the Spirit into the hearts of sinners. He earned it on the cross. When He offered to His Father satisfaction for your sins and mine He purchased the privilege of bestowing His Spirit on us, as John the Baptist had foretold: “He shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”
Christ became a curse for us when He shed His blood. The oil of the Spirit – that’s a frequent metaphor in Scripture -- follows the blood of Christ to make the redeemed of the Lord fit for God’s service. We may enter into the presence of God anointed for the service of God.
Because God’s perfect plan called for His Son to return to His side and intercede for us, Another descended into this sin-stained creation to complete the work our Lord had begun in us. And by His power, we can proceed in the work God has assigned to us.
Like it or not, this is who the Father has made us, witnesses to the risen Christ and temples of the Holy Spirit. We are purer in God’s sight than we are in our own mirrors because the blood of the Lamb has cleansed us and the oil of the Spirit has anointed us.
As most of you are aware, I spent too much of my life in locker rooms. Until I went straight several years ago, I interviewed and wrote about high-profile athletes. I know things that would make you cringe, or worse, if I told them to you. Suffice it to say that when young men who are full not of the Holy Spirit but of themselves become millionaires many times over, more than mischief prevails.
These young men were not unaware that kids looked up to them as heroes. When they did decidedly anti-heroic things, and those things became public knowledge, they fell back on lines such as, “Ain’t up to me to raise your kids.”
Ain’t it? What they could not escape, no matter how they rationalized, was what should have been the sobering fact that one doesn’t get to choose whether he is a role model or not. Once a kid looks up to you, Bubba, you’ve got the job.
Still more are we without excuse. We are Christians not because of any power of our own, any merit within us, any talents we can claim to glorify us. We are sinners saved by grace and even our faith is a free gift of God bestowed on some for a reason we may never comprehend.
But we do know the purpose. Our Lord tells His apostles the Spirit will testify of Him, “and you also will bear witness.” To that end, the Holy Spirit will teach us all things we must know. To that end, we have the filling of the Holy Spirit, whom we are commanded not to grieve. If we do not know why we are chosen we do know that we are chosen.
And we know our mission, bearing witness of our Lord. St. John tells us that a day will come when “whoever kills you will think that he is offering service to God.” We have had such an easy time of it, you and I. But now God’s enemies are on the march. I am not a prophet of doom and I do not pretend to know God’s timing.
But neither will I stick my head in the sand. Our children and certainly our grandchildren may confront a world vastly different from the one we have known. Not all religion is good or right or true. Some with a faith that far outstrips our own – but a poisoned faith – will attack and murder the followers of Christ even as they bellow the name of God.
They will advance in the resolve that they are serving God when they are instead rallying to the cause of Satan. They will see themselves as crusaders, guardians of righteousness. I don’t make this stuff up; it comes straight from the word of God.
One thing we must teach those who come after us is the message of v 4: This persecution is not a sign that God opposes them – even if He is visiting His vengeance on an apostate land – but the outworking of His perfect plan.
God deals with people on a covenant basis. Righteous Daniel and his friends went into captivity in Babylon along with their apostate brothers.
And we must tell our sons and daughters that the Holy Spirit will not abandon them. Under the Old Covenant, the Jew received the mark of circumcision in his flesh as a token that he belonged to God.
Under the New Covenant, we have so much more. We have not only water baptism as the covenant sign but also the baptism of the Holy Spirit as the covenant seal.
It is then incumbent upon us to make our Lord’s interests our own. Here is where our human will comes into play. We can choose to serve the flesh or the Spirit, the self or God. “Be not drunk with wine but be filled with the Holy Spirit.” Be not drunk with pride, lust, power, riches, rich food . . . anything that crimps the space for the God within us.
Do not grieve the Holy Spirit by desecrating His temple which is your body. If you would live for Christ, live by His Holy Spirit. If we love God we will love the God who dwells in us. God shapes us with His two incarnate hands, the Son and the Spirit. When we remain supple, we are the clay He forms into the likeness of the Son. When we harden ourselves, we become brittle and we break.
If you have had a teenager in the house you likely get the picture – except this time we’re the goofy, hard-headed, high-strung kid. God’s commandments are in place not because He needs to rule but because we need to serve.
There remains one thing to be said before we celebrate our communion with our Lord. Francis Schaeffer spoke of what he called the “final apologetic,” or defense of our faith. After we have cited God’s work in creation, after we have extolled His work of redemption, after we have proclaimed His revelation in His written word and in His living Word, we have one last argument to make to a skeptical, sin-stained world.
It is our love for one another. As we await that glorious day when we are united with our Lord, we can rejoice in our love for one another because the Holy Spirit came into the world and lives this day in each of us. Amen.
.