Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1074
“I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with you forever.” John 14:16.
THE unspeakable gift of the Son of God was followed up by the equally priceless gift of the Holy Spirit. Must it not be confessed by us that we think far less of the Holy Spirit than we should? I am sure we do not exalt the Savior too much, nor is He too often the subject of our meditations, but at the same time we give to the Holy Spirit a very disproportionate place compared with the Redeemer. I fear that we even grieve the Spirit by our neglect of Him. Let me invite your devout contemplations to the special work of the Holy Spirit. Such an invitation is necessary. The subject has not grown stale, for it too seldom occupies our thoughts.
We have not been unduly engrossed with honoring the Spirit of God for this is a fault seldom or never committed. We have met with uninstructed persons who have glorified the love of Jesus beyond that of the Father, and there are others so occupied with the decrees of the Father as to cast the work of the Son into the background—but very few and far between are those Believers who have dwelt upon the doctrine of the Holy Spirit beyond its proper measure and degree. The mistake has almost invariably been made in the opposite direction.
The personal name of the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity is, “the Spirit,” or the, “Holy Spirit,” which words describe His Nature as being a pure, spiritual, immaterial existence and His Character as being in Himself and in His workings pre-eminently holy. We commonly also speak of Him as the, “Holy Ghost,” but the name is now an erroneous one. The word “ghost” was the same as “spirit” in years gone by, when the present translation of the Bible was made, but it does not popularly signify “spirit” now. Superstition has degraded the word from its elevated meaning and it might be as well, perhaps, if the word were dropped altogether and we confined ourselves to the more accurate word, “Holy
Spirit.”
The term, “Holy Spirit,” is His personal title and we have in this verse His official title—He is in the English version called, the “Comforter,” but the word used in the original, upon which we will meditate this morning, has a much wider range of meaning. The word is Parakletos—we used it just now in our hymn, translating it into the English as,
“Paraclete”—
“Cheer our desponding hearts, You hea venly Paraclete! Give us to lie, with humble hope, At our Redeemer’s feet.”
Now, it is true that the name, “Comforter,” is a fair translation from some points of view, but it rather translates a corner of the word than the whole of it. It is a light which really streams from the text, but it is one of the seven prismatic colors rather than the combined light of the very instructive and wonderful word, Paraclete. Understand, then, that we have now to consider, this morning, the official title of the Holy Spirit. May we be filled with loving reverence while we study His gracious work and His official name.
I. First, this morning, I shall try to EXPLAIN HOW THE SPIRIT OF GOD IS THE PARACLETE. The word, Paraclete, is so full that it is extremely difficult to convey to you all its meaning. It is like those Hebrew words which contain so much in a small compass. It is sternly and even primitively sublime in its simplicity, yet it comprehends great things. Literally, it signifies, “called to,” or, “called beside” another to aid him. It is synonymous verbally, though not in sense, with the Latin word, advocatus, a person called in to speak for us by pleading our cause. Yet, as we have come to
use the word, “advocate,” in a different sense, that word, although it would, like that of, “comforter,” convey a part of the meaning, it could not contain it all.
Paraclete is wider than “advocate” and wider than “comforter.” I think the meaning of the word, “Paraclete,” might be put under the two headings of one “called to,” and one “calling to.” One called to, that is, to come to our aid, to help our infirmities, to suggest, to advocate, to guide and so on—and one who, in consequence thereof, for our benefit, calls to us—for some see in it the idea of monitor, and certainly the blessed Paraclete is our Teacher, Remembrancer, Incentive and Comforter. His work as One called in to help us, consists very largely in His strengthening us by admonition, by instruction, by encouragement and by those works which would come under the head of a Teacher or a Comforter.
Paraclete is a word too extensive in meaning to be exchanged for any one word in any language. It is most comprehensive and we shall hope not so much to interpret as to paraphrase it in the first head of our sermon this morning. Let us take all the passages in John 14:15-16 which refer to this title and study them with care. From the first, which is our text, we learn that the Holy Spirit, as the Paraclete, is to be to us all that Jesus was to His disciples. Read the text, “I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter,” plainly teaching that the Lord Jesus Christ is the first Paraclete and that the Holy Spirit is a second Paraclete occupying the same position as the living Jesus did.