Understanding is given to the followers of Christ, by way of the Holy Spirit who indwells them. While all are under the expectation of God’s moral law, we cannot expect unbelievers to understand the things of God or of His Kingdom. Understanding is simply not there. On the flip-side, a believer in Christ should rejoice that s/he has understanding because it is an evidence of being born-again.
Sean C. Capparuccia
12 April 2026 – 2nd Sunday after Easter
Hosea 14:1-9; Psalm 73; II Cor. 1:23-2:17; John 16:12-24
I think one of the most difficult tasks that Christians have in our culture is celebrating our feasts with any meaning. I mean, according to the world, Christmas is over on December 26th and all lights and decorations need to come down – at least by January 6th – to get ready for the next holiday, Valentine’s Day. And likewise, Easter is over pretty much as soon as the family and guests go home on Easter evening. Well, that’s how the world celebrates our holy-days. We need to remember that Christmas, Easter, Pentecost – these aren’t “days” but seasons. The celebration doesn’t last for just a day, it should last on and on. That is why we are called the Christmas People – because we live in the life of the Incarnate God. It is why we are called the Easter People; because we live in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. And we are called the People of Pentecost – because we live in the Spirit of Christ. So we, as born again believers, are all of these things. But I choose these words carefully: I say we, as born again believers. Jesus said that “many are called, but few are chosen” (Matt. 22:14); He said that “the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matt. 7:14); He said that He came “to give His life as a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:28). And I believe I referenced this in last week’s message, but many who say, “Lord, Lord” on the day of judgement will be met with a divine denial. There is a difference between the born-again believer and the world; between the born-again believer and the “carnal Christian.” And likewise, there is not much difference between the “carnal Christian” and the world.
In today’s Gospel, we hear Jesus trying to comfort the Disciples, as we, too, should be comforted. But there is also something very discomforting in His words. By way of example I could take out this 50-cent piece here in my pocket. I could hold it right here between us and ask you to describe it. You might say, “Well, it has a large eagle on it holding an olive branch in one talon and a bundle of 13 arrows in the other.” And I will say, “No, it’s simply a profile of President John F. Kennedy and it says ‘Liberty’ and ‘In God We Trust.’” We could argue all day over it until we agreed that we are each looking at only one side of the coin, right? Every coin has two sides. And when we look at Scripture, we are often looking at a coin and we must be able to see both sides of it. What is said, and often what is not said.
That being said, in this passage, Jesus is speaking plain words to His Disciples but they just don’t get it. This is part of the Upper Room Discourse on the night in which He was betrayed; the evening before He was crucified. I think here is one of the downsides of the lectionary, or maybe the downside to 15 or 20-minute sermons. The Upper Room Discourse is pretty long. I think we sometime think the Upper Room consisted of Jesus washing the Disciples’ feet, and then saying “somebody is going to betray Me,” and then “This is MY body, take, eat….” But this Discourse takes up all of Chapters 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 in the book of John. Jesus had a lot to say before He was crucified. And even this isn’t all He wanted to say. It’s difficult to grasp, sometimes, how these passages fit together when we have to preach on them over weeks and months’ time.
:12-13 “I have much more to say to you, more than you can bear right now. But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all truth.” Here is one place where we are looking at one side of the coin, so to speak. Jesus is talking about the Holy Spirit, who cannot come until Christ ascends into heaven. He is leaving this earth. His body and spirit – eternally united – will be at the right hand of God until He comes again. I think He is pretty clear there, that His body and His blood will not come to this earth again until He comes again in glory. Another thing He is clear on here is that the Spirit of Truth, or the Holy Spirit, will guide Christ’s followers into all truth, or the rest of the truth.
Let’s look at the other side of the coin for a moment and see what He is not saying. He is not saying that the Holy Spirit will lead all people into the truth. He is also not really talking about progressive revelation here. The idea that God, through the Holy Spirit, has, over the many centuries, revealed various truths to His people here and there is not true. He revealed what He wanted said to the Apostles, they wrote those things down under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit from 32 A.D. to possibly 90 A.D., and those writings which were agreed to be inspired were canonized and called the New Testament. And the book of Hebrews, one of those inspired writings, says, “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the [OT] prophets, but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed the heir of all things, through whom also He created the world” (Heb. 1:1-2). In other words, all that needs to be known regarding who God is, what Christ has done, how we are saved, and our mission in life as the Church of God, has been told us by Christ and has been written down for us in the New Testament. There is no new revelation until He comes again. This is comforting because when someone pops up and says, “I got a revelation from God,” we can confidently say, “No you didn’t.” Now you may get a deeper understanding, or a better grasp of what has been said; you may find a new way to apply God’s word to your own life, but there is no new revelation that comes from God. Nor any moronic angels. Demons, yes, but not angels.
How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your faith in His excellent Word!
What more can He say than to you He hath said,
To you, who for refuge, to Jesus, have fled?[1]
But I digress..
I think Jesus meant in what He said to His disciples was this: “I have a lot to tell you, but if I gave it all to you now, your little mortal heads would explode.” But He was also revealing this Scriptural truth: without the Holy Spirit, no one can understand the truth. It was true for the first Disciples and it is true for us today. The Holy Spirit is who leads God’s people into the truth. Apart from the Holy Spirit, we do not merely lack information, we lack the ability to even receive it. You can sit in church every Sunday your whole life; you can listen to sermon after sermon for years and years; you can even quote the Bible with the best of them, but without the Holy Spirit you cannot understand its message of salvation; you still will not be able to ‘bear’ the truth.
Jonathan Edwards, a famous pastor in the 1700s in America, and who led in one of the greatest revivals our nation has ever seen, preached a now-famous sermon entitled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” This sermon was based on one seemingly obscure verse in Deuteronomy, Dt. 32:35, which simply says, “Their feet shall slip in due time.” He says in his sermon, that “there is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of Hell, but the mere pleasure of God.” Now try to remember that this was written in the 1700s when language was a little different than it is today.[2] In this case, God’s “mere pleasure” simply means God’s sovereignty over all. If God wanted to, He could put all men in Hell, or He could put all men in Heaven. Either way, God has sovereignty over His creation.
In our Psalm reading today we read, “Truly God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart. But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped.
For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked” (Ps. 73:1-3).
We see this same sentiment of feet slipping; or rather, souls slipping into danger unless God saves. We are, like Israel, like the Psalmist, by nature, in slippery places.
“I tell you the truth, you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy” (Jn 16:20). I’ve said this before and I’ll say it many more times: Scripture divides all of humanity into two groups, those that belong to God, and those that do not. Jesus tells them that while they are grieving over His crucifixion, the world will be rejoicing. What world? The unbelieving world. The world that cannot abide the thought that some God who created the universe might expect something from us. The world that abhors the thought that the things Christ taught are actually true.
You see, there are some who have divided humanity into three types of people: believers, unbelievers, and those who are kinda believers, but not completely. I believe the term for them is “Carnal Christians”; “Christians” who still follow the world.
But that is one of the “other sides of the coin” that Jesus was addressing to His Disciples here. When He said that the Spirit will “guide [them] into all truth,” He was saying that those who were His disciples would, in fact, be led into all truth.
There is no such thing as being truly religious but not born again; there is no such thing as a “nominal Christian” really. Yet I suspect that there are a lot of people who think they are saved because they know some Christian phrases; or because they know what ‘justification’ means; or because they are known by people at the church, the church that they are members of but only attend every so often. They are “near” to Christ, but nearness is not the new birth.
Now some of you might be thinking, well, that’s pretty harsh, pastor, and maybe a tad legalistic. But I tell you legalism cannot know the heart – it only knows the Law; that’s why it is called legalism. Only you know your heart.
And you know if you have understanding. It’s not enough to explain justification if you haven’t been justified. And what does grace matter if you’ve never truly experienced it and been broken and rebuilt by it? And there are many who can describe Jesus but who truly take no delight in knowing Him or worshipping Him as God. Maybe they go to the worship service because it is the expected thing to do, but there is no worshipping heart there. There is no sense of utter defeat before the throne of grace, and utter victory in the cross of Jesus Christ.
But listen, being a Christian is not about knowing stuff; it’s not about who has a certain amount of knowledge – all that is important for is ordination. What being a Christian is about is having the Holy Spirit. It is He who is the “giver of life,” the one who regenerates you from death to life. It is the Holy Spirit who illumines the heart and gives it understanding of who God is and understanding of His Word. Listen, He isn’t called the Holy Spirit because He is Holy, He is called the Holy Spirit because He makes you holy. He takes your heart of stone and gives you a heart of flesh.
What does that look like? It means where once you were indifferent to spiritual things, now you have a growing interest in them. Where you once could not have cared less about people in need, you now pray for them and help where you are able. Where you once had a growing disdain for your spouse because you’ve got both feet in the world and you’ve been allowing it pull you away, now, you see him or her through new eyes and recognize that your love for each other is a mirror for the love between Christ and His Church.
In your heart, the Spirit glorifies Christ. What does that mean? It means that you begin to see Christ all over the place, in other people, in every situation. It means that your obedience to the Spirit glorifies Christ at the throne of God.
In 2 Corinthians, Paul tells the faithful there that they are “the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life” (II Cor. 2:15-16). Paul was glorying in the fact that through them the “fragrance of the knowledge of Christ” was spreading everywhere.
Is that true of you? I think we suppress the Spirit quite a bit. Times when the Spirit is telling us quite plainly what we ought to do, or how we ought act or react, and we ignore Him or even downright refuse Him. Beloved, we can’t do that but so many times.
In verse 22 Jesus tells them that when they see Him again, their hearts will rejoice. And that applies to us – when we see Him, our hearts will rejoice! And no one will take that joy from us. Now He’s talking about two things at the same time here. He’s saying when His faithful followers see Him at His Return, for sure, but He’s also talking about here and now, when His faithful followers see Him in the actions of the Holy Spirit.
The day He died, His Disciples grieved and the world rejoiced. But the grief of the faithful did not last too long. And thankfully, we have never had to grieve His death because we never walked with Him. But oh how the world will grieve when He comes back and their joy will never return.
And that should break our hearts, Beloved. I’ve never known a Christian to gloat over the death of an unbeliever. It should sadden us. But if we look at verses 23-24 we see the power that we have in Christ. He says, “In that day you will ask nothing of Me. Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in My name, He will give it to you. Until now you have asked nothing in My name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.”
In verse 19 the Disciples wanted to ask Jesus but did not have the courage; in verse 23 He tells them that when the Spirit comes they won’t need to ask, see, because they will know, they will understand. And so they, as well as we now in this dispensation of the Holy Spirit, ask in Jesus’ name all that we require. This doesn’t mean that it’s some magic formula for getting what we want, but it means that we ask in accordance with what Christ has done for us through His suffering, death, and resurrection. By His power do we come to the throne of grace and ask of God. And what do we ask of God? Well a bigger house would be nice, but I don’t think that is what He is talking about and I further think that that kind of thinking will make for a lot of disgruntled people who didn’t get what they asked for.
No, He means that whatever we ask for in terms of furthering His Kingdom, we are to keep asking, in accordance with His will, those things of the spirit which will give us true joy. We are to pray for the salvation of others; we are to pray for the healing of our spirits and for our relationships; we are to pray for understanding that the Holy Spirit will point out to us where we are wrong or wronging others, and set us straight. We are to pray that the Holy Spirit indwell us, use us, and protect us. We are to pray for revival among God’s people.
If there is any doubt in you about who Christ is, pray that He will settle that doubt. What we need is more Christians who are sold out to Christ and His Kingdom and fewer pretend Christians whose faith and trust is entirely misplaced.
Be, then, a fragrance of Christ in our perishing world and a fragrance of truth to those who are being saved. Before many people ever hear about Christ they may meet only you. By the power and understanding and joy of His Spirit, may we each one see miracles this week and in the weeks to come. Amen.
[1] “How Firm a Foundation,” Rippon’s A Selection of Hymns, 1787.
[2] One glaring example of this is in the word “Religion” which in the 1700s meant “Christian denomination,” not different faiths as we understand it today. Hence the U.S. Constitution saying that Congress shall not make or infringe upon a religion, means simply that Congress shall not set one Christian denomination over another. America was a Christian nation, but not an Episcopal, or Congregationalist, or Baptist, or Presbyterian nation.
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What think ye?