“I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter;

that He may abide with you forever; even the Spirit of Truth.”

(John 14:16-17)

Everyone likes comfort. We don’t object to being comfortable, even in church, do we? We like to have the sanctuary warm in winter weather and cool in the hot summertime.

I remember back before more churches had air-conditioning, there was one church in Richmond, Virginia, just one that did have an air-conditioned sanctuary, and they advertised this fact by putting this notice in the newspaper: “Worship with us this Sunday in the beauty of holiness and the comfort of air-conditioning.”

Many of the keenest scientific minds and the best business heads of our nation are at work endlessly to produce more and more gadgets designed to give us more and more creature comforts. With the upward swing in our national prosperity, and our rising standard of living, and the phenomenal production of luxury items, folks in our day in America enjoy more physical body comforts than ever before.

But in the midst of our prosperity produced comforts we are gradually learning that physical comforts, be they ever so ingenious and lush, do not completely satisfy us. The great outcry now is for more soul comfort, for more peace of mind. But what we do not seem to have gone far enough in our spiritual pilgrimage to discover is that the ultimate source of soul comfort for human beings is truth, yes, truth.

Now, we should have known this and understood it perfectly, for Jesus in one of his most famous and comforting messages — John’s Gospel, chapter 14 — solidly connects truth with comfort when He promises His disciples that the Holy Spirit will come to lead them into all truth. Listen: “I will pray the Father and He will send you another Comforter, even the Spirit of Truth.” (John 14:16-17)

“I will not leave you comfortless,” says Jesus to that band of friends in the upper room on the night before His crucifixion when every heart was heavy with the thought of parting, and the ominous clouds of violence were gathering, and a fierce gale of opposition was blowing icy chills into the disciples’ hearts. “Let not your hearts be troubled,” He says. “In my Father’s house are many mansions. I go to prepare a place for you. I will come again and receive you unto myself. (And in the meantime) “I will pray the Father and He will send you another Comforter, that He may abide with you forever; even the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth Him not, neither knoweth Him; but ye know Him; for He dwelleth with you and shall be in you.”

We go to these words on sad occasions to find comfort for our bereaved and saddened hearts. We could not do better. For here we find the Savior’s promise so clear and satisfying. The other Comforter He promised has come to us in our bereavement and we have experienced the strong supporting comfort that He alone can give.

But these words of Jesus are not just for the darkened room and the hushed hour. Here is comfort not just for death, but for life; not just for the end of our earthly days, but for the beginning of every day.

Yes, in the farewell disclosures of the Fourth Gospel where, in the emotion charged time of parting, Jesus takes leave of His disciples and attempts to comfort them, He tells them of the reality of the new companion God will send in His place and the very first thing He says about the nature and character of this Companioning Comforter is that He is the Spirit of Truth.

Why is it that we don’t always have the comfort that Jesus promised — the comfort for which our hearts long? Why? Because we will not receive the Comforter He sends, nor follow His leading. Oh, the areas of our lives where we will not accept His truth about ourselves, our social order, our family relationships, our business ethics, our social engagements, our church relationships, and we are therefore sorely discomforted.

Even in our prayers, as P. T. Forsythe points out, we keep “a chamber or two in our souls where we do not enter in and take God there with us. We hurry Him by that door as we take Him along the corridors of our life to see our tidy places or our public rooms.” (P. T. Forsythe — The Insistency of Prayer)

When we refuse to face reality, refuse to embrace to our hearts the spirit of truth, the truth of our failures, our sins, our limitations, our evil habits, our prejudices and hates, our fraudulent values, our false relationships with others, we cut ourselves off from the Spirit of Truth — from God’s Holy Spirit — our Chris-sent Comforter, and we cannot be comforted by Him. To deny or to act contrary to our own convictions of where truth and right are is to embrace confusion, to cut ourselves off from the source of all spiritual life, to undercut our own spiritual power, to court disaster.

Jesus plainly told His disciples that the world cannot receive the Spirit of Truth, the Comforter, because the world does not see Him nor know Him, though His true disciples will receive and know the Spirit of Truth and have Him dwelling within them. Too often we have wanted to act and live like a lost world lives and still be comforted by the Holy Spirit, and that just can’t be done.

Back during the most desperate days of The Cold War, Casserly in his book, The Bent World, pointed out that the Western world was failing in its opposition to communism because, at the deepest level, we of the West had accepted so much of the communist philosophy. Casserly found that both the Communist East and the so-called Christian West were following a secular way of life; that both were obsessed with the idea that improved techniques could solve all our problems; that the West had accepted in practice the Marxist teaching that the economic realm was primary; that in both these opposing cultures family life, the core of any healthy society, was deteriorating into a dysfunctional unit and the basic building block of all human well-being was obliterated.

Yes, we cannot have the comfort of the Comforter who is the Spirit of Truth if we will not square our lives in straightness of deeds and in singleness of devotion to Him who said: “I am the way, the truth and the life.” There is no limitation on the Savior’s willingness or desire to pray the Father to send us the Comforter. But so often and so long we are comfortless, disconsolate, and in frenzied despair, because we will not meet the conditions of receiving the Comforter who alone can bring us, by His very nature, the Comfort of Truth.

What is the comfort of truth? Why, it is the Holy Spirit’s assurance to our spirits that we are at home when we are rooted and grounded in truth. What is more comfortable than being at home? After a hard day, and many exacting and tiresome duties done, and the push and crush of the crowd over — what is more comfortable than coming home to familiar haunts and understanding hearts where we feel in our bones that we belong?

Well, what is the true spiritual homeland of the human soul, where we feel we really belong, where we find soul comfort and peace of mind? As with “marvelous accuracy the homing instinct of birds, and the guiding urge which brings migratory fish and eels from their winter feeding grounds in the central deeps of the ocean back to the identical spawning place where their lives began” (Rufus Jones — Pathways to the Reality of God) so, the Holy Spirit, with unerring directness, seeks to guide us into truth, our spirit’s homeland, where we may be comfortably at home.

Because we were created in the image of God; because we first breathed the breath of life when the Eternal Spirit of Truth breathed eternal life into our souls, only by our return to the rock whence we were hewn and the spring whence we were sprung are we completely at home. This is the comfort of truth.

But more, the comfort of truth is the reinforcing of our wills, supplying moral power rather than mere repose, stimulating rather than stultifying our souls. “The curse of so much religion,” said Meredith, “is that people cling to God with their weakness rather than with their strength. “Once Phillips Brooks, in lecturing to young theological students at Yale, said: “Our pastoral work is pitched in too low a key. It tries to meet the misfortunes of life with comfort and not with inspiration; offering inducements to patience and the suggestions of compensation in this life or another that lies beyond, rather than imparting that higher and stronger tone which will make people despise their sorrows and bear them easily in their search for truth and nobleness, and the release that comes from forgetfulness of self and the devotion to the needs of other people. The truest help that one can render anyone who has any of the inevitable burdens of life to carry is not to take his burden off, but to call out his best strength that he may be able to bear it.”

When Jesus talked with His disciples that last night in the Upper Room He promised them: “I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, even the Spirit of Truth.”  The clear implication, of course, is that Jesus, their Master, had been a comforter for them, and the other coming comforter would be like Him. What kind of comfort had Jesus given those men? Why, He had lead them into repeated scrapes with the religious authorities, into endless controversies; they had felt the pinch of hunger, and the rigor of sleeping without shelter on frosty Galilean hillsides. What comfort? Why, the comfort of truth which is the inheritance of every true and brave seeker after truth which comes in a ponderous premium of reinforced will and moral courage — a fierce, strong, reckless, romantic courage. William Alexander Percy describes its reality in the lives of those first disciples of Jesus as the peace of God — this comfort of truth. Percy said:

I love to think of them at dawn

Beneath a frail pink sky

Casting their nets in Galilee

And fish hawks circling by.

 

Casting their nets in Galilee

Just off the hills of brown,

Such happy, simple fisher folk

Before the Lord walked down.

 

Contented, peaceful fishermen,

Before they ever knew

The peace of God that filled their hearts

Brim-full, and broke them, too.

 

Young John who trimmed the flapping sail,

Homeless, in Patmos, died.

Peter, who hauled the teeming net,

Head-down, was crucified.

 

The peace of God, it is no peace,

But strife closed in the sod.

Yet, brothers, pray for but one thing,

The marvelous peace of God.

Christ, our Savior, has prayed the Father for our sakes and in our desperate need He has sent another Comforter, that He may abide with us forever, even the Spirit of Truth, and comfort us at the point of our greatest need. The world cannot receive Him nor know Him. O may the grace be given us to receive Him and His priceless Comfort of Truth.