The Wind of the Spirit in the Book of Revelation
Photo by muha…
On Tuesday, December 2 of this year, I had the privilege of preaching for a combined chapel service attended by students, faculty, staff, and administration of both Lincoln Christian College and Seminary. Whenever I have the opportunity to preach before students, I confess that I get incredibly uptight. The experience that day was no different, even though I decided to preach a sermon on one of my favorite characters in the Bible, Nicodemus. I am making the sermon available for you should you desire to listen to it. I focused on John 3:8 where Jesus speaks about the effects of the Wind of the Spirit in people’s lives, and I attempted to show how Nicodemus’s three appearances in John’s Gospel (chapters 3, 7, and 19) are a commentary on John 3:8.
Even though there is not as much about the Holy Spirit in Revelation as there is in John’s Gospel, the few scattered references are significant. The power and presence of the Spirit are linked with God and/or Jesus in Rev. 1:4ff.,3:1, 4:5, and 5:6. John and the Spirit are linked on the day he received the Revelation from God (1:10; see also 17:3; 21:10). The Spirit speaks a word of comfort to Christians who mourn the loss of loved ones (14:13). The Spirit and the Church are linked in Rev. 22:17. But it is in Rev. 2:7,11,17,29; 3:1,6,13,22 (see also 11:4 where the Spirit is linked with the church’s responsibility to witness to a hostile world) that we are reminded about the Wind of the Spirit at work in the lives of disciples of Jesus: “To the one who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”
In the sermon on Nicodemus, I challenged my listeners to put themselves in the path of the Wind of the Spirit and that they could do so by placing themselves in a variety of settings (worship gatherings, prayer times, the reading of Scripture, intimate conversations, and even taking tests and writing papers!).
And so Jesus and the Spirit are linked in Revelation 2-3 where Jesus beckons and the Spirit whispers: Listen to what the Spirit of Christ continues to say to the churches and disciples in the first century and through the centuries.
And in preparing the sermon I was reminded of U2’s song, “Kite” from their magnificent album All That You Can’t Leave Behind. Bono sings:
Who’s to say where the wind will take you
What’s to know what it is will break you.
I don’t know which way the wind will blow.
Because of the structure of the song and the Christian ideas permeating the entire album, I am convinced that Bono was singing of the effects of the Spirit’s life in our lives.
I focused on the “What?” in examining John’s portrait of Nicodemus—the call to put ourselves in the path of the Wind of the Spirit—and the “How?” we can so place ourselves. But the final critical question that I answered was the “Why?” Why should we put ourselves in the path of the Spirit? And the readers of John’s Gospel and of the Revelation would have given the same answer:
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
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