The Holy Spirit as a Teacher.  
Our Lord Jesus in His last conversation with His disciples before His crucifixion said, “But the Comforter which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in My name, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (John xiv. 26).
 
Here we have a twofold work of the Holy Spirit, teaching and bringing to remembrance the things which Christ had already taught. We will take them in the reverse order.
 
I. The Holy Spirit brings to remembrance the words of Christ.
 
This promise was made primarily to the Apostles and is the guarantee of the accuracy of their report of what Jesus said; but the Holy Spirit does a similar work with each believer who expects it of Him, and who looks to Him to do it. The Holy Spirit brings to our mind the teachings of Christ and of the Word just when we need them for either the necessities of our life or of our service. Many of us could tell of occasions when we were in great distress of soul or great questioning as to duty or great extremity as to what to say to one [pg 142] whom we were trying to lead to Christ or to help, and at that exact moment the very Scripture we needed—some passage it may be we had not thought of for a long time and quite likely of which we had never thought in this connection—was brought to mind. Who did it? The Holy Spirit did it. He is ready to do it even more frequently, if we only expect it of Him and look to Him to do it. It is our privilege every time we sit down beside an inquirer to point him to the way of life to look up to the Holy Spirit and say, “Just what shall I say to this inquirer? Just what Scripture shall I use?” There is a deep significance in the fact that in the verse immediately following this precious promise Jesus says, “Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you.” It is by the Spirit bringing His words to remembrance and teaching us the truth of God that we obtain and abide in this peace. If we will simply look to the Holy Spirit to bring to mind Scripture just when we need it, and just the Scripture we need, we shall indeed have Christ's peace every moment of our lives. One who was preparing for Christian work came to me in great distress. He said he must give up his preparation for he could not memorize the Scriptures. “I am thirty-two years old,” he said, “and have been in business now for years. I have gotten out of the habit of study and I cannot memorize anything.” The man longed to be in his Master's service and the tears stood in his eyes as he said it. “Don't be discouraged,” I replied. “Take your Lord's promise that the Holy Spirit will bring His words to remembrance, learn one passage of Scripture, [pg 143] fix it firmly in your mind, then another and then another and look to the Holy Spirit to bring them to your remembrance when you need them.” He went on with his preparation. He trusted the Holy Spirit. Afterwards he took up work in a very difficult field, a field where all sorts of error abounded. They would gather around him on the street like bees and he would take his Bible and trust the Holy Spirit to bring to remembrance the passages of Scripture that he needed and He did it. His adversaries were filled with confusion, as he met them at every point with the sure Word of God, and many of the most hardened were won for Christ.
 
II. The Holy Spirit will teach us all things.
 
There is a still more explicit promise to this effect two chapters further on in John xvi. 12, 13, 14, R. V. Here Jesus says, “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He shall guide you into all the truth: for He shall not speak from Himself; but what things soever He shall hear, these shall He speak: and He shall declare unto you the things that are to come. He shall glorify Me: for He shall take of Mine, and shall declare it unto you.” This promise was made in the first instance to the Apostles, but the Apostles themselves applied it to all believers (1 John ii. 20, 27).
 
It is the privilege of each believer in Jesus Christ, even the humblest, to be “taught of God.” Each humblest believer is independent of human teachers—“Ye [pg 144] need not that any teach you” (1 John ii. 27, R. V.). This, of course, does not mean that we may not learn much from others who are taught of the Holy Spirit. If John had thought that he would never have written this epistle to teach others. The man who is the most fully taught of God is the very one who will be most ready to listen to what God has taught others. Much less does it mean that when we are taught of the Spirit, we are independent of the written Word of God; for the Word is the very place to which the Spirit, who is the Author of the Word, leads His pupils and the instrument through which He instructs them (Eph. vi. 17; John vi. 33; Eph. v. 18, 19; cf. Col. iii. 16). But while we may learn much from men, we are not dependent upon them. We have a Divine Teacher, the Holy Spirit.
 
We shall never truly know the truth until we are thus taught directly by the Holy Spirit. No amount of mere human teaching, no matter who our teachers may be, will ever give us a correct and exact and full apprehension of the truth. Not even a diligent study of the Word either in the English or in the original languages will give us a real understanding of the truth. We must be taught directly by the Holy Spirit and we may be thus taught, each one of us. The one who is thus taught will understand the truth of God better even if he does not know one word of Greek or Hebrew, than the one who knows Greek and Hebrew thoroughly and all the cognate languages as well, but who is not taught of the Spirit.
 
The Spirit will guide the one whom He thus teaches [pg 145] “into all the truth.” The whole sphere of God's truth is for each one of us, but the Holy Spirit will not guide us into all the truth in a single day, nor in a week, nor in a year, but step by step. There are two especial lines of the Spirit's teaching mentioned:
 
(1) “He shall declare unto you the things that are to come.” There are many who say we can know nothing of the future, that all our thoughts on that subject are guesswork. It is true that we cannot know everything about the future. There are some things which God has seen fit to keep to Himself, secret things which belong to Him (Deut. xxix. 29). For example, we cannot “know the times, or the seasons” of our Lord's return (Acts i. 7), but there are many things about the future which the Holy Spirit will reveal to us.
 
(2) “He shall glorify Me (that is, Christ) for He shall take of Mine and shall declare it unto you.” This is the Holy Spirit's especial line of teaching with the believer, as with the unbeliever, Jesus Christ. It is His work above all else to reveal Jesus Christ and to glorify Him. His whole teaching centres in Christ. From one point of view or the other, He is always bringing us to Jesus Christ. There are some who fear to emphasize the truth about the Holy Spirit lest Christ Himself be disparaged and put in the background, but there is no one who magnifies Christ as the Holy Spirit does. We shall never understand Christ, nor see His glory until the Holy Spirit interprets Him to us. No amount of listening to sermons and lectures, no matter how able, no amount of mere study of the Word even, [pg 146] would ever give us to see “the things of Christ”; the Holy Spirit must show us and He is willing to do it and He can do it. He is longing to do it. The Holy Spirit's most intense desire is to reveal Jesus Christ to men. On the day of Pentecost when Peter and the rest of the company were “filled with the Holy Spirit,” they did not talk much about the Holy Spirit, they talked about Christ. Study Peter's sermon on that day; Jesus Christ was his one theme, and Jesus Christ will be our one theme, if we are taught of the Spirit; Jesus Christ will occupy the whole horizon of our vision. We will have a new Christ, a glorious Christ. Christ will be so glorious to us that we will long to go and tell every one about this glorious One whom we have found. Jesus Christ is so different when the Spirit glorifies Him by taking of His things and showing them unto us.
 
III. The Holy Spirit reveals to us the deep things of God which are hidden from and are foolishness to the natural man.
 
We read in 1 Cor. ii. 9-13, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the............