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The Great Teacher Who Offers to Live Within

There is no point at which Christianity differs more radically from all other faiths in the globe than this. Its founder offers to come and live in the hearts and lives of his followers! Let us examine this apparently preposterous claim.

In many ways Jesus was very like other great religious and philosophical teachers. Socrates had a group of followers who went everywhere discussing the nature of truth with him. The Buddha had a similar group. So did Jesus. It was normal in the ancient world. That is how advanced teaching was imparted -- by a Master to his disciples. Thus far there was nothing unusual about Jesus. The staggering difference began to emerge on the night before his death. He started to teach them, what they could then only dimly understand, about the Holy Spirit. These were his words:

I will pray the Father and he will give you another Comforter, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him, for he dwells with you and shall be in you. I will not leave you desolate: I will come to you.

...Jesus was referring to the Holy Spirit, whom they already knew in a sense, for he was embodied in Jesus. Jesus had been a great guide, teacher and comforter to his followers, and he promises that after his death they will receive "another" as Comforter, the Spirit of truth whom the Father would give to them. There are several references to him in the discourses of Jesus on this last night with the disciples, recorded in John 14-16. The Spirit would be a lasting gift to them; he would take them further into the truth of God, flood them with Jesus' own peace, bear witness to Jesus and enable the disciples to do the same. They even came to see that it was to their advantage that their beloved Jesus was taken away from them, for otherwise the Spirit would not have come to them.

Excerpted from But Don't All Religions Lead to God