Abiding in His Love, Part 1
On the Holy Spirit • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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· 6 viewsLove commanded; Love defined; Friendship defined.
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Their faithfulness and love was convincing.
Their faithfulness and love was convincing.
At the one-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of missionaries in Zaire, Christians gathered to celebrate from that part of Zaire that was once called the Belgian Congo. Near the end of the celebration, a very old man stood to give a speech. He said that he would die soon and that he needed to tell something that no other man still living knew.
He explained that when the first white missionaries came, his people didn’t know whether to believe their message or not. So they devised a plan to slowly and secretly poison the missionaries and watch them die. One by one, children and adults became ill, died and were buried. It was when his people saw how these missionaries died that they decided to believe their message.
The missionaries never knew what was happening. They didn’t know they were being poisoned, and they didn’t know why they were dying. Their faithfulness to the Lord convinced the people they ministered to that their message was true.
Jesus in his Upper Room Discourse in John 13-17, gives us many things. In His farewell to His disciples, shortly before going to the cross, He tells them these parting instructions, assures them of His love, shares with them that He will prepare a place for them, and send His Holy Spirit. One portion of the monologue is the giving of a new commandment, to love one another.
This is basic to our faith, but not necessary simple. In fact, it can be taxing and demanding. Let’s look at it closer in our time together in a sermon I’ve entitled: “Abiding in His Love.”
Our love towards God is conditional.
Our love towards God is conditional.
What I mean by this is that it is quite clear that we must show our love for God, if it is authentic.
Jesus said in John 15:12-14
12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you.
Incidentally, it is how we got the term: “Maundy Thursday.” It comes from the Latin, “mandate.” It is the night that Jesus gave His disciples, “a new commandment.” That new commandment is found in John 15:12: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”
I would encourage you to refer back to Dr. Drake’s video devotional from this past week. In it, he refers to the first time that Jesus introduces this mandate in John 13:34-35 which functions as a precursor to his elaborations in our passage.
34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. 35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
And so Jesus is asking his disciples to love each other as He loved them. Our passage is what is known as an inclusio. It starts with a commandment to love one another and ends with the same. This is a literary device used to alert the reader to a theme or to explain what it means, in this case, to love one another.
And we need God’s definition of how to love one another, for we are predisposed to the superficial and shallow.
How must we define love? This question has plagued psychologists for many years. Kendra Cherry states:
“Psychologists, sociologists, and researchers disagree somewhat on the characterization of love. Many say it's not an emotion in the way we typically understand them, but an essential physiological drive. Psychologist and biologist Enrique Burunat says, "Love is a physiological motivation such as hunger, thirst, sleep, and sex drive."5 Conversely, the American Psychological Association defines it as "a complex emotion."6 Still others draw a distinction between primary and secondary emotions and put love in the latter category, maintaining that it derives from a mix of primary emotions.” (Found at What Is Love? (verywellmind.com) accessed 5-5-2023)
It is not a feeling. Feelings come and go. Here we need to be reminded that love is an action word that spells commitment. The love that Jesus is referring to is ἀγάπη which means:
“the quality of warm regard for and interest in another, esteem, affection, regard, love. (William Arndt et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 6.) Love is not a warm fuzzy.
The greatest love is sacrificial friendship.
The greatest love is sacrificial friendship.
And the greatest love is described as sacrificial friendship; the willingness to lay down one’s life for another, which is exactly what Jesus did. John 15:13 “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” Here, Jesus explicitly states how he loved His disciples. On the night that He would be betrayed, then go to the cross the next day, here He gives the motivation for such an action.
Where else do we have the idea of substitution? Where else has there been one who stood in the gap for his friends and took the force of what they (or you and I) deserved?
Then there is the concept of the vineyard in the old Testament. There, Israel is always seen as His vineyard. And it is in this vineyard that true love and healthy relationships exist. So it is among the church, the body of baptized believers, where love should be most profoundly understoood, and thus flourish.
Jesus would include love in the greatest commandment. In Matthew 22:37-40 he answered the question: “Rabbi, what is the greatest commandment?” To this he answered:
37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
Certainly we can look back at the commandments of Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 and see that love for God is specifically defined as having no other gods, respecting no idols, regarding God’s name with reverence and observing the Sabbath, which is our Sunday.
Love for neighbor, is defined as respecting those who are over us in authority, preserving life and well being, promoting and participating in sexual purity, respecting the property of others, telling the truth and abstaining from unhealthy desires for anything that does not belong to us.
But here, Jesus adds a layer of depth that takes a more extensive, more sacrificial understanding of love by labeling it sacrificial devotion. Jesus seems to build on these by saying: “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”
At this, D.A. Carson points out that the two commandments are not in conflict. He states:
“Jesus’ point is not that love for fellow believers exempts one from the call to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength, but that genuine love for God ensures genuine love for the Son , who is the focal point of divine revelation; that genuine love for the Son ensures obedience to him; that obedience to him is especially tested by obedience to the new commandment, the command to love.” (D.A. Carson, The Gospel According to John, 521).
This idea of substitutionary and sacrificial love with Christ as its model appears in Ephesians 5:25 which describes a husband’s love for his wife: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,” Wow. What a tall order!
And so the distinguishing characteristic of Christian love is in a completely different category than what the world states. It is not a superficial concern, but a sacrificial devotion. This informs
how you love your spouse;
how you love your kids;
how you love your parents;
how you love your friends;
and how you love your neighbors.
It does not mean that you will agree with them or affirm all their behaviors and decisions. But you will sacrifice comfort in order that they would not question your devotion to them. Your love reaches a level of sacrificial devotion, which sometimes means telling them the truth, when others won’t.
Sacrificial friendship with God has the privilege of full disclosure.
Sacrificial friendship with God has the privilege of full disclosure.
Later in the monologue Jesus states that his disciples are his friends, not his servants. Friends are given disclosure of the things that will take place. They are “in the know.” We see this reflected in God’s thoughts towards Abraham before the former would destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for their very grave sin. Genesis 18:17:
“The Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, 18 seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him?
And so God told Abraham what He was about to do. Other places, Abraham is called the friend of God. Isaiah 41:8 “8 But you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, the offspring of Abraham, my friend;” James:2:23 “...and the Scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”—and he was called a friend of God.”
1 John 3:16 “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.”
As Dr. Drake stated, this means you are flexible, bending, loving, inviting, encouraging, giving preference, walking alongside of, listening and bringing one along. It is an opportunity to “show off Jesus.”
The Holy Spirit supplies your love.
The Holy Spirit supplies your love.
Dr. Paul Brand was speaking to a medical college in India on Matthew 5:16: “Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” In front of the lectern was an oil lamp, with its cotton wick burning from the shallow dish of oil. As he preached, the lamp ran out of oil, the wick burned dry, and the smoke made him cough. He immediately used the opportunity.
“Some of us here are like this wick,” he said. “We’re trying to shine for the glory of God, but we stink. That’s what happens when we use ourselves as the fuel of our witness rather than the Holy Spirit. Wicks can last indefinitely, burning brightly and without irritating smoke, if the fuel, the Holy Spirit, is in constant supply.”