If you would please turn within your Bibles to John chapter 15 beginning at verse 9. Jesus says, ‘As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you would keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.’
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, you’ve given us your word as the rule of faith as well as a rule for our lives. You have shown us what love is. And you have told us who love is in your son Jesus. And you have told us how we are to love you, to love him, to love one another, and to love those around us through the examples that are recorded in your word, and through the commandments that are written there for our knowledge and for our understanding. Help us to hear you speak through them and help us to love as you command us to. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
So Jesus has said, ‘Abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine. You are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me, you can do nothing.’
When Jesus said that, he was talking about our union with him. And Jesus commands us to abide, to rest and remain, to be established firmly settled and attached to him. And thus abiding in him, he must also abide in us. Because we must be so united that there is no effective difference, division or distinguishment between us. We must be all in Christ and Christ must be all in us.
And Jesus called himself the vine and he names us the branches. He declares us, those who abide in him, to be extensions of himself, reaching out into the world. And Jesus has appointed us, and he empowers us by his Holy Spirit to be his agents out in the world, to be his image, to act on his behalf, and to do as he would do. So as far as the world is concerned, Christians are as Christs. We may as well be Jesus himself in their eyes.
And we should be so closely and so well identified with him that the world will respond to us as it would respond to him. An idea we will explore more later. And we should be so closely identified with him that we will treat the world and everyone in it how Jesus would treat them. Loving them as Jesus loved and loves us and them.
So next, Jesus continues to explain how we should respond to our union into him, telling us, ‘As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love.’ See, Jesus expects us to also abide in his love while we’re still trying to figure out how to abide in him. And the good news is Jesus is actually going to tell us here plainly how we get to do both since we shall abide in him by abiding in his love.
And the how of this really should not surprise anyone because it is nothing new. Jesus doesn’t expect us to do anything new or different than what we have always been expected to do. He explains, ‘If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my father’s commandments and abide in his love.’
Now you might want to ask, ‘What about grace and faith? What about mercy and forgiveness?’ Because I thought God is love. Not God is law. Because commandments, commandments mean law and rules. Commandments require justice, judgment, condemnation, and wrath for transgressions. But why do we so often assume that love and law are incompatible or even opposed to one another?
The answer is straightforward and simple. We assume it because our sinful nature is opposed to both God’s grace and God’s law, preferring the oppressive law of Satan’s sinful rule. A law that encourages us in false hope that if we just try a little more, if we work a little harder, then we will be able to do all that is required and so earn our reward.
See, it’s that obnoxious little voice that tries to make us doubt, which asks us, did God really say? And tells us that we can be just as wise and knowledgeable as God. It’s that remaining part of the old us within that believes we know better or which insists if God really loved me then God would let me, which argues that true freedom is unlimited and that any restriction at all is tyranny.
But the reality is that many of our common restrictions and limitations are so actually good and very necessary. I mean, why do we drive cars on the pavement rather than driving cross country to avoid getting stuck or to avoid damaging our vehicle? Why do we go on green and stop on red? To avoid getting into accidents so that we get to our destination in a timely and a fair manner.
Why do we insist that the drivers of cars have a driver’s license and have car insurance? To ensure that the people who are operating cars are trained in how to use them. To ensure that in case of an accident, people or property that get injured or damaged are compensated for.
See, ultimately everybody agrees that such rules and regulations are beneficial and necessary. It’s why you can never fight a true total anarchist because no one ever says that there cannot or should not ever be any rules because that’s a declaration itself which would be a rule if it was enforced. Anarchy cannot be consistent. It cannot continue consistently because there must always be some kind of underlying order. That’s why relativism always breaks down because absolutes cannot be avoided or their presence denied.
I mean parents establish rules for their children to follow, don’t you? They establish them in love. And since parents establish them because parents, you know what is best or most beneficial for your children. So you set rules like imposing a consistent bedtime. You require them to do their homework. You require them to eat their whole dinner. And you require them to brush their teeth and wash their hands.
And since the Lord God is who he claims and reveals himself to be in the Bible, then his commandments must be understood similarly. God’s commandments, Jesus’ commandments are understood as being issued in love and issued for our good benefit and well-being. Just like a parent imposing rules for their children is a sign of the love that they have for them, God’s commandments are a similar expression of his love for us.
Meanwhile, we push back and we rebel against God’s commandments, just like children push back and rebel against their parents’ rules. We rebel because we do not really understand why the rules are there. We rebel because we wrongly believe that the rules somehow limit our fun or enjoyment because we cannot see how they are actually keeping us safe or how they’re teaching us to be more responsible.
So if we want to be abiding in Christ’s love, then we need to keep his commandments because our obedience is an expression of our love for him. Our obedience is a response of love, loving him in return. So again, when Jesus said, ‘Abide in me and abide in my love,’ he was not talking about us getting saved, but rather he was talking about how we should respond to our having been saved, to our being grafted into the true vine of Christ.
And fortunately, Jesus also does not make us just simply guess or assume how we should respond. He has given us the plain example of himself. Jesus pointed to himself and said, ‘I am the model for how you abide.’ He told us, ‘If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.’
Obeying God’s law is how we abide in Jesus’s love. Because Jesus’s obedience to God’s law is how he abides in God the Father’s love. So our obedience matters, but it does not matter in the same way that second temple Judaism believed it does. Nor does it matter in the same way that Islam believes it does. And Christian morality does not work. It does not matter in the same way that atheistic and pagan values work.
See, we are all, everyone is obligated to obey God because he is our universal sovereign. We owe him our allegiance and obedience because he is our creator. And God declares, ‘You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules. If a person does them, he shall live by them,’ promising his people eternal life as a reward or benefit for their perfect personal obedience, just as he first promised Adam.
But since our perfect obedience is expected because it’s obligatory and will benefit us if we perform it, eternal life then becomes our due reward for simply doing what we’re supposed to do. Thereby making the entire system of works righteousness of Judaism or Islam completely correct. Right? Wrong. Judaism and Islam are wrong, utterly and completely wrong because they operate under a critically false assumption, assuming that it is possible for a human person to be perfectly obedient to the divine standard.
Judaism and Islam are wrong because no one can meet that necessary requirement. No one can satisfy their own obligation. Judaism and Islam are wrong because they deny, reject, or ignore the fact of humanity’s depraved nature and inherent sinfulness, assuming that at worst, people are born morally neutral and at best that people are born originally good. But except for Jesus, only Jesus, the God-man, could and only Jesus did. Only Jesus satisfied God’s righteous requirement.
Therefore, once the divine obligation was satisfied by him, then grace could be freely given to us. See, again, this is why our union to Christ is so important for us. United, Christ’s perfect obedience is imputed to us, meaning it counts as ours as well. His active obedience being all of the good that Jesus did as well as his passive obedience, all of the wrong that Jesus never did, all the rules that he never broke.
And so united to Christ, as far as God is concerned, we did all the same good that Jesus did and we never did all the bad things that Jesus never did. So in a sense, we have earned our right to eternal life earned it through our faith and trust in Jesus and the promises of God. So in a sense, we are truly saved by works, the works of Jesus which count as ours by virtue of this union and counted as belonging to us by grace.
So while we have really not earned eternal life, but rather receiving it as a gift by grace, what Jesus had earned on our behalf, we received it because we’re grafted into his vine. And so since Jesus has kept his Father’s commandments and so abides in his Father’s love, if we’re abiding in Christ, then we’re also being brought into the Father’s love right alongside Jesus.
And then Jesus continues to explain saying, ‘These things I’ve spoken to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full.’ He tells us that we are receiving this knowledge and understanding so that we may be filled with joy. So that our joy may be filled to the fullest. And this is something worth being joyful about. Because this is the knowledge of our salvation, of our being redeemed by Christ at the cost of his life, for the forgiveness of our sins and knowledge of our blessed eternal reward, peace with God, and eternal life in Jesus’s kingdom.
But this is also not all about us. This is not about or all about our joy and our being loved because the joy that we’re filled with is not a simple joy. It is complex. It is layered and multi-faceted. It is a joy that we feel knowing that we are beloved by God. It’s also the joy which God feels that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit feel knowing that we love them in return.
This is the joy that they feel when we keep Christ’s commandments. This is why our obedience is our response to God’s grace and not the means of earning God’s favor because God’s already sovereignly grafted us in and given us to Jesus. God has already shared and imputed Jesus’s perfect obedience to us.
So in order to abide in Christ and to abide in his love for us, we must now keep his commandments because our present and our future obedience, it demonstrates the love, honor, and respect that we feel for Jesus and our heavenly Father. Our obedience demonstrates how we continue to abide in Jesus and his love, both the good things we do and the bad things we no longer do.
Except although we are saved, we still continue to sin. What are we to make of that? Do we risk losing our salvation? Or do we risk not remaining grafted into Christ’s body even after God has given us to Jesus? No. Because when the Holy Spirit sets us to abide in Christ, we remain there. It is permanent and unchangeable.
This is where our works of repentance, our remorse, and contrition enter the picture. United in Christ, we are declared just and righteous despite our continuing to sin. Martin Luther had an expression for this, which is simileustus at peeore: at once justified and a sinner. You see, we are declared to be one thing while we are presently something else. But this is not a contradiction because when God, the sovereign of the universe, declares us to be something, we become it in truth.
But how is that just? Or how is that fair for God to do? It’s fair. And it’s just because Jesus has already paid the entire penalty required for each of our sins through dying on the cross enough to justify us. He suffered for all of our sins from before the moment that any of us were saved. And he’s also suffered for all the sins that we shall each still, sadly, commit after that moment right up until we die.
But although Jesus has paid that ultimate penalty for our sins, we don’t actually receive the benefit of it. We’re not actually forgiven, and we do not have our guilt removed until after we confess and repent of those sins. See, we must still respond and accept the grace he’s given. For as John tells us elsewhere, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
So God is just to forgive us because the satisfaction and restitution have already been made for us by Jesus. So this is also another reason why our present obedience is evidence for us abiding in Christ and abiding in his love because we want to obey Christ and God our Father out of our love for him because we now know and understand the true cost of our sin.
Now we know the cost that Jesus has paid for each of our personal sins. Now we do not want to sin. Now, we do not want to continue in our sinfulness because we are aware of the unimaginable and incomprehensible pain, suffering, and sorrow that our sins have caused Jesus to experience.
Now, because of our love for Jesus, we do not want to make that penalty any worse than it had to be. So now we should want to do everything we can to lessen or limit it. And finally, Jesus concludes the thought which he began back in John 13:34 saying, ‘This is my commandment that you love one another as I’ve loved you.’
Jesus commands us to follow his example of love, to love as he loves us, to love others as he loves us. This is why, ‘What would Jesus do?’ Or better yet, ‘How would Jesus love in this situation?’ Why? These are reasonable and helpful questions. Every time the answer to these questions will be whatever is right and true and good, whatever most honors God and brings him glory.
So do this and you will be abiding in Jesus’s love. Do this and you will abide in the Father’s love. Do this and know that you abide in Jesus and that your joy shall be full because his joy is in you.
Now from this I need to comment briefly against the subtleties of what’s known as the antinomian heresy against people and those who incorrectly believe partly because of this text that the only moral commandments which we as Christians are obligated to follow are those that were specifically commanded by Jesus in the gospels. They try to limit them by citing Jesus saying, ‘If you keep my commandments,’ while they ignore the truth that all of scripture, the whole Bible is the verbam Dei, the word of God and every word being the word of Jesus. Every letter should be a red letter in your Bible.
These people, they intentionally forget or ignore that all of the commandments really are Christ’s commandments. But in this moment in the upper room, it’s clear that Jesus was not talking about all of the ceremonial instructions that were given to Moses. Nor was he meaning the specific case law precedents recorded in the law, but rather he meant the moral commandments which are universal and unchanging and have been in effect since before creation.
Every divine commandment in scripture is derived from or related to some aspect of this moral law. And we as confessional Presbyterians believe that the moral law is summarily comprehended in the ten commandments. And that some is to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, with all our soul, and all our strength, and with all our mind, and our neighbor as ourself. We believe this according to how Jesus answered when he was asked, ‘What is the greatest commandment?’
So this is what and how we rightly understand the law of Christ to be, how we understand what Jesus’s commandments actually are. And this distinction is the historical orthodox position of the church. But also throughout church history, there’s always been those who reinterpret this and try to limit Christian obedience to just these few commandments that Jesus commended or affirmed in the gospels. And that is a very false teaching.
In Mark 12:9, Jesus affirmed our worship of the Lord God alone, the first commandment. In Matthew 23:16-22, Jesus spoke against taking the Lord’s name in vain, against wrongfully invoking him in oath, relating to the third commandment. Jesus commanded us to rightly honor our fathers and mothers in Mark 7:9-13, which is the fifth commandment. Jesus prohibited murder, even expanding that prohibition to include anger in Matthew 5:21-22, which is the sixth commandment.
Jesus condemned adultery, fornication, all forms of sexual immorality, unchaste behavior, dishonesty, covetousness, and theft in Mark 7:21-23, which is the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth commandments. Such false teachers will argue that since Jesus specifically commanded these, these are the only moral commandments we must still follow and obey as Christians. Ironically, these also seem to be the ones that are usually the least inconvenient to keep.
Then they go on to argue that because Jesus taught that it was lawful to heal others on the Sabbath and asserted that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, that he was rejecting the practice of Sabbathkeeping. And they will further argue that since Jesus never spoke against making images of God, then making pictures of Jesus, drawings, paintings, movies, or TV shows about him may be permissible and even encourageable.
Such false teachers teach that preserving the sanctity of the Lord’s day is not a moral issue. Such false teachers teach that the question about whether or not there is some positive virtue in images of Jesus, virtue in creating logically false images of the invisible God or of the intentionally undescribed without specific detail Jesus, that this is not a moral issue. But those teachings are demonstrably false when the whole of scripture is considered and when our God-given reason is employed.
And once you recognize that such popular lowest common denominator cultural Christianity only affirms the moral requirements of eight out of ten commandments, then suddenly the popular support for NFL Sunday and the widespread acceptance of TV shows like The Chosen among professing Christians suddenly starts to make a lot more sense.
And such false teachers, they use the same reasoning to argue that because Jesus never spoke directly about homosexuality in the Gospels, then he must not be opposed to it. They use it to suggest that at the worst it’s morally neutral and people who follow this kind of interpretive process ignore its clear condemnation in both the Old Testament and in Paul’s letters.
Such false teachers will use the same kind of argument to justify support for abortion in contradiction to the sixth commandment or for legal marijuana consumption in clear contradiction to Peter’s admonishment to be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers. But really, no. As Christians who are united with Christ, we remain obligated to and we are expected to obey the whole moral law as our response of obedient love for Jesus and our heavenly Father.
So thus and therefore we must live according to Jesus’s example because he commanded us. This is my commandment that you love one another as I’ve loved you. We must love as he loved so that we shall abide in his and the Father’s love. We must love as he loved so that we shall be abiding in him.
We must love as he loved so that all people will know that we are Christ’s disciples so that we will know that we are Christians so that we shall prove we belong to the true vine of Jesus. Now, while I dislike the triteness of the question, ‘What would Jesus do?’ it is a helpful guide in our application to this text. Since the immediate and primary application of Jesus’s command for us is to love one another as he has loved us, is for us to follow Jesus’s example and how he treated the disciples.
So how did he treat them and how may we do likewise? He called them out and away from their ordinary and routinely comfortable lives. He called them to live differently from the world self-sacrificially. And he charged them to consider others before themselves and to consider them better.
So perhaps we could all think more highly of others and better consider the needs and feelings of others before we act and speak. Jesus taught them. He taught them how to rightly understand God’s word and how to apply it to their life situations. So perhaps those of us with more knowledge, experience, or wisdom can share that with those who do not.
While perhaps those of us who lack such experience would benefit by listening, paying attention to, and learning from the advice and knowledge of others. Perhaps those of us who diligently study our Bibles or theology could step up to teach more frequently, sharing what we’ve learned and come to understand.
Well, also those of us who may not have studied scripture as much or as well as we would have liked or know that we should have, maybe we can make the effort to study more, to attend and participate more, and to be more personally intentional in our own personal study.
How did Jesus treat other people? How did he treat people who were not his followers or disciples? He showed them compassion. Those who were ill or injured, he healed at their request, often telling them, ‘Your faith has made you well.’ Because merely asking Jesus was a sign of their faith since no one would ask if they do not think or believe that somebody could help them.
Perhaps we could all be more compassionate as well. Perhaps when someone asks us for help, we can look for more ways or we can look harder to say yes rather than quickly answering no and turning away or instead of simply assuming that there is no kind of help available.
See, Jesus intentionally went out of his way as well to associate with those who did not believe in him, those who were not following him, those whom society considered to be accursed, unrighteous, or sinful. However, when he was with such people, he did not affirm their sinfulness. He did not signal his approval of whatever wrongs they were guilty of, but rather he was kind and considerate to them, relating to them on the level of their shared common humanity.
And then he shared a better way with them. He called them out and away from their sinful wickedness, and he invited them into a loving relationship with him. So, when was the last time you intentionally engaged or interacted with an individual or a group of people whom you know are not believers, whom you know are not Christ followers? When was the last time you placed yourself into that kind of situation intentionally for the purpose of sharing the love of Jesus with them, entering into it hoping for an opportunity to share Jesus with them?
We all each need to comprehend and act according to this true understanding that the best and most loving things someone can do for or do towards another person, the goodest good work possible is to share Jesus with them and offer them the hope of the gospel, the good news about our redemption from sin and judgment by God’s grace through our personal faith and trust in Jesus the Son of God alone.
But likewise, the worst and most hateful thing someone can do for or do towards another person, the most wicked and evil thing imaginable is to withhold Christ from somebody. To deny someone the opportunity to know Jesus, to deny them the opportunity to have hope and gain true joy and peace. To leave them in their state of condemnation and sin without hearing that they have the possibility to repent and be forgiven and to have their entire lives changed by God.
So if you have honestly and truly experienced that experience for yourself, why do you want to deny somebody else that same opportunity? Why do you not act as if you want everyone else around you to experience the love of God and the forgiveness of their sins? Because Jesus gave himself to us. He gave himself for us for our salvation, for our redemption from sin, and for our forgiveness before God our Father in heaven.
So if Jesus gave himself to us as an act of love, then if you withhold Jesus from anyone, if you refuse to share Jesus with other people, then can you honestly say that you love them as Jesus loved you first? Are you honestly loving God with your whole being by limiting, by gatekeeping? Who may enter into his kingdom? If you are truly grateful and thankful for your salvation and your union with Jesus Christ, then are you honestly loving your neighbor as yourself? If you will not share Jesus with them, even though somebody else once shared Jesus with you. Amen.
Please stand and let us say what we believe using the words of the Apostles Creed.