Manuscripts

This week, we continue to examine Jesus’ farewell address he gave to his disciples on the night he was arrested.  Last week, we saw Jesus warn his disciples that the world would hate them as it had hated him.  In our text for this morning, Jesus returns to a familiar topic in this discourse.  That is—the coming of the Holy Spirit.  Why would Jesus come back to this topic at this point in the discourse?  Think about what he has just said to them.  He’s going to send these men on a mission to preach the gospel to people who will hate them.

On its face, that’s a mission with no hope for success. Unless, God somehow overcomes the world’s hatred and causes them to see their need of the gospel.  It makes perfect sense for Jesus to speak of the Holy Spirit here because only the Spirit can miraculously change the hearts of people from hating Jesus to loving Jesus and submitting their lives to him.  The main section of Jesus’ teaching on the Spirit begins with verse eight, but he introduces it in verses four through seven. Jesus begins in verse four with, “…I did not say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you.”

Jesus hasn’t said a word to his disciples about the coming of the Spirit before this night, because HE was on earth and the Spirit wasn’t necessary until after he ascended to his Father.  His point is NOT that two members of the godhead couldn’t be on earth at the same time.  His point is that the ministry of the Spirit in God’s people could only occur after Jesus had gone to the cross.  Because Jesus was still with the disciples (he had not been crucified, risen and ascended) what theologians call “the age of the Spirit” had not yet begun.

What that means is–only after Jesus had done his redemptive work on the cross was there any need or purpose for the ministry of the Spirit of God.  Until the Redeemer had done his saving work on the cross, there was no need for the Spirit because a big part of his role is to APPLY the redemptive work of Christ to the lives of people and bring them into the kingdom of God. The Holy Spirit cannot APPLY the work of redemption to believers until Jesus had DONE the work of redemption by dying on the cross for them.

Jesus continues with a difficult saying, “⁵ But now I am going to him who sent me, and none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’”   This is a challenging verse to understand because the disciples had asked Jesus where he was going, so what can he means by “…none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?” In 13:36, “³⁶ Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, where are you going?” Jesus answered him, “Where I am going you cannot follow me now, but you will follow afterward.”

What then can Jesus mean when he says here in verse five, “none of you asks me, “Where are you going?”  The answer to the seeming contradiction probably lies with the way the disciples were asking the question.  When the disciples earlier asked the question, their concern was that he was leaving them, not where he was going.  Their root question was really, “WHY are you leaving us?”

In this sense, they weren’t asking him for his travel itinerary. Verse six confirms this when he says, “⁶ But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart.”  Jesus’ point seems to be, “your concern is not with what happens to me.  You’re more concerned about your own sorrow over losing me.”^[1]  That is not self-pity or cynicism on Jesus’ part.  Sadly, the truth of their self-centeredness was validated later when they all deserted him.

Jesus addresses their sorrow with a hopeful statement in verse seven, ^“7 Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.”  It will be to YOUR advantage for me to go away and the Spirit come to you.  We know from the Old Testament promises that this is because when the Spirit comes, Jesus’ promised New Covenant—a new and much better way of relating to God, will be inaugurated.  God will use this New Covenant to create a new race of people—people who are not only in Adam or, in their case—people of Abraham.  No, this will be a new people—rooted in his saving work on the cross and created by the Holy Spirit from every nation and united with Christ.

The Spirit will create a people very different than those under the Old Covenant.  This will be a people who, not only know God’s forgiveness, but will also receive from the Spirit a new, softened, spiritually sensitized heart that cause them to WANT to serve and obey God.  The rest of our text this morning answers this question—In what ways will the ministry of the Holy Spirit be so advantageous to followers of Christ?

The broad answer to the question from the text is—The Holy Spirit will, through Christ’s church, manifest and glorify Jesus Christ by continuing through them his ministry on earth.   To manifest Jesus, the Spirit makes him clearly seen in our lives, our marriages, our churches, our relationships, attitudes, desires and decisions.  When unbelievers get to know genuine believers well, they will see Jesus’ life manifest in our lives.  The Holy Spirit alone can manifest Christ through his church. The Holy Spirit alone produces the life of Christ in us so that others can see him in us.

Closely related to this, the Spirit will also uniquely glorify Jesus.  That means that he will powerfully reveal to the church and through the church how beautiful and magnificent Jesus is—how glorious he is as the Son of God.  Only the Spirit, through the witness of the church, can open the eyes of spiritually dead people to see the glory, wonder, beauty and supremacy of Christ.  Apart from the ministry of the Holy Spirit, the spiritually blind and dead people in this world will never see Jesus as anyone more than some sort of iconic religious figure.

Verses eight through 15 more specifically answer the question—How does the Holy Spirit manifest and glorify Jesus Christ to the world?  Most of the New Testament’s teaching on the Holy Spirit relates his ministry to those in the church—what he does and how he works in the lives of believers.  This teaching is different because much of it is about how the Spirit of God works in the lives of those in the world who by nature, hate Jesus.  Jesus gives three ways in which the Spirit of God manifests and glorifies Jesus to the world and another way in which he manifests and glorifies Jesus in the church.

Speaking of the Holy Spirit, Jesus says in verse eight, “⁸ And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment:” The key word here is the verb “convict.”  What does it mean for the Holy Spirit to “convict” someone?  The word occurs 18 times in the New Testament and the meaning is very consistent.  In almost every case, the word means to “show someone his/her sin, usually as a summons to repentance.”[2]  It is sometimes also translated by the word “exposed.”  Jesus says in John 3:20, “²⁰ For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.”  That’s the same word as “convict” in chapter 16 in the original.

The Holy Spirit exposes to a person their sin in the sense that– they NOW see them, NOT as mistakes or bad decisions or even as something that’s not wrong at all.  The Holy Spirit will cause them, for the first time to see their sin as something evil and shameful before God and he will bring them genuine heartache over it.  For instance, only the Spirit can take a person (who has prolifically spoken profanities for 30 years without even a twinge of guilt) and cause him/her to feel ashamed for using words they were not even conscious of saying only a couple of days earlier.  That kind of radical change does NOT come as a result of cultural conditioning.  It’s not about bowing to a new form of peer pressure.  It’s the Holy Spirit’s miraculous work in them because they don’t just feel uncomfortable about using profanity, they feel a new sense of shame before God.  The Holy Spirit causes people to blush over things they’ve never blushed about.

Only the Holy Spirit can take a sexually immoral person and cause him to think that an activity that, for the last decade he has practiced with little if any guilt, is in fact, evil and bring massive amounts of guilt and shame to his soul.  This new sexual ethic is NOT brought on by a self-improvement program.  It’s not the result of education or moral enlightenment.  It’s God Almighty taking a dark, hardened and perverse heart that is blind to his own sin and shining a supernatural light on a behavior he never before had any reservation about.

Conviction shouldn’t be thought of primarily in legal terms–as if God the Spirit puts us on trial and declares us guilty.  This is more than that.  As politically incorrect as it is today, the Holy Spirit brings a healthy sense of holy shame on people and that causes them to think completely differently about their sinful attitude, desire, or action.

We see this same dynamic in the ministry of Jesus in our text from last week. In John 15:22,  Jesus says about the world, “²² If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have been guilty of sin, [their sin would not have been exposed]  but now they have no excuse for their sin.”  The lost world hated Jesus, but it wasn’t until HE came and spoke the word of God to them that the Spirit through him exposed that hatred that had been in their hearts all along.  So, the Spirit will be doing through the church what the Spirit did in the ministry of Jesus.

In verse nine, Jesus explains what specifically the Spirit’s conviction of sin will primarily be exposing in the unbeliever. He says, “…concerning sin, because they do not believe in me.”   The first way the Spirit manifests and glorifies Jesus is by:  convicting the world of its sin and unbelief.  Jesus shows that the root sin any person must be convicted of to be saved is… unbelief.  People don’t go to hell for sexual sin or murder or lying.  People go to hell for unbelief—because they refused to believe in Jesus and receive forgiveness and repentance from their sins.   Jesus says in John 3:18, “¹⁸ Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”

It’s the Spirit of God alone who can cause a sinner to recognize and see the peril of their unbelief mainly by causing him/her to realize he/she can never be good enough for God.  The Spirit does not cause them to simply acknowledge mentally that they are not good enough for heaven.  This is the sense of horror and dread in the life of sinners when they  realize that, as an unbeliever, the wrath of God is awaiting them!  It’s only the Spirit of God who can dramatically convince people that they’re lost in unbelief and must repent and trust in Christ if they’re to be saved.

Apart from the Spirit’s work of conviction, the sinner will be largely indifferent to their sin and deceived about their souls.  They may go to church, but church attendance alone doesn’t impact how we view our sin.  Only the Spirit of God can cause a spiritually dead and indifferent sinner to have a sense of holy urgency about the state of his/her soul.  Only the Spirit of God can convince a person that he/she is absolutely and without doubt headed for hell apart from faith in Christ.

We can tell people that, but unless the Spirit of God makes that truth real to them in their hearts, it will have no redemptive impact on them.  Unless the Spirit of God—the Spirit of TRUTH invades the sinners’ heart to convince and give him/her a sense of fear and urgency about their unbelief, they will not be saved.

A second way the Spirit manifests and glorifies Christ is in verse 10.  He convicts the world “¹⁰ concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer;”  A second way the Spirit manifests and glorifies Christ is by:  convicting the world of its sham righteousness.  The world in their unbelief assumes that God will accept them in spite of their sin.  Only the ministry of the Spirit can convince them that the alleged righteousness they’ve been trusting in is sinking sand, a false hope—a counterfeit, a lie.

Most of those in the world that Jesus confronted were the hypocritical Jewish religious leaders. These leaders were confident God approved of them based on their religious works and outward piety.  Jesus tells them in Matthew 23, “²⁷ Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. ²⁸  So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”

He pronounces seven of these woes or curses on the Pharisees, all of which were intended to expose their unrighteousness—that their righteousness was only external and in the words of Isaiah–like filthy rags before God.  What they thought was pleasing to God was in fact, repulsive to him.  The Spirit of God continues Jesus’ ministry of exposing and convicting the world of its sham righteousness.

Only the Spirit of God can convince someone to repent, not only of their sin, but also of their sham righteousness and cause them to renounce it as shameful in God’s sight. Only the Spirit of God can convince an outwardly religious person that what they thought was earning them salvation is in truth, condemning them.  Only the Spirit of God can convince someone who thinks he/she’s a believer that they’re lost and that their reliance on their own good works will in truth, land them in hell, not heaven.

We see this work of the Spirit powerfully in Paul’s life.  In Philippians chapter three, he describes how the Spirit exposed his phony righteousness.  Speaking of his own righteousness he says in verse six he was “…as to righteousness under the law, blameless.  ⁷ But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ…For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ ⁹ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.”  Paul says that “what I used to think of as my righteousness I now see was rubbish in God’s sight—dung.”

It was the Holy Spirit who caused that radical shift in his thinking and revealed his desperate need to renounce his own righteousness and place his trust in the righteousness that comes from God—the righteousness of Christ.  Only the Holy Spirit can do that.  The Spirit of God alone convicts the world of its phony righteousness.  One way the Spirit does that is by manifesting genuine holiness/righteousness in the holy lives of believers.  When he was on earth, Jesus’ holy life exposed the unrighteousness of the world and now the holiness worked into the lives of believers by the Spirit does that as well.

Jesus says the reason the Spirit of God will convict the world of their sham righteousness is “because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer.”  The Spirit of God will do this—Jesus says—because I will not be here to do it.  I will be out of your sight with the Father.  In verse 11, he gives a third way the Holy Spirit will manifest and glorify Christ.  That is–he will convict the world “concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged.”

The Spirit will manifest and glorify Christ by: convicting the world of its false judgments.   When we think of judgment, we tend to think of God’s judgment of sin, but Jesus is referring to the world’s twisted moral judgment. This is the world’s upside-down, ethically twisted, selfishly permissive and culturally debased judgments, values and priorities—their moral worldview.

Jesus implies that the world makes its judgments based on the lies fed to them by their prince—Satan.  Lies like—“you won’t be held responsible for your behavior,” “short term pleasure is better than eternal bliss,” “riches and material wealth will make you happy,” “commitment is costly and should be avoided,” “if something is hard, it must be wrong,”  “life should be easy” “the bible is just another religious book,” “personal sacrifice is a waste,” “the church is a fraud—stay away” and finally,” “God promises far more than he can deliver.”

Those are the kinds of lies that provide the foundation for the perverse judgments this world makes.  Believing those lies—that are becoming increasingly widespread and, in your face,—predisposes sinners to making rotten judgments.

The Holy Spirit alone can cause someone to believe that a judgment or world view or value system they have held for decades is actually a lie from the devil.  Jesus says the reason the Spirit of God will convict the world of their lie-laden judgments is: “because the ruler of this world is judged.”  That means that the Holy Spirit will be able to convict the world of its morally perverse judgements is because the one who conceived those lies and empowers them will be judged and defeated at the cross. Only the Holy Spirit can so radically change a person’s belief system that, what they once thought was sound judgment, logical, thoughtful, enlightened, broad-minded, even loving—is in fact based completely on lies told them by a vanquished foe who was defeated by Jesus at the cross. 

Only the Spirit can snap someone’s head around that dramatically.  You cannot educate this into a person—though the Spirit can use the word of God to reveal the lies underlying these false judgments.  We must see that, apart from the ministry of the Spirit, it doesn’t matter how eloquent or compelling or logical or winsome or impassioned our arguments or evangelistic appeals are, they will either bounce off the person or simply irritate them.  This why prayer is the most important part of missions and evangelism—because unless God shows up in power to do his miraculous work, nothing is happening.

Unlike the first three truths, a fourth and final way the Spirit manifests and glorifies Jesus is directed toward believers.  His work on behalf of believers is: revealing to Christ’s followers the implications of the Person and work of Jesus.  He introduces the section in verse 12 saying, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”  The apostles are not ready to hear anything more because they don’t yet know that Jesus’ main mission is to die for sin and rise from the dead, defeating death, hell and the grave.  He has only been able to assure them in a general sense that it’s better for him to go away and the Spirit to come because the Spirit will enable God-haters to become God-lovers.

Verse 13 continues, “¹³ When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth….”  Jesus says the Spirit of God is the Spirit of truth who will guide believers in all the truth.  We already know from chapter 14 that Jesus is the truth.  That means the Spirit’s truth-guiding ministry is to reveal the implications of what Jesus’ life, death and resurrection accomplished.  The Spirit’s main way of doing this is through his inspiration of the Word of God.  It’s the New Testament that wholly and absolutely points to Jesus and reveals who he is and what he has done for us in the cross. The Old Testament looks forward to Jesus, predicts him through the Spirit-inspired prophets and explains what his salvation will bring to God’s people.

Jesus says the reason the Spirit of truth will guide his disciples into all truth is “for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.”   As we’ve seen several times in this discourse, Jesus didn’t speak or act on his own authority and neither will the Spirit.  This utter dependence upon God ensures—as it did with Jesus–that the Spirit will be speaking on behalf of the entire Godhead.  There is no difference between the truth of Jesus and the truth of the Father and the Spirit of truth.

They’re all the same.  When Jesus says the Spirit will “declare to you the things that are to come” he’s not speaking of futuristic prophecy.  He’s referring to his death and resurrection.  He’s saying, “The Holy Spirit will unpack for you disciples the implications of what is to come in my passion—what all this means to you and my church.”

Verse 14 reveals the main truth of this section.  ^“14He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” The Spirit will glorify Jesus as he unfolds for his people what Jesus did on the cross for them.  Jesus promises the Spirit will do this to “glorify” him. That is his purpose—to shine the light—to reveal to his people the beauty and supremacy and glory of Jesus.  Jesus wants to clarify however that this glorifying ministry of the Spirit doesn’t in any way diminish the Father.  That is—because the Spirit is expressly sent to glorify the Son, that doesn’t take away from the Father because—verse 15, “All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”  The Holy Spirit’s ministry is to manifest and glorify Jesus Christ and what he has received from his Father in the church. 

As we close, let’s bring out two crucial implications of this vital truth.  First, as we say repeatedly, we must keep the main thing the main thing in Christ’s church.  If the ministry of the Holy Spirit indwells the church for the purpose of manifesting and glorifying Christ, then that should be the passion and heartbeat of believers and of Christ’s church because the Spirit who lives in us and guides us has as his agenda–the glory of Jesus.  If we’re NOT driven by a passion to see Jesus made much of, we are not being driven by the Holy Spirit.

If the Spirit of God is active in our lives and in our church, then what we think, say and do will be an expression of loving Christ, treasuring Christ, savoring Christ, following Christ, sharing Christ, fellowshipping around Christ, living for Christ, dying for Christ, seeking after Christ, worshipping Christ and serving Christ.  Those are Christ-centered manifestations of the Holy Spirit.

Churches can do many outwardly impressive things without the Holy Spirit. Several years ago, one of the leaders of the house church movement in China was invited to America and he visited several well-respected American churches.  Before he left someone asked him his most powerful impression of the North American church.  His response was, “It’s amazing how many things you can do here without the Holy Spirit.”  Human ingenuity and entrepreneurialism and advanced technology can be very impressive—so impressive that we THINK we are witnessing the ministry of the Spirit, when we’re really just seeing the fallen glory of humanity.

This much we DO know:  the only believers, churches and ministries the Holy Spirit will empower are those with the ongoing, self-conscious mission of bringing glory to Jesus Christ—making much of him.  So, if we want to have a Holy Spirit-empowered life or ministry or family or church, we must orbit very tightly around Jesus.  To the degree that we stray from that focus, we will not be empowered by the Spirit which means we will fail dismally.

Another implication for us is—we should never lose hope for our lost loved ones because the Holy Spirit can convict anybody and save them.  Its tempting to give up when we’re praying for lost loved ones as we see them spiraling off in directions that seem to be further and further away from God.  It can be so disheartening.  And it SHOULD be disheartening IF we’re relying on THEM to change their minds or become positively influenced for Christ by someone.  If THAT is our hope, then we have every right to be disheartened.

But Jesus is clear here.  Every person who is converted is a miracle of the Holy Spirit’s power and there is NO ONE, NO ONE, NO ONE, the Holy Spirit cannot convict of his/her sin. He is the omnipotent God and his purposes cannot be thwarted!  [Job 42:2] There is no one who is too tough a nut to crack—no one whose heart is too hard—who is so in love with their sin—who has wandered so far from God that the Spirit cannot transform them.  We should never lose hope for any of the lost people we love, and we are praying for.  Continue to boldly plead with God for a saving miracle by the Spirit in their lives!

Finally, as you sit here this morning listening to the work of the Spirit, have YOU ever been awakened to feel that sense of deep shame about your sin?  Have you ever been intensely awakened to the fact that—because of the horror of your sin before a holy God, you deserve hell?  That’s the convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit.  If you haven’t had that kind of awakening in your soul, you have reason to question your salvation.

If you DO experience this at some point, now or in the future, it’s because the Spirit of God is at work in your heart.  He’s calling you to give up on your own efforts to make it to heaven but instead, place your trust in Christ—in what he did to purchase your forgiveness and impart his righteousness to you through the cross.

Follow the leading of the Holy Spirit, confess your sin, feel the mercy of his shame for your sin and place your trust in Christ today.  May God give us the grace as individuals and as a church to manifest and glorify Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit for his glory and our joy.

[1] Carson, D.A. Pillar N.T. Commentary, Gospel of John…

[2] Carson, D.A., Pillar, pp. 532-542.

This morning, we continue with Jesus’ farewell address to his disciples in John’s gospel, chapters 13-17.  You may recall from a few weeks ago that, in the first half of chapter 15, Jesus tells the disciples that they were profoundly united with him—so much so that he calls himself “the vine” and the disciples, “the branches,” that grow out from him and are dependent upon him for life and bearing fruit.  We saw last time from the immediate context that this “fruit” these human branches produce at least in part refers to the new converts they win to Christ.

The crucial requirement for the branch (or, anyone united to Christ) in order to remain healthy and fruit-bearing is that he/she must abide in the vine.  That is–the branch/the disciple remains in—depends upon, draws its strength and nourishment from the vine/Christ.  We saw from 15:11 that abiding in Christ is experiencing the very joy of Christ and the very love and peace of Christ.  Our joy is dependent on his joy because it IS HIS joy we express as we abide in him.  The main point is that if our relationship with Christ is to be healthy and fruitful, it must be characterized by our abiding in Jesus.

As Jesus moves to the section we looked at last time, he tells the disciples that their relationship to one another should be marked by love and not just any love, the same kind of sacrificial love that characterizes his relationship to them.  THIS is part of the fruit that is produced in disciples as they abide in Christ—love for one another.  So, we’ve seen how we are to relate to Christ—abide in him and how that causes us to relate to one another in love for one another.  But what about everyone else—those outside the church?  What does the relationship between the fruit-bearing disciple and the world look like?  As we’re seeking to win the lost and bear the fruit of new converts, how will the world relate to us?

That’s what Jesus addresses in our text for this morning and he introduces the section in verse 18 with, “¹⁸ “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.” The world’s relationship to you, if you are abiding in Christ and are fruit-bearing, is—hatred.  The world will hate you.  Jesus doesn’t want this impending hatred from the world to be a surprise to the disciples.  They’d watched Jesus for three years endure the hatred of those who didn’t know God—often Jewish religious leaders.  Jesus says that the disciples are to expect nothing better from those outside the kingdom of God than what HE received from the world.

For lack of a better approach, this morning we want to look at three “R’s” surrounding this issue of the world’s hatred.  In verses 18-21, Jesus spells out the reasons for the world’s hatred.  In verses 22-24, he moves to declare reasons why those who hate believers are guilty before God.  Finally, in verses 25-16:4, we see the responses we’re to have to this hatred from the world.  First, Jesus gives two reasons for the world’s hatred of his followers.  Let’s read verse 19 again.  “¹⁹ If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.”  The first reason the world will hate believers is because:  Believers have been transferred spiritually to another kingdom and the world is at war with it.  At the root of this is the truth that believers are not of this world. We have been taken out of the world.

We can think of it like this.  The world is made up of rebels in revolt against this world’s rightful King, King Jesus.  Before the fall, humanity was loyal to their King, but because of the fall, they’re now in rebellion, warring against him and his kingdom.  They are unaware of this because they’re spiritually dead and blind, but they’ve now fallen under the command of another—Satan—the prince of this dark world.  According to verse 19 however, from out of that group of rebels in Satan’s kingdom, Jesus chooses some people for himself and transfers them into his kingdom.  These folks are miraculously changed, and they now willingly submit to Christ’s authority as their new King.

So, if you’re a believer, you were at one time part of the rebel kingdom of darkness that hates the kingdom of light and Jesus, its King.  But one day, you were miraculously transferred out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light.  You consciously change your allegiance from the prince of darkness to the King of light.  Jesus is saying that in response, the kingdom of darkness will hate you with the same hatred they have for your new King—with whom they are (unknowingly) at war.   Being newly joined to the kingdom of light, you are now consciously warring against those you once served and who now relate to you as a turncoat.[1]  Jesus is teaching that this is what’s going on in this spiritual conflict between the believer and the world.  That’s the spiritual reality confronting any follower of Christ.

Jesus puts it this way in John 3:19-20. “¹⁹ And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. ²⁰ For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.”  The world hates the light that exposes their sin and followers of Christ radiate HIS light, HIS joy, HIS peace and HIS love.  A fundamental change has occurred in all followers of King Jesus.  You are no longer defined by the things of the kingdom of this dark world—wealth, politics, social standing, possessions, popularity, power.

Now, what defines you is your new King. HE is what gives your life meaning.  HE is your great love, your new Master.  Your life orbits around him–he even calls you his friend.  The world no longer owns you—controls you, your agenda, your attitudes and desires. Unless you willingly allow it, they’ve lost their capacity to hold—lost their ability to significantly influence you and those dark spiritual forces of this world hate that.[2]  If you were converted in a non-Christian environment—whether family or the workplace, you’ve experienced this firsthand.  For many of those in the world you were formerly associated with, your conversion to Christ was NOT good news.  The first reason the world hates followers of Christ is because his disciples have been transferred to another kingdom with which the world is at war. 

A second reason the world hates followers of Christ is:  We are profoundly related and radically connected to Jesus.  Look in verses 20-21. “²⁰ Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours. ²¹ But all these things they will do to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me.”  The first truth Jesus states here is the same saying he used in chapter 13, “a servant is not greater than his master.”  There the focus was on humility—washing feet.  The disciples were not greater than Jesus.  Here he turns the focus onto their expectations from the world.  As his servants, disciples of Jesus should expect no better treatment from the world than he received.  “If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.”

Jesus presses the point in verse 21 when he tells the disciples those who persecute them will be doing so on account of him—his name.  This is consistent with his teaching of the vine and the branches.  You cannot hate the vine but love the branches because they are one.  Our union with Christ means that Christ is in us and the world hates Christ.  They will see Christ—his love, his joy, his peace, his attitudes, actions and desires in genuine believers and they now hate HIM …in YOU.  Finally, if we’re producing the fruit of more new converts, the spiritual darkness will hate us even more because we are purging members from their kingdom and, by God’s grace, bringing them into the kingdom of God.

Again, because of their spiritual blindness and deception, they won’t be aware their hatred is for Christ.  They’ll make it about YOU—what a crazy, closed-minded, intolerant fanatic you’ve become.  But Jesus says in effect— “their hatred for you is only an extension of their hatred for me.”  We see what this looks like in Acts chapter five.  The Jewish leaders have ordered the apostles not to preach in Jesus’ name and the apostles responded by telling them that they would obey God—who called them to preach Christ.

The Jewish leaders arrested them and, before releasing them, had them beaten and again, ordered them not to preach Christ.  The story concludes in verse 41.  Luke records, “⁴¹ Then they left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name.”  The dishonor they suffered was as a result of their association with the name/person of Jesus.  The hatred the Jews had for Jesus is now transferred to them.

This is what’s implied by Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:20. He says to the believers in Corinth, “²⁰ Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us…”  The message of the gospel is God’s appeal/message, not ours.  He simply makes his appeal through us.  An ambassador is a representative of the government who sent him or her and who conveys the message from their country.  If you’re an ambassador to Libya, you’re representing America, not yourself.

You are only speaking what your president and State Department tell you to speak.  But if Libya gets angry at America—their first act of retaliation is not to bomb America. They will throw you—the ambassador—out of the country or perhaps even imprison you.  You’re the one persecuted because of their hatred for America.  Likewise, the world hates Christ—we are united with Christ, so they hate us.

Again, those unchurched folks around you think the reason for the change in their relationship with you is because your interests have changed—you’re not as much “fun” as you used to be—you talk differently and have a set of new, weird church friends.  Those things ARE true on a human level, but behind all that is the spiritual reality that—you’re in love and lovingly, willingly enslaved to someone they can’t stand—as much as they might deny that.  Jesus says, those are the reasons the world hates his disciples.

In verses 22-24 we see reasons those who hate followers of Christ are guilty before God.  The first reason for their guilt is—they rejected Jesus the Messiah who had clearly revealed his identity to them.  He says in verse 22, “22 If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have been guilty of sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin. ²³ Whoever hates me hates my Father also. ²⁴ If I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin, but now they have seen and hated both me and my Father.”   Jesus is NOT saying that if these Jews had received him, they would be innocent of ALL sin.

He’s saying that they would not have been guilty of rejecting him. The main truth Jesus spells out here is similar to what he teaches in a parable in Luke 12.  At the end of the parable he says in verse 47, “⁴⁷…that servant who knew his master’s will but did not get ready or act according to his will, will receive a severe beating. ⁴⁸ But the one who did not know, and did what deserved a beating, will receive a light beating. Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more.”  This teaches that there will be degrees of punishment in hell, among other things.

Jesus is saying to these Jews that—”those who have received much—who have heard my teaching and witnessed my works—those who know the truth about me, they will be punished at the highest level of accountability for knowingly rejecting me as their Messiah.”  These people who’re guilty will receive more profound levels of punishment at the judgment because of what they know about Jesus.  Those who are aware of Jesus’ teaching and miraculous works and who reject him will be punished far more severely than those who reject him but were far less knowledgeable about him.

These Jews had rejected a Christ who had repeatedly and compellingly proven to them who he was.

Another reason for Christ declaring these Jews guilty of great sin in rejecting him is—they were guilty of rejecting not only Jesus, but also the Father.  Verse 23 says, “²³ Whoever hates me hates my Father also.”²⁴  If I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin, but now they have seen and hated both me and my Father.”   

This makes perfect sense in light of what we’ve seen in this gospel where Jesus so closely identifies himself with the Father.   In chapter 14 Jesus says to Philip, “⁹ … Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father?”  He also says in John 10:37 that he is doing “the works of my father.”  That means if you hate Jesus, you are by definition hating the Father because he does just what the Father does.  You cannot love God the Father if you do not love Jesus.

The third major truth Jesus speaks here details the proper response to persecution.  The first of three responses he gives to the disciples is:  be assured that your persecution does not necessarily mean you have done something wrong.  Most of us are conditioned to believe that if someone attacks us or shuns us or hates us, we must have done something wrong.  Jesus shuts down our impulse for self-blame in verse 25 where he quotes King David’s words from Psalm 69.  “²⁵ But the word that is written in their Law must be fulfilled: ‘They hated me without a cause.’”  David writes of his own experience of being opposed because of his zeal for the God of Israel.  Jesus is saying that by the Spirit, David and his experience foreshadows Jesus and the opposition he faced as the Son of David.  “They hated me without a cause.”

Another function of this reference from Psalm 69 and Jesus’ understanding that his persecution was a fulfillment of the Law is to assure the disciples that their persecution will not threaten God’s redemptive plan.  He is saying in essence, “The persecution you will experience is not a hindrance to God’s plan—it’s PART of God’s plan that he foretold. Your persecution will actually fulfill what was written about you in the law.”

Persecution is absolutely inevitable for the genuine believer—you WILL suffer loss in this world for Christ’s sake if you’re growing to resemble him.  Paul says in Second Timothy 3:12, “¹² Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.”  Paul implies that—if you have NOT suffered for Jesus, something may very well be wrong with you because this is the way of the cross.

Jesus had warned these disciples many times about the cost of following him, but in this last extended teaching, he wants to buttress his earlier warnings.  This is because if we expect persecution as inevitable, that helps keep us from losing hope which more easily happens if, when we are persecuted, we think that something strange or wrong is happening to us.  Peter says in First Peter 4:12, “¹² Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you but rejoice insofar as your share Christ’s sufferings…”

Another proper response to persecution is to be assured because you will not be alone.  Verse 26 says, “²⁶ “But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me.”  Jesus again refers to the Holy Spirit as “the Helper”—the One who comes alongside believers.  When you are persecuted, the Spirit will not only be with you, but will bear witness about Jesus—he will help you in your task.

The idea is similar to the assurance Jesus gives to the disciples in Mark 13:11 “¹¹  And when they bring you to trial and deliver you over, do not be anxious beforehand what you are to say, but say whatever is given you in that hour, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit.”  This verse also puts to rest any temptation for the disciples to think— “when Jesus goes away, why would the world hate us?”  Wrong.  If the Helper comes—he will in some sense take Jesus’ place[3] and will bear witness about Jesus in the same manner he did.  Expect persecution because, though Jesus whom they hate is ascending to the Father, the Holy Spirit whom they also hate as God will be here with you.[4] You will not be alone—a Helper will be with you always.

A third and final response to persecution is: Remember both the assurances of Jesus and the self-deception of those who persecute you.  Twice in these last four verses Jesus tells the disciples WHY he is warning them of the world’s hatred.  In 16:1 he says, “¹ “I have said all these things to you to keep you from falling away.”  Notice that it is Jesus who keeps us from falling away.  We cannot remain faithful to God apart from the ever-present “keeping” ministry of Jesus.  We should pray regularly that God would keep us saved.  The New Testament repeatedly teaches that Jesus not only saves us initially, he is the One who keeps us saved.  This keeping work is part of his saving work in us as our Shepherd.  This is in the Old Testament in verses like Psalm 121:3. “He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber.”

We see this in New Testament texts like Jude, verse one. ¹Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, To those who are called, beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ:”  To the believers in Corinth, Paul promises that it is Jesus “⁸ who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  The final verses in Jude echoes this truth.  He says about Jesus, “²⁴ Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy,”

A believer will reach heaven, NOT because he/she gutted it out through thick and thin.  None of us would persevere to the end without the keeping ministry of Jesus.  “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it.  Prone to leave the God I love.  Here’s my heart, Lord, take and seal it.  Seal it for thy courts of love.”  That’s a prayer for God to keep us saved.  We would wander away in no time if he weren’t keeping us.  Any saint in glory will be there because, against our own sinful inclinations, Jesus kept us saved through the Holy Spirit.

Jesus clearly expects that these warnings will protect his disciples from falling away from being so discouraged or confused by their suffering.  The first part of 16:4 is similar.  Speaking of their inevitable persecution he says, “⁴ But I have said these things to you, that when their [the ‘darkness’] hour comes you may remember that I told them to you…”   Again, it’s not IF the dark hour of hatred will come, it’s WHEN it comes.

That means that when we’re mocked or lose friendships or promotions at work or are reviled by this world, we should remember, “Jesus said it would be this way.”  It’s not us they hate, its Jesus.  Suffering for Christ is not a cosmic malfunction of some kind—it’s just part of being a disciple of Jesus.  This is born out in the last beatitude in Matthew chapter five.  Verse 11 says, ^{11 “}Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. ¹² Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

Jesus wants to further assure us by communicating just how deceived these persecutors will be.  “² They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. ³ And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me.”  The first persecutions of the church came from the Jews who refused to accept Jesus as their Messiah.  Saul of Tarsus is a great example of someone who, from his religious zeal actively persecuted the church.

He was utterly sincere in his belief that he was absolutely and without a doubt doing God’s will as he hauled believers off to jail and to their execution.  This is a grand delusion and Jesus wants his disciples to be assured that, even if your opposers out-number you 100 to one, the problem is with the 100 deceived zealots, not you.  Even if they fast and pray for God’s blessing as they abuse you, THEY are the ones who are deceived.  Today, we see this level of delusion among those who practice radical Islam. Scores of believers have been murdered across Africa in the last several years because Muslims believed they were carrying out a sacred mission from Allah to rid the world of infidels.

In verse three, Jesus clarifies that this deception that they violently manifest—is rooted in their ignorance—they don’t know the Father or me.  Because they don’t really know God (in spite of what they think), they will serve their counterfeit gods and counterfeit gods always pose a threat to believers—whether it is the idols of our own heart or the false gods of this dark and deceived world.

In closing, let’s think about three questions.  First: Are we living mindful that our great blessings in Christ make us highly accountable before God for our unprecedented riches?   Again, remember verses 22 and 24.  John 15:22 “²² If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have been guilty of sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin.”   Verse 24, “²⁴ If I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin, but now they have seen and hated both me and my Father.” No group of people in world history has had the access to the truth about God and what he has done for us through Jesus than we now do in America.

The tools we have available to us to know what God has done for us are amazing.  There are so many translations, concordances, dictionaries, study helps, commentaries, books on reading and understanding the Bible.  We can go to the internet and listen to great preaching from godly and anointed teachers and preachers.  Any believer can take very good seminary courses online for no cost.  And wherever we go, we can carry all that around with us in our pockets and purses on our smart phones!  No church in history has remotely had the opportunities we have had to know the truth of what God has done for us—his saving works.

In light of that, what does it means in our context for Jesus to say, “Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more.”  Given the theological shallowness of the North American church, I can’t help wondering Jesus isn’t saying something like, “If my church in the Middle East or Africa or my church in Asia—all of which are under profound persecution—had access to the truth that you have, there would have been a powerful, global revival years ago. They would be sanctified by my truth—they would be encouraged in their trials by my truth—they would be aggressively evangelistic about the wonders of the gospel that you can access on your smart phone any time you want.”  We will be held responsible for the unparalleled spiritual resources we can access by God’s grace.  The good news of course is—these materials ARE a blessing from God and, as we rightly use them, we CAN grow to be strong in the Lord.

 A second question is:  Is Christ seen clearly enough in you to arouse opposition?  We’ve seen repeatedly that the world hates Jesus and by extension hates his followers because they are like him—he is clearly seen in them and they are hated for HIS name.  Because that’s true, what does that imply about a professed believer who has seldom if ever been ostracized, opposed, mocked, derided or in some way persecuted for being a follower of Christ?

Think about it.  The world hates Jesus.  If the world doesn’t at some level oppose you as a follower of Jesus, it’s NOT because they’ve lost their hatred for him.  It’s because they just don’t clearly see Jesus in you.  Don’t misunderstand, there are those in the church who are persecuted, NOT because of Christ in them, but because the world knows they don’t love them.  All the world feels from these self-righteous believers is disdain and condescension.  But on the other end of the spectrum are those who avoid the hatred of the world by living like the world—by keeping their mouths shut about their faith or refusing to let their faith impact the issues of the day.

The reason the world doesn’t hate them is because they’ve given them no reason to think they’ve been taken out of their kingdom.  Going to church on Sunday or teaching Sunday school or preaching a sermon doesn’t bring the opposition– resemblance to Jesus’ character and continuing his fruit-producing ministry does.  Still other believers suffer no persecution from the world because they tragically avoid any meaningful relationships with unchurched people. They seal themselves safely in the Christian ghetto.

A third and closely related question is—Is the reason you are not persecuted because Christ is not in you?  Again, Second Timothy 3:12 we said says, “¹² Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted,” Paul is not saying you have to be a spiritual giant—an extraordinarily godly saint to qualify for persecution.  His stipulation for the inevitability of persecution is simply—do you desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus?

For some here, if you’ve been a professing Christian for a long time but have never been confronted for your faith in Christ, examine yourselves to see if you have genuine faith in Christ.  Many in the much more tolerant western church don’t see the bible’s instruction on persecution to be all that relevant to them.  But, the presence of absence of persecution says something vitally important about where we are with God.

That will be even more the case in the years ahead as the persecution of the church becomes more pronounced and socially accepted.   If you don’t know Christ today, come to him and confess to him that you are a sinner—a sinner who loves the comfort of being safe and unassailed more than you love Christ.

Receive him by faith—accept his righteous life in place of your sinful one.  Receive his blood shed on the cross to forgive your sins. Receive his Holy Spirit who will give you boldness and direction as you follow his lead.  May God give all of us the grace to expect and not shy away from the persecution that will come when the world sees Christ in us for his glory and our joy. Let’s pray.

[1] Carson, D.A. (1991).  The Gospel according to John (pp.524-530).  Leicester, England; Grand Rapids, MI:  Inter-Varsity Press; W.B. Eerdmans.

[2] Keller. T.J. (2013). The Timothy Keller Sermon Archive.  New York City:  Redeemer Presbyterian Church.  January 26, 1992

[3] This is a phrase D.A. Carson uses in his commentary on John, Pillar series.

[4] Carson, Pillar

This week, we return to our series of messages from John’s gospel in chapters 13-17 or what has been called the Upper Room Discourse.  To review just a bit and see how these verses relate to what we said last week.  Last week, we saw in chapter 15:10 that Jesus tells the disciples, “¹⁰ 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.”  Keeping the commandments of Christ enables us to abide/remain in his love for us.  That is—keeping Christ’s commandments enables us to have an ongoing experience of Christ’s love for us.  Our obedience allows us to relate to God without serious impediments that would hinder us from experiencing God’s love.

This does NOT mean that when we develop patterns of disobedience–Jesus stops loving us, but when we live in disobedience, we grieve God and quench his Holy Spirit within us.  That is—living in disobedience throws a wet blanket on the Spirit’s influence in our lives.  That negatively impacts—it mutes, it insulates believers from experiencing God’s love.  We see more specifically what disobedience does to keep us from experiencing God’s love when Jesus explains what the Spirit was sent to do in believers.  Jesus teaches in chapter 16 of John’s gospel.  “¹³ When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.  ¹⁴ He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.  ¹⁵ All that the Father has is mine; therefore, I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”

Though the Spirit’s ministry of guiding us into all truth and declaring to us what is Jesus’ can mean many things, it surely includes conveying to us the love Jesus has for us.  The Spirit declares Jesus’ love for his disciples.  The point is–when we, through repeated, entrenched sin quench or mute the influence of the Spirit of God in our lives, that will disable our ability to   hear well in our hearts his declarations of Jesus’ love for us.

As we move into our text for this morning, Jesus in verse 12 narrows his focus and explains what he means by these “commandments” we’re to keep if we’re to abide in his love.  ¹² “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”  The curious thing here is that this is only one commandment, but he says in verse 10, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.”   That just means that when he says here in verse 12, “This is my commandment” that he’s summarizing all his commandments in this one commandment.  That is—all his commandments are somehow tied to us loving one another.

We can also see how this commandment is related to the vine and branches section from last week.  If we are his disciples, we will abide in his love—his love will be in us and flow through us as his branches.  That means that this new commandment Jesus gives to his disciples to love one another is inevitable for a genuine disciple because his love abides in us and flows through us.  Here, he’s simply commanding his disciples to direct the flow of his love into the lives of other disciples.

Verses 12-13 communicate—in response to God’s love for us, we must love one another.   As we’ve seen many times, 1 John 4:19 tells us that “We love because he first loved us.”  The love we have in our hearts for other believers is as a result of us receiving and experiencing God’s love for us.  If we do not have his love in us, we will have nothing to give to others.

And Jesus has already implied that all his commandments are in some way wrapped up in this one to love each other.  Paul confirms this truth about love including all the other commandments in Romans 13:10 when he says, “…love is the fulfilling of the law.”  That is–if you have genuine, God-like love for others flowing through you as his fruit, that will serve as the basis for obeying all the other commandments.

This has so many implications but one is–this teaches the importance of the local church in our walk with God.  This teaching of Jesus tells us that it’s absolutely illegitimate to claim as some professed believers do— “I love God and Jesus, but the church—I can take it or leave it.”  That simply cannot be true because Jesus is saying here by implication that a huge part of our love for God is expressed in loving other disciples in his church.

Now, let’s unpack this text by dividing into four major truths that pertain to either God’s love for us and/or our love for each other.  The first truth is in the second half of verse 12.  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.”  We’re to love each other as Jesus has loved us.  The way Christ loves us is multi-facetted, but as we’ll see:  The core quality of Christ’s love for us is sacrificial love and THAT is what we must have for one another. 

Jesus explicitly says this in verse 13. “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.”  This love we’re to have for each other is a “laying-down-our-lives-for-each-other” love.  Paul says this about God’s love in Romans 5:8, “⁸ but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”   Dying for someone is the ultimate sacrifice and the occasions for that are comparatively very rare.  However, sacrificial love includes many things other than dying for each other.  The ultimate sacrifice is physical death, but sacrificial love for others also means death to our own selfish desires through self-denial.

Loving each other includes things like —spending time with each other when we had intended on spending it another way.  It includes helping each other, encouraging each other when your selfish desires are pulling us to do something else.  It may mean serving in ministries for a season of our lives that we have no real desire for, but do it simply because we love those who are active in it and want to help them out—like in the nursery or helping out with children’s Sunday School—just to name two that are not so arbitrarily chosen.

This kind of sacrificial love can carry implications like—taking part of your vacation fund and giving it to someone in the body that you know has deep, legitimate financial needs.  It can include things like loaning your cabin to someone on a weekend when you were planning to go out to the lake.  Having brothers and sisters into our homes when selfishly, we would really rather be left alone.  Taking time to encourage someone who is beset with trials—rearranging your schedule in order to help someone in crisis.  I had a seminary professor who used to say, “Sometimes the interruptions in your ministry ARE your ministry.”

Sacrificially loving one another also includes listening to each other—really listening because your love for them causes you to care about what concerns them.  Paul says in Romans 12:15 that it means that we, “¹⁵ Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.”  We enter into one another person’s joys and celebrate with them.  And we enter into one another’s grief and pain and share in that too.  All of these expressions of sacrificial love go against the selfish grain of our fallen souls.  That’s why they’re sacrificial.

Sacrificial love is more or less defined in Philippians 2:3-4.  ³ Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. ⁴ Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.”  Paul goes on to say that, if you need help understanding what that looks like, look to the example of Jesus who emptied himself and came from heaven to suffer and die for us.

A second truth about this love is found in verses 14-15.  “¹⁴ You are my friends if you do what I command you. ¹⁵ No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.”  Another way we could describe God’s love for us based on what Jesus says here is:  God’s love for us is the love of a divine Friend.  This is an astonishing truth that isn’t much discussed in the church today—perhaps because we’re afraid that it might diminish God to speak of friendship with the Creator of the universe.

Obviously, Jesus has no problem referring to his friendship with us.  He even explains what this friendship love for his disciples is by contrasting a friend with a servant or slave.  A slave has no personal relationship to the Master—he or she is just a person who does what the Master tells them.  This is a purely one-dimensional relationship.  The master gives the orders and the slave follows them.

It’s a bit like an army drill sergeant at boot camp. He’s not there to make friends with the recruits.  He is only there to tell them what to do to make them good soldiers.  He doesn’t show them pictures of his family or chat with them about his new pickup truck—he tells them what to do and expects it to be done.  If a recruit disobeys, then punishment immediately ensues and if it involves some humiliation of the recruit, the sergeant loses no sleep over that because he/she is not his friend.

Jesus tells us specifically what separates being Jesus’ slave from being his friend.  That is—revelation.  “…the servant doesn’t know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.”   A powerful indication of intimacy with someone is sharing things/revealing things to them that are important to you.  To Jesus, the most important thing in his life was doing the will of his Father and he faithfully shared the will of his Father with the disciples in a way that he had not with any other people.  We see an example of this relationship between loving others and revealing ourselves to them in John 5:20.

Jesus says, “²⁰ …the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing…””  Jesus connects the Father’s love for him to the fact that he “shows [reveals to] him all that he himself is doing.”  In our text for this morning, Jesus uses a form of this same Greek word for the love the Father has for the Son, phileo, to describe his friendship love for the apostles.  The point is that this friendship love is not shallow—this is not Facebook-friend love.  Jesus has already said it’s a love that will cause him to lay down his life.   It’s the same love the Father has for the Son.  This is stunning!

This relationship between God’s friendship love and his revelation of himself is seen in both Abraham and Moses.  They were both called “friends of God” and both of them enjoyed unusual intimacy with God characterized primarily by the fact that God shared his plans with them.  He uniquely revealed himself to both of them, especially Moses.  D.A. Carson in his commentary on this verse says, “…slaves…are simply told what to do, while his [God’s] friends are informed of his thinking, enjoy his confidence and learn to obey with a sense of privilege and with full understanding of their master’s heart.”[1]

One reason this is very important to us is—this truth clarifies for us the kind of obedience a disciple of Christ gives to Jesus.  That is– the kind of obedience friends can give— “with a sense of privilege and with full understanding of their master’s heart.”  We must ask ourselves:  Is that how we view and how we practice obedience to God?  A disciple’s obedience to Jesus should never be a slavish obedience—”You do this or suffer the consequences.”  That slavish obedience is motivated by a desire to avoid punishment—it’s a negative motivation and it’s rooted in fear, not love.  John tells us in First John chapter four.  “¹⁸ There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.¹⁹ We love because he first loved us.” 

The obedience characteristic of a follower of Christ is like a soldier  whose commanding officer is also his best friend.  He will obviously obey what the officer tells him to do, but it’s not done from a sense of raw obligation.  This is obedience rooted in a warm relationship, not solely in the authority of the commanding officer.  Many believers too often hear calls to obedience as “If you don’t obey me, you can’t possibly love me and you’re in big trouble.”  Jesus pictures obedience in a very positive light here.  It’s an expression of our love for him that occurs within the context of—an intimate friendship relationship.

Obedience to God is not only a matter of holy obligation, it’s also intensely good for us and should flow out of a friendship love for God like Moses and the apostles experienced.  What a privilege that the Lord of the cosmos—Creator of the Universe would look at sinners like us and call us his friends—that he would “take us into his confidence, inform us of his thinking.” He does that mainly through his Word, but also through his prompting by the Holy Spirit.

This element of the gospel should blow us away(!) and if it doesn’t, something serious is missing. Living with this understanding of how Jesus loves us will greatly increase our desire to obey and will make it increasingly a joy, not a burden.  Implicit in all that is that we must place our emphasis on our friendship relationship to God with our obedience to him growing out of that.  In other words, the foundation is God’s friendship with us and flowing out of that, obeying him.  Here’s why the relationship always must precede the obedience in our minds.

Many believers fall into a pattern of obeying God mostly out of obligation without any sense of relationship with him.  It’s possible to outwardly obey God without being his friend.  But what Jesus is teaching here is that it’s not possible to be a friend of God without living a life increasingly marked by obedience.  If a believer makes obedience the center of their relationship with God without the foundation of God’s friendship, he/she is placing themselves under the law by making obedience impersonal and detached from a relationship.  If you, by nature are a person who tends to be driven mostly or even only by a sense of duty, you need ask God to incline your heart to the truth that Jesus has made you his friend and your obedience should increasingly flow out of his friendship with you, not a cold sense of duty.

A third truth about this love God has for us is in the first half of verse 16.  That is—Friendship love from Jesus is not rooted in our own merit.  Jesus says, “You did not choose me, but I chose you…”  Do you see what Jesus is doing here?  What do you suppose the temptation would be for 11 prideful sinners when their Lord tells them they are his friends?  “Well, you know the Lord and me—he doesn’t make a move without telling me what’s he’s doing—Yeeaaah…he trusts me with what the Father has shown him…he does that with a few of us.”

To keep his disciples from being prideful about their friendship with him, Jesus quickly follows with a truth that he intends will choke off any sinful impulse to believe that their friendship with Jesus is grounded in something special about them.  Jesus wants them to know that they are no better, no more fit to be his friends than anyone else.  If they’re going to boast about being friends with Jesus, their boast should be directed to Jesus because they owe their friendship with Jesus entirely to him!  He reminds them of that by next telling them, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.” Notice, he leads with the negative, “You did NOT choose me.”  Those in Christ are chosen, NOT choosers. 

One reason this undercuts our temptation to boast is because being chosen for nothing in ourselves brings no glory to us.  It’s not that we are smarter or more discerning or wiser than the other folks who weren’t chosen.  Jesus’ choice is from his own sovereign will and purposes—not from anything in us.

A fourth and final truth is in the second half of verse 16.  “¹⁶ You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you.”    Another truth here:  Jesus calls his friends to share his love with others through the gospel.  We’re not to hoard this friendship love of Christ as if it were only intended for us—we’re to share it with others.

We know this is the point of what Jesus is saying here because Jesus says we’ve been appointed to bear fruit.  That’s not a command, it’s a commission—he’s sending us on a mission here.  We also see this when he tells us that we should “GO and bear fruit.”  There’s an echo of the Great Commission in this verse  An apostle is one who GOES—because Jesus has sent him or her.  Jesus says here we are being sent to bear the fruit of new converts.

Also, notice that he connects this fruit-bearing to prayer.  Literally, this verse says, “…I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide THAT whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you.”  In context, he’s saying that one of the means we employ by which the fruit of new converts is produced is prayer in Jesus’ name.  Disciples produce the fruit of new converts by not hoarding this friendship love of Jesus, but sharing it with others.  And the means he mentions here by which we do that is praying for lost people in Jesus’ name.

We’ve seen this same connection between prayer and winning converts before in chapter 14.  In verses12-13 Jesus says, “¹² “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father. ¹³ Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.”  We said that these “greater works” the disciples would do after Jesus left them had to be the work of winning converts because this was the one work of the apostles that was much greater than what Jesus had done.

A second reason this understanding makes sense is because Jesus has just told the disciples that his friendship with them was not because of any merit in them but was because Jesus chose them, so God gets all the glory.  Again, the same priority is found in verse 13.  “¹³ Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.”  We are to go out and win converts to Christ, but we must pray and ask GOD to do the work of bringing them to himself because God alone can CHOOSE to bring someone from death to life.  That ensures that all the glory goes to God.

Like everywhere else we’ve seen in this discourse, God’s glory permeates and underlies all of this.  We saw that God is glorified because it’s HIS initial love for us that chooses us and causes us to love him back by obeying his commandments.  God is glorified because when we obey, HE allows us to experience his love for us—it abides in us.  God is glorified as HE makes us his friends, not through anything we do, but by his electing love in us.  Finally, God is glorified as HE produces the fruit of new converts in response to our prayers and our GOING to them.

As we close, let’s remind ourselves of two points of application more closely.  First, we must always understand God’s call to obey as the call of a divine Friend.  Again, we must always remember that the fact that those who are in Christ have been made his friends in NO way diminishes his authority over us or our obligation to obey.  What this does do is—it helps us better comprehend the spirit underlying God’s calls for radical obedience to us.  We are to obey, not only for his glory, but for our joy.  Jesus says in verse 11 we looked at last time, “¹¹ These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” 

When we obey—we abide in the love of Christ—we experience it more fully—not because we’ve earned it, but because obedience allows the flow of God’s love for us to not be hindered.  When God calls us to obey in big things or small, he’s not there as a detached, impersonal Commander, but as the One who sent his Son to die for us so that he could make us his friends and even more amazing, his children.

Second, a question:  how fruitful are we in producing new converts?  For too many of us who claim to be believers and abide in Christ—there is little if any fruit in this area.  At best, that makes us a mutation because normal branches, when they abide in Christ produce fruit which includes new converts that come to Christ in response to their prayers.

How many lost people are we regularly praying for outside of our family?  Are we praying for those in our circle of acquaintances—whom God has sent our way?  As we pray and pray, we feel much more inclined to actually share the gospel with them because we’ve invested considerable time and energy—we’ve developed a deeper love for them in prayer.  This is a HUGE weakness in North American believers, who generally feel very little sense of responsibility in this area.

Often the reason we’re so weak in this area is because we’re more concerned with cultivating friends from this world than with maintaining a close friendship with God.  James speaks directly to that sinful impulse.  In chapter four, verse four he writes, “⁴ You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.”  When we’re not willing to place our friendship with our unchurched friends beneath the friendship God has with us—we’re not willing to risk our friendships with them for God, he considers it spiritual adultery and enmity—direct opposition from us.  We become God’s enemy.

When we have our friendship priorities backward, we need to pray and ask God to make his goodness and glory known to us through the gospel.  It was God who sent his Son to save us from the eternal punishment our sins deserve.  It was God the Son who, on the cross, became sin for us and received the punishment we deserve.  It was God who transferred the perfect righteousness of his Son onto us so the Father would love us in the same way he loves Jesus.  It was God who sent his Spirit to live within us and remind us of truths like God’s love for us as his friends and adopted children.  As we regularly call those glorious truths to mind, our minds are renewed and that helps our supreme love for God be restored.

If you are here today and have never received Jesus Christ as your Savior and have NOT escaped eternal judgment, you must do that today.  May God give all of us the grace to bask in the glory of being a friend of God and produce the fruit of new converts for his glory and our joy.

[1] Carson, D.A. (1991).  The Gospel according to John (pp.520-524).  Leicester, England; Grand Rapids, MI:  Inter-Varsity Press; W.B.  Eerdmans.  Electronic version.

 

This morning, we continue in Jesus’ farewell discourse in the gospel of John.  As chapter 15 opens, we come to one of the better-known texts on the essence of what it is to be a disciple of Christ.  When Paul talks about the heart of our relationship with God, he uses the phrase “in Christ” to describe the reality that when a person becomes a Christian, the Holy Spirit spiritually and eternally unites the believer with Christ.  Jesus’ metaphor about the vine and the branches we heard read a few moments ago is a graphic way of depicting what that union between Christ and the believer looks like.

This a foundational teaching on Christian discipleship and if believers are to live fruitful Christian lives, we must seek to understand and increasingly live out our identity as fruitful branches united to Christ, our vine. There is a real challenge for believers in living out our union with Christ and producing spiritual fruit.  That is, we must allow our thinking to be dictated by a paradox taught in the Scripture as it relates to how to increasingly become fruitful or mature in our walk with Jesus.  That’s a challenge because a paradox is when two seemingly contradictory truths are woven together.  Keeping two seemingly contradictory things together in our minds is not easy.  In fact, the Holy Spirit must empower us to do that.

This paradox comes into view every time we see the Christian life described in terms of our union with Christ.  For instance, Paul in Galatians 2:20 says, “²⁰ I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me…”  You hear the union-with-Christ language there—crucified WITH CHRIST and Christ LIVING IN ME.  I died with him and he lives in me. I have been crucified—from a spiritual perspective, it’s NOT me who lives but Christ lives in me. That’s clear enough—no paradox there.  That is, until you get to the second half of the verse where Paul says, “And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” How does Paul fit that together with the first half of the verse?  I thought you no longer live, Paul?  Yet, you say, “the life I now live, I live by faith…”

The verse captures this paradox that shows itself whenever our union with Christ is discussed in Scripture.  Living the Christian life involves (paradoxically) BOTH living as a Christian by faith and not living but instead having Christ live in us because we have been crucified with Christ.  We see similar paradox as Paul relates his own life in Christ as an apostle in First Corinthians 15:10. He says, “¹⁰ But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain…”

There it is—it was God’s grace that was working in and through Paul.  GOD is doing the work!  But in the second half of the verse he says, “On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.”  Ok, that’s confusing.  What was it, Paul?  Was it YOU working harder than all of them?  Or, was it THE GRACE OF GOD working IN you?  And Paul would answer that question, “Yes.”  Its not either/or.  Its both/and.  But that’s confusing because we want it to be EITHER one or the other. How can it be both?  It’s a paradox and its found all over the New Testament.

Jesus’ teaching of the vine and the branches does not unlock this paradox by removing the tension between God’s role and ours in living the Christian life.  But Jesus here DOES throw some light on it through this metaphor.  This vine/branch relationship helps us think more clearly about ourselves and how we relate to God in living as a follower of Jesus.   Before we get into the text, there are a couple of important background truths that will help us better understand and appreciate this teaching.

First, we must remember that Jesus is using a metaphor here to describe our relationship to him and the Father.   Jesus isn’t a literal vine and we are not literal branches—this is a metaphor.  Metaphors are graphic images and Jesus uses this metaphor of the vine and branches to give us a picture of this relationship between him and the individual believer.  With metaphors in the bible, we have to be careful not to press the image too far.  If we try to interpret this teaching in a hyper-literal way, it will end up confusing us.  Metaphors give us an image; an analogy and all analogies break down if you press them too far.

A second background truth is—this metaphor is drawn from the many references to the vine in the Old Testament.  This vine/branches image is not one that Jesus just randomly chooses.  This metaphor was a very familiar one to the Jews.  These disciples knew that in the Old Testament, any vine or vineyard imagery almost always represents Israel as God’s vineyard.  God had called Israel to be his vine and bear his fruit.  That is—display has character to the surrounding nations.  However, in nearly every case in the Old Testament, this image of Israel as God’s vine is used negatively to illustrate what a sick and fruitless vineyard God’s people were.

Isaiah 5:7 is one of many examples of this.  He writes, “⁷For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are his pleasant planting; and he looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold, an outcry!”   God appointed Israel as his vineyard but when he looked for the fruit of his justice and righteousness, his vine was bare.  In his parables, Jesus also speaks of Israel as God’s vineyard and, like the prophets before him, he too uses this image to condemn Israel for the rotten and barren vineyard it was.  Israel was a vineyard whose fruit was either non-existent or rotten.

However, the Jews would have also known that the Old Testament teaches that sometime in the future, God would have a new and fruitful vineyard that bore much fruit.  Isaiah 27:6 tells us, “⁶ In days to come Jacob shall take root, Israel shall blossom and put forth shoots and fill the whole world with fruit.”  That Old Testament, forward-looking understanding of the vineyard is the backdrop of Jesus’ teaching here.  This is why Jesus in verse one says, “I am the true vine…”

Jesus is drawing an implicit contrast between himself as the true and fruitful vine, and Israel—the barren and worthless vine.  Israel was a fruitless vine that God ultimately condemns for its fruitless idolatries.  Jesus however is the vastly superior vine to which the nation of Israel pointed.  This TRUE vine, Jesus, through his branches, his New Covenant people will, without fail—no possibility of failure–“fill the whole world with fruit.”  When we see this teaching through that Old Testament lens, it helps us understand better what Jesus means by it.

With that as background, let’s look at this teaching and find three keys that open the door to faithful discipleship—or three keys to walking faithfully with Christ.  The first key and the main teaching of Jesus here is: For the believer, all our spiritual life and fruit come from/belong to Jesus.  This gets at what we were saying earlier about what is Christ’s role and what is our role in living the Christian life.  It’s important that we become as clear as we can on this truth for several reasons.  First, because this keeps us from believing the lie that the ultimate secret to being a faithful Christian is trying harder—exerting more personal willpower or effort to live the way we are supposed to.  This metaphor openly exposes that lie.  Branches don’t produce fruit by straining, but only through their connection to the life-giving, fruit generating vine.

Verses four and five are clear as Jesus describes himself as the vine and his followers as the branches on which is fruit is found.  Jesus says, “⁴ 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. ⁵ 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.”  THE ONLY WAY the branch can bear fruit is if it abides in the vine.  Without Jesus the Vine, the branch is a withered up, fruitless appendage.  We know this from our own experience.  If you sever a branch from a plant, it will eventually die because the life is not in the branch, it’s in the vine or the plant which imparts its life to its branches.  The branch only transmits or carries within it the life and fruit it receives from the vine—it has no independence from the vine.

Likewise, we have no spiritual life or fruit in ourselves—it is only the life of Christ through the Spirit that gives us life and produces his fruit in us. Jesus concludes this section of this teaching by giving an example of what he means here in verse 11.  “¹¹ These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”  This is very similar to what he said last time in 14:27 but there he’s not speaking of his joy being in us but his peace being in us.  He says, “²⁷ Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you…” This is not some vague, alien sense of peace he leaves us—it’s the very peace of Christ—it’s HIS peace.  This peace we inherit from him is the exact same peace he experienced when he was on earth.  Likewise, here in 15:11, he does not intend for us to have joy in some general sense.  He says that he wants us to abide in him so that HIS joy would be OUR joy.  That we would enjoy with his joy.  John Piper paraphrases it this way. “I have instructed you about abiding in me so that you would enjoy all that I enjoy with the very joy with which I enjoy it.”[1]

It would be unreasonable for us to cut off a branch and expect it to bear fruit.  That’s a picture of futility.  But it’s just as ridiculous and futile for us to expect to bear fruit simply by exerting more of our own effort, or by trying a new discipleship plan or performing other religious works.  The only way to grow spiritually—to bear fruit—the very fruit of Jesus–is to abide in the vine, Jesus.  The reason abiding in Jesus is necessary in order to bear fruit FOR Jesus, is because the fruit he intends that we bear is the very fruit OF Jesus.

Our spiritual fruit includes the ways in which Jesus shows his character through us, but it also includes the “fruit” of those people we have led to Jesus or positively influenced for Jesus.  Our fruit is what Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, produces in us and through us as we abide in Christ.  It’s no coincidence that love, joy and peace—all of which Jesus mentions here in this section of John, are the first three of the fruit of the Holy Spirit according to Paul in Galatians chapter five.  And Jesus teaches us that, as we abide in him—remain in him, trust in him, draw our strength and satisfaction from him– HIS peace and HIS joy and HIS love are  produced in us by the Holy Spirit as he reproduces them in and through us.  In the second half of verse nine, Jesus tells us to “abide in my love.”  Just as with his peace and his joy, he’s telling believers to love with HIS love.

This is why Leon Morris says, “…fruitfulness is impossible apart from Christ, but…is inevitable if we preserve vital contact with him.”[2]  There can be no wider gap than the one between something that’s impossible and something that’s inevitable and the reason that fruit is inevitable if we abide in Christ is because it’s HIS fruit manifest in us by the Holy Spirit.

This is why Jesus says in verse eight, “By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.”  The acid test of the genuineness of a disciple is the presence of spiritual fruit because– the only way a person can bear much fruit is if Jesus, by the Spirit is living and producing HIS fruit through them.  The Father is glorified when we bear much fruit because much fruit in a disciple is a sure-fire indicator that his Son is showing HIS love, peace and joy through that disciple and that glorifies him.

This is not to say that all believers abide in Christ with the same consistency or passion, but all genuine believers abide in Christ at some level and produce fruit at some level.  Another reason disciples must abide in Christ and therefore bear fruit goes back to what we said about the Old Testament prophecies about the vineyard.  If Jesus had disciples who never bore any fruit, that would call into question his credentials as the true, fruit-bearing vine.[3]

All this begs the question—how are we to think of a person who claims to a follower of Christ—a branch, but who genuinely produces no discernible fruit—their lives, their passions, their priorities look just like any unsaved but outwardly nice and moral person?  John tells us in his second epistle in verse nine.  “⁹ Everyone who goes on ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not have God. Whoever abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son.”  As we’ll see later—abiding in Jesus’ words or teaching is the same as abiding in him.  Believers who claim to be in Christ, but don’t bear any of his fruit are not believers.

That may sound confusing to us but one of the repeated themes of John’s gospel is that there are people he calls “believers” who are not believers.  John 2:23 says, “²³ Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing.” John goes on to say however that, Jesus did not entrust himself to these because he knew the heart of all men—that these were phony “believers.”  The same thing is true of how John uses the word, disciples.  In John 6:66, John says, “⁶⁶ After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.”  These were self-professed disciples that stopped following Jesus which means they weren’t genuine disciples.  Judas is the great example of this kind of disciple.  It’s impossible for Christ to produce his fruit in these phony disciples because he is not IN them and he can’t produce his fruit in someone in who he does not reside by the Holy Spirit.  Its these false disciples that are taken away for judgment in verse two. “Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes that it may bear more fruit.”

His purpose is to teach: “there are no true Christians without some measure of fruit.”[4]   He’s certainly NOT saying that God will remove genuine believers who are not fruitful because this text teaches that all genuine believers are fruitful to some degree.

We must allow the warnings like this one in verse two to jolt us into repenting of any lukewarmness toward Christ.  This is the purpose for these kinds of warnings in the New Testament—to cause us to examine ourselves.  For a complete absence of fruit, God will eventually cut you off as a person who, in reality, is a deceived unbeliever and throw you into the fire of his judgment.  On the other extreme are the people whose fruit bearing is hindered because they are not lukewarm but are spiritual perfectionists. These believers can have much fruit in their lives, but their perfectionism keeps them from seeing it.  They live with a continual and paralyzing sense of guilt and inadequacy for their many failures.

I was reminded of this several years ago one Thanksgiving morning.  I was listening to a radio program—a cooking show.  A younger woman who had never made a Thanksgiving dinner called in.  It was very clear she was high strung and putting considerable pressure on herself to turn out an absolutely perfect meal.  The host could hear this expectation and wisely told her, “Don’t let perfection spoil excellence.”  That is—it won’t be perfect—it never is, but if perfection is what you expect, you may sadly be disappointed over what in truth may be an excellent meal.

There are some in the church who need to hear that word.  When they read this text with its warnings and strong language, they haul out their spiritual electron microscopes and immediately do an intense fruit inspection of themselves  And because they’re perfectionists, they fail to see the fruit in their lives.  They see themselves as fruitless when mature believers who know them well would say they have a very fruitful life in Christ.

Notice that God the Father works diligently in believers to increase our fruitfulness.  Verse two again says, “Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes that it may bear more fruit.”  In verse one, Jesus calls his Father “the vinedresser.”  So, again– we see the entire Trinity involved in Christian maturity.  The believer must abide in Jesus to have his fruit—the Father increases fruitfulness by pruning and the fruit that is produced by abiding in Christ is empowered by the Spirit. Verse five says the end of this pruning and abiding is that we bear “much fruit.”

What is meant by pruning?  How does the Father do this?  This is what Hebrews chapter 12 is talking about, but there the author uses the word “discipline” to describe this process of increasing our fruitfulness.  He says in verse seven.  “⁷ It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline?”    Verse 10 continues, “¹⁰ For they [our fathers] disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. ¹¹   For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit [same word] of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.”  Pruning is our loving Father’s way of bringing correction into our lives to cause us to leave our sin and come more fully to him.

It may come in 1000 forms.  It may be a word of correction or rebuke from someone—in or out of the church.  It may be an enslaving addiction we need help getting out from under.  It may be a time of financial hardship for our poor stewardship of his money.  It may be loss of a job if we are being a less than strong witness for Christ.  Not every bad thing that happens to us is disciplinary—some come to test our faith and help us glorify God in other ways.  But some of the hardships we experience ARE disciplinary—they’re God pruning us to put off the old man and put on the new—to repent of our sin and produce the peaceful fruit of righteousness as we are trained by his discipline.

A second key to discipleship is: For the believer, central to abiding in Christ is the ministry of the word, prayer and obedience.  Jesus mentions the “word” a couple of times.  In verse three he tells the disciples, “³ Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you.”  The word “clean” is from the same Greek word as the word “prune” but the Father prunes and Jesus says that he has cleansed these disciples through his word.  This probably means that, by virtue of the correcting influence of the continuous inspired teaching of Jesus, these disciples—except Judas—were clean—ready to bear fruit when the Spirit came.

Notice however the strong connection between the word of God and prayer in verse seven.  “⁷If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.”  We get the meaning of this later in verse 16 where Jesus goes into greater depth.  “¹⁶  You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you.”

When you put those two verses together, Jesus is saying, “I chose you to bear fruit and that implies abiding in me and my words—as my words abide in you, whatever you ask, will be my words.  If my words are abiding in you, then out of that Christ-directed, Christ-saturated heart will flow Christ-directed, Christ-saturated prayers consistent with my name and my Father will answers all of those prayers.”

If we have his mind, his heart, his agenda, and his kingdom priorities, then we will increasingly pray according to those priorities.  As we pray that way, God answers and the answers to those prayers are part of the fruit of our lives. Another point we mustn’t miss here is that the purpose of prayer is that we bear fruit.  We pray so that we can see God’s will done and thereby produce kingdom fruit and thereby glorify God.

Verses 9-10 bring in the importance of obedience.  “⁹ As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. ¹⁰   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.”  We are to abide in this remarkable love Christ has for us–the same kind of love the Father has for the Son.  Then Jesus says something curious.   He tells us that keeping his commandments is a condition for abiding in his love—just as Jesus met that condition of obedience and abides in his Father’s love.

The question is–how can God’s love—which is from his grace and mercy alone and is totally undeserved– be conditioned upon our obedience or anything else we could do?  It’s similar to what we saw two weeks ago.  One scholar puts it this way, “continued enjoyment of that love turns, at least in part, on our response to it.”[5]  You may remember in John 14:21 that Jesus says, “²¹ Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.”

We said that in this way our relationship with God is like our relationship with any other person.  If, as a child you have loving parents but you persist in disobeying them, though they love you, you will not much experience their affection for you—you will not abide in their love because you cannot continue to enjoy their love when you keep grieving them by your disobedience.  This is just the way all relationships work.

Closely related to this is the third key to discipleship. That is:  For the believer, abiding in Christ brings great joy.  These verses can come off as being very heavy—the warnings and conditions can feel a bit intimidating to us.  But if we get that from this text, we’ve missed it badly because Jesus concludes this section of the teaching in verse 11with this glorious promise, “¹¹These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” Notice the relationship between obedience and joy.  Jesus has just commanded us to obey so that we can experience his love.  Here he tells us that as we obey and experience God’s love, we will know joy and not just any joy—we will share in his joy that he receives from obeying the Father.

The main take-home message here is simply–we cannot live a fruitful Christian life on our own.  We are called to abide—remain in Jesus and as that happens—he produces his fruit in us through the Spirit.  So, are we abiding?  Are we living in his word, praying kingdom prayers—enjoying with his joy, loving with his love and living with his peace?  We are the branches, totally dependent on the vine we are connected to by the Spirit.

When we aren’t abiding, but either ignoring God for some reason or trying to serve God in our own strength, from our own initiative and with only our energy, we produce NOTHING—no matter how busy we may be—NOTHING!  If we were able to produce fruit without abiding then we, not God would get the glory and that can never happen.

Finally, perhaps God has spoken to you, clearly revealing to you that you do not have a genuine love for Jesus.  You have never enjoyed with his joy or loved with his love.  If that is you, then place your trust in Christ.  Confess that you’re not united to the vine and you deserve to be cut away and burned.  As you look in faith to Christ for your salvation, he will save you—the Spirit will connect you to the vine and you can spend the rest of your life knowing his peace, enjoying with his joy and loving with his love.

May God give us the grace to abide in Jesus so that this might increasingly describe our life in Christ for his glory and our joy.

[1] https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/glorifying-god-by-bearing-fruit-in-union-with-christ

[2] Morris, Leon.  1988.  Expository Reflections on the Gospel of John.  Baker book House…p. 519

[3] Carson, D.A. Pillar Series, The Gospel of John, electronic version—him commentary on verse 2.

[4] Carson, D.A. Pillar Series…

[5] Carson, D.A. John…

We continue working through Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse” in John 14-17 where Jesus is meeting with his disciples just hours before his crucifixion.  In our text for this morning, Jesus is again reassuring his frightened disciples after he had announced to them that he will soon leave them.  The message of assurance he repeatedly gives to them in this upper room is that he will be going away, but in his absence the Father would send the Helper, the Comforter, the Advocate, the Holy Spirit to actually live in them and minister both to them and through them.

These reassurances that Jesus gives to his original disciples are also encouraging for us because any sincere believer knows that we simply cannot live the kind of life, or do the kind of ministry Jesus calls us to do without massive infusions of supernatural help from the Holy Spirit.  In the text Bill read a few moments ago, I find four words of assurance for us.  All of these assurances are rooted in the Holy Spirit and his ministry to the church.

The first word of assurance is in verses 25-26.  Jesus says, “²⁵ “These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. ²⁶ But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.”  The first assurance from Jesus is that: The Holy Spirit will teach us how to live and minister for Jesus.  First, notice the Holy Spirit—the Helper who encourages us, strengthens us and advocates for us before God the Father will, according to Jesus, come in his name.  The fact that the Spirit will be sent by the Father in Jesus’ name is another way Jesus is tightly connecting the ministry of the Spirit both to him and the Father.

This also tells us that the main lesson the Spirit teaches us about living and ministering for Jesus is that –all of our lives and ministries are to be done in his strength for the glory of Jesus.  Let’s briefly do some thinking about how the Spirit’s ministry to Jesus is like the Spirit’s ministry to us. We saw last week that– just as Jesus came in the Father’s name to do his works through Jesus, so will the Spirit come in Jesus’ name to do Jesus’ works through his people, the church.  When Jesus was incarnated—when he came in the flesh, it was the Father sending, Jesus was ministering, and the Spirit was empowering.

As God continues to incarnate himself through the church, it is Jesus who is sending, we, the church is ministering, and once again, the Spirit is empowering.  Jesus did not independently do his works.  He did the Father’s works through the Holy Spirit.  Likewise, God’s people, the church is not doing our own works, but the works of Jesus through the same Holy Spirit.

We must hear and internalize this amazing parallelism between Jesus’ ministry in the power of the Spirit and our ministry in the power of the Spirit.  Jesus ministered in his Father’s name because he came representing the Father. We minister in Jesus’ name because we are representing or incarnating Jesus and BOTH Jesus and the church minister in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Let’s take it one more step.  Everything Jesus did was ultimately about the Father—to 1. glorify the Father by showing the world what the Father was like and 2. To reveal Jesus’ love for him.  All that was empowered by the Spirit.  Everything the church does is ultimately about Jesus—to glorify him by showing the world, in the power of the Spirit, what Jesus is like and to reveal our love for Jesus through our obedience to him.  As we do that, the glory will go to Jesus, but it will also redound back (or, greatly contribute) to the glory of the Father.

This set of truths about who we are and why we’re here is absolutely essential for us to have in our hearts if we’re to live dynamic, supernaturally empowered lives.  This is because it forces us to remain vertically oriented toward God and not to ourselves or others.  It’s so easy for us to live the Christian life as it were simply a life-long religious assignment we’ve been given.  That way of looking at the Christian life is guaranteed to bring either pride and self-sufficiency, or great frustration and self-hatred because its ultimately all about US.

What Jesus is teaching here in the Upper Room is so vitally important because this parallel reality between Jesus and his mission and us and ours reminds us that our lives are intended to be all about HIM.  The works that we do are HIS works, not our own.  The power that we utilize is THE SPIRIT’S power and the Spirit’s role in us is to make much of Jesus.  Our motivation for doing what we do is not our own glory, or to feel good about ourselves, it is for HIS glory.

This teaching on the coming of the Holy Spirit reminds us how utterly God-centered the Christian life is.  We are not autonomous in any way.  We are sent by God, empowered by God– to bring glory to God by revealing God. The Christian life completely and very tightly orbits around God, God, God!

Jesus gets to the heart of this later on in the discourse when he says in 16:14 about the Holy Spirit, “¹⁴ He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”  Again, the Spirit’s role is to lead us to live lives and do works that reveal and glorify Christ in our context and to empower us to do them.  Now, for the original disciples, this meant the Spirit would bring to remembrance what he had personally taught them.

For us, because we have never literally walked with Jesus, it works a bit differently. For us, the Holy Spirit teaches us how we’re to live and minister for Jesus mainly as he illumines the Spirit-inspired Word of God.  This is how we-2000 years after Christ, can experience Jesus speaking directly to us.  He also brings to our remembrance specific truths from the Word of God when we need them.  The Spirit will prompt us to minister to those both in the church and outside the church through the Spirit-inspired Word of God—the Bible.  This is why, if we are to glorify Jesus, we must, all our lives, work to master his word. Understanding all that helps us know how to pray God’s will for us.

To help us keep the main thing, the “main thing,” it’s important for us to pray some more general prayers at times–about God, how he works in our lives and his mission for us.  Prayers like this:  “Father, thank you that you’ve sent the Spirit to me so that I can glorify your Son Jesus as you, through the Spirit, reveal what Jesus is like by living his life and doing his works through me.  Thank you that this is just what you did when Jesus revealed what you were like as you did your works through Jesus by the Spirit.  Father, by the power of the Holy Spirit, reveal Jesus to others through me.  First, reveal him through me as, by the power of the Holy Spirit, I continue his supernatural ministry.  Second, reveal Jesus through me by the fruit of the Spirit, as I manifest his supernatural character.  Do all of this, Father, so that by the Spirit, Jesus would be glorified, and you would be glorified.”  That’s BIG-picture Christianity and we must carry that understanding with us as a baseline of our doctrine of living for Jesus.

This is what the Christian life is about!  If that kind of prayer is not consistent with the desires of your heart, something is WAY out of whack. It reminds us that God sent the Holy Spirit so that our lives would be ALL about Jesus–HIS revelation, HIS glory, HIS power, HIS ministry, HIS character.  As we regularly think that way and pray that way, it reminds us that we are not here for us.  Our lives are NOT about us.

It also helps us remain dependent upon the Spirit to accomplish our God-centered purpose.  Finally, it reminds us that all THREE Persons of the Godhead are impassioned about, and involved in fulfilling, the purpose for our lives. In light of all that, we know we are spiritually healthy when our biggest desire is, “Oh Father, give me a passion for Jesus—an all-consuming, life-transforming, mission-shaping passion for his glory—his name and his fame, here and to the nations.  Cause your Spirit to impart to me HIS own passion for Jesus—that I might reflect the Spirit’s passion for the glory of Jesus.”

A second word of assurance is in verse 27.  Jesus says, “²⁷ Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”  This is a very comforting verse, but it’s even more comforting when we understand it in its original context.  When Jesus promises “peace” to his disciples, these Jewish men knew exactly what he was talking about.  But unless we understand a bit about Jewish culture, we won’t appreciate what it is to have this peace of Christ.  When we conceive of having “peace,” many think about that feeling of contentment people get when they’ve spent a relaxing day on the lake.

That’s not at all what Jesus is talking about.  You don’t need the Spirit for that.  Anyone can potentially experience that feeling because it’s rooted in our circumstances.  A peaceful setting can produce peaceful feelings for most of us.  The peace that Jesus is talking about is not dependent on the circumstances.  This kind of peace—his peace—can rule our hearts in our darkest hour.  This is the same peace Jesus showed throughout his arrest and passion.

Have you ever noticed that when the soldiers come out to arrest him (and Jesus alone knew the torture that meant for him) have you ever noticed that, as everyone else is drawing swords and running for their lives, Jesus is in complete control?  He’s telling Peter to calm down, he calmly re-attaches the ear of Malchus.  He calmly queries the soldiers about why the Jews were arresting him at night in this garden.  He is the picture of peace and tranquility—he’s the calm eye of the hurricane in the midst of a demonically-inspired storm of evil.

This peace he promises us through the Spirit is rooted in the Old Testament concept of “shalom.”  The Greek word here is not “shalom,” but when New Testament writers employ this word translated “peace,” they’re very much embedding it with this Old Testament meaning of shalom.  A second word of assurance rooted in the Father sending of the Spirit is: The Holy Spirit will give us a comprehensive sense of well-being grounded in God’s presence with us.  This is a basic understanding of the peace that Jesus says he is giving (or, literally) “bequeathing” to his church. In other words, Jesus is saying that this peace he will leave with his church is part of the spiritual inheritance he gives to all believers.  In addition to this peace not being dependent upon our circumstances, here are three more quick truths about this peace Jesus gives us.

First, the kind of peace Jesus gives is comprehensive. This is not simply an absence of anxiety—shalom also includes a sense of personal security, wholeness, completeness—a comprehensive sense of well-being.  This is the sense that all is right with you and all is right with your world even when the circumstances are all screaming at you that NOTHING is right with you or your world.

Second, this peace Jesus  gives is dependent upon God’s presence with us.  The reason Jesus promises his peace in this context is because he is promising his presence with the disciples through the Holy Spirit.  We have Jesus’ peace with us through the Spirit because we have JESUS with us through the Spirit.

If we really believed this—that Jesus himself, the Lord of glory, were with us—standing next to us every moment (as it were), there would be no reason for us to fear anything.  If we need protection, Jesus is there to give us his invincible protection.  If we need courage, Jesus is there to assure us that all will be well with us.  Whatever we need in that moment of crisis or trauma, Jesus who, by the Spirit, is here with us is MORE than able to bring us through it with joy.

Third, this peace Jesus gives has been purchased through God’s work through the gospel.   This is what Paul is saying in Romans 5:1 “¹ Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace [shalom] with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”  The reason we can have this shalom is because, through the gospel of Christ’s blood and the forgiveness and reconciliation with God it brings, we can enjoy complete harmony with God—he’s not mad at us anymore!  Because Jesus purchased our peace with God through his suffering on the cross, it can never be taken away.  It’s possible for us not to experience it if we walk in unbelief instead of faith, but the purchased peace of Jesus is always with us.

That means that– even when we’re in times of great trial, the peace of Christ, not anxiety or worry, can rule in our hearts.  Paul tells the Colossians, “¹⁵ And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful.”  This peace is something we have to let—allow, permit to rule our hearts.  What triggers this supernatural peace is faith in the goodness and power and promises of God.  Again, this peace is not simply the absence of anxiety.  In the midst of trial, we can actually have this calming sense of fellowship and security reign in our hearts.  If we’re not walking with this sense of peace that Jesus gave us, then we’re not walking under the control of the Holy Spirit because the fruit of the Spirit is “…love, joy PEACE…” the very peace of Christ himself.

A third word of assurance we see in John 14 that’s rooted in the coming of the Spirit is: The Holy Spirit will give us a selfless love for Christ that places his glory ahead of our own comfort/survival.  This is implied in verse 28 through the negative example these disciples give us who do not yet have the Spirit.  Jesus says to his disciples, “²⁸ You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I will come to you.’ If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I.”  Jesus is saying something very powerful here.

Last week, was saw the airtight connection Jesus makes between our obedience and loving him.  If you walked out of here discouraged and wondering if you really loved Jesus, take some comfort from the fact that in verse 28, he implies that his disciples didn’t love him either.  And these men had left everything they had to follow him!  We know he is communicating that they don’t love him because he tells them that if they DID love him, they would have rejoiced and been happy for him because he is going into presence of the One he loves—the One who is greater than he—the Father.

That tells us that not loving Jesus is a matter of degrees.  These disciples loved Jesus in the abstract.  In John 21, after his denial of Jesus, Jesus asks Peter if he loved him and Peter at one point tells him, “Yes, Lord; you know I love you.”  One implication for us is—if we’re not consistently obedient to Christ, we may still genuinely love him, but our love for him is far from complete and our lives don’t much communicate that we love him.

Jesus says here that the Father is “greater” than him.  This is only in the sense of his authority over Jesus within the Trinity, not that he is any more divine than Jesus.  Jesus tells these men that if they loved him, they would have placed his joy above their own selfish desires to keep him with them indefinitely.  Genuine love is selfless and sacrificial—sacrificing our self-centered desires for the good of those we love.  Instead, these disciples were thinking only of themselves and Jesus rebukes them for their lack of love for him.  It’s also true that one reason they were so anxious and not experiencing the peace of Christ is because they were selfishly thinking only of themselves and that kind of self-focus will always drive away the peace of Christ.

Another reason we know that this rebuke teaches us the Spirit is intent on making us selfless lovers of Jesus is because in Acts, when the Spirit HAD come, this is precisely the way the disciples live.  They continually place the glory of Christ ahead of their own safety.  In Acts chapter five, the apostles are brought before the Jewish religious leaders and are strictly charged not to preach Christ.  Verse 29 says, “²⁹ But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men.”  The Spirit is empowering their boldness and their top priority is transparently NOT about them.  It’s about bringing glory to Christ by boldly preaching his gospel regardless of the opposition.  The Holy Spirit, when we allow his influence to be dominant in our lives, will give us this selfless love for Christ and his glory that will dwarf any concerns we might have for our personal safety or comfort or reputation.

A final word of assurance rooted in the sending of the Spirit is implied here and that is:  The Holy Spirit will give us a confidence that the Adversary will not be able to keep us from obeying Christ.  Jesus says in verse 30, “³⁰ I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no claim on me, ³¹ but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father. Rise, let us go from here.” Jesus is telling them that he won’t be talking to them very much in the next few hours.  We know the reason is because he will be caught up in all the events connected with his passion.

Jesus says the reason these events will occur is because “the ruler of this world is coming.”  That is—his passion was the final, last ditch effort of Satan to attempt to get Jesus to sin.  Satan will literally be coming to him in the form of Judas because at this point, Satan is controlling Judas.  But Jesus says something very reassuring.  “He [Satan] has no claim on me, but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father.”

Jesus is reassuring his disciples that what he will suffer in the hours ahead in no way indicates that Satan is in control.  He says Satan has no claim on me—literally, “he has nothing in me.”  That is—he has no legal right to control or manipulate Jesus because Jesus has no sin for him to latch onto.  Jesus wants his disciples to know that, although Satan is involved in his imminent suffering as a secondary cause, HE is NOT running the show.  He’s not the primary cause, the Father is.  Jesus reassures his disciples that he will endure this suffering at his Father’s command so that the world may know that he loves him.  We see this truth in Acts 2:22 as Peter is preaching his great sermon at Pentecost.

He says, “²² “Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know— ²³  this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.”  As Jesus was being abused and tortured, it would have been easy for these disciples to see this and believe that Satan was in ultimate control and killing their Master against his will.  Jesus prevents them from reaching that conclusion here.  He’s saying, “This will be Satan’s hour—The Father has given him authority over this very short window of time as part of his plan so that I can, in the ultimate way, show my love for my Father.”

This is also a word of assurance for us because for those in Christ, Satan has no claim us.  His victory over Satan at the cross purchased for us final victory over Satan as well and the reason is because the Holy Spirit unites us to Jesus so that HIS victory over Satan becomes OUR victory over Satan.  Another aspect of this victory over Satan is one Paul cites in Colossians.  That is, that on the cross Jesus did the work to forgive our sins and that work “disarmed the rulers and authorities, putting them to open shame by triumphing over them.” In forgiving our sins Jesus, “…canceled the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands.”

Before our sins were forgiven, Satan had a legal claim on us—he had a merciless, legal power over us through our unforgiven sins and the law that condemned us for them.  But when our sins were forgiven, his controlling power over us was broken.  Just as Satan has no claim on Jesus, he likewise has no claim on those who are IN JESUS.  Just as Satan’s power could do nothing to keep Jesus from obeying the Father and demonstrating his love for him, so too are we, by the Spirit free from Satan’s power to prevent us from obeying Jesus and demonstrating our love for him.

There’s a great picture of this in the Old Testament.  In Zechariah chapter three, the author presents a vision of heaven.  Its set in the heavenly throne room and there are three main actors.  Sitting as Judge is the Angel of the LORD—this divine being we see in the Old Testament at times.  On trial as the defendant is the high priest of Israel, Joshua, who represents Israel.  The prosecuting attorney preparing to make his case against Joshua is Satan, the Accuser.

Speaking of God, Zechariah says in verse one, “¹ Then he [God] showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him.  ² And the LORD said to Satan, “The LORD rebuke you, O Satan! The LORD who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is not this a brand plucked from the fire?”  ³ Now Joshua was standing before the angel, clothed with filthy garments.  ⁴ And the angel said to those who were standing before him, “Remove the filthy garments from him.” And to him he said, “Behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you with pure vestments.”  ⁵ And I said, “Let them put a clean turban on his head.” So they put a clean turban on his head and clothed him with garments. And the angel of the LORD was standing by.”

Satan surely thought he had an “open and shut,” “slam dunk” case against Joshua because Zechariah tells us that Joshua was clothed with “filthy garments.”  More literally, his garments were covered with excrement.  According to the Law, that would have completely defiled him before God, making him unacceptable to him.  However, before Satan can begin his prosecution, the LORD declares Joshua “not guilty.”  He says to Joshua that he had “taken your iniquity away from you.”  The reason he does this is, as verse one says, “…the LORD has chosen Jerusalem.”

As the high priest, Joshua was representing Jerusalem and God had chosen his people for something and his forgiveness of their sin and his sovereign purposes for them overruled any charge Satan might bring against him and Israel.   He had already revealed his will to preserve the Jews by bringing them out of the exile.  Through the vision, the LORD is telling us that the exile had “charred” his people, but in his mercy, he had plucked them from the fire of exile.  And he didn’t rescue his people out of exile to allow them to be condemned by Satan.  In fact, he removes his filthy garments from him and clothed him with his own pure vestments.

What a great picture of what God has done for believers as it relates to Satan and his accusations against us!  That is—as unforgiven sinners, we were covered with the excrement of our sin, making us unacceptable before God, standing condemned before him.  But through his work on the cross for us, Jesus has taken away our iniquity.  We’ve been rescued—plucked out of the fires of hell.  Like Joshua, we too have had our sin-caked, filthy garments removed and replaced by a pristine robe of righteousness—the very righteousness of Christ.

And the reason is, like Joshua, we are part of God’s chosen people.  God has a sovereign purpose for us that, by the Spirit, we might glorify him and that cancels any charge that Satan can bring against us.  ^“1 There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”  Those in Christ have nothing to fear from Satan.  Like Jesus, he has nothing on us because the Holy Spirit has united us with Jesus, giving us the same legal status before Satan Jesus has.

If you this morning have not by faith received Jesus and his saving work on the cross, know that you are still covered with your iniquity and stand condemned before a holy God.  Satan has a legal right to bring condemning charges against you before the Judge.  Come to Christ this morning and receive his forgiveness as one of God’s chosen people—as one plucked out of the fire–rescued from his wrath to bring him glory.

When we hear about the incredible empowering, peace-giving, Satan-overcoming ministry of the Spirit, it’s tempting to be discouraged if we aren’t seeing much of that in our lives.  Its far better to use that emotional energy praying for a spiritual revival brought by the Holy Spirit.  Pray that God’s Spirit would move in a new way in your life, your marriage, your family, North Shore Church and this region.  Pray that God, by his Spirit would cause us to repent of our sin, know his power, experience his peace and overcome Satanic assaults.  May God give us the grace to continually cry out for a new and dynamic move of the Spirit of God for the glory of Jesus and the joy of his people.

We continue to work our way through chapter 14 of John’s gospel.  The text that Brian read for us this morning grows out of two promises Jesus made in the text we read last time.  First, his promise that when he left his disciples to go to the Father, they would “do even greater works” than he had done.  We said these “greater works” were accomplished through the apostles winning many sinners to Christ who were supernaturally transformed to a radical, new way of life.

In the book of Acts, we see that promise fulfilled as the church exploded with new converts.  When Jesus makes this kind of promise to them, the disciples surely would have wondered how on earth they could ever do greater works than him.  That’s why now, he introduces his teaching on the coming of the Holy Spirit.  It’s the Spirit of God, who the Father will send after Jesus leaves them, who will provide the miraculous spiritual power necessary to bring spiritual life to spiritually dead human hearts.

A second promise Jesus made is in verse 14, “If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.”  In these verses for today, he clarifies that promise by defining who he meant by the “you” who will ask him anything in his name.  He tells them here that this promise is intended only for those who genuinely love him.  That is–those who, because of their love for him, obey his commandments.  He wants to prevent his disciples from thinking that anyone can manipulate God into giving them what they want simply by asking for it in Jesus’ name.

We said last time that when you ask God for something in Jesus’ name, that’s for Jesus’ sake–that Jesus will be magnified as he gives you what you ask for.  That means that those who rightly ask in Jesus’ name will be those who love him, not those who seek to use him.  Asking for something in Jesus’ name is not like rubbing the genie’s lamp.[1]  That’s how these verses relate to what we saw last time.

The touchstone truth of this text that Jesus repeatedly returns to is first in verse 15, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”  That truth is communicated in some form in verses 15, 21, 23 and 24—four times in ten verses.  It forms the spine to which all the other truths are connected.  This truth is easily and frequently misunderstood and wrongly applied.  So, to keep us from some of these common misunderstandings, let’s first think about some clarifying truths that I hope will keep us from applying this teaching in inappropriate and hurtful ways.

First, in saying “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” we must understand that Jesus’ main purpose for this teaching is NOT to provide a test to determine whether we really and truly love him.  That doesn’t fit the context at all.  We shouldn’t apply this promise as if Jesus were saying, “The reason you must obey me is to prove your love for me and if you disobey me, you don’t love me.”

Too many believers understand this verse something like that.  When rightly understood–what he’s really saying is, “if you love me—the result of your love for me will be that you will obey me.” Jesus places the main stress on our love for him, not our obedience to him.  The point is that one of the implications of loving Jesus is –increasingly obeying his commands.  Jesus intends our obedience to him to be part of the overflow of our love for him.

Jesus is also implying the importance of having the kind of obedience that is rooted in love for him.  That’s a VERY important qualifier because outward obedience to God does NOT always indicate the presence of love for him.  You can outwardly “obey” his commands without loving him.  In First Corinthians 13, Paul implies that we can do even intensely sacrificial things like, “give away all I have” and “deliver my body to be burned” for Jesus and do it without any love.

We can come to church, offer our tithes, tell others about Jesus …without loving him.  We can do anything for God from only a raw a sense of duty.  “Why do you live the way you do?  Because I’m supposed to.”  That’s very different than saying, “I live the way I do because it’s a way I express my love for Jesus.”

Another clarifying truth about this teaching is that it also reveals how wrong it is to believe that loving God means having a purely emotional response to him.  It’s possible to be a person who cries every time you hear “How Great Thou Art” and be living in complete rebellion to the commandments of Jesus.  Emotions alone are NOT indicators of love for God.  Loving God—as Jesus describes it here, results in something far more powerful. It produces a willing and often sacrificial obedience to his commands.

Another helpful truth in knowing how best to apply this teaching of Jesus is to understand what Jesus means here by “love.”  What does he mean when he says, “If you LOVE me, you will keep my commandments?”  It’s really important for us to know that what Jesus means by loving him means to intensely desire him.  If we’re to understand HOW love for God results in our obedience, we must know what this love looks like that leads to obedience.  Though part of our love for God is expressed in obeying him, there’s more to loving God than just obeying him.  Underlying and supporting that obedience that Jesus is talking about is a particular set of affections/emotions for God—this intense desire for him.  We said earlier that loving God was far more than just having emotional feelings toward God, but loving God is never less than having affections for him.  You cannot intensely desire Jesus if you don’t love him.

Maybe we can understand more of what this kind of love looks like when we see it in another context.  Jesus says in John 3:19, “¹⁹ And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved [same word] the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.”  Lost people love the darkness—that’s the spiritually dark world that opposes God and where the power of sin reigns. Does this “loving the darkness” mean that the people are somewhat disposed toward the darkness?  Have they grown mildly fond of the darkness?

No—they’re lusting after it, craving it, longing for it, they’re intensely desiring the darkness.  Their desire for it is so strong that it utterly blinds them to the radiance of the glorious light of God in Jesus.  John uses this same word for love in 12:43. He’s speaking of the Pharisees and says, “⁴³ for they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.”  He’s saying that they want this glory—they covet after it—they labor to get it. That’s the kind of love for Christ that results in obedience.

John Piper writes, “…loving Jesus is not a matter of doing excellent things.  It’s a matter of delighting in an excellent Savior. Jesus says doing excellent things—keeping my word—is the result of delighting in an excellent Savior…This is the only way to love the Son: to be pleased with him. To feel pleasure in him.  To esteem and admire and enjoy and treasure and stand in trembling, happy awe of him.”[2]  THIS is the kind of love for Christ that results in obedience.

An abiding respect for Jesus—warm feelings toward him—a sentimental attachment to him will never cause you to lay down your life for him in obedience or do the many other things he calls his church to do.  No—this is an intense, vibrant, overflowing love.  Does this describe your love for Christ—esteeming, enjoying, treasuring, standing in trembling and joyful awe of him?

No one feels this all the time—we live in a sinful world and we’re sinners whose love can run hot and cold at times.  But if this is not frequently our experience in our love for Christ—we won’t be obeying him very consistently.  And what obedience we DO exhibit will be coming solely from a dry, lifeless a sense of duty and obligation. What that means is—if we’re not living in consistent obedience to Jesus—the root problem is NOT our disobedience.  The root problem is our failure to love—failure to treasure Jesus rightly.

Does this mean that I don’t have to employ strategies to battle sin and kill my indwelling sin but instead, just love Jesus?  No.  The point is—in order to want to battle against our sin and conquer it as Jesus’ death enables us to, we must first love Jesus.  There must be love for Jesus in our hearts if we are to wage the intense battle against our sin that God calls us to wage because love for Jesus is a necessary motivation for that hard work.

A final clarifying truth of this teaching of Jesus is:  Our love for Jesus is only one facet of a larger jewel revealing the way we relate to God. Jesus begins this teaching with, “If you love me”—but this love for Jesus is not something we could ever generate independently.  Though we need to labor every day to stoke the fire of our love for God— (this is one reason why we pray and study the word and fellowship with other believers) none of that stoking alone will cause us to love and treasure Jesus.

This is because, as we’ve said before, the gospel always, always, always begins with what God in his love has done for us.  Paul says in Romans 5:8, “⁸but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”  God loved us when we were still spitting in his face.  The first facet of this jewel of how we relate to God is GOD’S LOVE FOR US.  First John 4:19 says, “¹⁹   We love because he first loved us.”  As we’ve said many times before, our love is always in response to God’s prior love for us.  The ONLY genuine, biblical love we can give to God is in response to his love of us.

We must know that any genuine, biblical love we express to God is in response to his love for us shown most powerfully at the cross.  That means the second facet of this jewel revealing how we relate to God is that WE RESPOND TO GOD’S LOVE WITH LOVE FOR HIM.  First John 5:3 says, “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments.  And his commandments are not burdensome.”  The reason his commandments are not burdensome is NOT because they are not demanding.  It’s because they are to be done NOT mainly out of a sense of duty, but as an overflow of our Holy Spirit-infused, radical love for Jesus.

A great example of the motivating power of love is Jacob’s relationship to Rachel in the Old Testament.  You’ll recall that Laban had Jacob work for him for seven years before he would give him Rachel to marry.  Though Laban turned out to be a liar, Jacob’s response to his seven years or hard work is illustrative for us.  He said that it was as if it were only a “few days because of his love for Rachel.”  His love was a powerful motivator to work hard for Laban and to do it with joy!

Second John 1:6 says— “⁶And this is love, that we walk according to his commandments…” Biblical love for Jesus expresses itself as we walk according to his commandments.  In all of those verses—it’s assumed that we’re responding in love to his prior and greater love shown through Christ. If we don’t get that—REALLY get that in our hearts–all these truths about the relationship between loving God and obeying God will be a great burden to us.  If our main focus is on obeying Christ and not loving Christ, we will live with an ongoing sense of guilt and condemnation.  Obedience is crucial, but ONLY the obedience that is a result of our love for God.

The third facet of this jewel is revealed in John 15:9-10.  Jesus says, “⁹ As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. ¹⁰ 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. ¹¹ These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”

Here, Jesus tells us something about how we remain in the love he has for us—how we experience it on an ongoing basis.  The first facet is—God demonstrates his love for us in the cross.  The second is—we respond to that love with a love for him marked by obedience.  The third facet of this jewel is WE MORE CONSISTENTLY EXPERIENCE GOD’S LOVE FOR US AS WE ABIDE IN HIS LOVE THROUGH OBEDIENCE.  This may sound a lot more complicated than it really is.  In fact, we experience this all the time in our other personal relationships.

If you repeatedly do things or present attitudes that are opposed to what your spouse or some other loved one expects of you, he/she will still love you in the abstract, but you will not experience that love.  Disobedience or rebellion interrupts the warmth of our fellowship with God just like it does with other persons we relate to. This truth also tells us that our experience of God’s love for us can be so powerful that it can keep us consistently obedient.  It motivates ongoing obedience to him.

The final facet of this jewel in how we relate to Jesus is the main theme of the text that and is—GOD PROMISES TO DEEPLY, RICHLY BLESS US AS WE WALK IN LOVING OBEDIENCE TO JESUS.  I find two blessings in this text that Jesus promises to those who respond to his love in obedience.  The first is found in verse 16.  After Jesus tells his disciples, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments, he says, “¹⁶   And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, ¹⁷ even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.”  This first blessing of obedience is—He will send the Helper, the Holy Spirit of truth.  

Again, Jesus is not laying down a condition—”Only If you obey me, will I send the Spirit.”  It can’t mean that because we cannot possibly obey Christ without the Spirit.  Here, Jesus is telling us that the obedience that he requires of us, he does not expect from us without God’s help.  He knows that any obedience of ours requires God’s supernatural enabling.  So, he is committing to send the necessary resource—the Holy Spirit, so that we can indeed obey him.

Notice he says the Father will send ANOTHER helper.  Who is the first?  1 John 2:1 says it’s Jesus. “¹ My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” The word translated “advocate” here is the same one translated “Helper” in our passage. “Helper” does not mean that we are in charge and the Spirit gives whatever assistance we need to do what we want to do.  He’s NOT that kind of Helper.  He helps us in the same way Jesus helped his disciples when he was with them. 

The Helper—the Holy Spirit advocates, strengthens, encourages and brings the resources we need every moment in order to obey Jesus.  Jesus also calls him “the Spirit of Truth.”  He uses that terms for the Spirit because he wants to assure the disciples that they will not be losing anything when he leaves them and sends the Spirit in his place.  Earlier, Jesus has told them that he is the truth.  Now he tells them that –the Spirit is the Spirit of truth.

So, the first blessing God gives in coordination with our obedience is—he sends to us One who encourages, strengthens and is our Advocate before the Father—One who is like Jesus—the Spirit of Truth who will tell us the truth of Jesus when he is not physically present with us.  This Spirit of truth is not given to the world—those outside the church.  Jesus says of him in verse 17, “…the world cannot receive [him], because it neither sees him nor knows him.”  Paul says the same thing in First Corinthians 2:14. “¹⁴ The natural person— [the unbeliever] does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.”

Today, we might say—the world cannot receive the Holy Spirit because their minds and hearts are tuned to a different spiritual frequency.  Believers, in having received the Spirit, have been given new spiritual “receivers” that can pick up God’s frequency.  So, if, as you listen to a message like this and you’re wondering— “why on earth would anyone voluntarily submit themselves to this every week for 40 minutes” you may be tuned into the world’s frequency and not God’s.  You may need a new receiver—a new, Holy Spirit-filled heart that will actually WANT to know God better.

Unlike the world, Jesus says of the church in verse 17, “You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.” The Spirit had been dwelling with them because it was the Spirit who empowered the ministry of Jesus.  Through his ministry to Jesus, he had dwelt WITH them in that sense.  But what is coming after Jesus goes to the Father is new.  It was promised by the Old Testament prophets, but had not yet been fulfilled.  At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit actually takes up residence in all who believe.  Verse 18 says, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.”  Here, Jesus momentarily turns the spotlight back on himself.  The reason is because the apostles are scared at the prospect of Jesus leaving them. When he tells them that he’s leaving and sending the Spirit to them in his place, he anticipates the question, “Yes, but what about you, Jesus?”[3]

Here he tells them that he will not leave them as orphans.  This initial time away from them is only temporary.  He will again come to them in his resurrection.  That’s what is meant here because that’s verse 19 points to it. “¹⁹ Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me…”  The world never witnessed Jesus after his burial.  His post-resurrection appearances were only to his followers.  To the world, he was gone but his followers saw him several times in those weeks before he ascended.

A second blessing that comes from God in response to our loving obedience to Jesus is: We will experience God’s love for us and will come to know Jesus more intimately.  Again, we see this main touchstone in verse 21. “²¹Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me.”  Then, he announces the blessing, “And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.”  This tells us that God’s love for us not only precedes and motivates the love we give back to him, but he infuses us with another blast of his love after we respond to his love through our loving obedience to him.  Here’s the sequence. God demonstrates or shows his love to us through Jesus’s death on the cross.  We respond to that love by giving him loving obedience.  God then responds to THAT by giving us, in some expression, another dose of his love for us. That’s the pattern!

In a sense, God’s love to us bookends our obedience—his love comes prior to our obedience through the Holy Spirit to empower us to obey and follows after our obedience.  This provides a dual motivation for our obedience.  First, we’re motivated to respond in obedience to his love through Christ and what he did for us at the cross.  But there’s also a future motivation because we’re promised more expressions of God’s love as we obey.

Jesus, as one of his expressions of love to those who obey, tells us that he will “manifest [him]self to him” who obeys him.  This means that he will reveal himself to us in ways that are precious to us. In response to our obedience, we will come to know him more intimately as he progressively reveals himself to us.  The promise that our obedience brings a deeper manifestation of Jesus to us—is another tremendous motivator for us to obey. Do we want to know Jesus more intimately?  Then, by God’s grace, give him your loving obedience.

At this point, the disciples have heard that the world will not see Jesus, but they will see him and that left them with a question.  They all assumed that when they saw him again, he would return to earth in the glory of his magnificent, heavenly final return. Because that was their expectation, they wondered how on earth that could happen and the world not see it.  That’s what Judas is getting at in verse 22, “²² Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?”  Jesus answers by repeating the touchstone in verse 23, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word…” This is Jesus’ way of saying, “I will manifest myself only to those who love me and keep my word—it’s not for the world at this point.”

In verse 23, Jesus explains in more detail the nature of this more intimate relationship to him in response to our loving obedience to him.  This is what he says in verse 23. “…If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”  This is the only time in the New Testament we’re told that in some way both the Father and the Son will make their home in us.  We get a clue what he means by this because he used this same word translated “home” back in verse two.  “² In my Father’s house [home] are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?”

That usage refers to God’s home in heaven–the one here in verse 23 refers to God’s home on earth as he takes up residence in his church.  The blessing is (paraphrasing John Piper) –“If you love me and as a result keep my word, I will make this world—even with all its sin and suffering—I will make it for you like a slice of heaven on earth.”  I will make my home in you on earth—as a foretaste of you making your home with me in heaven.  That’s wonderful! That’s enough to motivate us to obey Jesus!

In verse 24, he states this touchstone truth again, but this time he puts it negatively.  “²⁴ Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me.”  Again, the emphasis is on love—in this case, the absence of it.  If there is an absence of love, there can be no obedience.  And, as if to emphasize how serious not keeping his word is, Jesus adds, “And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me.”

The implication is, if you do not love Jesus and therefore offer no obedience to him—that will bring horrific consequences from both the Father and the Son.  So, the complete picture is–when you live in loving obedience to God—BOTH the Father and the Son will bless you.  But if you do NOT love God and live in corresponding DISobedience, you will know the curse of both the Father and Son.

Let’s try to tie all this together by giving three points of application.  The first is—Loving Jesus through obedience to his commands is far more rewarding than disobeying him.  This may seem self-evident, but we frequently need to be reminded of this because the persistent lie of the world, the flesh and the devil is that if we disobey God, life will somehow be better for us.  For some believers, they’ve lived so much of their Christian life purely out of a sense of raw duty, that even the words “obedience” or “obey” have taken on a connotation of suffering and joyless drudgery.  If that is true for you, this text should be a powerful renew-er of your mind.

The truth of Jesus here is –it’s ALWAYS, every single time, better—long term, if we show our love for God by obeying him.  This is a big part of what it is to walk or live by faith–to believe that, even when it doesn’t feel right to us, we will do what God says and not our feelings.   The life of faith is trusting in God—his promises like these here that loving obedience to Jesus—no matter how hard it may be at the time—will ultimately result in much greater good for us in this life and the next.  And that trust is rooted in our love for God.  The more and longer you have loved someone, the more you trust in them—that they are FOR you.

A second point of application is—Believers have dual motivation to show our love for God through obedience.  The gospel—Jesus’ love for us as seen through his sacrificial death is our primary motivation.  If his love for us—displayed on Calvary doesn’t cause us to love him, to desire him, to crave him, savor him, to make him our treasure, then we don’t know—or at least—we haven’t deeply internalized the gospel. But in addition to his love displayed 2000 years ago on Golgotha, we have the promise that we will increasingly experience more of his love as we express our love for him by obeying obey him.

When we’re battling against the daily, hourly temptations to disobey, we must always remember to look back 2000 years and meditate and delight in the cross and the amazing love Jesus demonstrated for us there.  But we must also look forward and trust in his promise of future blessings both here in this life and for eternity in response to our loving obedience.  If by God’s grace we do that, it will increasingly weaken the temptations that beset us.

A third and final application is—You must believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.  For believers, this text is chocked full of blessing and encouragement and hope to fuel our hearts in love and obedience to God.  But if you have not yet placed your trust in Jesus Christ, you must do that today.  First, because for anyone who doesn’t have this love for God, you have only God’s promise that you will pay the ultimate penalty for not loving him and keeping is commandments.

Paul says in First Corinthians 16:22, “²² If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed. Our Lord, come!”  Those who don’t trust in Christ and therefore cannot truly love Jesus will be accursed in hell.  You must place your trust in the Savior to cleanse you of your sins—which God hates–and to make you acceptable to a loving Father.

Second, if you are not in a love relationship with Jesus, you are missing out on the best thing in the universe.  Experiencing the ongoing love of Jesus and the Father is inexplicably satisfying.  You get to know and experience the intense, life-transforming love of God and, with increasing intimacy, come to know the Lord of the Universe.  Don’t miss that!

Do we love Jesus—do we want him, desire him, crave him?  May God give us the grace to do that and to express the obedience that springs from it for his glory and our joy.

[1] D.A. Carson’s commentary on John was very helpful in helping me see this.

[2] From a message John Piper preached on this text.

[3] Carson, D.A.  The Gospel According to John. Pillar series