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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

This week, we move into chapter 14 of John’s gospel but it’s a continuation of the conversation Jesus is having with his disciples in chapter 13.  Jesus has made a couple of statements that frightened the disciples.  In verse 33—only hours before his crucifixion he says, “³³ Little children, yet a little while I am with you. You will seek me, and just as I said to the Jews, so now I also say to you, ‘Where I am going you cannot come.’”   In verse 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.”

In order to appreciate how the disciples would have heard that, we need to put ourselves in their shoes. They had left everything to follow this Messiah.  Everything in their lives orbited around this man and their futures were completely, totally bound up in him.  If this man leaves them—the last three years of their lives make no sense.   The future they had envisioned for themselves goes up in smoke.  If Jesus leaves them, their lives are meaningless.  He had been the reason and purpose for their lives these past three years.

But now he tells them, “I’m leaving you and you can’t come with me.”  He does promise to come back and get them, but he hasn’t told them where he’s going.  And he gives no timeline for any of this except to say that his departure will be …soon.  And to top it all off, he has implied that the next few hours of their lives will be wretched.  They will be so hard that their leader, Peter will deny Jesus three times.  So, in the midst of these great trials, Jesus won’t be with them to protect or deliver or even comfort them.  That’s something like what the disciples’ perspective would have been when Jesus announces his departure here in chapter 14.

This chapter begins with another promise of Jesus that’s very familiar to us. Verse one (“Let not your hearts be troubled”) is read at countless funerals to give assurance to those who’ve lost a believing loved one.  Though that’s certainly appropriate, that’s obviously not the reason Jesus says it here and we need to understand it within its original context if we’re going to rightly apply the message of John 14.  Another very familiar claim of Jesus is in verse six where he says that he is “the way, the truth and the life.”  In our day, we tend to hear those words as a proof text that Christ is the only way of salvation.  Again, not inappropriate, but for us to rightly apply this incredible claim to our lives, we must see it in its immediate context.

The message of these opening verses of chapter 14 is a call to a group of scared, anxious disciples to:   Live confidently in Christ without fear.  That’s what we need to take away from this because we too can be scared and anxious disciples—when our money runs out—when we lose our job—when our kids or a family member deeply hurt us—when a loved one dies suddenly or becomes gravely ill.  Jesus here gives two major reasons why those in Christ—even when the bottom seems to have dropped out from under us, are to live, NOT in fear or anxiety, but in faith.

If you dig down deeply enough into our hearts, the root of all our fears is the same one these disciples had.  That is—we’re afraid that God will or has deserted us—that he won’t be where we need him to be.  We know that because if we truly, genuinely believe that an all-powerful God deeply loves us, is with us and is in complete control of all our circumstances—if we really believed that then– even in the most difficult of trials, we would have no fear.  But we tend to respond to crises—at least initially–as if we’re in it all alone.  We try to manage the pain and confusion on our own and we’re quickly overwhelmed by it.  That’s what the disciples felt here.

When life is going well, we find it easy to believe that Jesus is with us–he’s taking care of us.  But when crisis comes, our tendency is to forget that and assume that we have to go looking for him.  The first reason we’re to live confidently in Christ is in verses one through three.  Jesus says, ¹ “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. ² In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? ³ And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.”

Let’s unpack this.  First, we see that the antidote to our fear is to “believe” in God and believe in Jesus.  This command implies that the reason their hearts were troubled was because they were NOT believing.  When our hearts are anxious or troubled, the root cause is NOT the trial that is overwhelming us, it’s because we are not believing something about God—we’re not leaning on him.  The disciples were anxious because they faithlessly assumed that Jesus was going to leave them all alone and their lives would be ruined.  The fact that this would render null and void all his wonderful promises to them about their future with him hadn’t occurred to them in their unbelief.

Also, don’t miss another implication when Jesus says, “Believe in God, believe also in me.”  Notice, he so closely associates himself with the Father that he implies that believing in the Father is equal to believing in him.  If a pastor or church leader were to tell you, “Believe in God, believe also in me” you would be rightly incensed that the leader places trusting him on the same level of urgency as trusting in God.  But that’s exactly what Jesus does here.  He intends that we place him on the same level of trustworthiness as God—this is one of many times in this discourse where Jesus identifies himself as God.

So, the first reason from this text that we can live confidently in Christ without fear is–Because of the security that genuine disciples can enjoy through Christ’s work on the cross.  Where do we get that from this text?  Here’s where.  After telling them to believe in the Father and in him, he then suggests where he was going.  “In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?”  That’s where he’s going—to prepare a place for them…and all who believe.  This verse has been horribly misunderstood because of some very poor translation.  The King James translates “rooms” as “mansions.”  That is a bad translation.  It was influenced by a wrong understanding of the Latin version of this verse.  It’s not even close to an accurate rendering of the original Greek word John uses.

The word rightly translated is “rooms”—not “mansions” and it simply means “dwelling places.”  The same word is used a bit later in verse 23.  Jesus is speaking and says, ”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 [same word] with him [in our bodies].”  He’s not saying that our bodies are mansions that the Father and Jesus are going to live in.  No–they’re going to inhabit these bodily dwelling places—these temples of flesh and bone.

When Jesus speaks of the “Father’s house,” he’s using a metaphor to describe where he’s going.  He’s going to his Father and his point is that the disciples needn’t worry about not being able to follow him there because he is going to make preparations for them to follow him and there is plenty of room available in his Father’s house.  THAT’S the message.  An entire Christian tradition—along with its own music and subculture has been built around the flawed notion that believers upon their deaths will spend eternity in our own individual mansions that Christ has been painstakingly building for two millennia—as if someone who spoke the entire universe into being in a single word would need 2000 years to build a mansion.

Jesus was a carpenter, but he’s not building mansions in heaven.  That completely misses the point.  Jesus will later tell us what is the most important thing awaiting his disciples in heaven and it’s not some stupid mansion.  Twice in verses two and three Jesus speaks of him going to prepare a place for the disciples to go.  If it doesn’t mean that the Lord is busy polishing the gold in our mansions, what does it mean?  The best way to get at this is to ask the question:  What preparations does Jesus have to make in order to get his people to heaven?

The preparation he is talking about here is—he has to go to the cross.  This is not about Jesus putting the finishing touches on our final habitation; it’s about him doing the work of redemption necessary to forgive our sins and make us righteous before a holy God.  THAT’S what Jesus means when he says,  “I go to prepare a place for you.”  He means “I go to die on a cross for you.”

The ground of our security—the basis of our confidence in life is this preparation—his cross and the empty tomb.  When you strip away the metaphor, Jesus is saying to his scared disciples here, “Don’t worry—trust in the Father and in me.  The reason I’m going away is because, in order for me to make the necessary preparations for you to follow me to heaven, I have to die on a cross and stay dead for three days.  You will follow me to heaven later on.”

So, in verses two and three Jesus reveals the ground of our security—the basis of our confidence in Christ which is—his saving work on the cross to forgive us of our sins.  So, why should that quiet our anxious hearts in the midst of great trial?  The reason is obvious if you think about it.  Our sin before a holy God who must punish sin—THAT’S by far our biggest problem in life—nothing else even approaches it.  The worst crisis you have ever faced, are currently facing, or will ever face does not even approach the crisis your sin presents to you.

If the crisis of our sinfulness is resolved—then, from an eternal perspective—the rest of life is just details.  Spiritually speaking, our sin is like a terminal illness to us.  Every other problem by comparison is a runny nose.  The point is–if Jesus has resolved what is by far our GREATEST CRISIS, we can surely trust him to resolve, give hope in, or deliver us from any other problem!  In the second half of verse three he takes it one step further, “…I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.”

John very seldom mentions the second coming in his gospel.  But we know that’s what he means here because Jesus never came back to earth to take the disciples to himself.  Though they went to him in spirit when they died, at his second coming, he will come to get them and all his genuine disciples in bodily form when on the last day he, through the Spirit, resurrects his disciples so they physically may be where he is also.

Don’t miss that Jesus’ stress—his emphasis is on the disciples being where he is.  That’s what was most important to both he and the disciples—being with each other.  The truth that we will one day be with Jesus forever allows us to see every trial through an eternal perspective.  If Jesus has done the work to secure for us an eternity of pleasure and bliss at his right hand, then he can certainly bring us through any trial in this life.  This emphasis on being with Jesus for eternity is important for us to apply in other areas as well.

For instance, when you hear some professed believers talk about heaven, their words completely betray this priority of Jesus. They speak with the most excitement and anticipation about seeing their dear departed believing relatives—of never having to experience pain or aging and even being able to endlessly enjoy their favorite hobby—as if heaven were a great eternal vacation—the Griswold’s do heaven.  Again, that completely misses the point!  Jesus tells us what is glorious about heaven.  “I…will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.”

That’s why we should long for heaven!  The attraction of heaven should never be the “heavenliness” of the destination.  The supreme draw of heaven is to be with our Lord Jesus.  Who cares about seeing old aunt Agnes again or traipsing around on “streets of gold” when you can see the beauty of the Son of God?!  Paul says in Philippians 1:23, “My desire is to depart and be with Christ which is far better.”  It’s being with Christ that is far better than this world.  Paul had lived an extraordinarily difficult life—much of his last 30 years were spent either in prison, being brutally persecuted or running from persecution.

If anyone would have yearned for a heaven where there was no pain or persecution or trials, it would have been Paul.  But his desire for heaven isn’t to be free of any of those things—not to see his late uncle Mordecai. Again–it’s to be with Jesus.  When a person who is a professed believer says things like, “I don’t want Jesus to come back until after I’m married—until I have children or grandchildren—until I live to be such and such…they’re telling you that their hearts are in love with this fallen world–that those fallen things of earth are more important to them than being with Jesus.

If someone tells you, you can either have a new car or a bucket of slime—most of us will take the new car.  Yet the distance between being with Jesus and even the best experience of this life—marriage, having children– is far great than the distance between a car and a bucket of slime.  What was troubling the disciples was the fear of not being able to be with Jesus.

So, the ground of our security—the reason we can live confidently, secure in Christ every day, is because of the preparation Jesus made at Calvary so we can be with him forever.   A second reason we can live confidently in Christ without fear is because:  By God’s grace we’ve discovered that Jesus is the one, valid means by which people get to heaven.   In verse five, Thomas says, “⁵ … “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” ⁶ Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Thomas, speaking for the other disciples essentially says, “We don’t get it—you said you are going away—that you are making preparations so we can join you and that you will even come get us to take us to be with you.  But we still don’t know WHERE you’re going—how can we know the way to get there?”   As happens so many times in the gospels, Jesus is talking about a spiritual reality—getting to heaven by way of the cross–but the disciples are looking for a material reality—a place on a map.

Jesus begins to enlighten them that he’s not talking about a physical destination when he answers Thomas’s question—which is clearly purposed at receiving directions to where Jesus was going.  Jesus again points to a spiritual reality by pointing to himself.  “I am the way, and the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Jesus says in effect, “The way to get where I am going is not by a map or a route—it’s by a person—it’s through me.”  The only way to get to the Father is through me.  That is–out of the thousands of means by which people try to find eternal life— by God’s grace alone—followers of Christ are walking on the one right path.  By God’s grace, we’re not wandering through a spiritual maze of false religions that terminate in hell.  Jesus has shown us the way to God and it’s through himself.  Again, if Jesus has revealed to us the only way of eternal salvation, we can surely trust him to save us from whatever trial we face in this life.

This is not only profoundly encouraging to believers—it is arguably the most controversial, politically-incorrect statement Jesus ever made because in one sentence he makes a dead-end street out of every other religion, belief or creed.  He implies that any other way people try to take to get to heaven is utterly futile and hopelessly misguided.  He implies that all those people who are trying those ways are horribly deceived about the most important matter conceivable.  In spite of all their good works—in spite of however sincerely they’ve practiced their religion—all these deceived people will end up in eternal torment.  If they don’t trust in Christ alone and the preparation he’s made through the cross then, as condemned sinners, they’ll never get into heaven.

It’s no wonder people think this is an arrogant claim and it would be unimaginably arrogant… if it didn’t happen to be true and if the only reason certain people are able to believe it is the utterly undeserved grace of God.  Also, we should see through the claim that people make when they say things like, “How dare you think that Jesus is the only way to God—that’s SO exclusive.  There are obviously many paths leading to God.”  Do you hear the arrogance in THAT position?

C.S. Lewis, Tim Keller and many others point out something important about that argument that we need to see.  That is—people who criticize Christianity for its exclusive claims are being every bit as exclusive in their claims.  When someone tells us there are many paths to God, not one, they’re not being inclusive and open-minded.  What they’re really saying is—”There are two ways to look at spiritual reality—yours and mine and I am right.”

What they’re saying (and by implication what they are trying to get you to believe—they’re trying to convert you just as much as you’re trying to convert them!) is—”Of the two ways to see spiritual reality—me and my many-paths-to-God-argument or you and your single-path-to-God argument, I am exclusively right and you are wrong.  Therefore, you must drop your intolerant, close-minded belief system and adopt my much more tolerant one.”  That’s what they’re saying because you can’t get away from the binary, either/or choice where truth claims are concerned.  Someone is right and someone is wrong.  The difference is—WE will admit that we are proposing an exclusive choice, the world won’t.

Because this issue is so important, here quickly are three reasons why Jesus’ claim as the exclusive way to heaven must be valid.  First—Four thousand years of redemption history leading up to Jesus’ appearance unmistakably point to this truth.  If Jesus is wrong here, it’s not simply a matter of him making one exaggerated statement.  It means the central truth of the Bible—with its perfectly coherent and consistent message, gradually revealed by God over 4000 years of redemptive history— ALL of it is completely bogus.  We must remember that God revealed his exclusive, ONE AND ONLY plan to solve humanity’s sin problem back in the Garden of Eden.

After Genesis chapter three, the next 40 centuries of redemptive history gradually prepare us for the revelation of Christ and his mission, as the one way to God, to die for our sins.  The Old Testament prophets, the priests, the kings, the sacrificial system, the law and the promises–they all point to the fact that God has one, single plan to redeem humanity and it’s through the person of the Jewish Messiah, Jesus Christ—the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.  If Christ isn’t the only way to heaven, then the entire Bible is a fraud and its central message is a lie.  If this claim of Jesus is not true, we’re simply not able to say that Jesus was a great moral teacher and the Bible has great life lessons for us.  No, the whole thing is a sham if Jesus is not who he says he is.

A second reason Jesus has to be the only way to God is–because God is holy and must judge our sin and there is only one way a sinner can be forgiven and made righteous—Jesus and his death on the cross.  No other world religion has a solution to our sin problem.  No other world religion makes a sinner (and we’re all sinners) acceptable to God.  They may claim to but  only Jesus bridges the gap between God and sinful humanity.  That makes him the only possible way to live eternally before a holy God who hates our sin and must judge it.

A third reason Jesus must be the only way to God is because:  If Jesus isn’t the only way to God, then based on what happened on the cross, the God of the Bible is unspeakably cruel, and his Son is a cosmic fool.  Remember what happened on the cross.  God the Father poured out his holy wrath for our sin on his Son and punished him as a substitute sacrifice for all those who would believe.

If there were alternate ways to get to heaven other than Jesus, then that unimaginable wrath and agony the Father inflicted on the Son didn’t need to happen.  And if it didn’t have to occur, then the Father unnecessarily crushed his Son–which would make him guilty of divine child abuse.  It also means that Jesus—who believed he was the only way—was not only self-deceived, but must have also been a fool because he received that immeasurable punishment from his Father for no reason.

People simply cannot legitimately say things like, “The Bible has many good things to say and Jesus is a wonderful model for us—even a prophetic figure—but he’s certainly not the only way to God—he’s just one of many paths.”  In our culture those kinds of statements are assumed to be thoughtful and refined.  They’re idiotic!   If Jesus Christ is not the only way to God, then both the Father and the Son as presented in the Bible couldn’t be trusted to run a city council meeting, much less the universe.

A God as unspeakably cruel as the one people imply he is when they deny the exclusivity of Jesus as Savior–is not someone you would ever trust, much less worship.  The truth is—though it’s not politically correct, though it will make people think you’re a narrow-minded bigot for believing it–there cannot possibly be any other way to God except through the crucified, risen Son of God.

Let’s close with two points of application.  Earlier, we said the reason we don’t have to be anxious about our lives when crisis hits is Jesus’ death on the cross has addressed what is BY FAR our biggest crisis—our need for the forgiveness of our sins.  The reason is because death is the one enemy we all face.  Whether death is a gateway to glory or a highway to hell depends on whether our sins are forgiven.  So, Jesus’ death completely resolves our death problem and that’s important because the fear of death is the granddaddy of all our fears.

Hebrews chapter two speak of Christ’s redemptive work for us and says in verse 14, “¹⁴ Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, ¹⁵  and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.”

The fear of death enslaves people all of their lives.  Unless they are completely deceived, they’re not comfortable thinking deeply about their own deaths because they fear death.  But when you get right down to where the rubber meets the road on a day-by-day basis–How does Jesus’ death help you live without fear?  Again, the answer is–if Jesus has solved the death problem for you so that you can stare into its face with no fear, then surely, he can be trusted to work out all your other trials and problems.  Are you feeling fearful of anything—put your eyes back on the cross and remember that on the cross Jesus liberated you from your greatest fear. Compared to where we spend eternity, all other fears and anxieties aren’t worth mentioning.

A second point of application is–If it’s true that Jesus is the only way to go to heaven—why aren’t we telling more people about him?   The entire world population—everyone we know apart from Christ is helplessly plummeting to their eternal death and believers are the only ones who can give them a parachute to break their fall.  We know Jesus is the only way—God has mercifully, with no credit to us, opened our eyes to believe this glorious truth.

Why aren’t we more consistent in telling others who don’t know or believe it?  Why aren’t we inviting them to church or sharing our faith with them? The knowledge that Jesus is the only way to God is not just a theological truth—it’s an implicit call to action.

Finally, if you’re here today and you don’t know Jesus—if you’re still living for the things of this world rather than following Jesus as your Savior and Lord and greatest Treasure—I hope you’ve been reminded of the eternal crisis you will face at your death.  Jesus IS the way, the truth and the life.  Come to him in faith, confess and turn from your sin and place your trust in him as the only way to God.  May God grant to all of us the grace to trust Jesus as the way, the truth and the life for his glory and our joy.

This week we continue the first chapter of the Upper Room discourse in John’s gospel.  Last time, we looked at 13:31-32, where Jesus, with the cross in his sights says, NOW the Son of Man will be glorified and the Father in him.  We looked at several ways in which the New Testament teaches that the glory of the Father and Jesus are so powerfully tied directly to Calvary’s cross.  Today, we’ll be looking only at verses 34-35.

Jesus says in verse 34, “³⁴ A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. ³⁵ By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” The challenge in studying these verses—and any other well-known text– is that they’re so familiar to us, we can easily miss just how penetrating, how absolutely revolutionary this commandment is.  Jesus is commanding his disciples (this church) to love one another.  But he defines what this love looks like by telling us that it’s the same kind of sacrificial, laying-your-life-down love he has for his disciples that he will soon demonstrate on the cross.

He then tells us that one of his reasons for commanding us to love one another is because—that is one way the lost world can clearly see him—through his disciples relating to one another in this way.  So, there this broader purpose for loving each other than simply obeying Jesus; that is—that the world will see what Jesus is like by witnessing those who follow him—those who are seeking to be like him.  And they will be able to see what he is like by how they love each other.  This is a radical command and even more sobering because these two verses spell out what is near the very heart of what it is to live as a follower of Christ.  “They will know we are Christians by our love.”  These truths are not on the edges of the Christian ethic, they’re dead center.

Because that is truth–if this matter of loving one another is not near the center of our understanding of what it is to live as a follower of Jesus Christ—if our life as a believer does not project this priority, then that should be a MAJOR cause for concern to us.  We know how crucial this truth is to Jesus because it is repeated so many times in the New Testament.  One of the clearest parallels to this verse in John 13 is something John himself says in First John 4:11. “¹¹ Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” That’s the command—something we are to live out.

But, like Jesus does in John 13, the apostle follows the command by telling us HOW our love for one another gives witness to the character of God to the world.  The motivation behind the command is the similar to Jesus in the Upper room.  John says, “12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” There again is the connection between our love for one another and how that impacts the world who doesn’t know God.

Let’s unpack this.  First, John admits the obvious–that people can’t see God physically—he’s invisible.  But—there is one way people can “see” God.  That is–they CAN see what God is like when they look at the church and see God’s people loving one another in the same way Jesus sacrificially loved them. John Stott says it this way, “the unseen God, who once revealed himself in his Son, now reveals himself in his people if and when they love one another.” ^[1] 

But then John says something more remarkable.  “…if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.”  Again, Stott says, “God’s love for us is perfected only when it is reproduced in us … in the Christian fellowship.”^[2]  This is absolutely astonishing because you would assume that God’s love for us was “perfected” at the cross.  Sending his Son is the ultimate demonstration of his love for us.  I think what John is saying here is—the final purpose that completes—that is the final piece of God’s motivation in displaying his love for us– is seen ONLY when we put it on display for the world to see.  And the way we do that is by loving each other as he loved us.  So, we must love one another, not only because it’s the way the world sees the very life of God in us.

We must also love one another because the final purpose of his love for us is only completed when we love each other.  Do you hear how important this is to God–how near this matter is to his heart?  If we don’t love one another, then God’s love that he showed us in sacrificing his Son—that love is in some way incomplete—it’s not fully accomplishing what God intends if it is not also seen in his children loving each other that same way.  Stunning!

That means that —A huge part of our mission is to reveal to this world what a glorious God we have through how we love one another. A few verses later in First John chapter four he takes it a step further and says, “²¹ And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.”   John is saying that part of what defines people who love God is—they love their fellow believer.  If we don’t love we brothers and sisters, then our claim to love God is verifiably a sham.  He says that we cannot be obedient to “the Great Commandment” to love God with all we have if we aren’t loving our brother or sister down the pew or across the aisle from us.

This absolutely pulverizes the lie too frequently heard today among some professed believers.  That is– “I love Jesus, but you can HAVE the church!”  That’s a lie—if you don’t love your brothers and sisters, if you are ok with being out of fellowship with your brother and sister, then you don’t love Jesus.  One of the ways we can determine the real depth of our love for Jesus is by our attitude toward our brothers and sisters in Christ.  And loving our brother or sister means that we’re loving ALL of them with the same kind of sacrificial, other-centered love that sent Jesus to the cross.

This love, although it is most often seen between people in the same local church because of our regular contact with one another, this commandment is not ONLY intended for those in the same local church.  This command to love other believers runs across age and denominational and racial and ethnic and any other demographic lines.  We must hear how weighty this command is to love one another.  There is such an intense, supernatural connection between Jesus and his church that –if you don’t love those God has saved, then you don’t love God.  Please let that sink in as you think about your relationships with other believers in and out of the church.

Do we believe that?  When we say things like, “I love that brother or sister, but I don’t like her.”  Or, if we feel ok about avoiding some people in the church for some reason.  Do we believe this if there are brothers or sisters to whom we will barely speak?  Do we believe this if we have brothers or sisters with whom we’re out of fellowship and have “learned” to be content with that?  How is that showing the world what Jesus is like?  That’s the way the fallen world loves!  How is that perfecting God’s love?

This commandment of Jesus, at one and the same time, belongs both to the kindergarten and graduate school of Christian living.  We hear it very early in our Christian lives and we should spend the rest of our lives doing at least three things with it.  First, seeking after God for grace to keep this commandment near the center of our understanding of what it is to be a Christian; not allowing it to be swept to the margins as we can so easily do with it.

Second, seeking out God for a deeper appreciation for how, in concrete and specific ways, we can live out this commandment in the church.  Third, living in continual repentance of our selfish and self-centered hearts that God reveals through our repeated failures in living out this commandment.  In light of how important the New Testament repeatedly makes this; all those should be lifelong and persistent pursuits.

The commandment is spoken to the disciples, so it’s clearly intended for believers only.  There are commands elsewhere to love our enemies as well, but this one is intended for relationships within the church.  Now that we’ve explained what Jesus is saying here, (which is very easy to understand) we could move on to the next part of the discourse.  But it’s important for us to first stand back and realize that this new commandment of Jesus is so revolutionary that even the assumptions underlying it are countercultural within the contemporary church.  In other words, before we could even begin to seriously live this out at North Shore, certain very basic things about how we understand the church would need to be altered.  The way North America commonly thinks of the church is simply not compatible with living out this commandment to a church full of people.

For instance, when Jesus gives this commandment, he assumes that believers will be gathered together frequently enough and long enough to develop the kind of relationships where this radical, self-sacrificing love can grow and be seen.  The assumption is that believers will be in community with one another that is intimate enough for us to know the needs of others so we can be in a position to lovingly, sacrificially meet them because THAT is how Jesus loves us.  For most of the people in this body and in most local churches, we have only a vague notion of what Jesus is commanding here.  Unless we happen to be friends, relatives or in a vibrant small group, we simply don’t know each other well enough to know what this kind of Christ-like love would look like.

Think about it.  If the aim of this commandment is for the outside world to see these relationships between believers closely enough for them to know what God is like, that assumes at least one of two things.  First, that we spend time with some other believers outside this worship service before a watching world—and/or second, that we have worship services where unbelievers are regularly being invited so they can actually witness how we relate to one another.  Other than those two ways, how else can they see us praying for one another and weeping with one another and giving sacrificially to one another?  One reason you invite unchurched people to church is to put God’s love on display as they watch you how you and other believers relate to each other.

You can easily see how this happened in the early church culture.  Acts chapter two says believers were together daily.  They heard apostolic teaching together in the temple—they prayed together—they shared their wealth with each other.  Acts 2:46 says, “⁴⁶ And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts.”  These believers were frequently gathering together in the temple where the world (in their case, unbelieving Jews who also gathered at the temple) could see them gathered together as a church.  But the world—the unbelieving Jews—also witnessed believers getting together in other venues where they loved on one another.

There would have been many opportunities for the early church to obey this commandment to love one another so that the unbelieving Jewish world would connect the way they loved each other.  If we’re serious about obeying this new commandment, that would seem to obligate us to make the changes necessary for us to place ourselves in a position to love other believers in a way that points the world to Jesus.  This gets very practical for us a North Shore. One implication of this is that we need to be inviting unchurched friends to church so they can see from the inside out what God is like as they witness his love being share among us.

Another implication is that we at North Shore need to be spending enough time together to enable us to know each other well enough to be able to love one another as Jesus loved us.  You can’t love someone you don’t know!  One of the reasons why, two years ago, it seemed good to the elders to seek God about the addition of a new kitchen where we could broaden our hospitality ministry was so we as a church could eat together more often.  Eating together after church is a wonderful way to make Sunday more like “the Lord’s Day” as the scripture calls it than “the Lord’s hour.”  As we saw in Acts chapter two with the early church, regularly breaking bread together is a great way to build loving relationships that can go beyond the walls of this church and give the world a chance to see them.

A second assumption Jesus is making here is that the church will be closely interacting with the world—forming relationships with them that will allow them to see how we love one another.  Frankly, many evangelicals cordon off their social lives to separate themselves from unbelievers.   For many in the church if they DO have contact with unbelievers at work, those relationships are purely professional.  They’re not intended to be redemptive—as a way to introduce that person to Christ and his church.

A study from the Gordon-Conwell’s Center for the Study of Global Christianity found that 20 percent of non-Christians in North America do not “personally know” any Christians[3].  That is not all on us; but some of it surely is and that makes it kind of difficult for them to witness how believers love one another and in doing so, see what God is like.

How many of your unbelieving friends (assuming you have some) are in a position to witness how you love fellow believers?  This new commandment of Jesus assumes that will be happening. —its implicit in the new commandment.  Too often, when an unbeliever becomes a Christian, sadly, he/she leaves behind his/her unbelieving friends for good.  That makes obedience to this new commandment of Jesus much more difficult.

The point of all this is not to condemn—it’s merely to say that—it would do us very little practical good to think deeply about this new commandment of Jesus text without first admitting that—for many of us, before we can even think seriously about actually obeying this new commandment of Jesus, we must first make the commitment to put ourselves in a position to sacrificially love each other before a watching world.

To that end, let’s spend some time thinking about what this love looks like by the use of some concrete examples.  Remember, Jesus gives this command to his disciples to love each other as he loved them only hours before he dies for them.  These aren’t commands or even suggestions.  They are simply some idea, examples or illustrations to help put some flesh on these bones—to make this real to us in our life situations.

Some examples of this kind of sacrificial love might include:  If someone in the church needs a car to get to work and you have a second car you don’t use every day, loan or give the car to her to drive while you work out a way to share your remaining vehicle within your family. That’s sacrifice and it’s also an indication that your cars belong to God to do with what he wants, not you.  If a brother’s in financial need—has lost his job, take the vacation fund you’ve been saving and give it to him so he can make a couple of mortgage payments on his house before he goes into foreclosure.

Someone in the church loses his job and can’t make their modest house payments—and they lose their home. You have extra room, so you let them move in with you.  This kind of sacrifice is commonly seen in the East—even, expected.  And that’s among mostly Muslims who’ve never experienced the love of Jesus. Here’s another example–the husband of a sister in Christ walks out on her, leaving her and her two toddlers without any source of income.  She needs to work full time and you’re a stay-at-home mom.  Open up your home and give her free day care until she can make ends meet.

Make no mistake, for most of us—obedience to this new commandment of Jesus will radically change your life—AND it will powerfully reveal what Jesus looks like to a world that desperately needs to see him.  Can you hear this woman the next day talking with an unbeliever who asks her, “How do you afford day care on what you make?”  “A woman in our church is giving me free day care.”  “Wow.”  A brother needs a bigger house but has no money.  You have construction skills and tools. So, volunteer to spend significant time in the evenings and weekends helping your brother build an addition—leave your wife and kids for a season and help him out…for free.

An elderly couple in church and in failing health and on a fixed income can’t afford to pay for yard work and maintenance to their house.  Adopt them as your family’s “love project”—you and the kids mow their lawn, clean the leaves out of the gutters, put in their screen doors, snow-blow their driveway.  If we’re too busy to do these kinds of things, we are too busy because we’re too busy to obey the new commandment of Jesus.

Just a few more…A woman on a limited budget comments on your lovely new blouse—a blouse she could never afford.  If you can afford it, go buy another just like it, put it in a box and give it to her the next time you see her.  That’s a form of “giving her the shirt off your back” and it looks a lot like Jesus.

A sister needs a new kidney and her family members are either unwilling or unable to donate.  If you’re healthy, pray about giving her one of yours.  You say, “But that would leave me with only one if I had kidney problems.”  Yes, and Jesus gave his one and only life for us.  A local pastor I knew several years ago had a transient—someone he’d never seen before– wander into his office one afternoon with advanced kidney disease with no way to get a new one.  The pastor gave him one of his—he barely knew this man!  That’s Jesus.

These are not commands for us to follow.  They’re just ideas of expressions of what the early church would look like if those folks were alive today.  This is far more than being nice to one another—the world can be nice to one another.  These acts of love will point the world to Jesus.  God can use this kind of love to create a hunger in them to know this God whose people love like this.  “By this all people will know that you are my disciples if you have love—Christ-like love—for one another.”   In the early 80’s, this passage prompted Francis Schaeffer to write an entire book on Christian love called “The Mark of the Christian.”

Schaeffer says– about this this truth, “Jesus turns to the world and says, “I’ve something to say to you.  On the basis of my authority, I give you a right:  you may judge whether or not an individual is a Christian on the basis of the love he shows to all Christians.”  Schaefer continues, “In other words, if people come up to us and cast in our teeth the judgment that we are not Christians because we have not shown love toward other Christians, we must understand that they are only exercising a prerogative which Jesus gave them.”[4] 

Jesus is saying to us that “what I want the world to know about my love—I want them to learn by watching how you in my church love one another.”  This is a humbling and daunting call to us.  This is risky, inconvenient, uncomfortable, selfless, time-consuming and sacrificial—In other words, it’s like the love Jesus showed for us on the cross.  Let’s face it—none of us can do this.  Yet Jesus clearly commands us to live like this.  So, what are we to do?

Part of the answer is back in First John.  One of the most powerful chapters on loving each other in the New Testament is First John chapter four.  Near the conclusion of the chapter John writes in verse 19, “¹⁹ We love because he first loved us.”  In other words, we can’t hope to love others unless we’ve experienced– and are regularly experiencing– God’s love on the cross for us.  This is the way it is for all Christian virtues—our practice of all of them is in some way rooted in our experience of the gospel and God’s love for us on the cross.

If we’re impatient with others, it’s because we haven’t realized and internalized how patient God is with us because of Christ.  If we’re easily angered, it’s because we don’t appreciate that, because of Jesus, God has an immeasurably long fuse with us.  If we’re proud or condescending, it’s because we’re not in touch with how Jesus humbled himself for us on the cross.  If we’re selfish, it’s because we don’t really appreciate what it means for Christ to have impoverished himself for us on Calvary.  And if we don’t love each other, it’s because we have no depth of experience of God’s love for us in Jesus.

Love is the same way.  “We love because he first loved us.”  The more our hearts are saturated with God’s love through the gospel, the greater capacity we’ll have to show this kind of love to each other. D.A. Carson puts it this way.  “The more we recognize the depth of our own sin (for instance, in not loving each other as we should), the more we recognize the love of the Savior; the more we appreciate the love of the Savior, the higher his standard appears; the higher his standard appears, the more we recognize in our selfishness, our innate self-centeredness, the depth of our own sin[5]…the more we recognize the depth of our own sin, the more we recognize the love of the Savior…and on and on and on.”

The Christian life should be an endless cycle of learning to see the profoundness of our own sin which spurs within us a deeper, more profound appreciation of what God has done for us in Christ, which enables us to increasingly love others as he has loved us.  Big sin, big Savior, big love for us.  This is the gospel.  This gospel—as it becomes part of us, causes us to delight to do what is necessary to love other believers so that the world can see that we belong to Jesus.  The love of Christ in the gospel is what frees us to joyfully make the sacrifices necessary to spend quality time building relationships with both believers and unbelievers.

This is one of the most basic commands in Scripture and it’s impossible.  Unless we work at deeply ingesting the gospel, we’ll never do it, but by God’s grace, we can do it as we focus on Christ crucified and think about what that means to us as we repeatedly and powerfully experience the totally undeserved love of God.  May God give all of us the grace to know this love so deeply that it will radiate out of our lives for his glory and our joy.

^[1] Stott, J. R. W. (1988). The Letters of John: An Introduction and Commentary (Vol. 19, p. 164). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

^[2] Stott, J. R. W. (1988). The Letters of John: An Introduction and Commentary (Vol. 19, p. 165). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

[3] http://markwoodward.org/2013/08/26/2575/

[4] ^[4] Francis Schaeffer, The Mark of Love,  in The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer, Vol. 4, A Christian View of the Church (Wheaton, IL; Crossway Books, 1982) p.187.

[5] Carson, D.A. (1991).  The Gospel according to John (pp. 483-487). Leicester, England; Grand Rapids, MI:  Inter-Varsity Press; W.B. Eerdmans.

This week, we return to John’s gospel in chapter 13.  Jesus has washed the disciples’ feet, identified Judas as his betrayer and permitted him to begin his satanic betrayal.  Clearly, when Judas leaves—that triggers something in Jesus because John tells us in verse 31, “³¹ When he [Judas] had gone out, Jesus said, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. ³² If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and glorify him at once.”

The way he introduces his Upper Room Discourse here is very important.  In this opening statement he looks ahead to his crucifixion and says, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God [the Father] is glorified in him.” And then he says that God will glorify the Son in himself.  That is—NOW, with the cross in clear view—both the Father and the Son will glorify each other and are glorified in each other.

These are some of the most instructive words Jesus speaks during this entire discourse because here he gives us the lens through which he is looking at the events of his imminent passion.  We know this because he’s repeating what he and the Father say in the previous chapter in 12:27. 27 “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. ²⁸ Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.”

Jesus is troubled at the looming prospect of the cross but admits that it’s inescapable and he reveals the very heart of his purpose when he asks the Father to glorify his name and the Father assures Jesus that he will glorify it.  In two consecutive chapters, John ties the glory of God directly to the cross.

Because the cross is the most important event in human history and one of the main reasons God became a man, that means that Jesus’ main motivation for going to the cross is something must spend some time exploring.  That’s our goal this morning as we’ll be looking at just these two verses– 31-32 in John 13.  The question that will direct us is—why, as Jesus is looking out across the events of his impending passion—with all its horrors—would Jesus be talking about his and the Father’s glory?  That’s an epically important question!

You might expect that, in anticipation of his crucifixion, Jesus would say something like, “Now is the Son of Man to be scourged, mocked and crucified by the hands of sinners?”  Or, “Now, the great trial for which I came to the world must be fulfilled” or … “Now, my humiliation begins…”  Those would have all been accurate and not unlike what he’s said before.  But here goes in a completely different direction and frames the events of his passion with… GLORY!  We know he’s talking about the glory of the cross because verse 31 says God will glorify him “at once.”

This isn’t some future glory in eternity—it’s very soon—within hours.   Later, Jesus says to Peter, “Where I am going you cannot follow me now…”  Peter asks, “…why can I not follow you now?”   Again, why would Jesus speak of the imminent and terrifying events of his passion in terms of glory?  What’s could possibly be glorious about being beaten into a bleeding mass and stuck to a wooden cross to die among criminals?

Before we can appreciate Jesus’ concern for his glory, we need to explain just a bit about the glory of God.  If we don’t know what God’s glory is, we’ll never understand the priority Jesus places on it.  A theological statement about the glory of God says: “All the attributes of God are summarized in Scripture’s reference to the glory of God.  The majesty, splendor, beauty, and brilliance of God who dwells in unapproachable light are expressed in this indefinable term.”[1]

So, God’s glory is so glorious, it can’t be defined, but his glory is expressed or seen or manifest in his divine attributes—his holiness, justice, mercy, etc.… As we’ll see in a moment, the reason the cross is central to the glory of God is because–in the cross of Christ, all the glorious attributes of God are brought together and put on display.   Psalm 19:1 says, “¹ The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”  The creation pronounces or reflects some of God’s attributes—it glorifies him in that sense.  Tim Keller comments on that verse and says that in this sense “…the Grand Canyon shows the glory of God, but it’s like the moon, it’s a reflection of the glory of God.”   “But when you go to the cross, (Keller says) you’re looking [at God’s glory] in the full-sun blaze of itself.[2]  The cross doesn’t just reflect God’s glory—it emblazons it!

It’s in the cross of Christ where God’s glory-laden attributes are revealed most powerfully and completely.  The cross is the most concentrated expression of God’s glory possible.  That means that –the most vivid experience of God’s glory in this life the average believer can receive is by spending serious time meditating—thinking long and hard– on the cross.  We’ve seen before that the teaching of Scripture reveals that all of human history builds up to this one climactic unveiling of God’s glory at Calvary.

Every other previous revelation of God’s glory—his glory on the radiant face of Moses, his glory—high and lifted up in the heavenly temple of Isaiah chapter six, the glory of Jesus in his transfiguration.  If you were to put all that glory together, that’s a tiny spark in comparison to the ultimate glory of God revealed at Calvary.  In each of those earlier revelations, you see one or a few aspects of God’s glory—his majesty, his resplendence, his radiance.  But on the cross, you get as close to a complete picture of God’s glory as has ever been, and (as far as we can know) ever will be seen.

To see why Jesus connects his crucifixion to his glory, we want to look at four of the many ways in which God’s glory is ablaze in the cross of Christ. First, we see:  God’s Glory is seen in his perfect justice on the cross.  God is the Judge of the universe and his justice is perfect—as many Scriptures attest.  A big part of his justice is in his absolutely unfailing punishment of the wicked.  Proverbs 11:21 says, “Be assured, an evil person will not go unpunished…”  Exodus 34:7 says that God “…will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”  Numbers 14:18 says, “The LORD…will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation.”  The prophet Nahum 1:3 says, “The LORD…will by no means clear the guilty…”

The almost verbatim repetition of this truth means it’s extremely important for us to know.  There is NO WAY in the universe that God as Judge will EVER let any guilty offender off without being fully and completely punished for his sin.  To not punish the guilty as they deserve is as foreign to God’s character as lying or coveting would be.  His perfectly just nature demands that he punish the guilty to the full extent of his holy law and his omnipotent power assures that no one will be able to escape that punishment.  So, here we are–cosmic rebels deserving the full weight of his holy punishment or wrath.  Nothing we can offer God for our pardon could ever satisfy his justice because we are totally depraved and defiled by our sin.  Our guilty fingerprints leave a wretched stain on anything we could offer him.

God is glorified at the cross because at the cross, God through Christ shows his perfect justice as he mercilessly judges ALL the sin of his people.  Romans 3:25 helps us see this.  Paul speaks of Jesus, ^“25 whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. ²⁶ It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”  Paul reveals here that none of God’s people who died before Jesus came to earth had received the punishment their sins deserved.  That left God potentially open to the charge of being unjust—of being inconsistent with his character that he will “by no means clear the guilty.”

To address that, Paul says God put Jesus forward as a propitiation—the perfect sacrificial Lamb to receive the wrath of all the sin of his Old Testament people.  The punishment these people deserved was meted out to Jesus.  HE received the full measure of God’s holy wrath their sins deserved.  Because he is just, God’s righteous anger against sin must be fully and completely satisfied.

Paul is saying in Romans three that after the cross, God could no longer be accused of being less than perfectly just.  Instead of punishing the people themselves, he instead put forward his own sinless Son as a substitute in their place.  JESUS became the target of the Father’s anger as he hung on that cross and became a wrath-bearing sacrifice.

This God-glorifying justice meted out to Jesus was not only for those who lived before Christ, but also, of course, for those on this side of the cross who would believe.  If you’ve placed your trust in Christ as God’s perfect sacrificial Lamb, then all the wrath, the divine rage God justly had toward your sins …has already been spent.  God’s anger for our sins was completely spent 2000 years ago.  All the anger God has for my past, present or future sins was poured out on the Lord Jesus.

If you are in Christ, your sin can never bring God’s wrath upon you.  Paul says, “¹ Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”  God is no longer opposed to us who believe because in the glorious justice of the cross, the righteous anger we deserved was instead fully absorbed by Jesus as his Father crushed him for our sin.  We see the glory of God’s justice on the cross.

A second way the glory of God uniquely radiates from the cross is because in the cross we see:  The Glory of God’s love.  Romans 5:6 says, ^“6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷ For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— ^“8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”  In the cross, God proves that his love for us is utterly unique and unquestionable.

If we’re following Christ and we question God’s love for us, we need to more deeply believe the gospel because it’s on the cross that the invincible evidence of his love for believers is on display.  When a believer doubts God’s love for him, he is impugning Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross.  It’s as if he’s saying to God, “Sacrificing your innocent Son—crushing him on the cross for my sin…that wasn’t enough to prove your love for me—you must do something more to assure me of your love.”

The reason the cross is the pinnacle, the apex, the ultimate expression of the glory of God’s love is because:  it’s impossible for him to ever do anything more loving than sacrificing his perfect, eternal, sinless Son for the sake of fallen blasphemous rebels at war with him.  John, the apostle of love defines love by one particular element of Christ’s work on the cross in 1 John 4:10.  He says, “¹⁰ In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

John could have spoken of God’s love for in terms of his atoning love or his saving love or some other general reference to the cross.  John says that the ultimate expression of God’s love is his propitiating love.  That is–that on our behalf, he surrendered his Son to the most potent and terrifying force in the universe—his own holy wrath.  John, the apostle of love says that THAT is God’s ultimate love.  The glory-of-God-radiating love is…the Christ-crushing, divine anger-satisfying, propitiating love of God.

Two more expressions of God’s glory seen in the cross are given in First Corinthians chapter one, Paul in verse 23 says, “²³ …we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, ²⁴ but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”  Two more expressions of the glory of Christ crucified are “the power of God and the wisdom of God.”  Let’s first look at the Glory of God’s Wisdom in the cross.

Paul says the world sees no wisdom, but only foolishness in the cross.  But in First Corinthians 2:6 he says, “⁶ Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. ⁷ But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.”  Paul’s talking about the wisdom of God seen in this glorious plan of redemption that would culminate in his divine Son dying at the hand of sinners.

God’s glorious wisdom is seen in several ways through the cross.  Let’s look at two.  First, God’s wisdom is seen in the cross because it ensures that God alone will get the glory for his saving work in Christ.  As we’ve seen, God’s highest priority is his glory.  If there was a way for a sinner to be saved by something that could be figured out or achieved by the very wise, then they would get the glory, not God.  You just need to be wise enough to figure out God’s plan of salvation and salvation will be yours.  First Corinthians 1:31 says the reason why God revealed his plan of salvation in the way he did is because NO ONE could have anticipated this.  “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

Eons ago, God predetermined that no one could be saved from their sin because of anything in them—their position, wealth, wisdom or cleverness.  Everyone would need to be totally and completely dependent upon his saving work alone.  To that end, God devised a plan to forgive sinners that would not only be totally dependent upon him.  More than that–his plan would appear so outlandish to the wise or the elites of this world, they never be able figure it out.

More than that, his plan of salvation would be one so far removed from anything they could ever conceive; they would dismiss it as ridiculous.  The wise or the elite of this world considers it patently foolish to believe that an all-powerful, all-knowing God would save condemned sinners from his eternal wrath by sending his sinless, all-powerful, all-knowing divine Son as their substitute to die a tortuous, humiliating death–executed among criminals.  The wisdom of this world calls this things like “divine child abuse.”  No one in a million years could ever intuit that plan or in any way figure that out because to the fallen, upside-down wisdom of this world, it’s a perfectly foolish plan.

God’s wisdom in his plan of redemption takes what this fallen world prizes—wealth, power, position, education, status and renders them utterly irrelevant to salvation.  Instead, in God’s plan, he takes what the wisdom of this world despises—humiliation, vulnerability, weakness and death and uses those hated things to save sinful people.  In this way—God alone in his wisdom gets the glory from the cross.

A second way God’s glory is seen in the wisdom of the cross is in First Corinthians 1:22.  Paul says “²² For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, ²³ but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, ²⁴ but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵ For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”

A second way God’s glorious wisdom is seen in the cross of Christ is— the only ones who will believe in Christ crucified for their salvation are those to whom God calls by revealing to them his wisdom in the cross.  Let’s unpack this a bit.  Paul cites the blindness of most of the Jews and Greeks and their inability to see the wisdom of the cross.  Then, in verse 24 he says, “but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”  He’s saying that—what enables a person to see the cross as anything other than a scandalous stumbling block or foolishness has nothing to do with whether you’re a Jew or Gentile, but whether you are among “those who are called.”

GOD is the active agent in salvation.  He uses this gospel message that sounds so foolish to the world to call those he chooses to himself.  The implication is that no one, through their own fallen reason, would figure out that the way to be saved from your sin is to look in faith to a humiliated, crucified Jewish rabbi.  Only those who God supernaturally calls to himself can genuinely, savingly believe this.  That’s what Paul is saying.

The gospel message of the cross is not appealing to people because of anything in them—any wisdom on their part.  The gospel message is appealing and a gloriously compelling answer to our biggest problem—our sin problem– ONLY to those God calls to himself to be saved.  A person can be saved from his/her sin only when God, by his grace and for his glory, gives a person a new heart that can supernaturally see the wonder of God’s wisdom revealed in the cross of Christ. And Paul says the reason God does it this way, is so that he gets all the glory.

A final way the cross glorifies the Father and the Son is seen in:  The Glory of God’s Power in the Cross.  The most impressive display of raw spiritual power in world history was on the cross.  Two thousand years earlier in the Garden of Eden, God’s representative on Earth, Adam—through his disobedience, forfeited his authority to rule this world under God.  As a result, Satan was granted temporary authority over this world.  This is what Luke records in his account of the temptation of Jesus by Satan.  “⁵ And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, ⁶ and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. ⁷ If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.”

Immediately after Adam’s fall, God announced his future, pre-determined plan to Satan that one day, another Son of Adam would come and “crush your head, and you will strike his heal.”  Later, when God announced that his future Champion would come through Abraham and the Jews, Satan relentlessly sought to destroy the Jews by seducing them into the demonic idolatry of their Canaanite neighbors.  God however was faithful to preserve a bloodline from Abraham, to a King named David, to a virgin named Mary.

As Jesus ministered, the gospels tell us that he was constantly assailing the kingdom of darkness as he worked to return God’s reign on this earth.  As we said last week, at some point, it became clear to Satan that he couldn’t defeat Jesus through temptation for him to refuse to go to the cross.  So, in his last-ditch effort, Satan reversed his strategy –trying to cause Jesus to disobey God (as Adam had earlier) in the midst of the torture and humiliation of the cross.  His tempted God’s Suffering Servant to curse God and malign his Father.

We see this strategy implicitly in Isaiah 53:7 that speaks of Jesus during his passion, “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth he was led like a lamb to slaughter.”  No rebellion, no complaining, just quiet trust in his Father.  When Jesus was on the cross, with all the forces of darkness marshaled against him in desperation—in their last chance to bring him down in disobedience and maintain Satan’s authority over this world, how did Jesus respond as he hung there?  GLORIOUSLY!!

The words that Jesus spoke on the cross revealed the glory of Christ’s overcoming power.  For instance, as he was bearing the unimaginable burden of the combined sin of all God’s children, he was NOT overwhelmed by it.  In fact, his most agonizing moment, rather than scorn his Father, he prays for the forgiveness of those who had nailed him to the cross.  As he hung on the cross receiving the undiluted wrath of his Almighty Father, rather than curse his Father, he instead fulfills his responsibility as a first-born Son to arrange for the care of his mother who was standing at the foot of his cross.  With some of his last breath, he assigned that task to his friend, John.

Finally, when he’d fully and completely paid the penalty for my sin, he willingly surrendered his life at the moment of HIS own choosing, having finished the work required to destroy the works of the devil–crushing his head while bruising his heal in death.  Where Adam had failed, Christ crucified won a glorious and decisive victory over the evil one!   Romans 5:19 says, “For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.”

In Colossians chapter two, Paul writes of this glorious and cosmic victory Christ won over Satan.  Verse 13 says, “¹³ And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, ¹⁴ by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. ¹⁵ He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.”  Even though Satan still tempts and blinds and deceives people, the truth is—he was forcefully disarmed by Jesus at the cross.  As one scholar has said, “…The weapon of soul-destroying sin and guilt is taken out of Satan’s hand.  He is disarmed of the single weapon that can condemn us—unforgiven sin.”[3]

That weapon, unforgiven sin, which Satan used to condemn, defeat and ultimately kill people, now—after Calvary—instead drives believers to the cross where, through the gospel, we find forgiveness and liberty and eternal life in Jesus.  This is because –on the cross, Jesus violently stripped out of Satan’s talons his weapon of the legal guilt for our unforgiven sin.  As a result, Satan is now like a rattle snake with no poison.

Now, he rattles and strikes at us, baring his evil fangs.  But on Calvary, Christ drew his lethal poison—taking all the torment Satan could hand out on the cross, defeating him and leaving him without any genuine authority to do permanent harm to even one of God’s children.  And when in our unbelief or ignorance, we allow him to defeat us by influencing us to sin; God redeems our sin and uses our defeat to teach us to be even more potent in Christ that we were before.

The cross is the ultimate expression of God’s glory—his glorious power seen in his triumph over evil.  It’s on the cross we see the full-blown glory of God’s wisdom, the glory of his unfailing love and the glory of his holy justice.  This is why in First Timothy 1:11 Paul calls the message of Christ crucified “…the gospel of the glory of the blessed God…”  And this is why Jesus—hours before the torture and humiliation of his crucifixion can say of it, “… “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him.”

If you’re here today and you’re not all that excited about the glory of God—it just doesn’t do much for you—you find yourself being somewhat indifferent to it, know this—that indicates a massively SERIOUS spiritual problem in your heart!  The reason is —as we’ll see later in this discourse, the main purpose of the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Truth is to glorify Jesus.  The Holy Spirit is IMPASSIONED about glorifying Jesus.  NOTHING makes him more animated than the glory of Jesus Christ.

That means that, if a person is a believer with the Spirit indwelling them, they WILL be impassioned about the glory of God unless there is something seriously wrong!  You may have grieved the Holy Spirit through long-standing, unrepentant sin and become hardened—even to his most powerful burden to glorify Christ.  Or, you may not have the Holy Spirit at all—you may be lost.  In either case, you need to repent of your sin and allow the Spirit to live out his passion within you for God’s glory.

If you’re a follower of Christ, then spend good amounts of time meditating on the glories of Calvary—his justice—completely satisfied, his steadfast, sacrificial and totally undeserved love, his great wisdom that, through his call of you, has enabled you to not only understand, but to cherish his magnificent wisdom and power that liberated you from the power of Satan, sin and death.  Regularly, fix your gaze on the glory of the crucified, risen Christ.  May God give us the grace to believe and glory in the cross of Christ.

[1] Elwell, W.A.,Beitzel, B.J. (1988). In Baker encyclopedia of the Bible.  Grand Rapids, MI:  Baker Book House.

[2] Keller, T.J. (2013).  The Timothy Keller Sermon Archive.  New York; Redeemer Presbyterian Church.

[3] This is a quote by John Piper.  I cannot find the source.