A New Commandment I Give to You
Notes
Transcript
ME
ME
I remember when I was in sixth grade and we went to sing for state Chorus tournament… we were in Frankfort and were coming out of the building where we had performed, and whats crazy is I do not remember what that building was, but we were coming out and we started to get on the bus, and we start to hear tornado sirens… it had been raining all day so it wasn’t a total surprise, and as I look up in the distance I saw it… this beautiful tornado… and I know that is almost treacherous to say, but I saw it… and they do tons of destruction but at the same time they just seem so beautiful at the same time… anyway I look up and see it and every one is screaming at us to get off the bus, and run inside so we could all huddle up in a hallway somewhere, and it was the first time I stood and really watched a storm… and I am always fascinated by the beauty that happens right after one of those storms as the clouds clear and the sky goes bright and we get to see… normally you have this moment of clearness… Now Jennifer will tell you it wasnt the last time someone has screamed at me while I stand and try to watch a storm and everyone else is staying safe in the closet or basement somewhere… I still want to do that…
And you are thinking, that’s great preacher but what does that have anything to do with me or what you are talking about today… well I am glad you asked… today what we are seeing is exactly that… we have looked at how Satan has entered into Judas and now that storm has left the room and there will be this beauty where Jesus begins to teach the disciples that are left in the room… there is still this heaviness in the room… but there is this beauty coming in what he is teaching them… a new commandment…
But before he can get there he has to set it up a little bit he has to give us some background to bite into…
31 When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him.
And when we think of this moment… Judas going out to betray Jesus, we most likely think of it as this horrible moment… a man is going to sell out the son of god for such a small amount of money… and that isn’t really the important thing… its just a symbol for the wickedness in our heart… but we think about this event and it would cause all of this somberness in our hearts… but Jesus says that Judas leaving to betray him is what is going to glorify God…
And we have to think of what the disciples in the room must be thinking in these moments… Jesus is talking about God being glorified and they have to be thinking about some amazing glorious moment about to happen… all this talk of Jesus being the son of man would have probably reminded them of the text in Daniel 7 which says…
13 “I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him.
14 And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.
So here they are with this in mind thinking about God’s glory being displayed in that way, remember they were waiting for Jesus to put together this earthly kingdom that would lay all others to rest. They were seeing glory in a different way…But all throughout the gospel John has not shown us the glory of God in that way… he has shown us the glory of God through submission and then through the cross… and so at the end of verse 31 we again see Jesus calling back to how intertwined he is with the father so that even the Father is glorified when he is glorified… and he goes on
32 If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and glorify him at once.
And there are three things I think we can learn from this verse. 1. The Father is glorified in the son. 2. The Father will glorify the son in himself. 3. The Father will glorify the son at once…
And this can be confusing because there is so much depth here about the roles and the intertwined roles of the father and the son…
And we see in this the father and son are looking forward to the glory on the other side of the cross… the work complete and what will be done… they looked at the cross as we see over and over again in this gospel as the HOUR of their glory… and as we are in John 13 the crucifixion is mere hours away… isn’t it funny how fast we went through the ministry of Jesus in the first few chapters and now we have slowed down to slower than the pace I creep through these gospels…
The question may be why is it the cross is where the Glory of god is going to be shown. And the answer to this is on the cross the entirety of the wrath of God will be poured out on the son and because of the work of Jesus the entire wrath of God is satisfied by him
on the cross and he has taken all the penalty… he paid it all so that you and I that call ourselves his followers have been bought with a price and freed from the penalty of sin in that work in a way that we can glorify the father and the son forever..
And I told you at the beginning we were talking about a new commandment… and these verses are so important to the basis of that, because what these verse do is show us the foundation of the love that he is about to call us to… show us where it comes from and how it is lived out, because the cross is the greatest act of love the world has ever known… and you will see it soon in John 15:13
13 Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.
And he wants us to know before he tells us about this commandment the basis for the love he is speaking of comes through this… this laying down of life… lets go on
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.’
34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.
35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
And he is telling them the same thing we looked at a few weeks ago… that he wont be with them forever… I do find it interesting here that Jesus says he said it to the Jews when he is surrounded by all of his Jewish disciples… he has placed those Jews in a different group than the ones sitting around him… its almost as if the Jews he is speaking of when he says, “the jews” are the unbelievers…
And this command seems almost simple… Love one another… just as Jesus loved me… and I think we can get our kids at a very early age to memorize this… heck When we talk about treat other people the way we want to be treated I remember one of my kids saying they should be allowed to hit the other because they hit them and that’s the way they wanted to be treated…
Right?
But this is so much deeper…
He is telling us of a love that is a life of love… we are to love just as Jesus loved us… and this would be easy for us to think we should love only those that loved us… but that isn’t true… we can all love someone that loved us… but we are to go even deeper than that… we are to live a life of sacrifice and love for everyone… when we talk about counting the cost to follow Jesus, this is part of it, because following Jesus costs us to lay down everything we want to live sacrificially for the people around us.
And when we think about this commandment it doesn’t sound too new, because we see know even as far back as Leviticus 19:18
18 You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.
We knew that we were to love our neighbor… but what is different about this commandment is the motivation behind it… the reason we love one another is because Jesus loved us… our motivation… the reason we do all of this Jesus tells us is because we are his followers and we are supposed to do what he does… we are supposed to love sacrificially and love those around us… even the people we don’t really like… even the people we would call our enemies….
8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Christ showed his love for his… because while we were sinners… while we were enemies of God, Jesus died for us… and Jesus says this is how we are supposed to live our lives… by our love for one another… and I love the way Kent Hughes talks about how these first century people lived this out…
“Barbarian, Scythian, bond and free, male and female, Jew and Greek, learned and ignorant all sat down at one table, and felt themselves all one in Christ Jesus. They were ready to break all other bonds, and to yield to the uniting forces that streamed out from His cross. There had never been anything like it…and from seeing it the world began to wonder.”
-Kent Hughes
So these people did it… they sat down with people of different races, backgrounds, political affiliations, and had meals with one another and loved one another and they thing that brought them together, their love through the way Jesus loved them…
Can you imagine that happening in our political climate of today? I seriously think our two party system is a means for the enemy to get us to hate one another. Once every four years people seem to forget we are all sinful humans with errors, and we hate each other so much we can barely sit at a meal together. Jesus says we should sit and love one another…
And this is the stickler I think for most of us in Christianity… its the hard thing for us to do… to love people more than ourselves and lay our lives down because if we really were to look at ourselves we are selfish people who think about ourselves so often… not following?
How hard is it to love someone that has done you wrong? What we like to do when people do us wrong and hurt us is make excuses why we don’t have to love them anymore… we write them off and we come up with all the reasons that they don’t need our love because they want us to treat them they way they treated us right… they don’t deserve it because they are horrible selfish people so we kind of retreat from it
The good news is, Jesus isn’t like us… he doesn’t write us off for all the times we have wronged him… he doesn’t make excuses for why he doesn’t have to… he just gives his life before we even had the chance knowing we would deny him time and time again so that he could be ready and waiting the moment our heart opens to him…
This morning I want to challenge all of us… can you imagine a world where people actually loved one anotehr in the way JEsus called us to love one another… if we laid down our lives and humbled ourselves to put pothers before our selves… if when someone hurt us instead of allowing it to alter how we felt.. if we looked at the cross for how to live… if when tempted to put ourselves up we looked at the cross as our answer with how to respond… daughter in law gets snippy with yiou? Cross… Boss gets snippy with you? Cross… Person on the street needs help and we think they just want drugs or alcohol… cross…
Can you imagine the impact of the gospel? Can you imagine the impact of the world?
And after this deep lesson on life and how we are supposed to live we see the disciples being the disciples… we see them not really understanding what is important… and peter speaks and He normally is the first one to do so, but i can imagine Jesus has said all this… he’s laid down this amazing teaching… and we don’t see them asking anything about love… because its almost like all they have heard is… where I am going yoiu cannot follow… and here we have Peter…
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.”
37 Peter said to him, “Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.”
And this is amazing… Look at Peter bursting with Pride… First its this question… Uh Jesus… where are you going… and Jesus doubles down… and then You see it… I will follow you anywhere Jesus… just ask.. I will lay down my life for you… I GOT THIS>>>>
And what we see is sometimes our faith is stronger in the security of the upper room than it is when the rubber really meets the road…
And this got me… it reminds me of what we talked about a few weeks ago… I can come in the church and say Yes Lord, I will share you wherever I go… I will do whatever you asked me to do… I want you to lay down your life for me… live sacrificially and in the church when the preacher is talking Im puffed up… and then when I get to the concert and the man asks if there are any christians in the audience I throw that cross inside my shirt… And I know we can do this in other ways… our neighbors/coworker/kids life is falling apart and we have the opportunity to point them to the answer, Jesus, and we just come up with some other method to help…
And WE see Peter has this high view of his ability to follow Jesus in the hard places… and we can get just as prideful… and in Mere Christianity when he is talking about Pride, CS Lewis says, “…the one vice of which no man in the world is free, which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else, and of which hardly any people (except Christians) ever imagine that they are guilty of themselves…There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others. It is the complete anti-God state of mind.” CS Lewis
And we have to remember it was pride that turned Lucifer into the devil… him thinking he was better than God and deserved just as much attention…
And this goes together with what we have talked about love, because the first step to truly being able to love one another is humility… to be able to lay down our lives for one another we have to see ourselves as less than we typically want to… most of you that have had long happy marriages would also say that was a key… laying down our lives for one another…
And Look at what Jesus says to Peter…
38 Jesus answered, “Will you lay down your life for me? Truly, truly, I say to you, the rooster will not crow till you have denied me three times.
And he is saying… come on Peter… and you can almost know that this hurt Peter… and I say that because there is no instance of Peter interrupting here… he isn’t saying NO WAY JESUS… he just shuts up… it had to hurt… it made him introspective and look at himself and how he would handle Jesus… much in the same way it should do us…