Love Well!
Notes
Transcript
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another”
Was that really a new commandment?
I mean it is a good one - but was it new?
Were not the people of Israel already commanded to do this?
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.
You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.
That is two places in the Old Testament law where we hear the command to love our neighbor. And had not Jesus already made it clear the importance of keeping this command when he answered the lawyer who tried to trap him when he asked:
“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
So if loving one another was already commanded - what was new about it?
Here is the thing…Jesus’ new commandment was not “love one another as you love yourself.” Some people don’t love themselves very much - so they are going off a lower standard to begin with. Our capacity to love and our understanding of love can be greatly influenced by our life experiences.
Jesus’ new commandment is this:
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.
We are to love others with a higher standard of love - and that standard is Jesus’ love for us. A love that literally cost everything. It is not so much a “brand new” commandment as it is a “new and improved” commandment.
Let us look a little more closely at this passage in John. The scene is the Last Supper - Jesus eating the Passover meal, reclining at the table surrounded by his disciples. He had already taught them one important lesson. Before the meal began, he had taken on the role of a servant and washed his disciples feet. He told them:
You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you. Truly, truly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.
This was not a command - Jesus said you “ought to”, not you must - but it would be foolish not to do likewise.
This teaching reveals to us the heart of a disciple. We are to serve one another just as Christ came to serve us.
If you are familiar with the Last Supper, you know this is where Judas is identified as the betrayer as he leaves the group to go and put into motion the sequence of events that lead to Jesus’ death.
With Judas now absent from the group, Jesus knowing that his time is short, leans into to his faithful followers and says:
John 13:31–33 (ESV)
“Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and glorify him at once. 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.’
There is much here and I am not going into extensively. The glory Jesus speaks of is his death. Identifying himself as the Son of Man, Jesus is making it known that his death will bring God glory, and that God would vindicate him and bring him glory when Jesus rose from the dead. But it is the next line I want to highlight, the one where Jesus says “Little children, yet a little while I am with you.”
Jesus is speaking directly to his faithful disciples. Those who know him and follow him. He calls them Little Children - not as an insult as it could be taken in today’s vernacular. This is an endearing term - a term of loving concern. They are family - and it is now to these identified spiritual siblings that Jesus says:
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.
The love that a follower of Jesus gives to a fellow believer must be of the same kind that Jesus gave to us. It is a sacrificial love. It is the kind of love that Paul talks about in 1 Cor 13:4-7
1 Corinthians 13:4–7 (ESV)
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.
This is how Jesus commands his followers, God’s children, to love one another. This is how we Love Well! We love as Jesus loved us.
Turn and look at someone. Imagine how much Jesus loves them. That is how much you must grow to love them.
Why is this a commandment and not an ought to?
Well, I can come up with at least three reasons.
God is Love and we are made in His image. Jesus came to reverse the curse - to restore what was lost in the garden. Gen 1:27 “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” We are God’s image bearers. God created you to reflect His very character to all of creation. Sin messed that up. Jesus came and dealt with the sin - but he did not stop there. He sent the Holy Spirit to take up residence within us and to sanctify us - to make us perfect. He wants to return us to that unblemished image of God condition. The apostle Peter in his letter to the church reminds us of God’s intent when he writes “But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: “Be holy, because I am holy.”
We are in this process of becoming like Christ. The Eastern Orthodox Church actually has a term for it: theosis. Theosis is the understanding that human beings can have real union with God, and so become like God to such a degree that we participate in the divine nature.
We never become God - only God is God - but we can become like him - we can live out his characteristics through our own unique identity. As C.S. Lewis describes it: He (God) will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, dazzling, radiant, immortal creatures, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to Him perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that is what we are in for. Nothing less.
When Jesus commands us to love as He loved us - He is beckoning us to love in the manner in which God originally intended us to love. Not as humans broken by our sin, but as Christ bearers redeemed by his blood.
2. Loving like Jesus opens the eyes of the spiritually blind.
Jesus follow up his new commandment by saying:
By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
How do the lost see Jesus? How do those who are blinded to spiritual realities begin to see the truth?
Is it by what they hear or by what they see? I would argue that it is both. Look at how Jesus revealed himself. It was by Word and by signs and wonders. He would demonstrated God’s power and then he would teach God’s truth. People would see with their eyes evidence of the power of God and they would then be open to hear and receive what Jesus had to say.
By the witness of our sacrificial love for one another - Jesus says that people will know that we belong to Him. Christian loving Christian - regardless of their differences in skin color, tribal affiliation, social status, ethnicity, age, gender, IQ, health status, personality - whatever - it is how we love one another that will show the world that we belong to the King of kings whose name is above all names.
I long time ago, I read the book “Same Kind of Different as Me” by Ron Hall and Denver Moore. It was made into a movie at one point - some of you may have read it.
It is the story of an unlikely friendship that grew between a dangerous homeless drifter and an upscale art dealer. This friendship transformed both of them.
I’d like to read a quote from the book written by Denver, the former homeless drifter, in his own words:
“You was the onlyest person that looked past my skin and past my meanness and saw that there was somebody on the inside worth savin...We all has more in common than we think. You stood up with courage and faced me when I was dangerous, and it changed my life. You loved me for who I was on the inside, the person God meant for me to be, the one that had just gotten lost for a while on some ugly roads in life.”
That is the power of loving one another the way that Jesus loves us. It brings sight to the blind.
3. Love like Jesus allows us to imitate God’s mercy
Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins.
I have to admit something. I’ve always misunderstood this passage - mostly because I did not take the time to really consider it. I subconsciously read it as “my love for others covered over my own sins.” My thought was that as a Christian, there are times when I sin, but if I am constantly loving people, then it kind of cancels out my shortcomings. But that is not true. My sin is covered by the blood of Jesus. Nothing else can take it away. I am saved by grace alone. So what is Peter saying here?
Love covers over the sins of the one we are loving.
Edmund Clowney, in his commentary on 1 Peter, writes “We do not love others if we take delight in finding and exposing their faults and sins. Rather, love covers over a multitude of sins (4:8). Peter reflects the language of Proverbs: ‘Hatred stirs up dissension, but love covers over all wrongs.’ Unless love can stretch to forgive many sins, it will not avail among us sinners. Peter had asked Jesus how many times he must forgive his brother. He proposed a generous seven times. Jesus was not impressed. He replied, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven.’ Love does not keep score, but grants forgiveness freely to every brother or sister who seeks it.
To love well is to forgive often and wherever necessary - love comes with a cost. Forgiveness always cost the one granting it. The command to love one another as Jesus loved us means that we are willing to take on that cost - and in doing so - imitate our Lord and show God’s mercy to others.
In 2018, Officer Amber Guyger of the Dallas police department, killed a innocent man, Botham Jean, when she mistakenly entered his apartment thinking it was her own. He was on the couch eating ice cream, she was startled and immediately fired her gun.
She was sentenced to prison, but what capture the attention of the press and what soon went viral was the remarkable act of love demonstrated by the victim’s brother, Brandt Jean.
Taking the witness stand he turned to Amber as said:
“I love you just like anyone else and I'm not going to hope you rot and die, I personally want the best for you. I wasn't going to say this in front of my family, I don't even want you to go to jail. I want the best for you because I know that's exactly what Botham would want for you. Give your life to Christ. I think giving your life to Christ is the best thing Botham would want for you. I know if you go to God and ask him, he will forgive you."
He then asked the judge if he could give her a hug. There was not a dry eye in the courtroom when the two of them embraced.
That young man showed the world God’s mercy. People saw Jesus in his actions.
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.
Followers of Jesus - my brothers and sisters in the Lord - may we be obedient and love like that. It is only possible if we first love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind and all our strength. When we allow him to pour into us His love, and it overflows to others, are we to truly Love Well.
Amen.