John 15:9-17

Abide in my Love

Intro

If you didn’t see it done, you probably wouldn’t believe it, and you certainly would have a hard time putting it into practice. YouTube is popular for lots of things, but one of the really useful things is how-to videos. I can’t tell you how many how-to videos I have watched on how to fix this thing on my car, or how to build a set of stairs, or how to wire a room, etc.. We watch someone do it, and that gives us the confidence to try it ourselves. Jesus gives you a how to video, and says just as I have done, so you should do. None more so than calling His disciples to love one another.

Without mentioning the parable of the vine, branches, and vinedresser again, Jesus presses into the details of that metaphor as he invites His disciples to abide in Him. So we need to keep that in the background as we look today at how Jesus calls us to abide in his love (9). But what Jesus calls you to, he shows you how to do by His example. He has called His disciples to love one another, but like every generation, and none more so than our own, we have subtle ways of redefining love in very me-centered ways. Jesus is keen for us to love one another, but it’s got to look like His love for us.

Abide in My Love

He unpacks the significance of abiding in the vine by using Himself as an example. He has been loved by His Father, perfectly, I might add. And in just the same (perfect) way, Jesus loves you. I really think Christians have the hardest time grasping this. I know I could spend the whole sermon just getting you to see and believe the truth of this.

How do you imagine the Father loving the Son? Here is a perfect being, with no shadow or stain of sin. And they together form a union of persons, with a shared essence. The Son is of the Father, eternally begotten. And if eternally begotten, then eternally loved. Never a harsh word between them. No room for resentment. No petty tricks to get the other to do what they want. No mercenary love that gives only to receive. But perfect, unfailing, always true, mutually reciprocal love.

Because he loved the Son, the Father created the world through Him and for Him. And because of the love he has for His Son, the Father made man in His image. When the image of the Son in man was defaced because of sin, it was love for the Son that caused the Father to set a plan in motion to save that world from sin and death. It was all out of love for the Son that the Father sent His Son to recover ruined sinners and restore His creation to a more perfect glory.

We can say, to the extent that the Father loves the Son, so the Son loves you. Its quality and quantity are the same. It is there the Son calls you to live. I like how one commentator translates abide–make your home in. I would add, come to grips with. Live in (and out) of Jesus’ love for you. Make your home there, constantly be coming to grips with that most perfect of love. Which Jesus gives a series of practical steps for you to work that out, to begin and remain in that love. It goes like this: abide by obeying, obey by loving, love by dying. Just as Christ does. He abides in the Father’s love by obeying Him; He obeys him by loving His own sheep; He loves His own sheep by laying down His life for them. If you want to abide in His love, then you must follow Christ by loving as he has loved, by dying as he has died. Let us briefly unpack each of these so that we can understand how to abide in His love.

Abide by obeying

Jesus immediately in v.10 explains what it means to abide in His love. It means to keep His commandments. But again, he doesn’t just tell, he first shows. “Just as I have kept my father’s commandments and abide in His love” (10). So first we see that love, and abiding in love, involves obedience.

Imagine for a moment if the Son did not obey the Father. If he said, I really don’t like man, and I’m not too excited about getting my hands dirty with this whole redemption thing you came up with, I think I will go and do my own thing. Not only is this impossible, but it’s absurd, and it’s not love, at least not any kind of reciprocal love. No, the Father sends the Son, and he obeys Him. He gives Him a mission, and He sets out to accomplish it. He tasks Him with making the Father known to the world, of revealing who he is. Which he does. He obeys the Father by loving His disciples.

Do see, to abide in the love of Christ, to make your home with him, you must obey Him. To use the analogy that lies behind this whole discussion, if you are to be a branch that abides in the vine and glorifies the Father, then you must be a branch that bears much fruit. You must be a branch that obeys all that Jesus has commanded. There is no life apart from abiding in Christ, and the proof that you are is seen in your obedience to Him. To recall the debate from the nineties, you can’t have Jesus as Savior unless you also have Him as Lord. So you can’t follow Christ without obeying Him.

But Jesus, ever the helpful teacher, gets even more specific by teaching them how to obey.

Obey by Loving

What, then, is Jesus’ commandment? Helpfully he tells you in v. 12. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (Jn 15:12). Again, he sets the example for how this is done. As we have already noted from v. 9, as the Father loves Him, so he loves us. That’s some kind of love. In the same way he commands us to love one another. We’ll talk specifics in a minute, when we consider v. 13, but let’s consider just first that Jesus’ loves you.

Jesus obeyed His father, abiding in His love by loving you. Before we even get to His dying in v. 13, notice how costly His love to you is. Not to mention, you know yourself, how loveable are you, even at your best.

It took Him leaving the joy of perfect unbroken fellowship with the Father in heaven. Where at the father’s side, he enjoyed infinite freedom, unlimited power, and sovereign control. He traded all that so he could be born a crying baby, completely dependent on others to feed Him and keep Him clean. Now he is thirsty and gets hungry, he gets tired from walking, and tired of dealing with all the sin and unbelief in the world. He traded perfect acceptance to come and live among the people he made, and for whom He is their Lord, only to be rejected by them, and mocked, and hated, and plotted against by those he came to save. Then he constantly saw his work undermined. People he healed became sick again, those he raised from the dead would die again. He suffered much just to come to earth as a man, before he even went to the cross.

Why would anyone do so much? Love. Love for the world. Love for lost sinners. Love for His disciples, who, let’s be honest, most of the time had no clue what was going on, or what he was all about. Love was the reason, love was the fuel. Love was the ground motive. Love was the whole point. Love even for His enemies, like Judas who had already set in motion a plan to betray Him.

So when he commands you to love one another, he commands from the front, having already paved the way. Having already shown you what love is. If you have been keeping up with this so far, the golden chain of abiding in His love goes like this. To abide, obey; to obey, love. And to love, you must die.

Love by Dying

Now, he takes it further, for the one another, means fellow disciples, fellow branches abiding in the vine, fellow members of the body of Christ. We are certainly called to love as Christ did, even loving the world and our enemies. But our special love, our love for the sake of obeying so that we may abide in His love, kind of love, is for one another. That love is nothing short of sacrificial. He says, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” (Jn 15:13).

This is another one of Jesus’ statements that would soon take on much more meaning. For only hours from then, he would indeed lay down His life in death as the greatest act of love the world has ever known. Truly we find it heroic, when others sacrifice their lives, such as soldiers, or police officers, or firemen. We extol such virtue, and write stories and make movies about such feats. And we’d like to think that if the cause was just, or the situation was right, we would do the same thing.

Yet, the tendency to want to preserve our own life at the expense of another is very high. In other words this love is not natural but supernatural. But again, Jesus shows you how this is done by dying for you. What He calls you to do, he has done to the fullest for you. As I have loved you, by laying down my life, so should you lay down your life for one another.

Many, many have stumbled over the truth that God came and died for man. Why would any god do that? No god in the Greco-roman pantheon would do that. It’s almost unbelievable. “For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Ro 5:7–8). Christ laid down His life for His disciples as the greatest act of love. “Who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame” (Heb. 12:2). He didn’t grumble and complain about it, he went willingly, even though it meant that He whom His Father had never for one day been displeased with, who had lived even in His life on earth in perfect communion with–abiding in His love–it meant he would become sin, and God would pour out on Him the fury of His indignation and wrath giving Him and eternities worth of punishment for sins that you and I are guilty of. That’s the kind of love Christ has for you.

Now, at the eve of that moment of death, Jesus is eager to impress upon His disciples that it is this act of love that will form the basis for their own love for one another.

Here he completes the golden chain. To abide in His love, you must obey; to obey, you must love one another; loving one another means laying down your life for each other; just as I have done for you, in obedience to my Father, as I abide in His love.

The point of all this is: you must love one another (v. 17).

So Love One Another

As we move to unpack this in more detail and practically apply it, we need to consider first how we can love in this way, what should characterize this love, and what it means to have Jesus call you friends, concluding with a reminder that you have been chosen and tasked with bearing fruit in this way, and that you will only accomplish it through prayer.

As you have been loved

This has come up with unusual frequency in this last part of John, so I won’t belabor the point. But I can’t leave it out. You need to pay attention to one important word in v. 12–as. Love one another as I have loved you. The key to loving as Christ has loved you is to abide in His love. I mentioned one commentator translated abide as make your home in. If you have not made your home in Christ’s love for you, you can never pour yourself out for others. Only when you operate out of a secure love, experienced preferably daily, in communion with Christ, then loving others sacrificially will be impossible.

When you’re not abiding in His love, and operating out of that chances are you will love others only for what they can give you. You’ll see relationships like a bank you’ll put in, only because you think one day (soon) you’ll be able to make a withdrawal. But that is not love as Christ loved you. And thank God for that, for His love wasn’t predicated on any condition you would, or even could, meet, but solely for His good pleasure. When you have been loved by Christ, you can and will love others as He has loved you, but not until then.

Love full of Joy

Notice also that this kind of love, which in obedience to Christ, and the result of abiding in His love, is full of joy. “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” (Jn 15:11). Yet again, Jesus grounds His disciples’ joy in the joy he has in obeying His Father’s commands. Sin has a way of distorting righteousness by making obedience seem like drudgery. But since living according to God’s standards is the way you were designed to live, doing so is joyful. Sin’s lie entices you to believe that real joy is found in breaking God’s law, real joy is found in doing your own will. Adam believed that lie, and so have we since then. But it’s not true.

Real joy is found in obedience to all that Christ has commanded. So you may readily detect counterfeit love because it is joyless. That kind of love doesn’t produce joy, because it is not done with the right motives. Therefor it is not done in obedience to Christ. When you turn love into a work, you accomplish to earn God’s favor, you empty it of real joy. What’s left is resentment towards all the people you have laid down your life for.

Jesus’ joy comes from abiding in His Father’s love by His glad obedience to all the Father gave Him to do. His joy will be in you, when you too learn to abide in His love by the glad obedience to love one another by laying down your life for the saints. When you live like that, His joy will be in you, and your joy will be complete.

Jesus calls you friends

“You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.” (Jn 15:14–15).

Now, many saints in the New Testament self-identify as servants of Christ. Jesus is not obliterating any distinction between Himself as Lord, and His disciples, who he commands to obey him. But he calls us friends because he is intimate with us through the revelation of His Father’s plan of redemption. Jesus came to make know to them the will of God concerning their salvation. But servants, strictly speaking, don’t need to know the plan in order for their master to command them to do something. Jesus has a different relationship with you and I, for he has disclosed the heart of God to us. Friends tell each other intimate details of their lives. Jesus is a friend of sinners because he draws near to you and tells you the good news of the Gospel. He tells you that God so loved the world that he sent his well beloved Son to come and save it from sin, and give to all who believe in Him eternal life with Him forever.

Notice that this is a conditional statement. “You are my friends if you do what i command you” (v. 14). So if you abide in his love by gladly obeying His command to love one another as he has loved you, then you are His friends, and he will make known to you all that the Father has told Him.

Grounded upon election

But lest we draw from Jesus’ teaching it is our efforts to obey Christ that secure our abiding in His love, he closes this section by grounding everything in election.

“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.” (Jn 15:16).

The disciples had not selected Jesus as someone worthy of following, lest they begin to think that it was their wisdom that led them to Christ. No, Jesus chose them. He selected them by name, and led them, and disclosed God’s plan to them, for the purpose of giving them a mission to go and bear fruit.

Jesus chose you to abide in His love and so bear much fruit. That was the design of the plan he came to reveal. That from the foundation of the world the Father and the Son had made a covenant together, that the Son would one day come and save all those chosen for salvation by dying for their sins. In theological terms we call this limited atonement because Christ did not die indiscriminately for all, but for those particular people chosen by His father, and predestined for salvation. These he did for by standing in their place.

But these were chosen for a purpose, to go and bear fruit, fruit that would remain. That word appointed means to assign some task of function. You were chosen for a mission, and the mission is to bear fruit. And the fruit is found in doing the will of God, and here in the immediate context of Jesus’ farewell discourse the will of God for you is to love one another as Christ Jesus has loved you.

Suffused with prayer

Jesus’ whatever you ask must mean that the fruit-bearing task of loving one another will be something done in a constant state of prayer.

Leon Morris comments: “We ought not to think of prayer as something in the nature of a tool that enables us to do better service. Rather, we do better service in order that we may pray more effectively.… Jesus is here telling his followers that it is important that we should all have set before us the goal of being more effective in our praying.” [1]

Conclusion

Jesus, calls you to abide in His love by obeying his command to love one another as he has loved you. You learn love by receiving His love, and then abide in His love by imitating Him, laying down your lives for one another. There’s no greater love than that. True joy is found in living life in conformity to the will of God, which he has chosen and appointed you for, so go love one another and bear much fruit, that will remain forever. Amen. Let’s pray.

Holy Father, as you loved the Son, who was faithful in all you gave Him to do, so he has loved us, by laying down His life to save us from sin. O Father, let us abide int hat love and so bear fruit, the fruit of loving one another. Fill us with joy in this task you have appointed us to. So that as we abide in the love of Christ, we may glorify you. Through Jesus, we ask you, Father, cause us to bear much fruit and allow it to remain. Amen.

Lord ’s Supper Meditation

This is a communion table, a table of fellowship were we participate not only in union with Christ, but also our union and communion with one another.

Charge

As Jesus has loved you, so you must love one another.

[1] Richard D. Phillips, John, ed. Richard D. Phillips, Philip Graham Ryken, and Daniel M. Doriani, 1st ed., vol. 2, Reformed Expository Commentary (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2014), 309–310.