As I Have Loved You

As I Have Loved You Series: The One Anothers - #2 John 13:31-35 Rev. L. Kent Blanton Review & Introduction • New sermon series, “The One Anothers” - comprised of 59 NT commands that use the term one another or each other to teach how God intends for us to live in community. • What’s so important about living in community? Why should I be concerned about community? 1. You can’t fully experience God’s purpose in your life without it. 2. If you don’t fulfill your purpose, others in this world may never know that God sent his Son. • What’s our purpose? To glorify God and to enjoy him forever. • You cannot glorify God and enjoy him fully apart from community. • You were designed for community. • Community is one of our most basic human drives. • All people crave genuine community. Why? Because we’re made in the image of God and God dwells in community. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have existed and will exist in an interdependent relationship of perfect community for eternity past, present, and future. • Institutions established by Go in which we experience and participate in community: marriage, the family, and the church • The community experienced in marriage, the family, and the church is intended to provide a taste to us and the world of the perfect community experienced by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and of the perfect community that believers will experience with God forever. • Because we are fallen creatures, community no longer comes easy for us. We need to be reminded and encouraged to master the sinful, selfish tendencies that are a part of our old nature that resists genuine community. To this end, God has given us . . . The One Anothers • 59 specific commands teaching us how (and how not) to relate to one another in the church, as well as in marriage and the family. • About 1/3 of the One Anothers deal with the subject of love. We read them a little earlier in the service. Focal Passage: John 13:31-35 CSB When he had left, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man is glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Children, I am with you a little while longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so now I tell you: ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ “I give you a new command: Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you are also to love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another. • These verses form the start of Jesus’ Farewell Discourse that continues through John Chapter 17 • Delivered the night before his death in an upper room eating the Passover Meal with his disciples. • Jesus is attempting to prepare them for his death and departure • If you knew you were going to die tomorrow and tonight you gathered with your friends, what would you say to them? Things most important to you. “I give you a new command: Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you are also to love one another.” (John 13:34 CSB) • Why is this a “new” command? • The command to love others was not new to Judaism or even to secular society for that matter. • “. . . love your neighbour as yourself . . .” (Lev 19:18 CSB) • The Great Commandment: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,” and “your neighbor as yourself.” (Luke 10:27 CSB) • This is a new command is because the standard of love has been raised. As I have loved you. • Jesus is commanding his disciples, you and me, to love each other, to live in community, in the same way, to the same degree that he has loved us. How has Jesus loved us? 1. Jesus loved us by serving. • In John 13:1-12 we see Jesus loving - loving by serving. He washed his disciples’ feet. • His disciples had a need. They had stinky, dirty feet from walking the dusty dirt roads of Judea. • Jesus met that need. He sprung into action. He met them at the point of their immediate need. He served them. • The love with which Jesus loved his disciples was not a sentimental feeling. It was a loved evidenced by action. Jesus said of himself, . . . the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve . . . (Matt 20:28 CSB) • Illustration: Dr. Howard Hendricks’ story about stacking chairs and soiled napkins. 2. Jesus’s love is unconditional • What takes place immediately after Jesus gives this command to love one another? He predicts Peter’s betrayal. In v. 38, he says, “Peter, before morning, you will disown me three times.” • Jesus is saying these words knowing that one of his three closest friends is going to deny him not once, or even twice, but three times within the next 12 hours. • What occurs between the foot washing and his command to love one another as I have loved you? Jesus eats the evening meal with his disciples. • It’s during this meal that he identifies Judas as the one who will betray him. He gives Judas a piece of bread dipped in sauce and says, “What you are about to do, do quickly.” (John 13:27 NIV) • Not only is Jesus serving and eating with one who will in just hours deny him with cursing, he is serving and eating with a so-called friend who will stab him in the back by betraying him to the religious authorities who are determined to terminate him. • Jesus love for his disciples included a love for Peter and Judas. His love was, and is, unconditional. Jesus loves regardless of being loved in return. Jesus loved you and me before the foundation of the world. • His love was not, and is not, based on our acceptance or rejection of him. He loves us in spite of our rebellion and rejection of his love. • Illustration: Story of unconditional love expressed by Victoria Ruvolvo for Ryan Cushing 3. Jesus’ love is sacrificial When he had left, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man is glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. (John 13:31-32 CSB) • What was Jesus speaking of when he talks about being glorified and God being glorified in him? He was talking of the cross and the resurrection. “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains by itself. But if it dies, it produces much fruit. (John 12:23-24 CSB) • “Now my soul is troubled. What should I say—Father, save me from this hour? But that is why I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The crowd standing there heard it and said it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” Jesus responded, “This voice came, not for me, but for you. Now is the judgment of this world. Now the ruler of this world will be cast out. As for me, if I am lifted up[h] from the earth I will draw all people to myself.” He said this to indicate what kind of death he was about to die. (John 12:27-33 CSB) • What was this glorification referred to in this passage? • It was the glory of God that would be revealed in the cross. The glory that God himself would die as a man for the sins of the world. That the prince of God’s kingdom would come and die so that his rebellious and death-sentenced subjects, could be set free and adopted as children and joint heirs of the king! • It was also the glory that Jesus received before his father for fulfilling the Father’s will, the glory that will be consummated when upon his return to earth every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord and all the earth worships him as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. Hallelujah! • Illustration: Daring sacrificial act of French policeman, Arnaud Beltrame The Result of Loving as Jesus Loved “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” John 13:35 CSB • When you and I love one another like Jesus has loved us - through service, unconditionally, and sacrificially - Jesus says the world will see that we belong to him. Why? Because they will see him in us. • The world will see him in our marriages, in our families, and in the church. • They will see community at it best and they will see a picture of God that invites them to join the community that God has restored with humanity through his Son. • The early church experienced this kind of community and drawing action to the world around them (Acts 2:42-47) Testimony of Love in the Early Church • In the earliest centuries of the church, love was the hallmark of their community • Tertullian reports that the pagans said of the Christians, “See, they say, how they love one another … how they are ready even to die for one another” (Apology 39). • E. R. Dodds (20th century classical scholar, not a Christian) asserts that the genuine love and unity among Christians was “a major cause, perhaps the strongest single cause, of the spread of Christianity” (Dodds 1965:138). “Love of one’s neighbour is not an exclusively Christian virtue, but in the second to third century, Christians appear to have practiced it much more effectively than any other group” (Dodds 1965:136–37). • But by the 4th century after the advent of the state Church, to be a Christian no longer required a death to self. You could be a Christian and remain selfish and unloving. Love as a hallmark of Christianity was lost in practice. • 4th-century preacher John Chrysostom: “There is nothing else that causes the Greeks [that is, the non-Christians] to stumble, except that there is no love.… We, we are the cause of their remaining in their error. Their own doctrines they have long condemned, and in like manner they admire ours, but they are hindered by our mode of life” (In John 72.5). • In parts of the world today, the church (believers like you and me) continues to be the greatest obstacle to people’s coming to believe that the Father sent the Son into the world. How to Love as Jesus Loved • Loving as Jesus loved is not easy. • But Jesus would not command us to do something that’s impossible. • Do we just say to ourselves, “Self, don’t be selfish? Think about others.” Do we try to remember, “Jesus first, others second, me last?” Do we just try harder? • You and I must choose to respond to Christ’s command to love one another. But the key to loving as Christ loved won’t be found in just trying harder. The key is to be found somewhere else. • Later in this same Farewell Address, Jesus uses a metaphor to describe our relationship with him and with the Father. “I am the vine, you are the branches.” (John 15:5 NIV) • When we profess faith in Jesus, God the Father grafts us into the Vine that is Jesus. We are now “in Christ.” • Just as sap flows from a grapevine trunk into its branches, and each branch is nourished, grows, and bears fruit, so does the life of God flow from the vine that is Jesus into our lives as spiritual branches that are connected to Him. • The life of God flowing into us provides the power to do what we could not otherwise do. Jesus said, “Apart from me you can do nothing. (John 15:5 NIV) • What must a branch do to thrive? Just one thing. Stay connected to the Vine. Remain vitally connected to the Vine. “Remain in me and I will remain in you.” (John 15:4 NIV) • If we do, Jesus said we will bear much fruit. • What is the first fruit of the Spirit listed in Gal 5:22-23? Love. • When we stay connected to Jesus, the love with which he loves us is spiritually generated within us. We are transformed from the inside out by His love. We are enabled and empowered to love as he loves. • Are you remaining, are you abiding, in the Vine called Jesus? If not, you can do nothing. If so, you can love as Jesus has loved you. Summary/Challenge • Jesus love is a love that serves, a love that is unconditional, and a love characterized by extreme sacrifice. • Loving as he loved is possible through remaining vitally connected to him, the Vine. • As we remain in the Vine, genuine God-infused community is possible in our marriages, families, and in the church. • It’s the kind of community that will cause the world to believe that God sent his Son into the world to bring life.