THE POWER TO LOVE CHRIST

Introduction

-Several years ago, Dr. Gary Chapman wrote a book on the five love languages that then turned into a larger series of resources. Originally written for married couples, it expanded explaining how different people feel loved in any of their relationships.

~Everybody is different, and so they feel more loved in different situations. The way I receive love is different than how you receive love—we have different love languages. But they can generally be explained in five broad categories:

a) Words of Affirmation—These are verbal expressions of care and affection.

b) Gifts—Tangible and intangible items that make you feel appreciated or noticed.

c) Acts of Service—Doing something helpful or kind for someone.

d) Quality Time—Engaging in an activity together that both people enjoy

e) Physical Touch—Physical expressions of love

-I wonder, though, if we have ever considered the Love Language in our most important relationship—our relationship with Jesus Christ. We are told to love God, and thereby love Christ, with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, but what does that mean? And what does that look like? What is Jesus’ Love Language?

-Jesus tells us directly in the passage that we are reading today what His Love Language is. But what he tells us is not easy, and it is not something that comes naturally. And so, we need help and empowerment to speak Jesus’ Love Language. Thankfully, Jesus says that He Himself will provide the help for us to love Him in a real, tangible way.

John 14:15–31 ESV

15 “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. 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. 18 “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. 19 Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. 20 In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. 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.” 22 Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” 23 Jesus answered him, “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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 29 And now I have told you before it takes place, so that when it does take place you may believe. 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 says that when we love Him, we will keep His commandments. Jesus’ love language is that of obedience. To make sure we don’t miss the point He repeats it several times in this passage. He starts off in v. 15. He repeats it in v. 21 with the promise that the one who shows this type of love is loved by Him and the Father. He again repeats it in v. 23 with the repeated promise.

-Now, I want to make it clear that this passage is in no way advocating a works-based salvation. Jesus is not saying that in order to be saved you have to follow the law and obey every command. But what Jesus is saying is that someone who has trusted in Him will demonstrate love and gratefulness through their obedience. True saving faith is demonstrated through works of obedience, as James also explains in His epistle.

-But that is a tall order. Obeying is a whole lot harder than it sounds. We have this sin nature that we are born with which is why we can never be saved by works. And then even after we are saved, we still have the sin principle within us to contend with that makes obedience very difficult. If we could or would just automatically obey after salvation, then Jesus and Paul and others wouldn’t have to tell us how to live as Christians—we would just automatically do it.

-But we don’t because we can’t because we’re weak. If we are to speak Jesus’ love language, we need help. If we are to obey Jesus’ commands and words, we need some divine intervention to guide us along the way. Thankfully, in this passage, Jesus says that He is going to ask the Father to send us someone to help us along the way—and who the Father sends is the Holy Spirit.

-The Holy Spirit is not just some afterthought. It’s not that Jesus died for us to save us, and now we’re just holding onto the ride of life until we die, and the Holy Spirit is some nice add-on along the way. The Holy Spirit, who Himself is God, is essential. We have no power in the flesh to obey. If we obey, it is because the Holy Spirit came along and enabled us to do so.

-So, to summarize the principle found in this passage, it is that God gave us the Holy Spirit in order to obey Christ’s words and commands which is the way we show our love for Him.

~And Jesus uses this passage to describe how the Holy Spirit helps us in this endeavor. I want to quickly look at some aspects of the Holy Spirit that enable us to obey Christ.

1) He is the Spirit of counsel

-In v. 16 Jesus says that He will ask the Father to send another Helper to be with His followers forever. The Holy Spirit is described as another Helper. The word ANOTHER in this passage means another of the same kind. Jesus is not just going to send some other created being to help us other created being. And Jesus is not going to send some impersonal force to mystically guide people along. Jesus is going to send ANOTHER that is just like Him—personal and divine.

-In the passages prior to this Jesus had told His disciples that He was going away—He would die, be resurrected, but then return to heaven. But, as He emphasizes several times in this passage, Jesus would not leave believers all alone. He would send someone just like Him to walk with them in this life who would help them follow and obey Him.

-Jesus describes the Holy Spirit as a HELPER (ESV). Other versions might say Advocate, others might say Counselor, while others might transliterate it as Paraclete. It is a difficult word to translate into just one English concept.

~Part of the concept of the word is that it is someone who is like a legal assistant who pleads someone’s case.

~Another part of the concept is that it is someone who comes alongside another to help and encourage someone.

-So, Jesus is saying that to help us obey, God will send the Holy Spirit who will come along side us to give us counsel and encouragement on how to live and act and speak in ways reflective of loving Jesus. But when we fail, the Holy Spirit reminds us that we have an Advocate with the Father who is Jesus Christ who forever intercedes on our behalf.

2) He is the Spirit of truth

-This is the way He is described in v. 17. We know that Jesus Christ is the way, the TRUTH, and the life. Jesus is truth and He gives truth because He is the Creator of all truth. And the Holy Spirit will guide us to that truth.

-Jesus warns us that the world cannot receive that Spirit of truth and cannot see that Spirit of truth and cannot know that Spirit of truth because they don’t want to know the truth.

~To put a twist on a famous movie quote: THEY CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH.

~Why? Because the truth of Jesus Christ goes against their natural selfish inclinations and the truth of Jesus Christ is at odds with and completely opposes the supposed truth of the world.

~People in their sinful nature want to be the center of everything, and they will mold their beliefs about truth to that end. And the devil will help them along in this endeavor by molding the world system to feed into that desire.

-That is why you hear people talking about creating their own truth—they want to live in the fantasy that the world is about them rather than live in the reality that the world belongs to God. It’s as if they say I DON’T CARE WHAT IS REAL, I WANT WHAT I WANT SO THIS IS MY TRUTH.

~This is like someone saying: I don’t like the law of gravity, it is too constricting for me. So, I don’t care what the law of gravity says, I am going to jump off of this high-rise building without any sort of parachute, bungee cord, or other equipment, and I am just going to fly wherever I want because that’s my truth.

-You say: well, that’s silly. EXACTLY! Yet, this is what people are doing. I don’t like God’s reality, so I’ll make up my own way, but that way leads to their destruction. And unfortunately, Christians who are worldly and carnal follow the same lead.

-But followers of Jesus Christ are given the Holy Spirit so that they can know the truth and follow the truth that come from Christ Himself. The Holy Spirit will not lead someone to make up their own truth and reality. He will always point someone to the truth that is in Jesus Christ. And only in knowing the truth are you able to obey the truth.

3) He is the Spirit of presence

-At the end of v. 17 Jesus says that His followers know the Holy Spirit because the Spirit was with them and would eventually be in them.

~Throughout the Old Testament we are told of the Holy Spirit at work in God’s plan of redemption, equipping people for some task. The Holy Spirit has always been empowering people for God’s work. But Jesus says that the dynamic would be different in just a short time.

-What He is referring to is what would happen after Jesus’ sacrificial death. After Jesus died and rose and then went away by ascending into heaven, the Holy Spirit would not only come and be with people but would actually indwell people. It began at Pentecost and has now been the reality for believers ever since.

-When Jesus says He would not leave us as orphans, He did not say that He would somehow visit believers every once in a while just to give a pep talk. God would send the Holy Spirit who would permanently indwell believers so that the presence of God would be with them always.

-So, when it comes to the empowerment to obey and follow the words of Christ, we don’t need to make an appointment or wait on hold with the Holy Spirit to have a counseling session on how to follow Jesus’ commands.

~It’s not like when go to an AT&T store or the Apple store and they are real busy, they ask for your name and they put you in a queue and you wait forever in the store for them to get to your name. Or you call into some tech help line and you have to press a thousand buttons before you get a live person.

-The Holy Spirit is with us and in us and is available to lean on and encourage us right now, at this moment. When we are at a moment when we are faced with a choice of following a particular word or command of Christ or not following it, right then and there we can ask the Holy Spirit to empower us and He will if we let Him. He is always present and always available.

4) He is the Spirit of life

-In vv. 18-19 Jesus says He will not leave His followers as orphans but would come to them, and they would see Him again, because He lives His follower will also live.

~In the immediate context Jesus is speaking of His resurrection. Jesus would return to His followers after He died by rising from the dead and they would see Him. And because Jesus rose from the dead, His followers will be given life as well, and it is the Holy Spirit that gives and applies that life.

-There are two senses in which this is true. First, it speaks of spiritual life. The Holy Spirit applies salvation to the believer—it is He who gives us the new heart and makes us new. It is He who renews us through regeneration through the washing of the Word.

~As David Garner explained:

As the Agent of Salvation, the Holy Spirit gives Christ and all the redemptive blessings he has secured to the people of God. The Spirit applies to the church what Christ has accomplished for the church.

-By giving us this new spiritual life, the Holy Spirit changes our nature such that now there is actually the possibility for us to obey. Before, in our natural, sinful state we did not have the means to obey Christ. Now, through the Holy Spirit we have the capability (while, through His empowerment, we have the actual ability)…

-But then Jesus also means that because He lives physically, we also will live physically—we will be raised just as He was. On the day of the resurrection the Holy Spirit will raise up new spiritual bodies for all believers that will never sin again. Our new bodies will be able to obey without any hesitation or equivocation.

-So, it is the Holy Spirit giving us life that enables us to obey and show our love for Jesus.

5) He is the Spirit of manifestation

-In v. 21 Jesus says that for the one who loves Jesus through obedience, Jesus will manifest Himself to them. This was true for the first believers as Jesus manifested His resurrected self to them. But what about us?

-We don’t physically see Jesus and we don’t audibly hear Jesus. Yet, Peter in his epistle says that we love Jesus and believe in Jesus and rejoice with Jesus even though we haven’t seen Him. How is that possible? It is possible because the Holy Spirit manifests Christ to us in our lives.

-We will not see Jesus until we die or He returns. And yet Jesus is present with us. In fact, Paul says in Ephesians that Christ dwells in our hearts through faith. How does He dwell in our hearts if He is actually on the throne in heaven? He dwells in us through the Holy Spirit, and through the Holy Spirit He reveals Himself, He reveals His will, and He reveals His love.

-And the more Jesus is manifested and revealed to us through the Spirit, the more we will love Him and desire to obey Him.

-And there are a few angles by which we can look at this since the word for “manifest” means several things.

~It means to make visible. The Holy Spirit makes the invisible Christ visible to us in our spirits, assuring us of the truths and reality of Christ.

~It means to present evidence. The Holy Spirit opens our spiritual eyes to the unseen realities around us through the evidence of what we can see. Our faith is assured by the Holy Spirit awakening us to Christ at work all around us.

~It also means to make clear. There are a lot of religions and movements that seem to offer various forms of Jesus, but all they are doing is clouding the truth. There is the Jehovah Witness version of Jesus. There is the Mormon version of Jesus. There is the Muslim version of Jesus. And then there is the Christian Jesus. The Holy Spirit at work in the life of a believer will make clear which Jesus is the real Jesus because that Jesus will always match what is given in Scripture…

6) He is the Spirit of revelation

-And so, for us it means that the Bible is a supernatural book that we can completely trust because it has the Spirit as its author, Christ as its subject, and the gospel as its message.

-But now that we have the full canon of Scripture, it is the Holy Spirit that will enlighten us in order to understand what Scripture means and will apply that Scripture to our lives. There are some things hard to understand in the Bible, but the Holy Spirit will give us what understanding we need at the time and how we can follow in loving obedience.

-But the Holy Spirit needs something to work with. If the Holy Spirit is going to give understanding and application, then we need to be in the Word and lay it up in our hearts.

~How can the Holy Spirit use Scripture in our lives to fight temptation if we don’t have Scripture in hearts for it to bring to remembrance.

~And how are we going to obey Christ if we don’t have Christ’s commands and words in our hearts for us to follow?

-The Holy Spirit will take Christ’s Words and tell us THIS IS THE WAY WE SHOULD GO. WALK IN THIS PATH OF HOLINESS AND OBEDIENCE.

7) He is the Spirit of peace

-In v. 27 Jesus says within the context of everything else that has been said that He will give His followers peace. Peace doesn’t just mean a lack of conflict. The Hebrew word SHALOM is behind the concept, and it is a concept of blessed well-being in the whole person.

-The Holy Spirit is the arbiter of Christ’s peace. Jesus’ death gave us peace with God, and the Holy Spirit applies that peace to our lives. The Holy Spirit then brings us a living peace even in the midst of a chaotic world. And the Holy Spirit will give us the peace to know that obedience is always the right choice.

-Sometimes, when we are faced with a choice to obey Christ or not, our flesh and the world and the devil will do all they can to make it the most uncomfortable thing imaginable. They will make it such that it seems that disobedience is the much easier route to take.

~But when we rely on the Holy Spirit, He will make it clear that following Jesus’ words and commands are the only way to have true peace of heart and mind. Sure, disobedience might seem comfortable at first, but we pay for it later with guilt and shame. Obedience might seem uncomfortable at first, but it will give you peace of heart, mind, and spirit that will outlast any discomfort.

-The Holy Spirit counsels us to follow Jesus’ path of truth; with His presence He gives us life, manifesting Christ to us, revealing His word to us, so that we obey and are at peace.

Conclusion

-We obey because we love Jesus, and it is His love language. And the Spirit helps us to show love through obedience. But just because we obey doesn’t mean we necessarily love.

-I follow close enough to the speed limit, not because I love the law or the state or law enforcement, but because I don’t want to get a ticket. I don’t want the punishment for disobedience.

~What Jesus said was, “if you love me, you will keep my commandments.” In other words, love produces obedience, or obedience to Christ’s command is the result of genuine love. It is possible to obey Jesus’ words, as we would a speed limit, and not love Him, maybe because of fear of God. However, it should be impossible to love Him and not obey Him. I say should, because we often hurt the one we love don’t we! We obey out of love, not fear. That is Christianity.

-You who call yourself Christian—are you truly obeying Christ’s words or are you picking and choosing what you will or won’t do? What does that say about your love for Jesus or lack thereof? And if you do obey, what is your motivation?

-Still others haven’t taken the first step of obedience, to repent and believe in Jesus Christ for salvation. Believe that Jesus died for you and be saved. The good news of heaven only comes through Jesus…