Abide in My Love
Notes
Transcript
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9 As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love.
10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.
11 These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.
12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
13 Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.
14 You are my friends if you do what I command you.
15 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.
16 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.
17 These things I command you, so that you will love one another.
Consider the Great Love of Jesus
Consider the Great Love of Jesus
Jesus offers us the very love of God — the kind of love Jesus offers us is the kind of love he has received from the Father.
John 15:9 (ESV)
9 As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.
Consider how the Father loves the Son
The Father reveals himself and his work to the Son
John 5:20 (ESV)
20 For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing.
The Father gives glory to the Son
John 17:24 (ESV)
24 Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me ...
That Father loves the Son with an eternal love
John 17:24 (ESV)
24 Father, ... you loved me before the foundation of the world.
The Father delights in the Son
Isaiah 42:1 (ESV)
1 Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights...
The Father is pleased with the Son
17 and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
This is how the Father loves the Son. And Jesus says this is the kind of love he has for you, if you are trusting in him.
John tells us in 1 John 4:8 & 16 that “God is love.” This means that in essence when God expresses his love, he is offering himself — he is giving himself to us. And how has he done this? By sending his Son!
In his person and his work, Jesus is the greatest expression of the love of God.
Jesus expressed the love of God by taking on flesh
14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
Jesus expresses God’s love through his sacrificial death in our place
13 Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.
Ephesians 5:2 (ESV)
2 … Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
11 I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
When we consider especially how undeserving we are of his love, we see how amazing this love really is. We deserve to be condemned and forever separated from God, but his amazing love has rescued us as Christ died for us, in our place, bearing the punishment and penalty that we deserved to pay. Jesus’s death for us is the greatest display of God’s love for us. John says this also in 1 John,
1 John 3:16 (ESV)
16 By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us...
9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.
10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
This is amazing love!
“Amazing love! How can it be that Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?” Jesus, who is God in the flesh, gave his life in our place, in order to restore us to a right relationship with God. This is the essence of the Gospel — God gives us himself! And he does this through his Son, Jesus Christ, and his sacrificial death in our place on the cross.
Consider the great love of Jesus!
Nothing in the world can compare with him.
Receive the Great Love of Jesus
Receive the Great Love of Jesus
But this love must be received personally if you are to benefit from it and experience it forever. While this love is offered to the world, it only benefits those who receive it.
11 He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. 12 But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God,
Jesus, as the expression of God’s love, came to the Jews — his very own people, but most of them rejected him. They refused this great gift of love. Only those who receive him and trust in him become part of God’s spiritual family and experience his love.
John tells us again in 1 John 4,
1 John 4:16 (ESV)
16 So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us.
Have you come to know God’s love? You can know God’s love by looking at Jesus - who he is and what he has done.
Have you received his love?
Have you trusted in Jesus Christ and given your life to him?
If not, receive his love today! Do not reject him. Come to him and experience his eternal, all-satisfying love.
Abide in the Great Love of Jesus
Abide in the Great Love of Jesus
How can you know if you have received this love for yourself? Jesus says that if you have received his love, you abide in his love - you stay there - you live in it.
9 As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love.
What does that look like practically?
10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.
Jesus has already told us back in chapter 14,
15 “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
This means that our obedience is not the means of entering his love in the first place. We don’t obey him in order to get his love, but because we already have it. We obey him because we’ve experienced his love and we love him in return. This is one way you can know that you have received his love - do you love Jesus? If you love Jesus, it’s because you have first experienced his love for you. And if you love him, you will seek to obey him. Because, while he offers you his friendship, he is still also the King, and you owe your loyal obedience to the King. Three times here, he uses the word friend to describe his relationship with his disciples. But we must never forget that he is also the King of the Universe.
So back in ch. 14 we learned that true obedience that honors God comes from a heart of love toward him, which comes from a true experience of his love for you.
But here in ch. 15, Jesus says that the way you stay in his love (abide in his love) is by keeping his commands
10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.
Let’s try to put all of this together:
After God has revealed himself to you and you have come to know and trust his love, you then love him in return, and you begin to obey his commands out of that heart of love for him.
Then, when you begin to obey his commands, he reveals more of himself and his love to you, and you come to know him more and trust him more and love him more and obey him more, and on and on the cycle goes — it’s a never ending relationship with the God who is love.
So we don’t obey him in order to get his love in the first place, but in order to grow into a deeper understanding and experience of his love. We already have his love, and yet we long to know more of his love and grow in our relationship with him.
Jesus himself is the greatest example for us in this:
10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.
29 And he who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, for I always do the things that are pleasing to him.”
In some mysterious way, Jesus Christ himself grew in his experience of the Father’s love as he perfectly obeyed the Father’s commandments. He is our supreme example of what it looks like to obey God.
This is one evidence that you are born again, that you belong to God, and that you have truly experienced his love - you are growing in your obedience to Christ.
We find another test of whether or not you have received his love in v. 11
11 These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.
The test is this — do you have the Joy of Jesus in you? Full, perfect joy? Biblical joy is a deep happiness rooted in the character and work of God rather than our circumstances. The kind of happiness that the world offers is temporary, constantly fluctuating, and usually only surface level, because it’s based on circumstances that are constantly changing and uncertain. But if you know Jesus - if you have experienced God’s love in him, you have joy growing inside you - a deep, permanent, unshakeable, confident happiness rooted in your faith in the unchanging character and providence of God.
Do you have that kind of joy? That kind of joy is a fruit of the Spirit, a result of a true experience of the love of God in Jesus Christ.
Another test of whether or not you have received his love is found in v. 12 & 17. This one is perhaps the most often repeated, and perhaps more easily identifiable than other tests.
12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
17 These things I command you, so that you will love one another.
Jesus is repeating the same thing he told them back in ch. 13:
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.
Why is this so important that Jesus needs to repeat it multiple times?
First of all, I need to ask you, “How do you know that Jesus loves you?”
Well, the children’s song says this: “For the Bible tells me so.” Jesus tells us of his love in the Scriptures, and if we believe him, we know he loves us.
But, how do you experience his love?
These 11 apostles had Jesus physically present with them. They experienced his love in very tangible ways through the words he spoke to them and the things he did for them, like washing their feet.
But we don’t get to hear Jesus’s voice; we don’t get to experience him with our physical senses and have him get down and wash our feet; so how will we experience his love? And here is why this command is so important:
We experience the love of Jesus through other people, especially other believers. We gain head knowledge of his love by reading his Word, but we gain heart knowledge of his love when others show us the same kind of self-sacrificial love as Jesus did.
That’s one reason why this command is so important and why Jesus repeats it so often to his apostles. They knew his love personally, but the primary way that future disciples would experience his love would be through them. And now, through us. Future generations of disciples will experience the love of Jesus through us.
Secondly, I think in the context of John 15, what Jesus is saying is that our love for one another is a demonstration that we have experienced his love. Only someone who has experienced the love of Jesus and received it for himself can love like Jesus loved. If you have not received his love, you cannot love like this, because it’s a supernatural kind of love.
Consider Romans 5:7-8
7 For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— 8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
14 We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death.
7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.
If you love others with this kind of self-sacrificial love, the kind of love that Christ demonstrated by giving his life for us on the cross, that’s evidence that you have been born again, that you truly know God and have experienced his love. If you do not have this kind of love for others, you do not know God and have not truly experienced his love.
What does this kind of love look like practically? How do we imitate the love of Christ? Is he calling us to literally die for others like he did?
Well, yes and no.
No, we can’t die for others in the same way he did. And most of us will not need to literally give our lives for others to show his love.
But yes, he is calling us to die - to die to ourselves and our selfish desires. By nature we look out for ourselves and seek our own interests first. He’s calling us to look out for others and seek their interests above our own. It is a sort of death he’s calling us to.
I really love baseball. I’m an Atlanta Braves fan, and they’re a really good team this year - actually the best in baseball right now. And if I had my way, I’d watch every one of their games; but sometimes, loving others means missing a game so that I can go visit someone or do a Bible study with someone. Sometimes it means not watching a game so I can spend time with my wife and kids and read the Bible with them and disciple them.
Biblical love is placing limits on ourselves or giving up things in order to serve others.
For Jesus Christ, it looked like taking on flesh, becoming human, suffering the same kind of weaknesses, sicknesses, and temptations we do, and going to the point of suffering and literally giving his life on the cross in our place to restore us to God.
For you,
It may look like giving up time that you’d prefer to spend on your own hobbies or projects to help out someone else.
It may look like taking time to visit someone, make a phone call, or write a letter to encourage them.
It may look like setting aside time to pray for your brothers and sisters in Christ.
It may look like helping someone out with groceries or bills because you know they’re going through a hard time.
It may look like selling off most of your stuff to move away to another country and serve as a missionary.
In some cases, it may even look like literally giving your life to protect someone else or in the spread of the gospel.
Practically, love looks a little different in every one of our lives, because we all have different circumstances, different personalities, and different giftings. But here’s what it has in common: it looks like the love of Christ, it sacrifices something of value (time, energy, money, etc.) for the benefit of someone else.
Does this kind of love characterize your life? If you have experienced the love of God in Christ, this kind of love will be in you and will be growing.
As he closes this part of his conversation on love, Jesus wants his disciples to remain humble and not pat themselves on the back for being such great disciples and such loving people.
He tells them,
16 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.
It was typical in those days for disciples to choose a Rabbi that they wanted to follow, but Jesus reminds his disciples that he had done things differently. He had chosen them. He had called them and compelled them to follow him. Their experience of his love and their demonstration of his love toward others did not originate with them, but with him.
This truth of God’s sovereignty is meant to humble us. Lest we think that we have experienced God’s love and are such loving people because of how great we are or how smart or wise we are, he reminds us as well, “I chose you.” Yes we must respond in faith and love and obedience, but we must never lose sight of the fact that it all started with him. We love him because he first loved us. And we love each other because he first loved us. Salvation is of the Lord.
I’ve heard this illustration, and I think it’s a pretty good one:
At the entrance of heaven’s gates, on the outside is an inscription that says, “Whosoever will may come.” (That is, whoever wants to come in is welcome)
After you enter, you look up and the inscription on the inside is different; it says, “You were chosen before the foundation of the world.” (That is, the reason that you chose to come in was that God first chose you)
How exactly all that works is of course a mystery to us.
What is clear is that all the glory goes to God, because he is sovereign in salvation, and yet we are responsible to come to Christ by faith, to trust in his promise of eternal life with him because of his death and resurrection for us.
Receive the love of Jesus
Maybe you’ve never received the gift of God’s love. You’ve never trusted in Jesus Christ personally. Please come to him today. Receive his love! Trust that God loves you! No matter what you’ve done or what you’re doing now, there is full forgiveness and restoration to God available for you if you will come to Jesus Christ, trust in him and his sacrifice for you. Believe that he died for your sins and rose again. Receive the amazing gift of God’s love. Do not delay! Come to him today, and experience his perfect love.
Consider the love of Jesus
If you’re a believer, you need to continue to consider and meditate on the love of Jesus, because it is his love that will motivate you and empower you to obey his commands and have his joy and love others and bear all this fruit for the glory of God. So take time today to take a fresh look at the cross; remember what Jesus has done for you, grow in your knowledge and understanding of his great love.
Abide in the love of Jesus
Let his love transform you into an obedient follower
Live in the power of his love as you seek to demonstrate love to others
