Well if you remember we are readying our hearts for our new churchwide teaching theme, thinking together about growing in a life devoted to God and His glory. We began two weeks ago by considering God’s infinite devotion to Himself, and then last week we tried to plumb the width and length and height and depth of Christ’s devotion to His people. And finally this morning we are going to consider what that love calls for in us – our devotion to God.
So I wonder if you would turn with me in your Bibles to John’s gospel, chapter 14; page 901 in the pew Bibles. And we’ll be ranging about this wonderful book this morning, but our focus will be on one verse – John chapter 14, verse 15. “If you love me, you will keep My commandments.” Before we read, let’s get our bearings a little. John’s gospel has reached a moment of huge drama. Jesus and His remaining disciples are eating together in an upper room in Jerusalem. And to all human appearances, things have not gone well. Jesus has not been welcomed by His own. In fact, for several chapters now, His disciples have watched in despair as rejection and death become more and more inevitable. Judas, His betrayer, has already left the room with those terrible words left hanging in the air by the author – “and it was night.” And so now with our hearts heavy and our heads reeling, Jesus is teaching His disciples that all is far from lost. But what will the Christian life look like once He’s gone? Let me pray for the Lord to give us soft hearts and then we’ll read from verse 12. Let’s pray.
Lord Jesus Christ who said, “I am the way and the truth and the life,” we pray, Lord, let us never stray from You, our only way home, nor distrust You who is the Truth itself, nor rest in any other thing than You are life. Teach us now by Your Holy Spirit how to live and who to believe and where to find true rest for our souls. For Your own name’s sake we ask it, amen.
John chapter 14, beginning at verse 12. The Lord Jesus says:
“‘Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.
If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, 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.
I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. 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.’ Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, ‘Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?’ 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. 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.”
And onto verse 30:
“I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no claim on me, 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.’”
Well, amen.
It is Monday morning, the alarm clock has been ringing since 5am, and if you’re honest, the only reason that you keep hitting snooze is dread of what lies ahead. You know exactly how it will go – down a desperate cup of coffee, finish the paperwork you didn’t get to last night with one hand while you empty the dishwasher with the other, wrestle the sleeping child out of the bed, ignore the shouting child from somewhere back in the house, negotiate with the teenage child who doesn’t want to go to school that day, kiss goodbye to your morning devotions yet again as five minutes late you finally wrangle everyone into the car, lose your temper, rush back into the house for the bag you forgot, traffic, carpool, more traffic, more temper, notice the toothpaste down your jacket, and then arrive breathless for that meeting that you have been dreading all week.
Now all of that is still ahead of you. Right now it is 5:30am and you are safe under the bedcovers and so you do the only sensible thing – you hit snooze again and hide back under the sheets and hope that it will all go away. But then your mind drifts back to Sunday and to church. What was it your pastor is planning to talk about all year? He’s using this word, “devotion,” but as far as you can tell he plans to spend the year talking about holiness, obedience, sanctification. And I wonder how those words make you feel? For some of you, I’ll bet it gets you excited. This is an opportunity to grow. But for some of us, even dare I say some of the godliest saints I have spoken to, we hear those words and we have a very different reaction – exhaustion, guilt, discouragement perhaps. Perhaps we feel we can barely manage a morning devotion, let alone a lifetime of holiness. And so a theme like this one, it makes us want to hide back under the bedcovers and hit that snooze button.
Well what I would love for us to see this morning is how Jesus gives us a reason to get up out of bed and enjoy the day that He has given to us. In fact, He radically transforms out whole way of thinking. Verse 15, “If you love Me, you will life for Me.” Holiness, true holiness begins with love. And holiness centers on Jesus Christ. In fact, deeper than that, holiness begins with the story of an eternally devoted Father and His eternally loving Son. Now our job this morning is not to expound this passage the way we normally would. We’re thinking a little more doctrinally about our devotion to God and there are two things I would love us to see and respond to in this passage – an invitation and a motivation for that life of devotion. But the invitation is to something far bigger than we might ——- on a quick read of the text. In fact, it is an invitation too glorious to refuse. And so here it is – “Come and share,” says the Lord Jesus, “Come and share in the devotion of eternity.”
Now to see how that invitation works, I want to take us on a little adventure into the deepest structures of this gospel. There is a good case to be made that the great story of John’s book is devotion. This gospel is a love story. In fact, this was very clever of the apostle John. Perhaps he’s been surreptitiously tuning in to the First Pres livestream because he has more or less plagiarized the structure of our little sermon series! It is only now, only in chapter 14, that for the very first time Jesus talks about our love for God. And yet love has been the theme of this book right from the start. It began with the triune God who is devoted to Himself; the Son eternally secure in the blissful union of the Trinity. Chapter 1 verse 18 – the Son who belongs eternally in the bosom of the Father, eternally begotten of the Father, sent of the Father, devoted to His Father. And that love, as we saw in week one, is the reason behind all reasons. That’s mutual devotion of God the Trinity to His own glory is the point of it all. It is the love that gives meaning to everything else – you, me and all we see.
And so out of that fundamental devotion, the Son, begotten in eternity, is sent into the world in time to seek and to save the lost, which lets John show his readers what we saw last week – Christ’s devotion to His people. And yet even there, there is a greater love behind that love. You see it on almost every page of the Gospel. Jesus tells His disciples that the Father who sent Him has given Him a job to do and He loves the Father and so He will do it. Look at the end of our passage. Verse 31 – the disciples are shell shocked, Jesus has announced that He is leaving them, His betrayer has walked out into the night, there is a sinister ruler of this world with no claim over Jesus, and yet Jesus is insistent on facing him, of dying a death and going to a place where right now no disciple can follow Him. And why? Verse 31, “Because I do as the Father has commanded Me. He has given Me a job to do and I love Him and I want the world to see that I love Him.”
It’s the same story, isn’t it, at the start of our passage, verse 13. All that Jesus does, and above all this death He is about to die, He does because He is utterly devoted to His Father. In fact, He told us earlier in this book that His very food is to do His Father’s will. It’s the joy, the fuel that sustains Him. And not only that, but the Father is utterly devoted to His Son. Why does God send His only Son to His death? Well, there’s one very familiar answer that John gives us. It’s because “God so loved the world.” This dark, unloveable human realm, you and me.
But there’s also a deeper answer that John gives us from cover to cover of this gospel and I think that it is utterly extraordinary. The Triune God sends Jesus to the cross because the Father loves the Son. The cross is a work of undivided, Trinitarian love. From His very first miracle, Jesus has been counting down to what He calls “His hour,” His death for the world. And at last in this upper room He tells His disciples that that countdown is over. Flip forward a page or two and you find Jesus praying the most extraordinary prayer. Chapter 17 verse 1, “Father, the hour has come, the moment of My death has arrived,” and here it is, “glorify Your Son that the Son may glorify You.” Now isn’t that extraordinary? God sends His Son to the cross to bring glory to His Son. The cross is an act of Trinitarian devotion. He wants all creation to see the heart of the Son He loves – full of grace and truth and goodness and mercy, so deep that we could never imagine it, never believe it any other way. And the Son goes to the cross out of the very same eternal devotion to glorify His Father. It is the great theme behind everything else in this gospel. The Father sends His Son in devoted love. The Son obeys His earthly mission in devoted love. The Spirit sustains the Son through every moment of it in deepest devoted love. This is a mission the God-Man can only fulfill because in love the Father has poured out His Spirit on Him without measure.
Now how does all of that land with us as we read verse 15? “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.” Do you see what Jesus is doing there? It is bigger than we ever imagined, isn’t it? So much bigger than mere obedience. It is an invitation to share in the devotion of eternity. “The Father has given Me a commandment,” verse 31, “and I love Him, I’m devoted to Him, and I want all the word to see it. And so of course I do it! It is love for Him that drives everything I do. I have given all of you My commandments, and you love Me, don’t you? You’re devoted to Me. You want all the world to see it, don’t you? And so of course you’ll want to keep them. Isn’t love for Me the thing that drives everything you disciples do?” Notice this isn’t a command in verse 15. There’s no imperative. He doesn’t order His disciples to obey. He is simply telling them what love means. They are distraught at His leaving them and He is saying, “When I am gone, here is what it will look like. If you love Me, you will live for Me. Your love for Me will still be the great reason you get up every morning, ready to battle for holiness.”
John began this book with an invitation into the joy of the Trinity. The one who belongs eternally in the light and life and love of heaven, came in order to give His own the right to become children of God, to belong where He belongs. And so now it’s as if Christ is saying to us, “Will you let Me show you how to live as a true son?” Jesus is the blueprint for everything we see here. Our love for Him, our living union with Him means we get to share in all that He loves and it means we get to live by the same power that He lived by. So back in chapter 3 He told us that the Spirit was the Father’s gift of love to His Son. The Father loves the Son and He has given all things into His hand, including the Spirit without measure. And now verse 23, it is the same story for us. That same Spirit is the Father’s gift of love to all who love Jesus. “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word and the Father will love him and we will come to him, Father and Son through the Spirit, and we will make our home with him.” If you love Jesus, the whole undivided Trinity becomes yours. You can’t have Jesus without His Spirit. You can’t know Jesus without obeying His Father. And their great devotion to one another becomes your great love. You cannot love Jesus without being caught up in that devotion of the Trinity itself, without His great mission of love and obedience to the Father capturing your heart. Is that not a glorious invitation? Come and share in the love behind all loves. That is what holiness is all about.
Now before we move on, here is one crucial thing that bigger picture helps us to get straight. You could come away from this passage and think that what Jesus is giving us here is an order for salvation so that the whole thing begins with my love for Jesus. And so long as I love Him enough, then the Father might love me back. And because I’ve won His love, then He will give me His Spirit. But that would be to get the whole story of this Gospel back to front. Wouldn’t it? Remember this Gospel began with the one who is all love in Himself coming down to seek and to save the lost. Jesus has told us already that without His Spirit we cannot move towards Him in any way. We have to be born again in a supernatural way. We don’t love in order to win His love or His Spirit. Augustine put it like this. “How can we love so as to receive Him without whom we cannot love at all? Without the Holy Spirit we can neither love Christ nor keep His commandments.”
So Jesus is talking here to disciples whose love for Him is already all over their faces. They are devastated at the thought of losing Him, and that love is there because the Spirit has already begun knitting them to Him. Love for Jesus is the fruit of a spirit who is already uniting them to Him in faith. And so He tells them all of this as an encouragement. “When I’m gone to the Father, you won’t have lost Me. My Spirit will be to you all that I have been to you – another helper who draws alongside to strengthen you and to keep you going. And as you love in love for Me and obey Me, you won’t win My Father’s love, but you will experience it more and more. As you walk with Me, I will manifest Myself to you. So let me show you how to be a son. You do it just as I do it. You’ll share just like Me in the love of My Father and you’ll walk just like Me in the strength of the Spirit.” It takes the whole Trinity to make a holy Christian, so come and share in the devotion of eternity.
Well there is the invitation. Our call this year is not to grit out teeth and struggle joylessly for a godly life. No, it is far, far more glorious than that. Our call is to stretch our hearts and to grow in the love that makes obedience sweet and joyful and the thing we long for. But how do we do that? How do we stretch our hearts? If right now that word “sanctification” still fills us with guilt and a vague sense of exhaustion, how on earth do we just whip up the kind of love that makes us want to obey Jesus? Is that even possible? What if you aren’t just feeling it?
Well notice firstly that the kind of love Jesus is talking about is much more than an emotion. There’s an objectivity to this, isn’t there, which is wonderfully liberating. Love is the thing we get to show Jesus with our obedience. But there is a second thing that John shows us that I want us to wrap our hearts around this morning and draw from over this year, not just an invitation to the devoted life, but a motivation. How does this gospel teach us to love Jesus?
Well John doesn’t simply tell us to love Him. Instead, he shows us a Jesus whose person and work is deeply, deeply loveable. And by doing that, he gives us a motivation too beautiful to ignore. Come and see the devotion of your friend. And we see that so clearly in the immediate context to this passage. Why has Jesus’ ministry come to this crisis point that we are reading about this morning – a small group of friends, distraught, discouraged in an upper room with their master saying His goodbyes? How has it come to this?
Well the answer is that just before this took place, John showed his readers one of the most heroic and moving acts of friendship that there ever was and it triggered everything that followed in this gospel. You see, by the time Jesus reaches this upper room, He has already laid down His life for a friend. And by all human appearances, it brought His public ministry crashing down. Jesus has come to His own, but His own did not receive Him. He was rejected in Jerusalem, rejected in His home province, and deserted even by most of His followers. And so at the halfway point of the gospel, chapter 10, He and the ones who are left have retreated into the wilderness and across the Jordan for the ones who have stuck with Him, for the ones who are left, it all feels desperately disappointing. And then came the news, chapter 11, that a friend called Lazarus was dying. His sisters send the message, and just listen to how they word it. “Lord, he who You love is ill.” Lazarus is introduced as “the one who Jesus loves,” His friend. And then stubbornly, deliberately, steadfastly, Jesus walks back into the spotlight, back into the battlefield to rescue His friend, Lazarus, from the jaws of death. And the extraordinary thing is that everyone involved in this knows in advance it will get Jesus killed. Thomas shrugs his shoulders, chapter 11:16, and says to the other disciples, “Oh well, we might as well go too and die with Him.” They know what is going to happen. And after that decision, Jesus’ public ministry in this book is over. He can no longer walk openly among the Jews because everywhere He turns the leaders want Him dead. And that is how we have ended up with this little group of discouraged friends in an upper room.
“He came to His own and His own did not receive Him,” and so from that moment on, all the attention has turned to this little group of friends who did receive Him. And the language of the book changed profoundly. In the first half, it was all about evidence and signs and belief. Now there is one word which dominates the discussion, and it is the thing Jesus showed when He went back for His friend Lazarus – love. In this upper room, He tells these disciples again and again that the reason He must leave them and return to His Father is because He has to do the same thing for all of them. These are now His own and He will love them right to the end. He’ll tell them in a moment that, “Greater love has no man than this, that he lays down his life for his friends.” And what makes those words so profoundly moving is that this group of friends have literally just seen Him do exactly that – sacrifice everything for the life of one whom He loved. And so they know now, whatever else is going on, that He is devoted to them.
Jesus is utterly devoted to you. He gave everything to be the truest Friend you have ever had, to die a death that had no claim on Him but every claim on you and I. There is no greater love He could possibly have shown for you, nothing left of His heart to give for you. You see, this entire gospel is a story of devotion – God’s devotion to Himself, Christ’s devotion to His people, and only then, our verse, “If you love Me, you too, you will keep My commandments.” How does John teach us to love Christ? Well, he shows us in his gospel what he puts into words in his letter. “We love Him because He first loved us.” There is the motive. Look what a friend the Son of God has been to you.
So if you want to grow in holiness this year, keep looking to Jesus, the God so utterly devoted to Himself and yet utterly devoted to you. Doesn’t that make you adore Him? And doesn’t a love as great as that call for all of us, for everything we have to give, and then more? If you find obedience to Him to be an exhausting, discouraging burden, it can only mean you have taken your eyes off His great love and that is the whole difference, friends, between a life of legalism and a life of devotion. Legalism starts with gritting your teeth and grimly trying to keep up appearances. The alarm goes off and somehow or other we have to force ourselves out of bed because today we have to do better. Devotion starts with stretching your heart and feeding on Christ. We get up in the morning just as tired, don’t we, with all the same struggles, but we can say to ourselves, “Today I get to try all over again to do a better job of loving the God who loved me right to the end. Isn’t He kind to stick so close, in spite of all the things I’ve gotten wrong? Isn’t He kind to give me breath in my lungs and let me try once more today to be a little more like my elder Brother?” Surely living for a friend like that is the good life. That’s what I need to remind myself when I’ve lost my temper yet again for the hundredth time and it feels like a relentless chore to keep going. This is the good life because He is the good Friend.
Jesus’ food was to do His Father’s will, so what will my food be today, my delight? Well, He’s told us, hasn’t He? He’s told us, “Do not work for food that perishes, do not waste yourselves away toiling and gritting your teeth for your own work. I am the Bread of Life. Whoever comes to Me shall not hunger.” There is a work for us to do, I take it. There is hard work in this life of sanctification, but it’s the work of feeding on Jesus, the one who gave His flesh and His blood for His own. It’s work that begins from a position of absolute security and rest and joy. So you see, Jesus invites us in to share in His devoted love, but it’s not like He’s waiting on us to send in our RSVPs, to make ourselves look all presentable. It’s a very different kind of invitation, isn’t it? All of that has been done already. Verse 19, “Because I live, you also will live.” “If you love Me,” verse 21, “you will be loved by My Father forever. You belong in My family. It’s done.” So that now our joy can be to live for Him, to learn from Him how to be a son and all His commands become more and more opportunities to please Him and show Him our love. Isn’t that freeing?
God willing, we will start next week working together through the book of Leviticus. Did you know that’s why God’s Law was given to you? A thousand and one ways to please this wonderful God we love, to show the world how much we’ve been forgiven. A thousand and one ways to echo the words of our great Friend and Savior and say, “My Father has given me a job to do and I love Him and I want the world to see it!” Well First Pres, let’s pray that He would give us devotion like that this year. Let’s bow our heads.
Lord God, our loving Father, our gracious Friend, our Helper and Comforter and Strength, we love You and yet You have loved us so deeply in Christ that all the devotion of our hearts would never be enough, and the love we do show is so cold, so mixed, so often it fails to reveal itself in our lives. Thank You that in Christ we don’t have to perform in order to keep our place. Thank You that we have been freed to live as Your sons and work for our good Father’s smile. Thank You that to share in the devotion of Jesus truly is the good life. So help us, we pray, to live it. Amen.