“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.
As we saw yesterday, love and obedience to Christ Jesus go together. Jesus is as clearly spoken on this front. And yet for many Christian folks obedience is taken as an optional
part of the Christian life. Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. If anyone loves me, he will keep my word. This
text clearly reads as a warning. And it is a warning directed to those who might be tempted to think that it is enough to intellectually agree with the Christian faith. There is little doubt that there are folks who want Jesus to take away their sins and take
them to heaven when they die but other than that wish for Jesus to leave them alone, to let them go on with their life as they please. It might not be stated as blunt as that but in essence that is how many folks truly live.
Let me put this a different way so you can see the contradiction of it all:
Many people are happy to have Jesus die for their sins, and they would admit that Jesus had to suffer terribly and die so horribly to remove the guilt and punishment of those
sins…so wouldn’t it be right to conclude that those sins must be awful and that any right-thinking person would want nothing to do with them! And yet so many…live their lives in a way that is so utterly uncaring of what pleases the Lord or think so lightly
about the astonishing thing that Christ has done and the wonderful gift that Christ has given, and His sacrifice for them has left hardly a mark on them at all!
Anyone who does not deeply want to live for Christ, who does not strive to obey his commandments for love’s sake, who is not committed to changing his life, root and branch
in every way that Christ deserves, should not fool himself that his Christianity is genuine. His foundation is sand not rock and his pretense of a faith in Christ will not survive the shocks to come, whether in this world or the next.
Our obedience is not SO THAT Jesus will love us. We do not obey Him so we can BE saved, rather, we obey him because we HAVE been saved. We are saved by grace alone through faith
alone. And, not but, but AND, that grace, that faith, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit which has been given us means something, it will do something, it will produce a certain kind of life with certain desires that is authentically Christian.
Perhaps for some, the problem is different in that obedience looks very hard to actually do and for some reason you have thought it should not be. To
be obedient to the Lord’s commandments seems too difficult and I would never pretend to the contrary: The Christian life is a difficult way of life. It is too glorious to be easy! No
sinner can possibly really imagine that seeking to be Christ like in this world, with the souls we have, with the sinful nature that all of us possess, I say, no one could really think that, that would or could be easy.
Listen to this from Allen Bloom’s classic, The Closing of the American Mind: “That was the galactic error of the 1960s: the notion that virtue would be so easy.
“Make love, not war,” we were told. But making love is easy; it’s a physical act. Loving one’s neighbor is a different thing entirely. It takes sacrifice. It is an obligation very difficult to fulfill. But, somehow, it was thought that virtually every
really good thing was, in fact, an easy and pleasant thing. They went to marches and expected the university not to penalize them for absenting class. They began experimenting with drugs with no thought to the possible consequences. Something that feels
this good should not be wrong. But it was all a lie. “Never in history had there been such a marvelous correspondence between the good and the pleasant.” But, over time, we discovered, as anyone should have known, the good was never going to be that easy
and what was supposed to be pleasant turned out to be a personal and social nightmare.
[Cf. Allen Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 328-335]
The Christian life is difficult. Obedience is difficult. There are powerful temptations ranged against the obedient life at every turn. When Israel entered the
Promised Land, they were warned over and over again, even after all that God had done for them, that they would be sorely tempted to take up the idolatry of Canaan and make it their own. They would find God’s ways difficult and even tiresome. Oh sure they
experienced the Exodus from Egypt, they walked through the parted Red Sea themselves and ate the miraculous manna that came from heaven…still, still, obedience to God was not going to be easy, and we find it so ourselves.
But brothers and sisters, all of that being true, all of that effort will seem the easiest and most satisfying of all the labor…it will all seem as nothing when the storms of
life hit and you find yourself fixed on solid rock and when, still more, you find yourself at the Judgment Day and hear Jesus himself say to you, “Well done, good and faithful servant!”
Some time ago I read in a sermon on the wise and foolish builders a story about John Adams, our third president. As a boy he got fed up with his Latin lessons and told his father
that he would stop attending them. His father responded by ordering him to dig a long, deep ditch on their farm. After two days the boy relented and went back to his paradigms, vocabulary, and Latin syntax. Years and years later, near the end of his death
John Adams said: “If I have gained any distinction it has been owing to the two days’ labor in that abominable ditch.”
Well, in the same way, the hard work of the Christian life is not hard work at all in comparison to the hard work of living without the blessing of God and of facing the judgment
of God without the favor of Christ. There are two primary reasons why people will not become Christians, at least humanly speaking:
The first is that they do not want to admit and will not admit that they are as bad as the Bible says they are, that they are as needy as the Bible says they are, and that they
are as helpless as the Bible says they are. But the other reason why so many people refuse to become Christians is that they do not want to live as Christ requires his people to live. Unbelievers often see this more clearly than people in the church. If I
am to become a Christian I must change my life profoundly. I must give up many things that I now enjoy and I must begin to do many things that I have so far thought boring or distasteful or painfully difficult. They do not become Christians because they do
not want to live as Christians. They understand, instinctively, that following Christ would mean, must mean living for Him. This is the sadness and the futility of unbelief.
But what is more strikingly is the vast multitude of people who will populate the Christian church, professing to be Christian, but to have somehow, somewhere along the line
concluded that they really DON’T have to change all that much, or become all that different, or live all that peculiarly…I think we would have to say that the unbeliever who refuses because he does not WANT to change is much closer to understanding the Xn
life than the one who professes Christ but doesn’t think there is a need of a new life!
The Christian life, complete with its many difficulties, is rich with rewards beyond the power to conceive, I can understand why unbelievers would not believe that, but I cannot
understand why any of us would not believe it. To put it differently: We have nothing to fear in surrendering our will to Christ’s and devoting ourselves to living the life that pleases him. We will not suffer any loss. It will be only gain. We must remember,
we are following the King of Kings, the Savior of Sinners, the One who gave Himself to bring you Joy, peace, comfort and eternal life.
It might mean a loss of friends, of certain activities, a change of entertainment preferences, and a different outlook on how you should be living…but Jesus promises you joy
that cannot be known without this obedience. And what is more when the storms of life come, not if, but when, you will find yourself wonderfully steadfast in that in the midst of those storms you will find your feet standing on solid rock.
It is a wonderful thing to live in this world. Take the Lord’s warning to heart; take it deep within your heart. Tell him today, tell him right now, that, far from wishing that
you didn’t have to obey, you only desire to obey more completely and more perfectly. Tell him…that nothing would please you more than every day and in every way to love Jesus and to prove that love in joyful obedience to all that He has said.
More Love to Thee O Xp
More Love to Thee
Hear now the prayer I make, on bended knee
This is my earnest plea, more love O Xp to Thee.
Prayer: Father, it is my deepest desire to obey You more completely, fervently and perfectly than I have thus far in my life. Nothing would please me more than
to prove Your love for me, by loving You more deeply in return. Give me the ears to hear Your Spirit within me, and the courage to be faithful to walk in the truth of my Lord and Savior that I might be pleasing to You and give glory to my King. In Jesus name,
Amen.
Hymn: More Love to Thee
