Today’s message is from John 15:9-17. It a part of Jesus’s teaching that he is the vine and his disciples are the branches. (And remember that we are Jesus’s disciples too.) As we read the passage, remember that we are reading the words of Jesus, who is God who came to us as a man—in the flesh. Also, Jesus taught just exactly the things that God the Father wanted him to teach. It’s what God wants us to know. He arranged for it to be recorded so that we could read it, study it and apply it to our lives.
Also, as always, read the entire Bible over and over again. It’s the word of God and it gives life.
[Prayer]
Now let’s read the passage. (This is a rerun of a message from around five years ago, so the text is from the NIV rather than the HCSB.) Let’s read John 15:9-17:
9 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. 14You are my friends if you do what I command. 15I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 16You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. 17This is my command: Love each other. (John 15:9-17)
In the first eight verses of John 15, the passage that comes right before today’s passage, Jesus taught the disciples—and us too—that he is the vine and we are the branches. It is necessary for us to remain connected to Jesus to bear fruit. If we remain connected to the vine, we bear fruit—and God “prunes” us so that we bear even more fruit. That’s what brings glory to him! It is impossible to bear fruit if we are not connected to the vine—to Jesus. If we are not connected to the vine, we dry up and die and are eventually gathered up and burned. The fruit is what God wants to see in our lives. In today’s passage, Jesus talks about that fruit.
Look at verse 9, the first verse in today’s passage. In verse 9 Jesus says, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.” “As the Father has loved me…” How had God the Father loved Jesus? And what does it mean to remain in Jesus’s love?
When Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist at the beginning of his public ministry, a voice came from heaven and said, “You are my beloved son. With you I am well pleased.” Later, when Jesus was transfigured—when he took Peter and James and John up on the mountain and his face and clothes shown like lightning—God spoke to them and said, “This is my beloved son. With him I am well pleased. Listen to him!” God the Father was well pleased with his Son Jesus. Actually, he said that he delighted in his Son.
Usually we think of love in the Bible as expressing self-sacrifice in order to help someone in need—in order to bless that person. In this case, however, God the Father was not sacrificing to bless Jesus. He was sacrificing Jesus to bless us—to redeem us from sin and death! And it delighted God the Father that his one and only Son was doing exactly what he wanted him to and was doing it perfectly. And Jesus was about to fulfill everything by going to the cross.
In Luke 10:21, after the disciples had come back from traveling around to the various towns to heal the sick, cast out demons and preach about the kingdom of God—after they had reported to Jesus all that had happened, Jesus was filled with joy through the Holy Spirit and said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.” Jesus was filled with joy because of what God the Father had done through the disciples. God the Father was delighted to do it too. It was his good pleasure! As the Father had loved Jesus, so Jesus was loving the disciples.
And now, what does it mean to remain in Jesus’s love? How do you remain in Jesus’s love? Look at verse 10. In verse 10 Jesus says, “If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love.” Jesus is always our example. To remain in his love, we need to obey his commands just as he obeyed his Father’s commands. Then we will remain in Jesus’s love just as he remained in his Father’s love.
Now I need to say something. God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son so that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life (John 3:16). (And incidentally, God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son does not mean that God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son. It means, “This is the way that God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son.”) Anyway, God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son so that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. That means that God loved everyone in the world—all of us. He loved us by sending his Son to die for us. But just as not everyone will have eternal life, but only those who believe in Jesus, those who trust in him, so not everyone who believes in Jesus will remain in his love, but only those who obey his commands. These commands are not the commands to believe in Jesus. Those who don’t believe in Jesus will not be saved. These are the commands for those who do believe in Jesus. But those who do believe in Jesus but don’t remain in his love, will be, to use the apostle Paul’s analogy in 1 Cor. 3:10-15, saved as one escaping through the flames. Their works will be burned up when they are tested by fire. Let me quote the whole passage from 1 Corinthians 3:10-15:
10By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should be careful how he builds. 11For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. 12If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, 13his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man's work. 14If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. 15If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames. (1 Corinthians 3:10-15)
So remain in Jesus’s love!
Now let’s look at verse 11 in today’s passage. In verse 11 Jesus says, “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.” What Jesus means is that he wants his disciples—us also, not just the original disciples—to obey his commands so he can rejoice because of us—so that his joy will be in us. He will rejoice because of us.
When the disciples returned from going through the different towns, as I talked about earlier, Jesus was filled with joy through the Holy Spirit because of what God had done through them. Let me tell you something. When you rejoice to see God’s work in another human being… When you rejoice to see that person obeying God—receiving God’s blessing and rejoicing in it himself, it is the Holy Spirit of God that is giving you that joy. People who don’t have the Holy Spirit are not able to rejoice in that way. In fact they may do the opposite. When they see someone rejoicing to obey God, they may curse instead of rejoicing! But it is the Holy Spirit that enables us to rejoice in God’s grace and mercy.
But, Jesus wants to rejoice in us. Remember how he cried because Jerusalem was not accepting his gift—his gift of himself for their salvation. But he doesn’t want to cry because of us, he wants to rejoice! He wants to rejoice because we obey his commands. And not only will Jesus’s joy be in us, he says that our joy will be complete! Our joy will be complete if we obey his commands. For the joy set before him, according to Hebrews 12:2, Jesus endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of God. Jesus obeyed his Father and his joy was complete. When we obey Jesus, our joy will be complete.
You know, this is a lot like it is (or is supposed to be, anyway) in human families. Parents are delighted when their kids want to obey them and want to be just like them. And the kids are delighted when they see that their parents are pleased.
Now look at verses 12 and 13. This is where we find out what Jesus’s command is—what it is that will cause him to rejoice and be absolutely delighted when we obey. Jesus says in verses 12 and 13, “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” Jesus’s command is for us to love each other, to love each other as he has loved us. And how did he love us? He endured extreme pain and suffering and sacrificed his life to save us!
And you know what? Jesus rose from the dead. He suffered much on our behalf, but he didn’t really lose anything. Listen to this. This is from Philippians 2:9-11:
9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name,
10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Now, we know that Jesus ultimately gave up his life for us when he went to the cross. But, really, he gave up his own life throughout his ministry. He had no home. He stayed in other peoples houses or just slept out in the open. He didn’t save up for his retirement as we do. He had something much better that what we call retirement in mind. For the joy set before him, he endured the cross. (We can have that joy too, if we obey Jesus’s command to love each other.)
Many people have literally given up their live for others. Sometimes missionaries get killed in trying to take the gospel to places where they are hostile to it. But how do we practically love each other short of actually dying for each other—or at least risking our lives? It’s simple. You give to others without expecting to get anything in return (except maybe joy—what Jesus expected to get back). Think about your motives for doing things. According to Jesus, you don’t have to die a martyr’s death. It can be as simple as inviting someone to dinner who is not able to invite you back. But Jesus wants you to live your whole life that way, not just once in a while. He wants you to live a life of sacrificing on behalf of other people. Then he will rejoice and you will too.
Now look at verses 14 and 15:
14 “You are my friends if you do what I command. 15I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.”
Jesus called his disciples his friends. He said, “You are my friends if you do what I command.” But he had called them his friends (“I have called you friends”), so we know that they were obeying him. (And they were his friends even though he knew Peter was going to deny him three times that very night.)
Jesus says that a servant does not know his master’s business. A servant doesn’t have to know his master’s business for his master’s business to be accomplished. All he has to do is to obey what his master tells him to do. He can take part in accomplishing his master’s business without having any idea what that business might be. But in the case of Jesus’s disciples (and in our case too), that business is for us to become like him—for us to become like Jesus!
Do you want to be like Jesus? Do you want to become like him? John says we will be like him! That’s what he says in 1 John 3:2: “...we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” It’s the word of God!
You know, we have all of Jesus’s commands. They’re in the Bible. All we have to do is obey them—especially the command to love each other. And Jesus told the disciples that he had chosen them to bear fruit that would last and that God would give them whatever they asked for. Jesus chose the disciples to bear fruit (v 16) and he has chosen us to bear fruit too, fruit that will last. All we have to do is obey Jesus’s commands.
At this point it sounds like “OK, let’s grit our teeth and do it—obey his commands.” But the whole teaching is that it is impossible to obey Jesus’s commands unless we remain in the vine—unless we remain connected to Jesus.
And you know what else. I think that if you understand what I just said the way most people in this country would understand it, it is still impossible. I’ll tell you why. It’s because Jesus is the head of the church. The church is his body. To remain in him means to remain in the church. If you don’t remain in the church, you don’t remain in Jesus!
And to remain in the church certainly doesn’t mean to simply be on a membership roll. And it doesn’t mean to simply go to meetings. No. What it means is that we have to have close and intimate relationships with each other, that we have to open our hearts to one another, that we have to bear each others burdens! When one member of the body hurts, the whole body hurts. When one member rejoices, the whole body rejoices. (I haven’t mentioned the verses, but this is all from the Bible. My practical experience bears it out too.) Above all, we have to pray for each other. I could spend a lot of time talking about the church, but won’t just now. And by the way, the church is not an organization like LHF, but consists of all those who believe in Jesus Christ and have eternal life through faith in him. There are certainly people that are on church membership rolls and go to meetings who are not part of the church. But the church consists of those who believe in Jesus. I won’t say much more about the church just now, but I will say this. God purposely designed us to need each other. Just as we need Jesus, we need each other. Each member of the body has a purpose. We absolutely need each other!
In verse 17, Jesus again tells us to love each other: “This is my command: Love each other.”
[Prayer]