Sermon Given by David Lowry At the Evening Services on 1 st November 2009 John 15:9-17 - No greater love Where I am living at the moment, there is a big mix of people from all kinds of different nationalities, and it is interesting to see how people from different countries really do share common cultural characteristics. You can always push national stereotypes too far, of course, and get into trouble, but there is always some truth in them too. for example, I m living with lots of Dutch people, who, compared to the English, are quite direct in the way that they deal with people. One of them shocked us by being so direct as to actually ask a lady her age in public those Brits who were present of us were speechless that anyone should be so outrageously rude and forthright. Then there are several Americans. It is fashionable to insult Americans, and I don t want to do that at all, but it is quite noticeable that most Americans really dislike long periods of silence. And so if there is an American sharing in the conversation over dinner, then there almost certainly won t be a period of silence of longer than 3 seconds before the American jumps in and fills it. People from different nationalities really are hall-marked by certain traits, and these become very obvious if you live in a very culturally mixed environment. This passage is part of Jesus farewell discourse his final words before he was betrayed and put to death. And in his final words to his disciples before his death, he has some hugely important things to say about the sort of people that he wants them to become the things that ought to hallmark them as a group of people. They will be known as his disciples, and he wants their conduct to be such as will honour him. In particular he wants them to be people who love each other, and to learn to love each other in such a way as will change the world. 1. Remain in my love. v9-11 v9 is a remarkable verse. Jesus said, as the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Imagine that. Jesus, the Son of God, has lived with his Father since before the beginning of the Universe. It is impossible to imagine the love that God the Father and God the Son have for one another. Yet this is the love that Jesus says he loves us with. And Jesus says now remain in my love. If Jesus says remain in my love then it must be possible to not remain in his love. It is very important not to be sentimental when we think about God s love. People often think God loves me, that s his job. The Bible says that God loves everybody in the world, but he doesn t love everybody in the world the same way. There are two images of God s love used in the Bible that might be helpful here. The love of a father for his children, and the love of a jilted husband for his unfaithful wife. The love of a father for his children is unconditional. If the child messes up, the father still loves the child. He disciplines him, not because he enjoys punishing the child, but because he wants to see the child grow up to maturity. A loving father pours himself into his child, and loves to spend time with him or her. 1 st Nov 2009, PM P a g e 1 John 15:9-17
The love of a husband for his unfaithful wife is a very different kind of love. It may still be a powerful feeling, and the husband may still want to help the wife and do things for the wife. Yet it is a love mixed with anger, and a love that knows that unless the wife changes her behaviour then there is no ultimate future in the relationship. Two very different kinds of love. The second describes the love that God has for the whole world. God loves everybody in the world in this way no matter how they live their lives. Yet it is the love of a relationship that has no future unless people change their behaviour. But it is the first kind that Jesus is talking about here, the love of a Father for his children. This is the love that God the Father has for Jesus God the Son, and this is the love that Jesus has for us if we re his disciples - for those of us who have believed and trusted that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. And this is the love that we need to make sure that we re remaining in. It is possible to not remain in this love and only have the other one. We need to make sure that we re remaining in it. So how do we do that? v10 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. It sounds almost too simple. If we keep Jesus commands then we remain in his love. If we don t keep his commands, then we don t remain in his love. And in case we re in any doubt that this really is worth doing, he says, v11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. If we keep Jesus commands, then we will know complete joy, we ll get to experience the kind of joy that the Son of God himself experiences in his Father s love unimaginable joy. Yet if we don t, then we lose God s fatherly love, and all we have left is his other kind of love his unfaithful wife love. What things stop us obeying God s commands? Perhaps there are people here who know very clearly that there is a specific command of God that they aren t keeping. Perhaps you know there is someone that you aren t willing to forgive; or you know that you need to stop looking at internet pornography or stealing from your boss or from the inland revenue. If that is you, then can I urge you to hear God s voice in this passage. He calls to you if you obey his commands you will remain in his fatherly love, and you will know his perfect complete joy. Whatever sins there are that we re unwilling to let go of, we desperately need to believe that we will certainly be happier if we let them go. The way to real happiness and joy is to keep Jesus commands. Then again, maybe we listen to this and we can t really think of any of God s commands that we aren t keeping. But are we sure that we are keeping all his commands? Are we making time regularly to thoughtfully read the Bible, then it will pretty much guarantee that we aren t really being serious about keeping God s commands. If we re not listening to what his commands are, then we won t be serious about keeping them. Proverbs 16v25 says There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death. It is so easy to imagine that we re going about life the right way. There s a way of living life where everything we re doing seems right and good to us, and where, at the very least, we re doing as well as the other people around us. We can think that, and yet be 1 st Nov 2009, PM P a g e 2 John 15:9-17
absolutely deceived. The only way we can possibly tell if we re genuinely keeping God s commands is if we re checking ourselves continuously against the Bible. Remain in my love, Jesus said. Jesus loves us with unimaginable love even with the love that God the Father has had for him since before the beginning of the universe. If we remain in that love we will know complete joy. What a great encouragement to press on with keeping his commands. 2. Love one another. v12-14 There is one specific command that Jesus has in mind, when he said keep my commands, which is really the heading for this whole sermon. Jesus said, v12, My command is this: Love each other. I said at the beginning that Jesus had some key things to say about the sort of people that he wanted his disciples to be, and this is really the key point. Above all, we re to be people who love one another. And how are we to love one another? Jesus says, 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 commands us to love each other, and he himself is the ultimate example of what that means. He died for us, and not only died, but died the most painful, excruciating death imaginable. He hung there on that cross, taking on himself the punishment that we ought to have deserved from God. It is impossible to think of a greater demonstration of love. If he hadn t done it we would have been forever lost and cut off from God. Because he has done it we can be children of God and heirs of everlasting life. Notice the wonderfully circular flow of the argument in v14. Jesus says you are my friends if you do what I command. So who did Jesus die for? His friends. And who are his friends? The ones who do what Jesus commands. And what does Jesus command? That we love another. And how should we love one another? By being willing to follow his example of dying for his friends. There is something very powerful when Christians really do keep this command, and really do love one another. Up until the age of 18 I was very much an atheist. I didn t believe in God, and I reckoned that anyone who did was a bit of an idiot who hadn t really thought things through properly. One of the main things that broke down my unbelief was when I went to a Christian Union meeting in my first week of my first year at university, about 10 years ago, and was really struck by the love that these Christians had for each other. It was a huge contrast compared to everything else that was going on in freshers week at my university where the pattern was that if you were clever or if you were funny or if you were athletic and talented or if you were good looking or if you could really handle drinking lots of alcohol then people would be nice to you and would welcome you into their in-crowd, otherwise not. Yet when I went to this Christian meeting, it was so noticeably different people were welcomed and loved whatever they were like and it made me hugely more willing to listen to the talk. I still look back on that meeting as a crucial time for me in making me more open to thinking about Christian things. Christians showing love can be hugely powerful. Another example of the power of love. I was hearing this week about some of the wonderful things that God is doing among Iranian refugees in Glasgow. There is a large community of Iranian refugees in Glasgow, all of whom are waiting for their asylum applications to go through, which can often take several years. While they re waiting, they aren t allowed to work, so they re forced to live in poverty, on benefits, with nothing meaningful to do with their time. 1 st Nov 2009, PM P a g e 3 John 15:9-17
An old Glaswegian Christian lady known as wee Mary decided to try and help some of these people. She began by visiting a few of them and inviting them into her home. She didn t speak a word of Persian, and they didn t speak much English (and even if they had they probably still wouldn t have understood her thick Glaswegian accent). Yet she cared for them. She cared for them so much that one of them described her care as being like having the love of God poured directly into his soul. She found ways to communicate the gospel of Jesus to them. One by one some of them came to Christ, and as they did, more and more were drawn in, spellbound by the love of Christ that wee Mary brought with her. Thanks to the love of that lady, under God, there is now a growing and flourishing Iranian church in that part of Glasgow. Christians showing love can be hugely powerful. We need to give Jesus command to love one another an absolutely central place in our lives. I often find this quite hard. We come from a very individualistic culture where productivity is the thing. And so I tend to think that my responsibility is to get my work done, and your responsibility is to get your work done. If I happen to have some spare time, and you happen to have some problems, then I can spend some of my spare time trying to help you with your problems. But if I don t have any spare time, then you had better sort your problems out by yourself. Are we willing to really put ourselves out for others and to involve our lives with others? Do we see this command to love one another as really being at the heart of our Christian lives, so that we will organise our time around it and put ourselves out for the sake of others? And do we do it even when those others are people we don t naturally get on with or like, or are people that we know we won t get anything back from in return? 3. Go and bear fruit. v15-19 Verse 16, Jesus said, then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name, and we think, does that mean I can ask for a Porsche and for a luxury 4 month all expenses paid cruise around the south Pacific and I ll be guaranteed to get it? And if not, then what does it mean? We need to take the verse in its context. And in the context, Jesus has called us, as his friends to do something specific. v15 I 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 says, you guys are unbelievably privileged you are not just my servants but my friends, I ve let you in on everything that the Father has taught to me. And I ve called you with a particular purpose in mind, v16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit fruit that will last. We ve been individually chosen by Jesus, and appointed to go and bear fruit. We re to be fruit bearers. In our lives we should have the mindset all the time of wanting to bear fruit the fruit of growth in godliness in our own lives and the lives of others, the fruit of seeing other people won for Christ, and of seeing children raised in the faith of Christ, and the fruit of God s name being made known and honoured all over the world. And, in that context, Jesus said, v16, then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. Do you see how that works? If we really have the mindset of wanting to bear fruit for Christ, then we will find that God really does give us whatever we ask in his name. I ve heard it said that prayer is a wartime walkie-talkie to call for reinforcements. We should use it with the mindset of soldiers in an army, who, at the end of their resources, call back to base in urgent need for the reinforcements they need to win the war. That is how we should 1 st Nov 2009, PM P a g e 4 John 15:9-17
think about prayer because the Bible says that we re in the middle of a spiritual war. Prayer malfunctions when we try to make it into an intercom to call upstairs for room service. Prayer is a wartime walkie-talkie, not a hotel intercom to call for more pillows and room service. If we ask for the Porsche and the cruise, we re unlikely to get them, because they aren t things that are really anything to do with bearing fruit for Christ. Probably quite a lot of the things that we ask for in our prayers are ruled out, because when we ask for them, we don t ask for them from a heart that really wants to bear fruit for Christ. This could well be one of the reasons why we don t get all the things we ask for in prayer. A friend of mine recently asked me, if my car broke down, would I have the faith to believe that God would heal it miraculously? I said, and I still think this is right, that it would depend on where I was going in the car at the time. If I was driving somewhere in order to preach a sermon, or help out a Christian brother in need, or to organise the catering for an evangelistic event (not that I would ever be asked to do that last one). If that was where I was going, and I knew that God wanted me to be there and that people were relying on me, and that what I was going there to do was related to bearing fruit for Jesus, then I would pray with confidence for him to heal my car knowing that he can easily do it, or at least find me another way to get me where I m going. On the other hand, if the reason I was driving is I was driving to town to buy myself a 78 inch plasma screen TV so that I could watch the X factor in luxurious cinematic style, then I wouldn t be able to pray with any confidence at all for him to heal my car. It is when we re absorbed in the business of bearing fruit for him that we can really expect him to give us whatever we ask in his name. I think that these verses are meant to encourage us. Jesus speaks really very tenderly to his disciples in these verses, he doesn t beat them over the head and try to guilt them into doing what he wants. I know that at this church there are many people who really are working extremely hard for Jesus in all kinds of ways. Many people are involved directly with word ministry things with leading childrens groups and youth groups and midweek groups and with teaching the Bible in all kinds of ways. Others are involved in practical things administration, finance, maintenance, all sorts of things that play a part in bearing fruit for Jesus. And it is easy, if we re involved in this kind of work for a long time to get tired and weary of it. But we need to remember that everything that is being done here could not be more important. Everything that goes on in this church is aimed at bearing fruit for Jesus. And he gives these two wonderful encouragements. First, that we his friends, called to be part of this work, that he cares about, with him. And second, that as we go about this work with all our hearts, longing to bear fruit for him, then he will really answer our prayers and give us everything we ask in Jesus name. So what kind of people does Jesus want us to be. He wants us to be people who remain in his love, listening to his voice and keeping his commands, so that we might know the complete joy of his love. He wants us to be people who love one another with the kind of powerful love that can really change the world. And he wants us to be people who go and bear fruit, living lives that are taken up with wanting to serve him and see his kingdom grow and expand. Audio versions of the sermons can be freely downloaded from the All Saints Little Shelford website, http://www.allsaintslittleshelford.org. These are available in two formats, mp3 and wma. (All scripture quoted is from the New International Version of the Bible unless otherwise stated.) 1 st Nov 2009, PM P a g e 5 John 15:9-17