John 15: 9-19 As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you; abide in My love. 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. These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full. This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends. You are My friends if you do whatever I command you.
Jesus states a commandment He has for us: that we love one another. We may think we do so decently most the time, but there is a qualification to the love: Jesus says to love one another as He has loved us. How great is that love? To the extent that we can lay down our lives for others – which Jesus Himself did – dying an excruciating criminals’ death, though He was completely innocent, for our crimes! In other words, total selflessness.
This may seem a difficult feat – to have that level of love - if the passage is isolated from the preceding verses. But read together, we see that this Great Love that Jesus requires of us, which He demonstrated, is possible when we abide in Him – in His love. The Bible tells us that God the Father IS love, and Jesus says here that as the Father loved Him, so Jesus extends that pure, perfect love to us. When we take up residence in that love, abiding in it, it fills us with the capacity to extend that love to others.
Obedience is the key. True obedience is a natural response to someone who shows us love. When we are told to do something by someone who loves us, we are compelled in our hearts to obey out of appreciation and reciprocal love: that servant’s selflessness of Christ. Jesus says in this passage that He also demonstrated keeping His Father’s commandments, and abiding in the Father’s love. Just as we are invited into love, we are also invited into the loving act of obedience: the reality of abiding. Therefore, loving others is not only possible, but also, a glad and wilful act of obedience, all through abiding in God’s love. Indeed: that our “joy may be full”!
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