After several years of being in the shadows, I was given my first opportunity to preach this past weekend for the first time in several years. These thoughts are a part of the tragic result of that development.
Admittedly, my preaching opportunity arose out of about 50% dare, and another 50% obligation. The element of, what you might call, "calling" was a rock-solid 0%. My good friend Adam pastors a small church called Open Door. And a couple of years ago I made a self-deprecating comment that nobody would ever allow me to preach in a church again for the rest of my lifetime. He saw that statement as a challenge. So when I asked if I could recruit mentors during his church service for the faith-based mentoring program that employs me, he kindly saw the opportunity to disprove my expired declaration.
I spend a decent amount of time in the Scriptures, so I had passed through several passages that I had strongly considered as options to share with Open Door. But for some reason, my heart gave me a subtle confirmation when I rolled across John 14:15 about two weeks before my scheduled church service. It simply states, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments." (ESV) Now really this is a pretty convenient scripture if one wanted to transform a Bible verse into an exegetical hammer to bang on a congregations' head with a commonly used little preaching technique called guilt. If you love God you will keep his commandments. Volunteering as a mentor is obedience to God's commandments. If you love God you will volunteer as a mentor. Slam Bible. Rake in mentors. Shake hands and ascend into Heaven.
The reality is I think that God called me to look into that verse and explore it, maybe even meditate on it. I may have mistaken the call to listen to God speak to me through this verse as His call to preach on it. Either way, the message for Open Door opened the door for me to look into a short passage of scripture that my heart badly needed to consider.
I don't like the verse. Okay, there; I said it. I don't like it because it uses the word "commandments". And what's worse, it associates that word with the term "love". I want to be great at love. But I really don't feel too great about commandments. So I would rather not associate those two concepts together. Truth is, when I read that verse this is what my mind hears: "If you really loved me you wouldn't screw up all of the time." That voice made the exploration of this verse difficult for me.
My first quest in exploration is to discover exactly what Jesus' commandments are in the Gospel of John. I looked for the Sermon on the Mount because I know that's a famous place in the gospels where Jesus reinterprets some Old Testament commands. But that sermon is not recorded in the book of John. I tried to find some other "thou shalls" and "thou shall nots" but there were none to be found. The Jesus that is portrayed in the book of John is a little bit different. He is a little mysterious, a little evasive (seriously, he sneaks away and vanishes in crowds regularly), a little cryptic. He's the kind of Jesus that beer drinking folks love to talk about because he is sort of a philosopher. I've been around some drunk folks before, and drunk folks always love Jesus and love to say things like, "Ya man, that Jesus was a pretty cool dude and I bet he would hang out and drink a beer with me if he were around tonight." The Jesus in the Gospel of John is kind of the type of Jesus that the drunk guy likes. But he is also a little frustrating, at least to me. See, if I were to approach the Jesus of John's gospel and say, "Hey Jesus, my transmission is slipping on my truck. Do you think it could be the clutch?" Jesus might respond, "Brent, I am in the Father and it is the Father who is in me. And because you know me, you also know the Father. And greater is the one who is in You because of the one who is in me." I would walk away from this conversation with two things, more gray hairs on my head, and an unfixed transmission.
I sent out an e-mail to many of my friends asking for their feedback on the verse in John 14. I found out that about half of my friends perceive the verse in the same way as me. Many people, myself included, initially respond to the verse with the idea that we need to be obedient to Jesus' commandments if we want to prove that we love him. In other words, we say in our hearts, "I want to be someone who loves Jesus, so I should do a better job at keeping his commandments." That was my initial approach. But there's more to be discovered here.
John wrote some other books in the New Testament. They are easy to find because they are all called "John". Well, there is one called Revelation but I'm going to leave that one alone for now. The John letters are all clearly written by the same John because they all have this very similar language in them. We see some recurring themes in John's writings that I'm not going to elaborate on in this blog for the sake of time. But those themes involve some significant terminology like The Word, Light & Darkness, The World, The Spirit, Belief, and of course Love. A few of these important themes are spelled out in the very familiar and famous verse of John 3:16, "For God so loved The World that He gave his only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life." In 1 John 3:23-24 we get this little helpful gem, "And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. Whoever keeps his commandments abides in God, and God in him. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit whom he has given us."
That pretty much answers the question on Jesus' commandments according to John. And I recognize that word "abide". See, right after our John 14:15 verse, in the very next chapter, Jesus talks a little about abiding. He talks about us (his disciples) abiding in Jesus, and mentions that he is the vine and we are the branches, and that we must abide in him in order to bear any fruit. I looked up this word "abide". I thought that it meant something along the lines of obedience or submission. Turns out that it is from the same root word as "abode". So abide means to reside with, to settle, to make your home alongside. Could it be that Jesus' commandments are to believe in Him, to love each other, and to live with Jesus? That seems all too simple. I like it.
See, what if Jesus' statement in John 14:15 doesn't mean, "If you really loved me you would be doing a better job at keeping my commandments." What if, instead, we approached the verse with this in mind, "I really need help in being like Jesus, so I need to do everything I can to get close to Jesus and love Him."? See, the secret to righteousness is in abiding. It's not that the secret to loving Jesus is in obedience. After all, Jesus tells us in John 15:5, "...for apart from me you can do nothing." I think He really meant that. In another one of John's letters he tells us, "We love him (God) because He first loved us." (1 John 4:19)
I really waste my effort when I strive and pursue obedience to commandments. But when I pursue dependence on Jesus Christ, I love Him. And in that love I become obedient. I can't help but become obedient. Hanging out with Jesus puts me in alignment with His will, because it makes me like Him.
I could write so much more on this subject, but I would risk taking something so beautifully simple and making it complicated. May those of us who strive find rest in these simple offers, believe in Jesus' love for us, and love each other.
