I. The Biggest Lie Is About Love 00:00
…But Lord, let me speak the words of the Maker of heaven. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
I want to start by acknowledging that we just had our ladies’ retreat this past weekend, and by all reports it was an amazing event. God showed up. Praise Jesus! We can always trust him to do so. And the ladies had an amazing time out in the desert. There’s something so special about saying, “You know what? This weekend I’m going to spend pursuing God and his people.” Right? Because there are two things happening at the ladies’ retreat. You always hear similar stories: you either hear how good God was in the message, or how awesome it was to spend time with your sisters. You get both of those reports, and that’s exactly right. God designed the whole universe with that in mind: that we’re to enjoy him and his creation, most specifically your neighbors, everyone around you.
So I wanted to start there. And then I want to say that the biggest lie that has ever been told in history was about love. The biggest lie in the world is about love. And why is that? It’s as old as Adam and Eve, right? There was a beginning, and then there was Adam and Eve, and then this lie came in. Because the lie was that what you could grasp was better than what you’d been given. And that’s why we were just singing that song, right? “I will climb this mountain with my hands wide open.” There’s nothing I hold on to. The lie is that a grasping love is better than a giving love, when a grasping love is a contradiction in terms.
Love is willing the good of the other. Love is willing the good of everything. Love is essentially not selfish. Love is giving and sacrificial. And we’re told in our New Testament, “God is love” (1 John 4.8). And so when we think about this, when we talk about idol worship, what is idol worship? It’s just mistaken love. And so you look at the world, and you see all of the pain and all of the brokenness that comes because people love the wrong thing, or because they love poorly. They love brokenly. They have a grasping love that’s more about fulfilling my needs than it is about willing the good of the other.
II. Abide in My Love 02:21
The only place you can find the true love is, of course, in God and in Christ. And so today, as we talk about that, we’re going to talk about what it means to abide in my love. That’s what we read in the Gospel today: “Abide in my love.” What does that mean for us? So we’re just going to start there. We’re going to start in John chapter 15, beginning in verse 9.
If you remember, last week we talked about the vine, right? “I am the vine, you are the branches.” This is exactly following. The vine was a picture Jesus used to explain the concept he’s going to get into today. This is continuing clarification of what it means to be the branches attached to the True Vine. So everything we talked about last week is more and more this week, and that’s what we’re going to talk through. So it says:
9 As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. John 15.9
So first of all, we know Jesus loves like the Father. And one of the other great lies of history, that God the Father is mad at you, and Jesus came so that he didn’t beat you up, and just took the punishment on himself, is thrown out the window. The reason Jesus came and died on the cross for you is because the Father loves you. If you ever read the Bible and go, “Man, I don’t think God likes me very much,” then jump to one of the Gospels, because Jesus reveals the Father as love. So that is not true, and yet we fall into this pattern of shame and brokenness.
In fact, we had a great picture that Jane House shared with us for our Fire Night this past week, where she said, “Jesse, can you bring a wooden cross? Because I just feel like in this resurrection season God wants us to leave the stuff he took on the cross on the cross, and walk in freedom.” And so we put a cross in the middle here, and during our Fire Night we had an invitation, and people wrote down on sticky notes (we didn’t quite do it super dramatically, where you nail it to the cross, but on sticky notes) the things they wanted to leave at the cross: shame, sin, brokenness, all of that stuff, the burden we bear that Christ already took for us to the cross.
III. God Is Love 04:32
And so when we look about and we say Jesus loves like the Father, you have to remember there are not two separate Gods, the judgmental one and the merciful one. No, there’s the one God, who in his justice gave us mercy. It’s incredible. It’s actually incredible, because it’s hard to believe, right?
And then in First John we see he teases it out for us. He says what is (and I’ve got a mountain up there, right?) the peak revelation of all of Scripture. Everything points to this truth: God is love. The whole mountain of evidence compiled in the Scriptures peaks in the idea that God is love. But what do we even mean by that, right? We look at the God of Exodus, we look at the God of the covenant, we look at the God revealed in Jesus, revealed as Trinity, and we say that can be summed up in this: God is love.
So when it says, “Abide in my love,” it’s the same thing Jesus was saying earlier when he said, “Abide in me, and I in you.” It’s just clarifying. He’s explaining so that we can grasp this fundamental concept about who God is and what it means to live out our Christian life. Because love is about wanting the good of the other, like I said at the beginning.
So imagine this. The God who created everything that is, in whom all being is grounded: that God can be summed up as the being that wants the good of all creation, that wills the good of all creation. It’s actually one of those statements where you think, “Sure, fine,” until you start realizing what that means. It means this whole project, everything that has ever existed, has been created so that we might love God and enjoy him forever. Everything that’s ever been created is actually for your good. It’s for your good, it’s for my good, it’s for his glory. It is for all goodness to exist in the world.
IV. A Grasping Love 06:49
So what went wrong? Well, that lie I talked about at the beginning: that a grasping love is better than a receiving, giving love. Because God set it up this way. He created everything good. In fact, he created everything very good. And we said, “No, we want to take for ourselves something you have not given us.” And ever since then our loves have been twisted.
Let’s just take the classic example. It’s almost in the air we breathe today: the idea that romantic love is the highest love, that the desire to be with a man or a woman, sexually and relationally, is the best thing in the world. That’s what’s communicated through Hollywood movies. That’s what’s communicated through everything you read and hear in our secular age: that’s it, if you could find that. But even that love is selfish, and you see it again and again. It’s like, “Oh yeah, well, I loved him. We got married. And then I fell in love again, and I’ve never felt this way before.” And they run off and follow that, and we’re supposed to cheer. I’ve literally seen movies where the point is that you cheer for this. Does that sound like God’s love? No. It’s not faithful. It’s not giving. It’s not kind. It’s not patient. It’s not longsuffering. It’s truly all about the self.
We’ve talked about this before in sermons, but we are living in an age that worships the self. It’s really about me. “And when I’m looking for a partner, what am I looking for? I’m looking for somebody who completes me.” It’s like, no. You’re looking for someone you can lay your life down for, the way Christ laid his life down for the Church. That’s the greatest picture of romantic love we’ve ever been given. The mystery between a man and a woman in marriage is the same mystery as Christ and the Church (Ephes 5.32). It’s actually about coming together and dying for the other person. It’s a death march to a life camp, as a friend of mine says. It’s something where you head forward laying down your life, and by laying it down you’re able to take it up again. It’s the only way. It’s the way of the cross.
So yes, marriage is the highest picture we have on earth of how Christ loves the Church. But it’s not like the movies. It’s like everyday life, where you choose to serve one another instead of serving yourself. And it starts in the marriage, right? But guess what? Then you’ve got these things called children, and there is no reciprocal service when you first have children. It is all death. It is just die and die and die, to love your kids. And over time you train them in the whole loving thing, but man, is it difficult. I’m speaking as someone who just spent a couple of days without my primary helpmate, my wife, with my kids. I can tell you from experience, they are not good at loving. They need a lot of help. It’s a lot of dying.
But that’s the center: abiding in love, and out of love. And if you’re willing to do that, if you’re willing to practice love by the grace of God, you will experience life, and life abundantly (John 10.10).
V. If You Keep My Commandments 10:12
Let me keep going, because Jesus explains this as he goes. Verse 10 says:
10 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. John 15.10
Imagine this Hollywood movie where a beautiful woman walks by, and the guy sees her, and they have a meet-cute. You guys probably know what a meet-cute is. You know, they bump into each other, and they’re like, “Oh!” And all of a sudden they’re in love, and you know it, because that’s how Hollywood does it, right? Imagine if at that point they started pursuing their relationship and said, “Okay, what commandments are we following, so that we know we’re loving one another well?” We have no idea what that conversation would look like, because it’s not a part of our culture. It doesn’t exist.
And yet in the Church we’re learning how to be truly human. And what Jesus says is that love is about following rules. That’s crazy, until you’re married for a few days and you start remembering, “I’m not supposed to kill my wife.” No. You start remembering, “I’m supposed to serve instead of be served.” You start remembering the commands Jesus gives. How does Jesus lead? He washes his disciples’ feet. How do I lead as a husband? I’m supposed to serve my wife, not rule over her.
Love is about following commands, because we are rebellious creatures. In fact, what’s happening is we’re getting reprogrammed. We have a script that runs in our head, and we do all the things we want to do. That’s what we start as, right? You’ve met a baby. You know they only want their comfort and their good. There is no consideration. And over time, like I say, you train children how to walk in love. But the script that starts in us is broken. It’s corrupted. And we are tempted in every way to do anything but serve each other.
What the commands do (and I’m using some computer language here, right?) is this: we’re inputting new commands to the system, and they’re overwriting our script, and we’re beginning to be different people as we follow commands. So what starts as “I will serve my wife because I know it’s what I’m supposed to do” becomes “I will serve my wife because I actually want to.” Or, I mean, wife is one thing. That’s a really hard deal. How about that guy at work who bugs the heck out of you? “I will serve him, because I’m called to love not just my wife but my neighbor.” Not the neighbor way over there: the neighbor right next to you.
In fact, the word neighbor is confusing even to the people Jesus talked to, because they’re like, “What do you mean, neighbor? You can’t mean the enemy who lives next door and plays his music too loud and gets me.” Like, no. Yeah, he means that. He means everyone you encounter. Neighbor is about the people you encounter in the world. You don’t have the same duty to a Himalayan monk you’ve never met as you do to the person who cut you off on the freeway. What Jesus wanted you to do was look around and see everyone you encounter through the eyes of love.
VI. The Fork in the Road 13:39
Okay. So we’re talking about these commandments, and we’re talking about how we’ve got this programming that got messed up, because it believed the lie that that which I could grasp for myself is better than that which I could receive from God. And that causes us to not want to give up for people. It causes us to not want to lay down our life for the people around us. And we encounter two types of scenarios as we go throughout our day.
The first one is clearer, but sometimes harder. And I’ve got a silly example, and I’m picking on my wife here quite a bit. Imagine it’s Tuesday night, and the trash cans have to be out front, and my babysitter Christian forgot to put the trash cans out. (Just wanted to call him out there.) And I have to put them out before I go to bed, because my wife says, “If you don’t put them out tonight, you’ll forget in the morning, and then I’ll have to” (and she’s very pregnant at this point) “walk outside in the morning and lug those cans out. Please, can you do it?” And I say, “Yes, dear, of course. That makes perfect sense. I will do it.”
But then I’m a couple of episodes into Reacher, and I’m having a beer, and I’m enjoying myself. It’s a TV show about this spy who goes around… well, he’s not really a spy. He’s military police, and he kills people. It’s a whole thing. Very enjoyable watch. Highly recommend. I’m watching this show that literally means nothing in my life compared to my wife, but at that moment everything in me says, “You should watch another episode of Reacher,” and nothing in me says, “I should go serve my wife and take the trash cans out.” And I’m faced with a fork in the road.
And every one of you faces a fork in the road every day, where it’s clear and evident what the right thing to do is, and we choose the wrong thing, because our script is corrupted. But in that moment, what does it mean to abide in my love? In that moment it’s to reach out to Christ’s love. Because guess what? I don’t have enough to choose to go take the garbage cans out. I need his love in me, right? It seems silly, but it’s so true. At some point you just don’t have it. “I just cannot get off the couch and go take the cans out.” And it’s like, “Well, you’re so weak.” It’s like, no: Christ is my strength, if I have any. I am nothing apart from him, right?
In that moment I could say, “Jesus, give me the motivation.” And guess what? I could go take the cans out. It’s not magic, right? It’s not like all of a sudden I love the idea of taking the garbage cans out. It’s that I’m willing to walk it out with him. I want it his way rather than my way, and his way includes a lot of serving the person next to you.
VII. Rewriting the Code 16:35
Now, there’s a second way we encounter this problem. (I’m using pretty easy examples because they’re simple and we can dive into them.) Imagine you’re driving on the freeway, and somebody cuts you off. Let’s say they cut you off so badly that they almost cause an accident, and your kids are in the back, and out of your mouth comes a lesson in how to use colorful language, and everybody’s just amazed: “Wow, I’ve never heard that string of curses before.” That’s the type of sin where you didn’t even think about the other option. You just responded poorly.
How do you fix that? Because it feels like you’re out of control, and in a way you are. You’re just following your programming. Guess what? You’ve got to rewrite the code. But you can’t do it on the road when you get cut off. You have to do it in the morning. “In the morning when I rise, give me Jesus.” You have to start there. You have to start in the morning. You’ve got to look to him. You’ve got to study his Scriptures, his word. You’ve got to sing your worship songs. You’ve got to let him transform you.
And over time, when you address this thing intentionally, you’ll find that all of a sudden you say, “God bless you,” but it sounds like “God bless you,” and everybody knows what you meant, right? They remember that other time, and they’re like, “I know what he’s saying in his mind.” But over time it becomes, “You know, God bless him. He probably has somewhere to be.” That’s the transformation that can happen when you abide in my love. You start actually wanting good for everybody. You actually will the good of the other. You actually begin to love your neighbor.
But it is a lifetime journey. You never arrive. There are people here who are zero to a hundred thousand years old. Not really. There are people here who are old and people who are young. There are people all over the spectrum, and not a single one of them doesn’t need to hear this message. That’s why we read the Scriptures our whole life. That’s why we call them living and active: because that same thing you’ve read a thousand times, all of a sudden it’s like, “Man, today it makes a difference in my life.” “Abide in my love.” That’s what it’s about.
VIII. That Your Joy May Be Full 18:41
But why do we do this? Well, Jesus is like, “Okay, I know you heard about the commands and the loving. Well, let me tell you what’s going on here.” In verse 11:
11 These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. John 15.11
It’s still for your goodness. Let me say it this way. Sometimes I teach my kids how to behave because it makes my life easier, not necessarily because it matters to them. God never does that. He only ever teaches us how to love well for our benefit. And then it reflects glory to him, and that’s great, but I mean unadulterated love. When he invites you to do something, you’re like, “God, that’s hard. I don’t want to do it.” If you only knew, if you only knew how good it would be to just do it his way. And over time we can discover how good it is.
This weekend we had this great thing, the ladies’ retreat, and I got to spend a couple of days with my four children. And if you just started with this, where you said, “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen: your wife, who does everything for you, is going to leave for a couple of days, and you’re going to be with the four children, and you have to make the house as beautiful as possible for when she returns,” and you just started there. And you had these four children who apparently have their programming a little off still, and their goal is actually to destroy the house by the time your wife returns. That’s their goal. And if they can beat up their brother and sister in the process, then they will do that as well, right? It’s like an added bonus; they get extra points. At that moment you think, “That’s not joyful. That sounds awful.” Unless you take it from abiding in love.
I will tell you, and this is no joke, I had so much fun the past couple of days. I’ve had times where I’ve had the exact same scenario and I have not responded well, and it has been a fight from dawn till dusk, and I’ve been miserable. But the past couple of days, for whatever reason, I knew where I was supposed to be, I knew what I was supposed to do, and I just did it, and it was awesome. Even the parts where I had to discipline, or where I had to change dirty diapers, or I had to do this thing or clean that thing. I just had so much fun, because instead of my daily life, where I’m thinking about how I’m going to pay this bill, how I’m going to do that, how I’m going to solve this problem, how I’m going to figure out how to talk to this person, I was just doing what I was supposed to do: be in the house, love the kids, make the house as good as you can. And that was it. And I just lost myself in the fulfillment that comes from abiding in love.
Now, I did not do it perfectly, let me just say that, right? I had moments where I was like, “Man, I really lost my cool there.” Whatever. My programming is being rewritten as we speak. But my point is, this is not just fluff. When he says, “that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full,” test him on it. Try it his way. He’ll show you. Taste and see that the Lord is good (Ps 34.8). It’s not condemnation for how awful you are at following his commands, how awful you are at loving others. It’s an invitation to the fullness of life and joy.
IX. Love One Another as I Have Loved You 21:31
And what is his commandment? Let’s just sum it up here, right? Jesus is like, “You guys need to understand this, so I’m just going to keep going.” Verse 12:
12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” John 15.12
And everybody goes, “Well, Jesus, at least the bar isn’t very high.” No, not really, right? Love the way Jesus loves? It’s incredible. It makes no sense. It means I actually have an obligation to die for you, each of you, no matter how much you annoy me. It’s both harder and better than you know, because what Jesus is telling us is that if we live the way he lives, then his joy will be our joy, right? We can’t lose the last verse. But in order to live the way he lives, he does want us to serve one another.
And yet every day I wake up thinking, “What can I do to make my life better?” That broken script plays again and again and again. Or I confront a decision, and it’s like, “I could do this fun thing, or I could do this thing where I have to serve somebody. What do I want to do?” I always want to do the fun thing. But love is about choices. It’s actually not about feelings. The feelings will come; you can trust God with your heart. But it’s the choices we make. That’s why it’s a command, right? It wouldn’t be a command if it’s what you wanted to do. Following a command is about obedience in the face of resistance. Now, there will be times, like I say, that it’s just fun. But most of the time we have to slow down and see what’s going on in our heart.
Because the lie of our culture today is one of self-love and individualism: I do me, you do you, and never the twain shall meet. That’s it, right? We’re all little isolated bubbles. And maybe I care about my family because they live with me, and so they’re kind of like, “I have to.” But I don’t want to deal with you and your baloney. Whereas the whole program Christ has written is that we would come together, be interwoven in love, relying on one another, bearing one another’s burdens, serving one another.
Moving people! Golly, you can hear so many podcasts about how you should just hire movers: “Don’t make your friends do that. What an awful thing.” And I think, that’s the church! Yeah, hire movers; they need a job. Fine, whatever. But I can’t think of how much I have been trained to work for other people, more than I think about the 35 times we had to go move people from apartment to apartment or house to house. My dad was number one volunteer for that job, and we did it. We’d wake up early in the morning on a Saturday, and we’d work for twelve hours, and they’d get you some pizza. And great, I love the pizza part. But let me just tell you, it was never my pleasure to serve you. It wasn’t, no matter what I said. But it was better than pleasure. It was joy, right? And it wove us together.
In fact, there’s something that says you shouldn’t inconvenience other people. Let’s just get that out of the way. That’s not our rule here. Inconvenience us! Ask for help. Let us come help you. Let us struggle with your thing together. You’re trying to push a boulder uphill, and it keeps falling down? Well, if we get like six people and a couple of engineers, we can probably figure it out, right? Why are you trying to do it alone? Don’t be Sisyphus. Don’t just keep doing the same thing, getting the awful results, and never asking for anything. That’s what love’s about: inconveniencing one another, serving one another.
This is not about a set of particular things you have to do. It’s actually about how you view everything. As Lewis has that great quote, right? “I believe in God the way that I believe the sun has risen: not because I see the sun, but because by it I see everything else.” It’s not about seeing love. It’s about seeing through love. And all of a sudden the whole world opens up, because God is love, and he created the world. In 1 John 5:3 it says:
3 For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome. 1 John 5.3
It’s not about doing all the things. It’s about viewing everyone as the person you want to serve and help.
X. Greater Love Has No One Than This 25:58
Okay, last verse. We’re going to end on verse 13:
13 Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. John 15.13
I love that verse. It’s written on our memorial out by our flagpole, for my grandfather, who died in Vietnam serving his country and trying to rescue people in danger. I mean, it’s so cool to me, growing up just thinking about all the men and women who have laid down their lives so that we can have what we have today. And yet I don’t want to do it. It’s great to look at all the heroes, but to actually live that out is hard, because usually it’s not jumping in front of a bullet. When I was younger I used to have this fantasy that I would push somebody out of the way of a car and get hit. I would be the hero, you know? Some sort of hero complex going on, right? And it’s not that. It’s way less glorious. It’s when somebody calls and says, “Hey, I’m moving tomorrow,” and you go. That’s not very glorious. In fact, nobody’s standing up and applauding. It’s just loving the person in front of you.
Or when somebody walks in on a Sunday morning and you go, “They don’t look so good,” you walk up and say, “Hey, how are you?” and you just speak encouragement and love to them. Sometimes you don’t want to. Sometimes you’ve got ten other things you’ve got to be doing. “I’m here to get fed at church.” Like, no, no, no. Yes, God will feed you; you can trust him with that. But that’s not why you’re here. You’re here to worship the Lord and to love your neighbor. That’s it. In fact, that’s kind of the secret to life: worship the Lord and love your neighbor.
Now, you may be thinking about Christ, because with this verse sometimes you think, “‘Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.’ But Jesus died for his enemies. Isn’t that better?” Sort of, yes, but not the way you’re thinking. It’s a paradox, because what did Jesus do? His enemies who crucified him, he treated as his friends. Jesus had no enemies and has no enemies. There are people who put themselves up against the love of God, and they get the consequences of their choices. But Jesus came that everyone might have life, and life eternal. As he died on the cross, he said, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing” (Luke 23.34).
It’s like if your buddy hits your car, and he’s like, “I can’t put this claim into insurance. Your car is ugly now. I’m so sorry. I have no money.” And you go, “Man, I forgive you. You’re my friend.” But then somebody else hits your car, and you’re like, “Let’s take him to prison.” And Jesus is like, “No, I just forgive everyone.” (I’m not giving you car insurance and accident advice this morning. Just to clarify, I’m not a lawyer.) But I am saying we’ve got to have a better picture of what Jesus did in order to live like him. He wasn’t up there going, “Man, they’re going to find out someday how bad they were to crucify me.” He wasn’t rooting for their destruction. He held out his arms on the wide wood of the cross, that all might come into the reach of his saving embrace. Wow.
That’s what it means to abide in love: to abide in love so much that even though you encounter somebody who’s out to destroy you, you can pray sincerely, “Father, forgive them; they don’t know what they’re doing,” hoping for their salvation. This script we have in our mind is being rewritten every day, right now. Let God continue that work in you. Look to him. He can accelerate it beyond your imagination. Last thing to think about as we end: imagine if you made every decision based on the love of God. You don’t know how good your life could be. That is our ever-present hope, found in Jesus. Amen.