His Loving Service

Text: John 14:15-21 Speaker: Pastor Matthew Ude Festival: Easter Passages: John 14:15-21

John 14:15-21

Verse 15 — ¹⁵ “If you love Me, keep My commandments. 

Love is revealed in service. This isn’t so much a command from Jesus as it is a simple statement of fact. If you love me, the result will be that you will keep my commandments. Love is revealed in service.

A mother’s love is evident in her service to her children. Teenagers often find a multitude of reasons for being angry at their parents, they may even insist their parents never loved them. But when they do this, they are blatantly ignoring fifteen years of service. No matter how we might think our mothers may have failed us. Their love is without question because they changed our diapers, fed us, clothed us, drove us to school etc.

Jesus’ love for us is evident in his service to us. He loved us therefore he came to serve us with his life and his death.

Is our love for him evident in service? Jesus’ statement here is a universal truth, where there is true love, there will be actions that display that love. There will be service.

Love results in action. Even if it is nothing more than a verbal thanks. Still love will result in action. This is what Christ reminds us in our test. “If you love me you will keep my commandments.”  Love for your mother will result in acts of affection. Love for Christ will result in keeping his commands. Even if those actions are feeble. Even if those actions are not what they ought to be. Still there will be something.

In verse 15 of our text we have the word “keep,” “you will keep my commandments.” I much prefer here the word “treasure.” This is a better depiction of what the Greek means. If we love Christ will want to do his commands, that is true, but what Christ has in mind here is something even deeper. Not that we will simply do what he commands but that we will treasure his word in our hearts.

Even when you love your spouse or your parents you don’t always act like it. But if you were ever at a point where you can’t even stand to listen to their voice. Where you never what to do anything that makes them happy, or talk to them. That’s a pretty good implication that there isn’t really any love there.

Just so with Jesus. How can you save that you love Jesus if you hate his word and every command that he gives. If you have no desire to listen to him or do any of those things he asks of us?

It is exactly for this reason that James says “Faith without works is dead.” If you get to the point where there are truly no works of the Holy Spirit within you, that is you do not have any desire to hear God’s word, do not want to do a single one of his commands, and can think of no reason to repent. Then how can you say there is any faith or love for Christ remaining? At that point it is obvious that your faith is dead.

But for us who love Christ, we will treasure his word and desire to do his commandments, even if we often fail. Our works of love and faith might be feeble indeed. They might be nothing more than reading or listening to his word once a week on Sunday, yet even that is a result of the love of Christ within us.

Love is service. A mothers love is years of patient service. Christ’s love is shown in the service of his life and death. What service reveals your love for your savior and your mother?

Verse 16 and 17 — ¹⁶ “And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever–  ¹⁷ “the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you. 

We do not love Christ because of His commandments; we show our love for Christ by treasuring his commandments. But the reason we love Christ in the first place is because of what he does for us, because of the promises that he gives. One of these promises is here the giving of the Holy Spirit.

Yet some might say, “Where is this Holy Spirit? I do not see him. I do not feel him within me. Perhaps I am of the world.”  Indeed, this very doubt and this very desire to have proof of the Holy Spirit and to see the promise of Christ fulfilled has led many to the Pentecostal churches. There they have seemingly visible proof of the dwelling of the Holy Spirit.

Nevertheless, what does Jesus say?

If we turn back to John chapter 3, we find that Jesus was discussing this very question with Nicodemus.

John 3:8  ⁸ “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

When Jesus says “so is everyone who is born of the Spirit” he does not mean we are like the wind, what he means is that we are like the man listening to the wind. We cannot see the Spirit, where he comes from or where he goes. But we can see the effect he has on our lives.

In general, you do not hear your heartbeat, and 99% of your life you do not think about it or notice it. Yet it is always there. You notice very quickly if it is gone.

The synapses in your brain are constantly firing.  A typical neuron fires 5 – 50 times a second, the human brain has 86 billion neurons. This would imply 430 billion synapses firing a second. That is a variable storm of electrical impulses going off in your brain. Again, you would notice very quickly if it stopped although you may not notice much that it is there now.

Just so with the Holy Spirit, we may not notice him but that doesn’t mean he is not there. We may not see or feel him.  But we would notice quickly if he was gone.

1 Corinthians 12:3 no one can say that Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit.

The very act of confessing that Jesus is my Savior is evidence of the Holy Spirit. The desire to hear God’s word. The desire to confess my sins and hear God’s forgiveness is evidence of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is with you and guiding you and standing by your side. You might not always notice him but that doesn’t mean he isn’t there.

VERSE 21  — “He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.”

Jesus promises not only to give us the Holy Spirit but that also he will come to us and will reveal himself to us.

One of the problems we have with these promises of Christ, is our own delusions of grandeur. Jesus says, “You will keep my commandments” and we imagine ourselves as modern day Mosses or Gandhi’s doing such great works that all the world will marvel. When our lives fail to live up to the image we have in our head, we wonder what happened to our faith.

We hear the promise of the Holy Spirit and again we imagine a second Pentecost. Speaking languages, healing people, foretelling the future, again when this fails to happen, we wonder where is the Holy Spirit.

Jesus also promises here that we will see him. And we might imagine the heavens opening like they did for Stephen. We might spend our lives looking for a heavenly vision.

Judas (not Iscariot) had just such a idea when he heard these words of Jesus. He responds to Jesus “how will you show yourself to us?” It seems Judas is thinking of a great vision of heaven. Maybe he is thinking back to the Mount of Transfiguration and hoping that this time all of them will be able to see what Peter, James and John saw.

But Jesus answers him with practically the same words which began our text, “If you love me you will keep  my word.”

Jesus makes it clear that he reveals himself to us through his word. The more we love Him, the more we love His word. The more we love his words, the more we dig into it. The more we dig into it, the more we learn about what he has done of us. The more we learn about what he has done, the more we learn about Him. The more we learn about him, the more precisely we are able to see him. The more we see him, the more we love him. The more we love him, the more we want to study his word.

You see how this is a cyclone. But not a bad cyclone that destroys your house but a good one that lifts you up to Christ.

We often fail of course in our love for Christ and in our desire to grow deeper into his word. Yet we always have the promise that he is our good shepherd who will pull us back from the edge and find us when we are lost. He is faithful.

Our mothers have served us in love since the day we were born. Christ has served us in love from the day he was born, even to dying for our sins. If we love our mothers, we will show it not just in words but in actions. If we love our savior, we will treasure his word.

1 John 4:19  We love Him because He first loved us.

We love our mothers because of their loving service.
We love Christ because of His loving service.
We respond with loving service of our own.

Amen