Calvary Road Baptist Church
“THE DEMAND OF LOVE” Part 3
John 15.12-17
We come to our examination of John 15.12-17 for the third time. Our first look at this passage began with me drawing a contrast between the concept of love as it is imagined by those unsaved people of this world who are utterly cut off from spiritual reality and love as it is shown in God’s Word.
The way the unsaved of this world envision love is to imagine that it sanctions the unbridled and unrestrained pursuit of personal pleasure. I’ve pointed this out before. No boundaries. No limitations. And no judgment of others, regardless of their conduct. That is, for the most part, the world’s notion of love.
Recall that I illustrated by describing how a young couple will justify their willingness to engage in sexual immorality. Same-sex couples also use the same justification to justify their inappropriate misconduct. They imagine that their pursuit of personal pleasure apart from the sanctity of marriage is acceptable so long as they claim to love one another and feel oozy and gushy toward each other. Along the way, their consciences are salved by their shallow repudiation of the institution of marriage.
You might have also noticed how older unmarried couples address this matter of love and marriage. With so many of them having failed in marriage, they write off the institution of marriage by shifting blame for their heartaches and personal tragedies to being married. It wasn’t their fault. It wasn’t their ex’s fault. They have decided to blame the institution of marriage and live like husband and wife, though they are not husband and wife.
In this way, older people who live together without the benefit of marriage frequently dismiss the whole adolescent notion of love and marriage by claiming they are living together because of unpleasant memories of past marriages. Excuses, excuses.
Still, others offer no justification whatsoever for what they do. They are engaged in convenient arrangements without any rationale or justification for the sins they commit apart from their gratification. The damage they do to themselves by their distorted counterfeit for love, First Corinthians 6.18, is of no interest to them. Neither are the negative influences of their behavior on others who will follow their pattern and on society at large, which they selfishly choose to ignore.
This spills over into the lives of parents who repeatedly deny their children access to the means of grace. A child comes under conviction, so the parents make sure the child is otherwise occupied on Sunday mornings for the next several weeks. Or daddy likes to stay home on Wednesday nights, depriving their children of access to the means of grace at a crucial time in their young lives. How is love for a child shown by depriving them of the means of grace?
Those in the crosshairs of my targeted comments will no doubt judge me to be harsh and unloving. But I plead the Apostle Paul’s example, who asked in Galatians 4.16,
“Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?”
I also illustrated how genuine love is demanding by pointing out the Apostle Paul’s comment in his first letter to the Corinthian Church, where he wrote in 13.5 that love,
“Doth not behave itself unseemly.”
Additionally, I pointed out that not only is the love one has for another human being demanding, but also the love one has for God. How is this shown to be demanding? By the insistence that God and the Savior have that love expressed by obedience to God and the Savior. This was all seen in my exposition of verses 12-15.
Reinforcing my understanding of the Savior’s comments was the Apostle John’s complimentary insistence on love’s demands, written in Second John 6 scores of years after the Savior’s comment, where he wrote,
“And this is love, that we walk after his commandments.”
There you have it.
I say again that if what someone calls love is not demanding, it isn’t love at all. Instead, it is a perversion of love, a delusion about love, a counterfeit of love, and a distortion of the love that reflects the nature of God, Who is love. It is better to pass on being a dad than to be a dad who deprives his children of the means of grace.
The second consideration of our text focused on verse 16, where the Lord said to His apostles,
“Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you.”
Who can deny that verse 16 also reflects the demanding nature of genuine love? Here, we, the objects of Christ’s greater love, are told we were chosen in eternity past, ordained in eternity past to bring forth fruit that should remain, and informed about the conditions of our prayer life to God the Father.
Answers to our prayers in Jesus’ name are rightly understood to be predicated on our fruitfulness, which is our abiding in Christ. I ask, what could be more demanding than that? The insistence of Christ’s love for His own is that we live as He has told us to live, as a precondition for our prayers being answered. Simple. It is so easy to understand that any child can grasp the concept. God is not about to reward anyone’s misconduct. He does not answer the prayers of the disobedient but demands obedience.
In preparation for examining the final verse of the passage, let us reread the passage in its entirety. John 15.12-17:
12 This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you.
13 Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
14 Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.
15 Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.
16 Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you.
17 These things I command you, that ye love one another.
I have two questions to ask you concerning John 15.17:
First, IS NOT COMMANDING DEMANDING?
I ask this question because of the tendency in evangelical circles to interject a philosophy and mindset into one’s dealings with the Lord Jesus Christ that are entirely foreign to Scripture.
I illustrate by pointing out to you the tendency of so many who are engaged in active witness to urge sinners to ask Jesus to save them and to urge sinners to ask Jesus into their hearts, which I fear is an unconscious reflection of their underlying misapprehension of spiritual reality.
Why ask the Lord Jesus Christ to do something He instigated and initiated? What sense does that make? Imagine a child responding to his mother’s directive, “Son. Come here,” with the words, “Mom, will you let me come?” Here is another one: “Susie, wash the dishes.” Susie responds, “Mom? May I wash the dishes?” Nonsense, right? Yet, troubled sinners are commonly told to respond to Christ’s directive in Matthew 11.28,
“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,”
by asking Jesus to save them, by asking Jesus to come into their hearts, or by praying a sinner’s prayer. Such puzzling responses betray a misunderstanding of what has been directed.
Remember, the LORD God sought Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden following their transgression, Genesis 3.8-9. They did not seek God but did their best to hide from God. Remember, also, that after the prophet Jonah was swallowed by the great fish, he realized, at his most helpless, according to Jonah 2.9, that “Salvation is of the LORD.”
It is the natural tendency of every unsaved person, and also the inclination of so many Christians, to unconsciously deny God His glory by taking credit for the initiative to reconcile with God. However, do we find any suggestion in the Word of God? No. Quite the opposite. The initiative to reconcile with a sinful individual is always God’s.
God sought out Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, so He sought out Abram in Ur of the Chaldees. Also, give no thought to a bush burning without being consumed in the Midian desert being anything other than the God of Israel reaching out to Moses.[1] This pattern is forcefully driven home to the Lord’s eleven in John 15.12-17. And this is no surprise, coming from the One who earlier said, “For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost,” Luke 19.10.
I have concluded that as many need to be reminded that the initiative to reconcile is always God’s are usually the same people who need to be reminded that the Lord Jesus Christ never asked His disciples to do anything. Every question the Savior asked that is recorded in God’s Word was designed to provoke thought, not to ask individuals if they would kindly consider doing the Savior a favor.
I mention these things to say this. A command is a demand. When the Lord Jesus Christ issued a command, He was not making a request. He was not issuing a suggestion. He was not offering a recommendation. What the Savior commanded, He demanded, which should be understood by everyone who reads the Bible. Therefore, make no mistake. Suffer no delusion or misapprehension. Introduce no complex thought pattern concerning what is simple and undeniably straightforward. Christ’s command is Christ’s demand. How, then, can failure to comply be anything other than to deny?
As Well, IS NOT OBEYING HIM LOVING HIM, AND LOVING ONE ANOTHER OBEYING HIM?
Concerning the disciples’ love for one another, commanded by the Savior as evidence of their love for Christ and a grateful return for His love to them, we must keep His commandments. This is His commandment that we love one another, John 15.12 and 17:
12 This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you.
17 These things I command you, that ye love one another.
No spiritual obligation is more frequently commanded nor urgently pressed upon us by our Lord Jesus than that of our mutual love and for good reason. Christ’s pattern here recommends it, as we saw in John 15.12, “as I have loved you.”
Christ’s love for us should direct and engage our love for each other. In this manner, and from this motive, we should love one another because Christ has loved us. And does He not here specify some of the expressions of His love to them? He called them friends. He communicated His mind to them. And He expressed His readiness to give His obedient followers what they needed.
We should go and do likewise. This is why my wife and I have opened our home to so many different people over the years. A couple and their three children, another couple and their two children (the two families simultaneously), a missionary’s son, a teen and his brother, my brother, a Brazilian lad, and a long-time close friend were those we were privileged to host in our home. Why host them? They needed our love in action, and words are so very cheap.
Loving one another is also required by our Lord’s precept. I hinted at this when I mentioned our Lord’s pattern a moment ago. Our Lord interposes His authority and has made love for one another a statute-law of His kingdom. Observe how differently it is expressed in verses 12 and 17, in a very emphatic fashion: “This is my commandment,” John 15.12, as if this were the most necessary of all the commandments. As under the Law of Moses, the prohibition of idolatry was the commandment more insisted on than any other, foreseeing the Jewish people’s addiction to that sin, so Christ, foreseeing the addiction of the Christian community to an absence of love, has laid the most stress upon this duty that we love one another. “These things I command you,” John 15.17. He speaks as if He were about to give them many directives, and yet names only this one, that you love one another, not only because loving one another includes many different duties, but because it will positively influence every other activity in the Christian’s life.
As the Lord Jesus Christ’s command of verse 12 is restated in verse 17, allow me to suggest that the Savior’s pattern, what I have referred to as His precept, stated in verse 12, is so implied by everything related to His life and conduct that it is unstated but understood in verse 17. Have you ever uttered the phrase, “That goes without saying”? It refers to matters so material to the topic being considered that it is borderline offensive to someone’s intelligence to suggest to them that it needs restating.
Unfortunately, some people are so dull that what goes without saying needs to be said for them. Not so with these eleven men, and I hope not with you and me. What was said in verse 12, which is noticeable by its omission in verse 17, despite what appears to be the Lord circling back around in verse 17 to where He started in verse 12, is the phrase “as I have loved you.” His love for those men was on display for three and one-half years.
His choice of them was motivated by His love for them from eternity past. His conduct toward them, featured by everything He had said and done to them and for them, convinced them beyond doubt (except for the Satan-blinded Judas Iscariot) that He loved them. It was His love for them that they were encouraged to use as the standard of their love for each other. Indeed, the display of your love for others reveals most tellingly your grasp of the Savior’s love for you. As you bask in the appreciation of the Savior’s love for you, so will you demonstrate your love for others.
What can be said by way of conclusion to wrap up this investigation of John 15.12-17, titled “The Demand Of Love”?
First, it can be said that love is demanding because it is the very nature of love to demand. Not only does love make demands upon the one who is engaged in loving someone else, but love for someone else makes demands of the person who is loved.
What mother or father does not recognize that love for your child requires that you make demands of your child? You demand obedience, compliance, and the development of wisdom because you love the child and recognize that without obedience to you, compliance with your wishes, and the acquisition of wisdom over time, the child you love will be woefully unprepared for life as an adult.
Therefore, yes. The Father’s love for you, and the Savior’s love for you, is demanding. Demanding obedience, demanding that you honor and glorify the Father, and exalt the Son. Also, you love others as God loves you. This is commanded. And commands are demands.
That said, it is not only the command of Christ that demands. We also noted that the precept of Christ is demanding. Let me explain. Have you ever observed that couples who have been married for a half-century and are somewhat similar in body type very often look alike?
Of course, such a thing would not be seen with my wife and me since I am double her size and weight. But it is something that frequently happens with couples of similar body types. And there is a reason for this. It’s called mirroring, and anyone whose career depends upon influencing other people is familiar with the concept. To sell someone a car, a house, a salesperson, or someone else who wants to influence or want a second date with that attractive person of interest resorts to mirroring the person of interest’s posture and facial expression. It makes that person of interest feel more relaxed, comfortable, and friendly toward the relative stranger who is mirroring them.
On an unconscious level, happily married people do the same thing. They tend to imitate how their spouses smile subtly, their mouths curve, and their eyes squint. Over many years, this has produced incredible similarities in married couples’ expressions.
Did you know this is also replicated in the spiritual realm? If you love the Lord Jesus Christ, over time, you will love who He loves, and it will become increasingly apparent that your love for others mirrors His love for those same others. It isn’t as overt, as evident, a demand to love others as is Christ’s command to love others, but it is a demand of love all the same.
That is why there is something wrong with anyone who has been a Church member for a long time and then ups and leaves the Church without any apparent prompting from the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God most usually prompts someone to depart from one Church to another Church when He so prompts. But someone who bails and has unresolved issues left behind? To do that, you demonstrate little or no love for those God loves because you harm them by divorcing them, abandoning them, or ghosting them. Such behavior is entirely the opposite of genuine love.
I close with this. Do not ever again imagine that love is not demanding. Of course, it is demanding. And if it is not demanding, it isn’t love. But what does love demand? It always demands what is best for the ones who are the objects of your love.
What is the ultimate best for those you love? To know the love of God that is found only through faith in Jesus Christ, my Lord, and to grow in your love for Jesus if you already know Him.
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[1] Exodus 3.2-6
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