Of Supply and Demand
Commentary
In the mid-1960s, a popular song declared, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love. It's the only thing that there's just too little of.”1 It was an era of both national and international unrest. And the American landscape was reeling from the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, and opposition to both. Amidst headlines so marked by unrest and division, therefore, the sentiment of the song struck a chord with an American audience.
Meanwhile, in the mid-1970s, The Imperials2 made popular a song that began by itemizing other things that “the world needs now.” “There's a shortage on corn / And there's a shortage on wheat / There's a shortage on beans / We've got a shortage on meat / There's a shortage on fuel oil / There's a shortage on gas / There's a shortage on wood / And there's a shortage on glass.”3 Again, the lyrics captured the spirit of the moment and the experience of the time. Americans were beset by a message and a feeling that we were running out of things that we had taken for granted for so long.
But the 1970s gospel song was titled “No Shortage.” For while it itemized all the things that we were told were in short supply, the song affirmed a larger, better truth. “But I know a good thing / That there's no shortage of / There's no shortage on God's mercy / There's no shortage on God's love.”
Both songs are many decades removed from our day. We have our own sense of unrest today. We have our own sense of shortages today. But I am inclined to blend the messages of the two songs, to say that they are both quite correct, and to declare that their combined truth is a right word for us today.
I’m sure, on the one hand, that it could be said in every generation, “What the world needs now is love.” Between Eden and the New Jerusalem, there never has been and never will be a time when love is not the world’s primary need. At the same time, however, I am equally sure that “there’s no shortage on God’s love.” In short, what the world needs most is marvelously available.
This week’s selected passages give us an excellent opportunity to preach to the world’s great need. It is an opportunity to declare that what we need is amply supplied. It’s an opportunity to preach about God’s love.
Acts 10:44-48
We are well-acquainted with racial divisions and prejudices. Most of us are far removed, however, from the sort of ethnic boundaries that marked the New Testament world. Specifically, just now, we’re thinking of the attitude of Jews towards Gentiles.
We make a mistake, I think, if we simply classify that attitude as a prejudice, like the sort that we may see evidence of around us. But this was different. This was a division between peoples that was much more substantial than mere prejudice or racism.
First, we observe the breadth of the term “Gentile.” From a Jewish point of view, it really amounts to a word that means “everybody else,” and that’s a rather remarkable linguistic phenomenon. “Gentile” was not a specific race or ethnicity — like Hispanic or Asian or Native American or some such. It was an enormous umbrella term that covered everyone who wasn’t Jewish.
Second, we note that this is not racism so much as it is theology. The Jews had come to an us-them understanding of the world, which was rooted in their sense of a covenant relationship with God. This was, I submit, a misunderstanding of God’s will. Nevertheless, they had come to believe that their thick boundary line between themselves and “everybody else” was obedience to God.
Third, we see that this Jew-vs.-Gentile paradigm was not just prejudice, but policy. It was not personal animus, but an entrenched system. Two other episodes from the New Testament will help us to grasp the worldview that was at work.
When Jesus taught his followers about a brother who had sinned, he prescribed a series of steps to help restore that brother. If that brother refused to repent, however, then the last resort was what we might think of as ostracism or excommunication. "And if he refuses to listen,” Jesus said, “let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax-gatherer” (Matthew 18:17 NASB). Such was the established system in first-century Palestine that when Jesus wanted to illustrate non-contact with another human being, he characterized it as “let him be to you as a Gentile.”
Meanwhile, toward the end of his recorded ministry, the Apostle Paul was arrested in the temple for being the center of a disturbance. Actually, Paul was innocent of any wrongdoing. But the disturbance began because of the rumor that “he has even brought Greeks into the temple and has defiled this holy place” (Acts 21:28 NASB). The temple precincts at that time were arranged into a series of concentric courts emanating out from the sanctuary itself — rings of decreasing holiness. The outer courts could be entered by Gentiles. Between that outermost court and the courts available only to Jews, however, there was a four-foot-high wall, which featured signs written in both Latin and Greek, reading, “Any foreigner who passes this point will be responsible for their own death.”
My denomination, the United Methodist Church, chose as its motto some years ago this expression: “Open Minds. Open Hearts. Open Doors.” But that was not the spirit of the Jerusalem temple in the New Testament era. Those doors were not open.
It’s against that larger backdrop of Jewish separation from Gentiles, then, that we read and understand this brief episode from Acts 10.
Earlier in the chapter, the Lord had prepared Peter’s mind and heart for an invitation he was about to receive: an invitation to enter a Gentile’s house to share the gospel of Jesus. Peter would have had some entrenched reluctance to accept such an invitation, and so the Lord had to do some pre-work. And so, when the invitation came, Peter agreed.
Then, once in the home of Cornelius, Peter began to tell them the story of Jesus: who he is, what he did, and what it all means. And before Peter had perhaps even completed his message, this thing happens that is recorded in our assigned reading. “The Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word.”
Peter and his companions were astonished by what was happening around them. And Peter recognized immediately the implication. “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people,” he asked, “seeing that they “have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” In short, God’s acceptance of these Gentile converts was already made manifest. How, then, could the human followers of Jesus reject the ones that God had clearly accepted?
This event in Acts 10 was a paradigm buster for many in the early church. Jesus and all his original disciples were Jewish. The earliest multitudes of converts were all Jewish. And since God’s long-standing covenant had been with the Jews, and inasmuch as the Christ represented the fulfillment of God’s promises to the Jews, it was natural to think of Christian faith as an extension of Judaism. Therefore, it wasn’t meant for Gentiles. Or, perhaps more realistically, it was meant for those Gentiles who had converted and conformed to Judaism.
Perhaps we might think of it this way. Imagine a throne room where a great king holds court. It is most desirable to have an audience with the king and to receive his favor. Anyone with any sense would want to have access to the king. The question is: how does one gain that access?
Up until Acts 10, it’s likely that the early Christians assumed that access to God came through Christ, and that access to Christ came through Judaism. But now Peter was realizing — and Paul went on to make explicit in his preaching and writing — that all people, both Jew and Gentile alike, have access to God through Jesus Christ.
1 John 5:1-6
When a person becomes familiar with a particular composer, he or she can often recognize that composer’s music, even if the specific piece is not familiar. You say, “Oh, that sounds like Mozart” or “That sounds like Beethoven.” You recognize the composer because you recognize his characteristic motifs or elements of style.
Likewise, pretend that you had read the four gospels, but none of the epistles. Yet when you heard this excerpt from 1 John for the first time, something within you would recognize it. “Oh, that sounds like John,” you would say, for the themes and style echo from the fourth gospel. In just six verses, we are exposed to characteristic Johannine themes of love, the world, water and blood, the interrelation of the members of the Trinity, faith, and the interplay of love and commandments.
These are too many themes, and too profound, to do justice to all of them in our limited space. But we may be able at least to trace John’s flow of thought as he moves fluidly from one major theme to another.
First, we observe that the starting place is faith. “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God.” This central issue of belief in Jesus resonates with fundamental verses from John’s Gospel (e.g., John 1:12, 3:16, 4:39-42, 9:38, 19:35, 20:25, 20:29). Indeed, this faith in Jesus is John’s stated reason for writing his gospel: “These have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (John 20:31 NASB).
Next, John says that “everyone who loves the parent loves the child.” I’m sure that each of us can think of some personal exceptions to that rule. Yet, John is working with a larger principle in mind. He likely has in mind the phenomenon of “agency,” and is promoting that phenomenon to an intensely personal and relational level.
The idea with “agency” is that your response to a messenger or your treatment of an emissary is construed as your response to or treatment of the person who sent that middleman. When the Ammonite king Hanun mistreated the men sent to him by King David, for example, it led to war between his country and David’s (2 Samuel 10:1-8).
This, then, becomes a principle that we see at work multiple times in the New Testament. Jesus said to his disciples, “The one who listens to you listens to Me, and the one who rejects you rejects Me” (Luke 10:16 NASB). He has sent them out, you see, and how people respond to those messengers of Jesus is their de facto response to Jesus Himself. And, more than that, Jesus says that it goes back even one step further: “He who rejects Me rejects the One who sent Me.” The Father sent the son, and so those who reject the son are also rejecting the Father.
So it is, then, that John is taking the principle of agency and raising it to this more intimate level. It is not merely about respecting or rejecting; it’s about loving. “Everyone who loves the parent loves the child.” To respect the king is to respect his emissary, you see. And to love the Father is to love the son.
Then comes another proof of love. “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments.” The love for the Father, then, is not only applied to his only begotten son, but to all “the children of God.”
Meanwhile, the connection between love and commandments is introduced by Jesus as part of John’s account of the Last Supper. “If you love Me,” Jesus says, “you will keep My commandments” (John 14:15 NASB). And, again later, “He who has My commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves Me; and he who loves Me shall be loved by My Father, and I will love him, and will disclose Myself to him" (John 14:21 NASB). We will give more detailed consideration below to the relationship between loving the Lord and obeying the Lord, but for now we simply observe that the connection is made and is thematic.
Meanwhile, John next returns to the theme of those who are “born of God.” These were mentioned in the opening statement about belief in Jesus, and the theme was then implicit in the reference to “the children of God.” Now John tells us that “whoever is born of God conquers the world.”
Again, we hear echoes from John’s account of the Last Supper. Jesus makes it clear that there is an animosity in the world toward him, and that that animosity would extend to His followers, as well (John 15:18-19). Yet the assurance to his disciples on that occasion was that he had overcome the world (John 16:33 NASB). And now, in this letter to the next generation of Jesus’ disciples, John assures them that “whatever is born of God conquers the world.”
Then John draws the connection between this victory over the world and the earlier theme of faith (verse 4b). Specifically, and significantly, John expresses our essential faith as our belief “that Jesus is the Son of God” (verse 5). And, in the end, we have good reason for our faith in Jesus, for the Spirit himself bears witness to that truth.
It is a dense passage — just a few verses, yet with so many themes, principles, and truths for the preacher to elucidate and for the people to learn. In the end, we will seek to read and preach this passage within the larger context of the other selected texts for this week. And in that bigger picture, the element from 1 John that I would want to highlight is the theme of love.
John 15:9-17
John favors us with an extended account of the event that we know as the Last Supper. His record of that night is longer than Matthew’s, Mark’s, and Luke’s combined. Indeed, based on the sheer volume of chapters and verses involved, one could argue that the Last Supper is the focal event in John’s Gospel.
In terms of the plot, Jesus and his disciples recline at the table together near the beginning of chapter 13. It’s not until the beginning of chapter 18 that they leave the table and cross the Kidron Valley to the garden. That’s five full chapters of the Last Supper scene. And if you are reading in a red-letter Bible, you will see that most of those five chapters are devoted to what Jesus said to his disciples on that night.
Our selected gospel lection for this week is a very small sampling, then, from that larger scene and that much longer text.
The pericope we are invited to preach this week begins and ends with love. That is appropriate at every level, of course. It is appropriate to the theme of the Johannine literature. It is appropriate to the gospel message. It is appropriate to the occasion being recorded. And, most important of all, it is appropriate to the heart and nature of God.
While the selected teaching begins and ends with love, it travels to many other themes in between. It is a fascinating and edifying journey to take. And while tracing that journey step by step may not be your choice unless you are an expository preacher, it is important for us to see the whole landscape, even if we only preach a portion of it.
The very first statement is sufficient for a sermon all its own: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.” What an astonishing connection for Jesus to make, and what a life-altering truth for us to internalize and embrace. Can we begin to imagine how the Father loves the son? Could we possibly fathom that love? Whatever quality or quantity you want to put on it, that, Jesus says, is the nature of his love for his followers.
It is a mind-boggling prospect, and it leads to a life-changing invitation. “Abide in my love,” Jesus says. Now that you have some hint of a sense for the scope of his love, you are invited to abide in it — to make yourself at home in it. Can it get any better than that? Has ever a better offer been made to a human being?
Then Jesus reveals the key to abiding in his love. “If you keep my commandments,” he says, “you will abide in my love.” It is, he goes on to say, the same with him and his father. And this relationship between abiding and obeying is worth some lengthier exploration below.
Meanwhile, Jesus invites the disciples to follow the same pattern that Jesus himself has demonstrated. Earlier, you recall, he had told them that he loves them as the Father has loved him. Now his followers, in turn, are called upon to love one another as he has loved them.
We know, both from personal experience and from academic studies, that there is a profound correlation between a person’s experience of being loved and a person’s capacity to love. We might say that healthy, loving relationships are hereditary. Sadly, so, too, are dysfunctional ones.
The teachings about love have already invited the disciples into the relationship that Jesus has with his Father, and now that invitation is made more explicit. Jesus calls his followers not servants but friends. And one of the key features of this friendship, according to Jesus, is that “I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” Once again, we see that what exists between Father and son is extended to include those who love and follow the son.
Next, we are met with a marvelous expression of the Lord’s grace: “You did not choose me, but I chose you.” This is a consistent theme throughout scripture. Time and again, we see the gracious initiative of God. And increasingly, as we see our own experience more clearly in the rear-view mirror, we also bear witness to this recurring theme in our story: his initiative, his choice, and his grace.
The subsequent purpose clause, meanwhile, may reverberate with echoes of Eden. After telling the disciples that he had chosen them, Jesus said, “I appointed you to go and bear fruit.” Just as the Lord’s creation of human beings in the first place was followed immediately by a command to be fruitful and multiply, so the Lord’s will for his disciples is also fruitfulness.
And then, finally, Jesus concludes with another allusion to the relationship between love and commands: “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another,” which we will consider together below.
Application
When I was a young minister, I served two, small, rural churches in Virginia. An older woman in one of those churches was very hospitable toward me, often including me in her Sunday after-church dinner. Then, after the meal, we would often retire from the dining room to her living room to visit. And the conversation would often turn to the view.
Miss Dunn’s living room had a large picture window that looked out toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. She loved that window and the view that it afforded. “It’s different every day,” she would proudly tell me.
Perhaps you recognize her experience. Perhaps you have lived somewhere with a view that feels always new, always different. Because of the sky, the leaves, the sunlight — the scene may be fundamentally the same, and yet the beauty is always new.
So it is for those who keep God’s love in view. It has a vastness and a beauty that are never exhausted. Instead, we keep seeing things we never saw before, and experiencing new loveliness that happily surprises us.
Our three selected passages give us glimpses of the magnitude and sweetness of God’s love. In Acts 10, we get a sense for the breadth of God’s love, as it encompasses Cornelius and his household. This was, as we noted above, a paradigm-buster for some of those first Jewish Christians. And thus, we are reminded that the gospel affirmation is “God so loved the world,” not just “God so loved Israel,” or “God so loved the church,” or some such. The Jerusalem temple of the New Testament era had walls and warnings that kept the Gentiles at a distance. But God’s love did not keep Cornelius at a distance.
In our epistle lection, meanwhile, we are reminded of the totality of God’s love, as we see each person of the Trinity involved. Two great truths are affirmed side by side. On the one hand, there is the truth that Jesus is uniquely God’s Son. On the other hand, there is the truth that we may be “born of God” and be reckoned as “children of God.” This is accomplished by the only son, sent by the Father, and witnessed to by the Spirit.
And, finally, there is the marvelous passage from John’s Gospel. Here we hear the mind-boggling truth that Jesus’ love for his followers is in line with the Father’s love for him. Here we see that love drawing the disciples in, calling them friends. And here we hear the irresistible invitation to make that love of Christ our home — the place where we abide, our very dwelling place.
In every generation, it is right to say and to sing that what the world needs most is love. And at any given moment, it is right to affirm and to declare that there is plenty of love available for this needy world. For all the things we lack, there is no shortage on God’s love.
Alternative Application(s)
1 John 5:1-6 and John 15:9-17 — “Of Love and Obedience”
In both the gospel and the epistle, we are introduced to this theme of a relationship between love and obedience. And so, along the way, Jesus says, “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” And John writes, “By this we know that we love the children of God when we love God and obey his commandments. For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments.”
Our risk is that we will hear this theme, these teachings, and misunderstand the message as one of conditional love. Because so much of our human experience of love is, in fact, conditional love, we naturally project that perception onto God. And so, it may sound to us as though his love for us is contingent upon our obedience.
But Jesus and John are not saying that the Lord will love us if we obey. Rather, the principle seems to be that we will obey if we love. And love, we know, is what is most important to him (Matthew 22:36-38).
Meanwhile, we have anecdotal evidence of the connection between love and obedience. If obedience were most important to God, for example, then we should expect that he would have created us differently — that is, that we would be as constrained to obey his laws of morality and holiness as we are constrained to obey the laws of physics. But obedience is not most important to him; love is. Hence, he made us free.
Furthermore, we see anecdotal evidence of the primacy of love in the example of the Pharisees. These deeply religious men of Jesus’ day were famous for their obedience — indeed, scrupulous obedience! — to the law of God. And yet one senses that they were not characterized by love — either love for God or love for others. Obedience, therefore, does not automatically yield love. But love, it seems, will manifest itself in obedience.
Furthermore, obedience represents a beautiful opportunity for us. “If you keep my commandments,” Jesus says, “you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love.” Notice, again, he is not saying that he will love us if we keep his commandments, but that we will abide in his love if we keep his commandments.
The principle, you see, is not that his love is withdrawn when we do not obey. Rather, the reality is that we withdraw when we disobey. We choose some other dwelling place when we stray from his commands. We elect to abide somewhere else — which is an inexplicable choice, indeed!
We are invited to spend our lives living in the love of Christ. There is no better place to be! And he urges us not to withdraw or distance ourselves from that beautiful love, but rather to dwell there habitually by keeping his commands.
1 Google search "what the world needs now"
2 The Imperials album "No Shortage"
3 The Imperials "No Shortage" lyrics
Meanwhile, in the mid-1970s, The Imperials2 made popular a song that began by itemizing other things that “the world needs now.” “There's a shortage on corn / And there's a shortage on wheat / There's a shortage on beans / We've got a shortage on meat / There's a shortage on fuel oil / There's a shortage on gas / There's a shortage on wood / And there's a shortage on glass.”3 Again, the lyrics captured the spirit of the moment and the experience of the time. Americans were beset by a message and a feeling that we were running out of things that we had taken for granted for so long.
But the 1970s gospel song was titled “No Shortage.” For while it itemized all the things that we were told were in short supply, the song affirmed a larger, better truth. “But I know a good thing / That there's no shortage of / There's no shortage on God's mercy / There's no shortage on God's love.”
Both songs are many decades removed from our day. We have our own sense of unrest today. We have our own sense of shortages today. But I am inclined to blend the messages of the two songs, to say that they are both quite correct, and to declare that their combined truth is a right word for us today.
I’m sure, on the one hand, that it could be said in every generation, “What the world needs now is love.” Between Eden and the New Jerusalem, there never has been and never will be a time when love is not the world’s primary need. At the same time, however, I am equally sure that “there’s no shortage on God’s love.” In short, what the world needs most is marvelously available.
This week’s selected passages give us an excellent opportunity to preach to the world’s great need. It is an opportunity to declare that what we need is amply supplied. It’s an opportunity to preach about God’s love.
Acts 10:44-48
We are well-acquainted with racial divisions and prejudices. Most of us are far removed, however, from the sort of ethnic boundaries that marked the New Testament world. Specifically, just now, we’re thinking of the attitude of Jews towards Gentiles.
We make a mistake, I think, if we simply classify that attitude as a prejudice, like the sort that we may see evidence of around us. But this was different. This was a division between peoples that was much more substantial than mere prejudice or racism.
First, we observe the breadth of the term “Gentile.” From a Jewish point of view, it really amounts to a word that means “everybody else,” and that’s a rather remarkable linguistic phenomenon. “Gentile” was not a specific race or ethnicity — like Hispanic or Asian or Native American or some such. It was an enormous umbrella term that covered everyone who wasn’t Jewish.
Second, we note that this is not racism so much as it is theology. The Jews had come to an us-them understanding of the world, which was rooted in their sense of a covenant relationship with God. This was, I submit, a misunderstanding of God’s will. Nevertheless, they had come to believe that their thick boundary line between themselves and “everybody else” was obedience to God.
Third, we see that this Jew-vs.-Gentile paradigm was not just prejudice, but policy. It was not personal animus, but an entrenched system. Two other episodes from the New Testament will help us to grasp the worldview that was at work.
When Jesus taught his followers about a brother who had sinned, he prescribed a series of steps to help restore that brother. If that brother refused to repent, however, then the last resort was what we might think of as ostracism or excommunication. "And if he refuses to listen,” Jesus said, “let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax-gatherer” (Matthew 18:17 NASB). Such was the established system in first-century Palestine that when Jesus wanted to illustrate non-contact with another human being, he characterized it as “let him be to you as a Gentile.”
Meanwhile, toward the end of his recorded ministry, the Apostle Paul was arrested in the temple for being the center of a disturbance. Actually, Paul was innocent of any wrongdoing. But the disturbance began because of the rumor that “he has even brought Greeks into the temple and has defiled this holy place” (Acts 21:28 NASB). The temple precincts at that time were arranged into a series of concentric courts emanating out from the sanctuary itself — rings of decreasing holiness. The outer courts could be entered by Gentiles. Between that outermost court and the courts available only to Jews, however, there was a four-foot-high wall, which featured signs written in both Latin and Greek, reading, “Any foreigner who passes this point will be responsible for their own death.”
My denomination, the United Methodist Church, chose as its motto some years ago this expression: “Open Minds. Open Hearts. Open Doors.” But that was not the spirit of the Jerusalem temple in the New Testament era. Those doors were not open.
It’s against that larger backdrop of Jewish separation from Gentiles, then, that we read and understand this brief episode from Acts 10.
Earlier in the chapter, the Lord had prepared Peter’s mind and heart for an invitation he was about to receive: an invitation to enter a Gentile’s house to share the gospel of Jesus. Peter would have had some entrenched reluctance to accept such an invitation, and so the Lord had to do some pre-work. And so, when the invitation came, Peter agreed.
Then, once in the home of Cornelius, Peter began to tell them the story of Jesus: who he is, what he did, and what it all means. And before Peter had perhaps even completed his message, this thing happens that is recorded in our assigned reading. “The Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word.”
Peter and his companions were astonished by what was happening around them. And Peter recognized immediately the implication. “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people,” he asked, “seeing that they “have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” In short, God’s acceptance of these Gentile converts was already made manifest. How, then, could the human followers of Jesus reject the ones that God had clearly accepted?
This event in Acts 10 was a paradigm buster for many in the early church. Jesus and all his original disciples were Jewish. The earliest multitudes of converts were all Jewish. And since God’s long-standing covenant had been with the Jews, and inasmuch as the Christ represented the fulfillment of God’s promises to the Jews, it was natural to think of Christian faith as an extension of Judaism. Therefore, it wasn’t meant for Gentiles. Or, perhaps more realistically, it was meant for those Gentiles who had converted and conformed to Judaism.
Perhaps we might think of it this way. Imagine a throne room where a great king holds court. It is most desirable to have an audience with the king and to receive his favor. Anyone with any sense would want to have access to the king. The question is: how does one gain that access?
Up until Acts 10, it’s likely that the early Christians assumed that access to God came through Christ, and that access to Christ came through Judaism. But now Peter was realizing — and Paul went on to make explicit in his preaching and writing — that all people, both Jew and Gentile alike, have access to God through Jesus Christ.
1 John 5:1-6
When a person becomes familiar with a particular composer, he or she can often recognize that composer’s music, even if the specific piece is not familiar. You say, “Oh, that sounds like Mozart” or “That sounds like Beethoven.” You recognize the composer because you recognize his characteristic motifs or elements of style.
Likewise, pretend that you had read the four gospels, but none of the epistles. Yet when you heard this excerpt from 1 John for the first time, something within you would recognize it. “Oh, that sounds like John,” you would say, for the themes and style echo from the fourth gospel. In just six verses, we are exposed to characteristic Johannine themes of love, the world, water and blood, the interrelation of the members of the Trinity, faith, and the interplay of love and commandments.
These are too many themes, and too profound, to do justice to all of them in our limited space. But we may be able at least to trace John’s flow of thought as he moves fluidly from one major theme to another.
First, we observe that the starting place is faith. “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God.” This central issue of belief in Jesus resonates with fundamental verses from John’s Gospel (e.g., John 1:12, 3:16, 4:39-42, 9:38, 19:35, 20:25, 20:29). Indeed, this faith in Jesus is John’s stated reason for writing his gospel: “These have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (John 20:31 NASB).
Next, John says that “everyone who loves the parent loves the child.” I’m sure that each of us can think of some personal exceptions to that rule. Yet, John is working with a larger principle in mind. He likely has in mind the phenomenon of “agency,” and is promoting that phenomenon to an intensely personal and relational level.
The idea with “agency” is that your response to a messenger or your treatment of an emissary is construed as your response to or treatment of the person who sent that middleman. When the Ammonite king Hanun mistreated the men sent to him by King David, for example, it led to war between his country and David’s (2 Samuel 10:1-8).
This, then, becomes a principle that we see at work multiple times in the New Testament. Jesus said to his disciples, “The one who listens to you listens to Me, and the one who rejects you rejects Me” (Luke 10:16 NASB). He has sent them out, you see, and how people respond to those messengers of Jesus is their de facto response to Jesus Himself. And, more than that, Jesus says that it goes back even one step further: “He who rejects Me rejects the One who sent Me.” The Father sent the son, and so those who reject the son are also rejecting the Father.
So it is, then, that John is taking the principle of agency and raising it to this more intimate level. It is not merely about respecting or rejecting; it’s about loving. “Everyone who loves the parent loves the child.” To respect the king is to respect his emissary, you see. And to love the Father is to love the son.
Then comes another proof of love. “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments.” The love for the Father, then, is not only applied to his only begotten son, but to all “the children of God.”
Meanwhile, the connection between love and commandments is introduced by Jesus as part of John’s account of the Last Supper. “If you love Me,” Jesus says, “you will keep My commandments” (John 14:15 NASB). And, again later, “He who has My commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves Me; and he who loves Me shall be loved by My Father, and I will love him, and will disclose Myself to him" (John 14:21 NASB). We will give more detailed consideration below to the relationship between loving the Lord and obeying the Lord, but for now we simply observe that the connection is made and is thematic.
Meanwhile, John next returns to the theme of those who are “born of God.” These were mentioned in the opening statement about belief in Jesus, and the theme was then implicit in the reference to “the children of God.” Now John tells us that “whoever is born of God conquers the world.”
Again, we hear echoes from John’s account of the Last Supper. Jesus makes it clear that there is an animosity in the world toward him, and that that animosity would extend to His followers, as well (John 15:18-19). Yet the assurance to his disciples on that occasion was that he had overcome the world (John 16:33 NASB). And now, in this letter to the next generation of Jesus’ disciples, John assures them that “whatever is born of God conquers the world.”
Then John draws the connection between this victory over the world and the earlier theme of faith (verse 4b). Specifically, and significantly, John expresses our essential faith as our belief “that Jesus is the Son of God” (verse 5). And, in the end, we have good reason for our faith in Jesus, for the Spirit himself bears witness to that truth.
It is a dense passage — just a few verses, yet with so many themes, principles, and truths for the preacher to elucidate and for the people to learn. In the end, we will seek to read and preach this passage within the larger context of the other selected texts for this week. And in that bigger picture, the element from 1 John that I would want to highlight is the theme of love.
John 15:9-17
John favors us with an extended account of the event that we know as the Last Supper. His record of that night is longer than Matthew’s, Mark’s, and Luke’s combined. Indeed, based on the sheer volume of chapters and verses involved, one could argue that the Last Supper is the focal event in John’s Gospel.
In terms of the plot, Jesus and his disciples recline at the table together near the beginning of chapter 13. It’s not until the beginning of chapter 18 that they leave the table and cross the Kidron Valley to the garden. That’s five full chapters of the Last Supper scene. And if you are reading in a red-letter Bible, you will see that most of those five chapters are devoted to what Jesus said to his disciples on that night.
Our selected gospel lection for this week is a very small sampling, then, from that larger scene and that much longer text.
The pericope we are invited to preach this week begins and ends with love. That is appropriate at every level, of course. It is appropriate to the theme of the Johannine literature. It is appropriate to the gospel message. It is appropriate to the occasion being recorded. And, most important of all, it is appropriate to the heart and nature of God.
While the selected teaching begins and ends with love, it travels to many other themes in between. It is a fascinating and edifying journey to take. And while tracing that journey step by step may not be your choice unless you are an expository preacher, it is important for us to see the whole landscape, even if we only preach a portion of it.
The very first statement is sufficient for a sermon all its own: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.” What an astonishing connection for Jesus to make, and what a life-altering truth for us to internalize and embrace. Can we begin to imagine how the Father loves the son? Could we possibly fathom that love? Whatever quality or quantity you want to put on it, that, Jesus says, is the nature of his love for his followers.
It is a mind-boggling prospect, and it leads to a life-changing invitation. “Abide in my love,” Jesus says. Now that you have some hint of a sense for the scope of his love, you are invited to abide in it — to make yourself at home in it. Can it get any better than that? Has ever a better offer been made to a human being?
Then Jesus reveals the key to abiding in his love. “If you keep my commandments,” he says, “you will abide in my love.” It is, he goes on to say, the same with him and his father. And this relationship between abiding and obeying is worth some lengthier exploration below.
Meanwhile, Jesus invites the disciples to follow the same pattern that Jesus himself has demonstrated. Earlier, you recall, he had told them that he loves them as the Father has loved him. Now his followers, in turn, are called upon to love one another as he has loved them.
We know, both from personal experience and from academic studies, that there is a profound correlation between a person’s experience of being loved and a person’s capacity to love. We might say that healthy, loving relationships are hereditary. Sadly, so, too, are dysfunctional ones.
The teachings about love have already invited the disciples into the relationship that Jesus has with his Father, and now that invitation is made more explicit. Jesus calls his followers not servants but friends. And one of the key features of this friendship, according to Jesus, is that “I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” Once again, we see that what exists between Father and son is extended to include those who love and follow the son.
Next, we are met with a marvelous expression of the Lord’s grace: “You did not choose me, but I chose you.” This is a consistent theme throughout scripture. Time and again, we see the gracious initiative of God. And increasingly, as we see our own experience more clearly in the rear-view mirror, we also bear witness to this recurring theme in our story: his initiative, his choice, and his grace.
The subsequent purpose clause, meanwhile, may reverberate with echoes of Eden. After telling the disciples that he had chosen them, Jesus said, “I appointed you to go and bear fruit.” Just as the Lord’s creation of human beings in the first place was followed immediately by a command to be fruitful and multiply, so the Lord’s will for his disciples is also fruitfulness.
And then, finally, Jesus concludes with another allusion to the relationship between love and commands: “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another,” which we will consider together below.
Application
When I was a young minister, I served two, small, rural churches in Virginia. An older woman in one of those churches was very hospitable toward me, often including me in her Sunday after-church dinner. Then, after the meal, we would often retire from the dining room to her living room to visit. And the conversation would often turn to the view.
Miss Dunn’s living room had a large picture window that looked out toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. She loved that window and the view that it afforded. “It’s different every day,” she would proudly tell me.
Perhaps you recognize her experience. Perhaps you have lived somewhere with a view that feels always new, always different. Because of the sky, the leaves, the sunlight — the scene may be fundamentally the same, and yet the beauty is always new.
So it is for those who keep God’s love in view. It has a vastness and a beauty that are never exhausted. Instead, we keep seeing things we never saw before, and experiencing new loveliness that happily surprises us.
Our three selected passages give us glimpses of the magnitude and sweetness of God’s love. In Acts 10, we get a sense for the breadth of God’s love, as it encompasses Cornelius and his household. This was, as we noted above, a paradigm-buster for some of those first Jewish Christians. And thus, we are reminded that the gospel affirmation is “God so loved the world,” not just “God so loved Israel,” or “God so loved the church,” or some such. The Jerusalem temple of the New Testament era had walls and warnings that kept the Gentiles at a distance. But God’s love did not keep Cornelius at a distance.
In our epistle lection, meanwhile, we are reminded of the totality of God’s love, as we see each person of the Trinity involved. Two great truths are affirmed side by side. On the one hand, there is the truth that Jesus is uniquely God’s Son. On the other hand, there is the truth that we may be “born of God” and be reckoned as “children of God.” This is accomplished by the only son, sent by the Father, and witnessed to by the Spirit.
And, finally, there is the marvelous passage from John’s Gospel. Here we hear the mind-boggling truth that Jesus’ love for his followers is in line with the Father’s love for him. Here we see that love drawing the disciples in, calling them friends. And here we hear the irresistible invitation to make that love of Christ our home — the place where we abide, our very dwelling place.
In every generation, it is right to say and to sing that what the world needs most is love. And at any given moment, it is right to affirm and to declare that there is plenty of love available for this needy world. For all the things we lack, there is no shortage on God’s love.
Alternative Application(s)
1 John 5:1-6 and John 15:9-17 — “Of Love and Obedience”
In both the gospel and the epistle, we are introduced to this theme of a relationship between love and obedience. And so, along the way, Jesus says, “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” And John writes, “By this we know that we love the children of God when we love God and obey his commandments. For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments.”
Our risk is that we will hear this theme, these teachings, and misunderstand the message as one of conditional love. Because so much of our human experience of love is, in fact, conditional love, we naturally project that perception onto God. And so, it may sound to us as though his love for us is contingent upon our obedience.
But Jesus and John are not saying that the Lord will love us if we obey. Rather, the principle seems to be that we will obey if we love. And love, we know, is what is most important to him (Matthew 22:36-38).
Meanwhile, we have anecdotal evidence of the connection between love and obedience. If obedience were most important to God, for example, then we should expect that he would have created us differently — that is, that we would be as constrained to obey his laws of morality and holiness as we are constrained to obey the laws of physics. But obedience is not most important to him; love is. Hence, he made us free.
Furthermore, we see anecdotal evidence of the primacy of love in the example of the Pharisees. These deeply religious men of Jesus’ day were famous for their obedience — indeed, scrupulous obedience! — to the law of God. And yet one senses that they were not characterized by love — either love for God or love for others. Obedience, therefore, does not automatically yield love. But love, it seems, will manifest itself in obedience.
Furthermore, obedience represents a beautiful opportunity for us. “If you keep my commandments,” Jesus says, “you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love.” Notice, again, he is not saying that he will love us if we keep his commandments, but that we will abide in his love if we keep his commandments.
The principle, you see, is not that his love is withdrawn when we do not obey. Rather, the reality is that we withdraw when we disobey. We choose some other dwelling place when we stray from his commands. We elect to abide somewhere else — which is an inexplicable choice, indeed!
We are invited to spend our lives living in the love of Christ. There is no better place to be! And he urges us not to withdraw or distance ourselves from that beautiful love, but rather to dwell there habitually by keeping his commands.
1 Google search "what the world needs now"
2 The Imperials album "No Shortage"
3 The Imperials "No Shortage" lyrics
