Readings
- John 14:15–21 Jesus promises his Spirit, to those who love him
- Acts 17:22–31 Proclaiming the ‘unknown’ God that we seek
- 1 Peter 3:13–22 Christ Suffered to Bring us to God
If You Love Me …
So much depends upon this, “If you love me”. On this depends –
- the gift of the Holy Spirit:
- receiving the divine help that we desperately need,
- whether we live, or are merely walking towards our death.
- knowing the reality of Jesus and God,
- seeing what the world can neither see, nor know,
- knowing the love of God in us, and us in God.
Such is the weight of this test, that it is not left uncertain. Though it seems to be about our feelings, it is not left to our feelings. Jesus says, you will know that you love me, by the way you respond to my commandments.
What Jesus is saying here, is more than a reward for obedience. And it is more than just believing in him (as most people think of it).
It is not about Doing Better
This is so much more than a reward for obedience; salvation by works. Jesus is not saying that you receive these blessings as a result of keeping his commandments. Too many people have a Christianity that is based on the hope that – in the end – they will be good enough to merit God’s forgiveness and life.
When we think like this, we balance our sins against our obedience and hope that our goodness will outweigh our sins. It is a lost cause. Those whose hope is like this, have entirely underestimated the weight of their sin before a holy God. And, as for our goodness, it is always less perfect and more tainted, than we imagine. As scripture says, all our good deeds, are really like filthy rags.
Off course, none of this makes any sense until we have truly encountered, and come to see, God in all his holy goodness. But it is true whether it makes sense to us, or not.
It is not about what you believe in
And it is so much more than believing in Jesus, or God, or anything – in the way that most people think of belief.
As scripture so succinctly puts it, even the devil believes … and trembles. Indeed, anyone who believes in Jesus or God and does not tremble, does not truly believe in God. Perhaps they believe in something that they call God (or Jesus), but it is the palest excuse for God.
Words are so slippery, and our hearts even more so. To believe in Jesus, if it is not truly Jesus that we believe in, or if it does not cause us to tremble with awe and wonder … and ultimately bring captivate us with love; its not the belief that Jesus calls us to.
This ought to make more sense. We know that people can say they believe in all sorts of things, but their lives demonstrate what they really believe in. And, we know that there is a difference between belief (which we may wish otherwise), and belief that loves what it believes in.
Belief, as Jesus looks for it is filled with love and deeply personal. Such loving-belief is not only far more motivating, its belief is deeply woven into the truth of who we are (as the devastating effects of betrayal in a marriage demonstrate).
If you Love Me … it will show
So, Jesus is looking for something more personal than obedience, and something more personal than mere belief. And so much depends upon this that we cannot afford to get it wrong. Nor can we afford to get it wrong for those that we call to Jesus.
It captivates you
What Jesus is looking for is something like the life changing encounter that 2 Corinthians 4:6 speaks of –
The God who said “let light shine out of darkness” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
And it is what John spoke of when he said, “we have seen his glory, full of grace and truth”.
When such an encounter draws out belief and love together from you, the one in whom you believe and what you believe about them becomes the most important thing in your life. Is this true, are they really like that (those who find their ‘soul-mate’, know wat this is like)? And, Jesus promises that in loving and believing in him, we will know.
It is a seeing and knowing that spoils your heart for anything else. And when Jesus becomes like this to you, you will do what he calls you to do out of love – because he has become everything to you.
It shows in your life
So, it shows in your life. It does not mean that our doing is perfect, there is too much of the imperfect in us that needs dealing with. But when doing springs out of such faith-filled love (or love-filled faith), even when imperfect, it is acceptable to God. It is made acceptable by the perfect love and obedience of Christ himself, through his death for us.
It also means that when our doing is imperfect, Jesus call is not for us to try harder, but to love better. I know that when I fail him, it is not just a failure of my will, but – more deeply – a failure of my love … I have loved something else more than Jesus. So, the antidote is repentance that seeks reconciliation and the renewal of love, more than it seeks forgiveness.
God does not respond to repentance that only seeks forgiveness – no more than we would. He responds to repentance that seeks restoration of a relationship.
And its reward will be … the One that is loved
And when we love Jesus like this, the blessing we receive is nothing else than the one that we love. The only appropriate reward for love is the object of that love.
So, Jesus says:
- If you love me … I will come to you
- If you love me … I will show myself to you
And when Jesus is loved like this,
- the Father – who loves Jesus above all – will love you,
- the Holy Spirit, will help you
And Jesus, who is alive in a fullness that we can barely imagine, will give you life, in him.
Our Deepest Longing and Purpose
Our other two readings echo this truth. They show how the need to know and love Jesus like this is our deepest longing. And, for those who come to such faith, it shows that it is our deepest purpose in life.
Our Deepest Longing
Our world is so much like the one that Paul came to in Athens. For all its exaltation of rationality and science, we have populated it with more and more things that we treat as God and worship. Isn’t it one of the most extraordinary things that, the more we try to undermine religion, the more people seek out things to believe in – until people will believe in anything?
And, in all this chaos of belief, there lurks something that is unknown, and unseen, but we can’t deny it a place. Paul noticed a statue ‘To the unknown god’, and though we don’t erect statues, all our longing and seeking points to the fact that we have yet to see and know what we are truly looking for.
The Gospel – the good news of Jesus Christ – is eternal and unchanging. But, just as we need to translate our words into the native language of our hearers, we also need to translate the Gospel into the language of the society that we are speaking to. That is what Paul was doing in Athens.
The Gospel is about God’s forgiveness and his love, but it is about more than that. And it may not be enough to say that God forgives you, or God loves you, without offering what people really need. The heart of the Gospel is the offer to us of God, himself, in Jesus Christ – the unknown god, for whom we are seeking. He is the hole in our reality, that will not be satisfied by any other.
Without him no one is truly satisfied. No matter how complete their lives may seem, there is always something missing – unknown and unseen, but longed for.
As to knowing God’s love – it is not so much that we may feel loved, but that we may be welcomed to love him. If God loves us, anything else that he gives to us, or does for us, that is not freeing us to love the only one who will satisfy our longing souls – it is not love.
And as to forgiveness – If there is any sense of sin and guilt, it is not so much because we have broken God’s rules, but that we have hidden from him and sought out other gods. We have failed to see and love the glory of the one who made all things. And we have loved, instead, the things that he made.
God has withheld judgement so that we may seek him, but when judgement falls it will be in the person of Jesus, and based on how we have responded to him. God has given his greatest treasure, his beloved, to die for us. He has given his love to us, that we might love him. He is our deepest longing.
Our Deepest purpose
In contemplating the mystery of suffering, Peter takes us to the one who suffered for us all. And he shows us Jesus’ purpose in his suffering:
“For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Pet 3:18)
Christ’s suffering, and our suffering as we share with him, has purpose to it. Its purpose is to bring us to God.
On the night of his betrayal, Jesus expressed this differently, when he said, “No one comes to the Father except through me”, and then more positively when he said to Philip, “Whoever has seen me, has seen the Father” (Jn 14:6,9).
To this purpose he lived and died and rose again to life.
- He took away the guilt and judgement that keeps us from God.
- He lived a life of perfect human righteousness, to enable us – in him – to come to God.
- And he became the way for us to be changed (in our whole being and living) and made a holy people, fit to live in God’s presence.
And if that was the ultimate purpose of Christ’s incarnation, ministry, suffering, death and resurrection – how can we live as if it is not our greatest purpose too? Consider the testimony of Ephesians 1
- He chose us in eternity “that we should be holy and blameless before him, in love”
- He predestined us for adoption as his own sons and daughters.
- He redeemed us, through Jesus shed blood, from all our sins and guilt that keep us from him.
- He has given us an inheritance in Christ, so that we might be (in all our being and living) to the praise of his glory
We live our lives so aimlessly. We are surprised when suffering comes, as if it makes no sense. But we have been chosen, called, redeemed and lavished with grace. Our lives have a meaning and a purpose that should shape all of our days, motivate all our efforts, fill all our hopes. To be live before God, in his presence, holy and blameless, in love and praise, in the fullness of joy and eternal satisfaction.
Stir Up your Heart, Mind and Strength to this
If you love me, says Jesus … that is our calling; to love God with all our heart and mind and soul and strength.
God is love and he is the greatest thing that we can love. Let us stir ourselves up to respond to his call – stir up our hearts in worship, stir up our minds in understanding and seeing, stir up our souls in dissatisfaction with anything less, and stir up our strength in imitation of him. What a promise we have when we do – even in our imperfect doing.
He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him. And in that day, you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.