John 15:9-17

Water finds a way. Water won’t be stopped. Any little crack or crevice is enough for the water to flow. Every year, kids go on field trips to one of the caves in southeastern Minnesota. And if you’ve been there, you’ve seen how powerful water can be. Rain falls on the land above and finds a crack to seep in, trickling down through rock until it falls into the pools in the cave. Solid rock cannot stand against flowing water. Boulders are worn down by its power. When water pours on the land, it must flow down. Nothing can stop it.

God’s love is like water, it cannot be stopped. God’s love is like water, it will find a way. God’s love is like water. Once it’s given, it must continue to flow down and out. But there’s two things that can slow the flow of God’s love. His love, His grace, is irresistible, we say, as good Calvinists. But we try. We will slow down His love if, first, we don’t understand how much God loves us. Sometimes, it seems like His love is too good to be true. He couldn’t possibly love nasty filthy sinners like us, could He? To say that He loves us so much seems to dishonor Him. It seems to bring Him down. And so we go out of our way to convince ourselves that His love is less than it is. We resist His love.

And then, second, we’re not really sure what to do with His love. If we understand how great the Father’s love is for us, then, sometimes, we just sit there with it. We like it, it feels good, but we don’t do anything with it. We resist the flow of God’s love to us, and God’s love to others through us.

But God’s love can’t be stopped. God’s love will find a way. Jesus is speaking, here in John 15. And Jesus is just hours away from dying. These are some of the last words He’s going to say to His disciples before He hangs on the cross, and He wants to make sure they understand. This weekend, we’ve been remembering and celebrating His ascension, and again, before He left, He wanted to make sure we heard Him. He wanted to make sure we understood. He wants to make sure we know His love.

Listen, first, to how great the Father loves you. Verse 9:

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.

Think, if we can, about the love that the God the Father has for God the Son. God the Son is perfect. God the Father is perfect, so the Father’s love for the Son is absolutely perfect. The Son never gives the Father a reason to stop loving Him. The Father can’t not love the Son. The Father has loved the Son from eternity. There has never been a time when the Father has been loving the Son in an intensely blazing love.

Now, listen to verse 9 again:

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.

Jesus loves you the way the Father loves Him. Jesus loves you as much as the Father loves Jesus. If we’re squeamish about this, if we’re looking for a “yeah, but”, then we have to say the same thing about God’s love for Jesus. “Yeah, Jesus loves me, but some of the time He doesn’t, right, because I do bad things. Yeah, Jesus loves me, but not me in particular, not me as an individual, right? Yeah, Jesus loves me, but sometimes He also hates me for doing what I’ve done, right?” Wrong. The Father loves Jesus with a pure and permanent love, and Jesus loves you in the same way. The Father loves Jesus individually, personally, and Jesus loves you in the same way. The Father could not, not in our wildest imaginations, He could not hate Jesus, and Jesus loves you in the same way. The love of the Father flows to Jesus and the love of Jesus flows down to you. Resist it all you want, His love will find a way. Fight it, cringe at it, but His love remains the same.

Resist His love, fight His love, or accept His love. Verse 9:

Now remain in my love.

Stay there. Accept it. Enjoy it. Rest in it. Remain in my love. And this is how. Verse 10:

If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love.

Now, we can get a little squeamish with this verse. When we first read this, some of us will hear the opposite. Some of us will hear Jesus say:

“If you disobey my commands, I won’t love you anymore. If you disobey My commands, you’re out, you’re finished, I’m through with you.”

But those of us who are understanding verse 10 in this way have already forgotten the love that the Father has for Jesus, and Jesus has for us. If there was any possibility for Jesus to be kicked out of God’s love, then there would be a chance that we could lose His love, too. But there is no chance, the Father will…always…love Jesus. So there is no chance, there is no possibility, there is no way Jesus will stop loving you, not if you’ve trusted in Him for your salvation. If Jesus died for you, if Jesus rose for you, if you know that He gave His life for you and to you, you are love by Jesus like He is loved by the Father.

No, Jesus didn’t say verse 10 to threaten us. He told us to obey His commands for a good reason. Verse 11:

I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.

His love is constant. His love is permanent. If we decide to disobey, if we reject God’s commands, then we walk away from that love. God doesn’t remove His love, we’re the ones moving away. But, when God is loving us so intensely, we would never want to leave that love. The joy, the safety, the wonder, the beauty of a life lived surrounded by the love of God, how could we ever reject that? How could we ever leave it? Of course we remain in His love. Life is just awful without it. And the way we stay surrounded by His love, the way we don’t walk away, is by obedience to His commands. We don’t obey to make Him love us. We obey BECAUSE He loves us. The Father loves Jesus. Jesus loves us in the same way. And we remain in His love by obeying.

And the flow of God’s love continues. The Father loves Jesus. Jesus loves us with that same intensity. And now, get this, verse 12:

My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.

Love each other, as Jesus loves you, as the Father loves Jesus. That’s a far cry from tolerating each other, isn’t it? We’re not just acquainted with each other. We don’t just want to find a way to get along. We love each other. We love each other in the same way that the Father loves Jesus. Our love for each other is as unshakable, as irrevocable, as permanent and as intense as God’s love for Jesus.

Now, here, once again, we can try to slow down the flow of God’s love. We can’t stop it, but we can fight it. If we have doubted His love for us so far through this text, then we’re not ready to love each other. We have not been blown away by the intensity of His love, then we’re not ready to love each other with the same intensity.

And if we have understood God’s love for us, maybe we’re not ready to show that same love for others. Maybe we’re like a big tub, that loves to receive God’s love, but doesn’t want to pass it on. We get fuller and fuller and fatter and fatter as God continues to love us, but we don’t let His love flow on to others through us.

But if we’re ready for the flow of God’s love to continue, then we love each other, we love other people, we love all other people in the same way God loves Jesus and Jesus loves us. And this is what that looks like. Verse 13:

Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

We love each other the same way Jesus loves us, and we show that love clearly. We lay down our lives for each other the same way Jesus laid down His life for us. We lay our lives down for each other.

And that can be just as frightening and just as painful as it was for Jesus when He laid down His life for us. Remember Him sweating drops of blood in the garden of Gethsemane? Remember the agony as He laid down His life on the cross? If we haven’t experienced some agony, if we haven’t known some pain, if we haven’t gone through some form of loss for another person, then we’re stopping the flow of love. God has loved us, but we haven’t loved others in the same way. God has loved us, but we’ve kept that love to ourselves.

We will love like Jesus when we lay down our lives for each other. And we can do that in a lot of different ways. We lay down our life for someone when we take the time to listen, taking the time to make sure they are heard, rather than making sure we are heard. It can be excruciating to be quiet and not jump in. We lay down our lives when we listen.

We lay down our life for someone when we join them in their mess. It’s far less painful to make sure we spend time only with people who have their lives together. It just makes life easier to let people take care of their own problems, while we just mind our business. We lay down our lives when we go and join someone in the struggles. When someone is struggling to control their kids in church, we don’t stand off, watching, shaking our heads. We go over and see if we can give that parent a break. When someone acts angry and grumpy, when all that is heard are discouraging words, it’s a lot easier to run and hide, to stay on the opposite side of the Sonshine room and keep a crowd between us. But we lay down our lives for them when we go into the anger, we approach them as if they’re okay. It’s frightening, it can be messy, and it’s loving each other like Jesus has loved us.

We lay down our lives for someone when they are more important, they are more valued, they are more loved than anything else in our own lives. That person is more important than my time. That person is more valued than my own feelings. That person is worth more, even, than my own life. And the only way to see someone else in this way, the only way to lay down our life for another person, the only way to love someone else so deeply is to first be loved so deeply. Jesus knows how hard it is to lay down our life for someone else. He knows from experience. So, after He tells us to love each other in this extreme way, He reminds us why. He knows it’s hard, He knows it’s painful, He knows it hurts, so He tells us, in verse 14:

You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

When Jesus told us to lay down our lives for each other, it wasn’t as a master to a servant. When Jesus told us to obey His commands, it wasn’t as the boss. Jesus told us to do these things as a friend. He brought us inside, back behind the scenes. He let us know what exactly He’s doing, and why He’s doing. We know what He knows. What the Father taught Him, He is teaching us. He’s letting us into His mind. He’s revealing His heart.

And when we see His heart, as we understand His mind, we begin to understand, even more, how great the Father’s love for Him, and how great His love for us. We understand, because we are His friends, why He willingly, intentionally let His body be so beaten, for us. When we see His heart, as we understand His mind, we know His love for us, which allows us to love each other, as He loved us. His friendship makes us eager to befriend others, even people that are difficult to be friends with. His sacrifice is the reason we are willing to sacrifice time and money, it’s the reason we can be patient with someone who isn’t moving as fast as we would like, who isn’t changing their life as quickly as we want them to. His love for us is why we don’t just put up with each other, we actually, genuinely nurture, care for, another person, who doesn’t deserve that care, who never earned the nurture.

We lay down our ambitions, we lay down our feelings, we lay down our judgments, we lay down our values, we lay down our lives, because Jesus did. The Father loves Jesus with a love that words can’t describe. Jesus loves us with a love that, truly, words can’t describe. Do we, we do, right, love each other with a love that words cannot describe. The One who loves us, the One who lay down His life for us, this One, our Friend, tells us, verse 17:

This is my command: Love each other.