“What Then Has Happened?” (4)

 

 

“He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me, and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will disclose Myself to him.” John 14:21.

 

There is a dangerous presupposition among some Christians that we cannot keep God’s commandments, this is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Certainly before we knew Christ, when we were sinners, we could not keep God’s commandments, but the very nature of the Gospel, the nature of the New Covenant, as contrasted with the Old Covenant, means that we, in Christ, are able to keep His commandments as our Way of Life. The Old Covenant drove us to Christ because we could not keep God’s commandments and were therefore convicted of our sins and our sin nature; the empowering grace of the New Covenant, the life of Christ living within us, the Holy Spirit living within us, the very nature of God living within us, the life of the Vine (Christ) flowing through us, our unity with the Trinity – all of these and more ensure that we can keep the commandments of our dear Lord Jesus and His Father.

 

And yet, it is not we, in and of ourselves, who keep His commandments – but Christ living within us and through us. Therefore we can keep His commandments as our Way of life, therefore we can love one another as Jesus loves us, therefore we can be one as the Father and the Son are one. There is only One Person who can live the Christian life and that is God.

 

This is indeed a New Day, is it not?

 

Consider what John writes in his first letter, “By this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments. The one who says, ‘I have come to know Him,’ and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him; but whoever keeps His word, in him the love of God has truly been perfected. By this we know that we are in Him: the one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked.” (1 John 2:3 – 6).

 

We are to love as Jesus loves, to give as Jesus gives, to bear witness to Jesus as Jesus bears witness to the Father, to know the Cross as Jesus knows the Cross, to lay down our lives as Jesus laid down His life. This is our calling in the Gospel.

 

Jesus says, “…so that the world may know that I love the Father, I do exactly as the Father commanded Me” (John 14:31a). So we, in order that the world may know that we love Jesus, are to do exactly as He commands us.

 

Our inheritance and our joy is that we are enabled by Jesus Christ to keep His commandments, and that we keep His commandments as an expression of our love for Him – because we desire to please Him and glorify Him. When we love Jesus we are loved by the Father, when we love Jesus we enter into the koinonia and love of the Trinity.

 

When we keep Jesus’ commandments, we receive His love and He discloses Himself to us.

 

When Judas (not Iscariot) asks, “Lord, what then has happened that You are going to disclose Yourself to us and not to the world?” Jesus replies, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep my word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him.” (14:22 – 23).

 

An element of the answer to, “What then has happened?”, is that because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the coming of the Holy Spirit there is now a People who keep God’s commandments, a People who are one in the Trinity, a People in whom the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit are dwelling – God’s Living Temple! (Eph. 2:21 – 22) – and that Jesus is disclosing Himself to this People – He is manifesting Himself to them as a natural way of life.

 

Conversely, “He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine, but the Father’s who sent Me.” (14:23).

 

O beloved, the Great Commission is to make disciples “teaching them to obey all that I commanded you” (Mt. 28:16 – 20). The Great Commission is not teaching disciples that disobedience is inevitable, it is not teaching them that they are sinners, it is not teaching them the mentality of spiritual failure and defeat – it is teaching disciples of the glorious empowering victory that they have in Jesus Christ, it is teaching them that they are the sons and daughters of the Living God and that Jesus is their elder Brother. It is teaching them to live by the life of Jesus Christ, just as Jesus lived by the life of the Father.

 

“It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery…If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit.” (Galatians 5:1 & 25).

 

Jesus Christ is our New Day!

What Then Has Happened? (3)

 

 

“In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you.” John 14:20.

 

In the previous meditation we considered what “that Day” is – however we turn the kaleidoscope of the Word of God in the Light of Jesus Christ, certainly those who are in a relationship with Jesus Christ are living in that Day. This leads to the question, “Do we know that Jesus Christ is in the Father, that we are in Jesus Christ, and that Jesus Christ is within us?”

 

Do we speak and act as if we know? Do we witness to Jesus as if we know? Do we love one another as if we know? Do we tell the truth as if we know? Do we spend our money as if we know? Do we read and share the Bible as if we know?

 

Are we living in communion with the Trinity, or is God a far–off God to us?

 

Does the fabric of our lives demonstrate that we are living in the reality of John 14:20?

 

Paul writes that we have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, “Abba! Father!” “The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are the children of God.” (Romans 8:15 – 16).

 

Now dear friends, beloved of our Father, does it not make sense for a father to speak to his children? Does it not make sense for an elder brother to speak to his siblings? How can we read the Upper Room (John chapters 13 – 17) and not see the deep theme of intimacy with the Trinity and with one another?

 

A tragic irony is that many Christians who profess to have a high view of Scripture think and teach that our Father no longer speaks to us because we have the Bible. This thinking betrays misunderstanding on at least two fronts.

 

The first misunderstanding regards epistemology, how do we know things? In our context it specifically has to do with, “How do we know the Scriptures? How are we to understand them?”

 

In the Upper Room Jesus speaks to us again and again about the Holy Spirit living in us and teaching us. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 1:17 – 2:16, teaches us that “the natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God…” (2:14a), and yet well – meaning Christians anchor their epistemology and exegesis and interpretation (and therefore their teaching and preaching) on natural methods, on methods that do not require reliance upon the Holy Spirit, that do not require the revelation (unveiling) of Jesus Christ.

 

When we give any method primacy or equality over the Holy Spirit and Biblical epistemology, including the grammatical – historical method, we display a fundamental misunderstanding of our Biblical relationship with God and of Scripture and we  disregard Biblical epistemology.

 

The second misunderstanding regards our nature as new creations in Christ Jesus, our new nature as daughters and sons of the Living God. “Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” We are to come to the Scriptures not as strangers to God, not as slaves, not as sinners, not as those in bondage to sin and the Law, nor even as minor children (Gal. 4:1 – 5; Rom. 8:1 – 17), but as adult sons and daughters partaking of the Divine nature of our Father and our Lord Jesus in the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:4).

 

Do we not see the irony in preaching on the one hand that we must be born again, and then, on the other hand, once we are born again we teach, “Yeah but, while you may be born again, while you may be a new creation, your essential identity remains that of a sinner and you can expect to live the life of a sinner”?

 

Would a kind father, whose wealth is beyond measure, have his children scour the alleys and gutters of the world to find sustenance, when his pantries are full of good food and drink to overflowing?

 

How can it be that we do not know the living reality of Jesus’ words in John 14:20?

 

Few professing Christians are functionally Trinitarian, for the Holy Spirit is usually, at best, nebulous and distant – at worst I suppose He is a functional non-entity. For those who do speak of the Holy Spirit, and for those who are open to His manifestations – John 14:20 is seldom a reality because they are focused on external manifestations and surface experiences rather than intimate koinonia in which we are transformed into the image of Jesus Christ (Rom. 8:29; 2 Cor. 3:17 – 18) as individuals and as His People.

 

Writing about John 14:20 is one of the hardest things I’ve done, it has been a tough reality check – for if what Jesus is saying is true, then we need a wake-up call. We do not need excuses, we need to examine just how it is that the idea and reality of John 14:20 is foreign to Christians – do we have the courage to do this?

 

We can pride ourselves on orthodoxy, but there is the orthodoxy of doctrine and dogma, and there is the orthodoxy of life in Christ – and to think that we can have the one without the other (though I think we are always  - hopefully – in transformative process in both respects) is simply foolish. Our Biblical understanding and teaching ought to inform our experience in Christ, and our experience in Christ ought to inform our teaching and understanding – the two really can’t be bifurcated…not really.

 

For us, as God’s People, not to live in John 14:20 means that we do not really know what Day we are living in.

 

Jesus has given us His very own glory (John 17:22) that we may know unity with one another in the Trinity – ought we not to receive and rejoice in the glory of Christ in this New Day?

 

When Judas (not Iscariot) asks Jesus in 14:22, “What then has happened?” The answer is that Jesus has brought us a New Day. Am I living in the Day? Are we?

 

Are you?

 

What Then Has Happened? (2)

 

I've been wrestling with John 14:20 for quite a few days. Since I have two distinct lives of thought, I'm going to post the first focus now and follow up soon, the Lord willing, with the second focus. I hope you will read the Scripture passages - after all, they are what really matter.

What Day are you and I living in?

Much love,

Bob

 

“In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you.” John 14:20.

 

What is “that Day”?

 

We can see the answer to that question in our context, both the immediate context and in the entire Upper Room and in the Gospel of John. It is the coming of the Holy Spirit to live within us, which is the result of the Ascension and Exaltation of Jesus Christ (John 7:37 – 39; Acts 2:33). It is Jesus going away and coming to us again. It is the “grain of wheat falling into the ground and dying” and coming forth as much fruit (John 12:23 – 24) in glorification.

 

It is Christ Jesus bringing us into this New Day, this New Creation, and making us new creations in Himself (2 Cor. 5:14 – 21), making us the “righteousness of God in Him.” When Jesus ascends He does so to, “…My Father and your Father, My God and your God” (John 20:17).

 

We might say that there are two new days, one that brings a New Creation, a new humanity, into existence in Jesus Christ; and another New Day that is individual and highly personal to each of us who are in Christ. We cannot experience the grand New Day unless we have our individual New Day, we must be made new creations in Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 5:17) if we are to enter into the New Heavens and New Earth in which righteousness lives. Dead people (Eph. 2:1 – 3) cannot live in the New Creation, dead people cannot live “in that Day.”

 

The Gospel is the proclamation of that New Day, it is the offer of the New Day to all who trust in Jesus Christ – it is the offer of eternal life (John 3:16), it is the offer of heavenly citizenship (Phil. 3:20). Jesus Christ is the New Day, and that Day is never ending (Eph. 1:9 – 12; Col. 1:13 – 20; Rev. 21:22 – 23; 22:1 – 5).

Are we living in that New Day?