“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!