Living in Jesus, Abiding in Him (31)

 

 

“Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love, just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.” John 15:9 – 10.

 

Where we live is a theme of the Upper Room. Who lives in us is also a theme. Regarding the former, perhaps it is better expressed as “Who we  live in”. A word in our passage that often expresses this theme is “abide”.

 

In 14:17 we see that the Holy Spirit had been abiding with the disciples and that He would soon be “in” them (as He now is in us).

 

In 14:23 Jesus says that He and the Father will come and make their “abode” in us.

 

In 15:1 – 6 we see that we are called to “abide” in the Vine and that we can do nothing apart from Him – Jesus the Vine is our sole source of life.

 

In 15:9 – 10 we read of Jesus abiding in the Father’s love and of us abiding in His love.

 

Then in the Holy of Holies of John Chapter 17 we read, “…that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us…I in them and You in Me…”

 

We will not understand what Jesus is saying about commandments if we do not understand, in some measure, what He is saying about abiding in Him, about living in Him, and about the Trinity living within us. When Jesus speaks of us keeping His commandments He is speaking of our internal relationship with Him, He is speaking of us abiding in the Vine – He is not speaking about outward behavior, He is not talking about externals. (Yes, outward behavior ought to be an element of the fruit of an internal life in Christ.)

 

This is not about outward performance; it is about knowing Jesus and loving God with all of our heart and soul and mind and strength (Mark 12:29 – 30). Our benchmark by which to gauge whether we are keeping His commandments is found in John 15:12 – 13:

 

“This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.”

 

We see this again in 1 John 3:16, “We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.”

 

This is a love and a way of life that can only be the fruit of abiding in the Vine, it can only be the fruit of an internal relationship with Jesus Christ. As we abide in His love we keep His commandments, and as we keep His commandments we abide in His love.

 

These are not the commandments of the Law, they are the commandments of relationship – commandments flowing from intimacy with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These commandments have a distinctive form to them, and that form is the Cross. The lives of the men and women and young people who follow Jesus and keep His commandments bear the pattern and the mark of the Cross of Jesus Christ – their lives are cruciform. (Ponder Galatians 2:20; Mark 8:34 – 38).

 

Just as Jesus, our food is to do the will of the Father, and to accomplish the work that He has given us in His Son (John 4:34), so that one day we can also say, “I glorified You on the earth, having accomplished the work which You have given me to do.” (John 17:4). This is Paul’s cry when he writes, “Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus.” (Phil. 3:12).

 

The commandments of Jesus, the will of Jesus which we are to obey, are for us to discover in Him every day. We have a constant and all – pervading commandment in which we live, to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; and to love one another as Jesus Christ loves us – laying our lives down for one another. We also have the commandment to “go” and make disciples of all people groups. These commandments imbue and produce all other commandments, that is the commandments which we discover in our relationship with Jesus Christ, the Father, the Holy Spirit, and with one another.

 

Perhaps what Paul writes to the Romans will help us see this:

 

“Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. For this, ‘You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet,’ and if there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor, therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” (Romans 13:8 – 10).

 

James terms “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” the “royal law according to Scripture.” (James 2:8).

 

While we all have the common ground of the Cross in our relationships with the Trinity, our individual relationships with God have their distinctive characters and expressions – Jesus manifests Himself in myriad ways through His Body, and He reveals Himself to us in countless ways. I am making a point of this because we have a tendency to look at others and think, “If he (or she) knows Christ in this fashion, then I must know Christ in that same fashion. My experience ought to be the same. My expression of Christ ought to be the same.”

 

Sadly, there are teachers and movements who insist that such-and-such a model is “the” model that we all must follow, insisting that we all must have certain experiences, or insisting that we cannot have certain other experiences – this seems to be a tendency most of us have (including myself).  

 

Your heavenly Father will reveal Himself to you as His particular daughter or son in Jesus Christ. Others can indeed help us along the way. In fact, our Father reveals Himself to us through others all of the time; but He does so not that we might be exactly like others, but that we might be transformed into the image of Jesus Christ (Rom. 8:29).

 

There have been (and are) people in my life very different than I am, and I have received Christ from them and been drawn closer to Christ through them – but I am not called to have the same particular expressions of Christ that have been given to them. Realizing this gives us the freedom to be who we are in Christ, and to give others that same freedom. Realizing this allows us to function as a people, to enjoy one another, and to discover Christ together.

 

Never forget Psalm 139.         

 

Dorothy L. Sayers illustrates what I’m trying to convey in writing of Charles Williams in a letter dated 12 June 1957:

 

"...I can enter into Charles's type of mind, to some extent, by imagination, and look through its windows, as it were, into places where I cannot myself walk. He was, up to a certain point I think, a practicing mystic; from that point of view I am a complete moron, being almost wholly without intuitions of any kind; I can only apprehend intellectually what the mystics grasp directly."

 

In Christ, we need to be who we are for the sake of others, and others need to be who they are for our sake. We are all called to learn and do the daily commandments of our Lord Jesus, as well as live within those commandments which inform all other commandments: loving God, loving others and laying our lives down for them, and making disciples of all people groups.

 

Is Jesus Christ not the Vine, and are we not His branches?

 

Be the branch that He has called you to be today.