“This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you …This I command you, that you love one another.” John 15:12, 17.
Do we understand what Jesus is saying? Do we understand what this is? Do we understand, at least in some measure, what Jesus is offering us?
There is no one as glorious and as beautiful as Jesus Christ. We have never seen or heard anything in creation, or anything produced by man, as beautiful as Jesus Christ. The sum of all beauty and all wonder and all glory and all joy falls short of Jesus Christ – He is truly beyond comparison and description.
What is it like to be in the Presence of Him who is altogether Wonderful? What is it like to know friendship and koinonia with Him? To touch Him and be touched by Him? To know joy with Him, to laugh with Him, to enjoy singing and music with Him? What is it like to know Him as the Elder Brother and to enjoy a relationship with our Father with Him?
When Jesus commands us to love as He loves, to lay down our lives as He laid down His life, He is inviting us to know Him in the depths of His Being (if we can use such language). He is calling us to have the image of God restored (actually beyond restored in the sense of beyond what Adam knew) within us. Jesus is inviting us to know the glory which He had with the Father before the foundation of the world (John 17:5, 22–24) and to which our Father is calling us (Hebrews 2:10–13; 2 Thess. 1:12).
When Jesus calls us to love as He loves, He is calling us into the beauty of the love of God. “We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in Him” (1 John 4:16).
Let’s recall that the Upper Room begins with Jesus washing feet, including the feet of Judas the betrayer. Jesus calls us to live such a life as we live in Him. Jesus loves as no one else is capable of loving, and He calls us to live in that love and to love with that love as we abide in the Vine and as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit abide in us.
When Jesus calls us to love one another as He loves us, He calls us to live in His beauty and wonder and glory and joy. True and enduring courage is found in His love, it is found in Him as we love. This is a love that is intercessory in nature, self-giving, that suffers gladly for others, that bears their burdens and sorrows and infirmities – spiritual and physical – and offers itself as a living sacrifice.
To know Him in the koinonia of His sufferings (Phil. 3:10) is to know Him in His inexpressible beauty and love and glory. This is to be captured and held tight by the love of God, a love from which nothing can separate us (Rom. 8:35–39).
Now friends, here is the thing, if we are only living as if this life is all there is, then who cares about any of this? It is a sweet story, or a story for fools – call it what you will, but it doesn’t matter, or at least it matters no more than baseball or Wall Street.
But if we are indeed the sons and daughters of the Living God through Jesus Christ, then loving as Jesus loves forms our souls for eternity and draws us into the depths of the Trinity. Furthermore, God draws others to Himself through us. Also, God uses us to bear the burdens and sufferings of others, He invites us to share the sufferings of Jesus Christ, to serve alongside Jesus our High Priest (Col. 1:24).
Jesus says, “Come be with Me where I am. Come and love as I love. Come and give as I give. Come and serve as I serve. Come and suffer as I suffer. Come and rise as I rise. Come and ascend as I ascend. Come and know our Father as I know our Father. Come and behold My beauty and know My joy and bask in the warmth and security and glory of My love.”
There is no greater command than, “Love one another as I have loved you.” There is no greater command in terms of importance, in terms of promise, in terms of invitation, and in terms of glory and destiny. There is no greater command because it calls us to unity with Jesus Christ.
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