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#5 The New Commandment

Gold from God

Feb 6, 2022


by: Jack Lash Series: Gold from God | Category: Love | Scripture: John 13:34–35

I. Introduction
A. Series / Review:
1. 10 commandments
2. Beatitudes
3. Lord’s Prayer
4. Great Commandment
B. John 13:34–35 “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. 35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
C. Setting
1. The evening before His crucifixion, so just before His departure.
2. The fact that this is His last evening with His disciples lends import to the things He tells them.
II. 34a “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another.”
A. There is something surprising and intriguing about this command.
B. Some people claim that Jesus’ teaching can be summed up by the command, “Love one another.”
C. I don’t think that’s a fair summary. In fact, most of the things Jesus taught do not fit into that theme.
D. However, while love one another is not a faithful summary of everything Jesus taught, love was one of the major themes of His teaching.
1. He taught the golden rule: Luke 6:31, Matt.7:12
2. He taught them to love their enemies: Matthew 5:43–45.
3. He taught them to welcome and serve those who would not be able to repay them: Matt.5:46-47.
4. He told the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37).
5. He showed them love in hundreds of ways as their example.
6. And we saw last week how He held up the command to love our neighbor as second only to the command to love God.
E. So, it comes as a surprise when, after all this, at the end of His ministry, He says what He says.
1. Not the love one another part – that’s just what you’d expect.
2. Like when a parent is about to die, saying to His children, “After I’m gone, please love another!”
3. No, it’s not the love one another part. It’s that He says, “A NEW COMMANDMENT I give to you, that you love one another.”
4. Why does He call this new? What’s new about this? He is drawing attention to something. He wants us to think about this.
F. The standard answer to this is that Jesus sets a new standard by which to love one another.
1. And this is certainly true: “As I have loved you, so you also are to love one another.”
2. After all, He was just about to demonstrate love in its highest form by dying on the cross for their sin. A little later in the evening He said, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” – John 15:13
G. But I don’t think this is enough to explain why Jesus called this a new commandment.
1. If He had said, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another as I have loved you,” then maybe that would be a reasonable conclusion. But that’s not what He said.
2. The second part seems like an add-on: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.”
3. I think there’s something subtly different about this command than anything He’d said before.
H. I think that a big part of what’s new is the ‘one another.’ It’s a new group to love.
1. Now, loving your neighbor includes everyone. So, what’s the big deal about saying, “Love one another”? Doesn’t the command to love your neighbor include loving one another? Well, yes.
2. But Jesus wanted to draw special attention and give special emphasis.
3. This is what Paul does when he says, “Husbands, love your wives” (Eph.5:25). Someone might say, “Why command men to love their wives when they’ve already been commanded to love everyone?”
4. Well, when Paul tells husbands to love their wives, he is saying that of all the people in the world God has commanded you to love, there is one which must be loved more than all the others, and that is the one God has given you as your wife.
I. And I think that’s what Jesus is doing here in John 13:34.
1. He’s directing their attention to their duty to love a new group: one another.
2. In the OT, the Jews were commanded to love their fellow Israelites and their neighbors and the sojourner in the land.
3. Then Jesus commanded early on for us to love our enemies.
4. But this is a new group to love: your fellow disciples, your fellow followers of Christ.
J. This new group is not identified by their humanity or their ethnicity, nor by any human action or distinction. This group is clearly distinct from the rest of the world. This group is identified by their relationship with Christ.
1. The Bible tells us that this group was actually created by God from the very beginning.
2. In the high priestly prayer Jesus refers to this group as,“the people whom You gave me out of the world.” – John 17:6
a. So, there is a certain group of people which God the Father gave to Jesus to be His own. It’s not the whole world, but out of the world He selected some to give to Jesus.
3. Later Paul says that in love they were chosen in love before the foundation of the world, predestined for adoption as God’s children in Christ (Eph.1:4-5).
4. And when Jesus came, this new community gathered around the new Messiah. He called them, “My sheep” in John 10:27, “My brothers” in Matt.25:40, and “these little ones who believe in Me” in Matt.18:6.
K. For a long time it appeared as if mankind was all one: that we all came from the same original lump of clay, from which God made Adam and Eve, the parents of the entire human race.
1. But later we find out that “the potter (actually) made – out of the same lump – one vessel for honor and another for dishonor.” – Romans 9:21
2. So, it turns out that there are, in one sense, two humanities, not in their physical origin or in their flesh, but in the purpose of God and in their destiny.
3. One group, the ones given by the Father to the Son, are destined for glory. When Christ returns, they will be resurrected and transformed into beings more glorious than the most spectacular thing any of us have ever seen.
a. And they won’t just APPEAR glorious, they will have perfect memories and perfect perception and perfect emotions and absolute joy. And so much more.
b. Nothing on this earth is as adorable, as precious, as rich, as magnificent, as appealing, as attractive.
c. As C. S. Lewis said, if you saw one of those people in that state right now, your natural instinct would be to bow down and worship. One day they will be easy to love, easy to adore, easy to celebrate.
4. But right now they’re not always easy to love.
a. As the poem goes: “To dwell above with the saints in love, that will be glory! To dwell below with the saints I know, that’s a different story!”
b. What makes us so hard to love now is that we are not glorified yet. We are still weak, and we sin, and we struggle, and we are pulled in two directions. The faith is real, but it is small.
III. 34b But we must not diminish what Jesus adds on: “just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” In other words, love one another as I have loved you.
A. And this is made more poignant by the fact that He’s just about to show them the depths of His love by going to the cross to bear the weight of their sin.
B. ‘Love one another as I have loved you’ goes beyond the WHO we are supposed to love and takes us to the HOW and the WHY.
C. It tells us how we are supposed to love one another: love one another supremely, as I’ve loved you.
D. And it tells us why we are supposed to love one another: love one another because I’ve loved you.
E. Love one another even to the point of laying down your life for one another; love one another even to the point of leaving the comfort and security of your present life and going into the mess and chaos of another person’s life in order to help them.
F. Love one another because Jesus has shown how precious the others are to Him by the way He went to such great lengths to love them.
G. Again, the key to loving others is to appreciate the way Christ loves us.
1. If we are truly in Christ, then Christ has always loved us! His mighty, passionate love for us began before we even existed!
2. We are the apple of His eye (Psalm 17:8, Zechariah 2:8, Deuteronomy 32:10).
3. We need supernatural help to even begin to grasp how wide and high and long and deep His love for us is (Eph.3:14-19)!
4. And amazingly His love was not diminished by our sin or our brokenness or our foolishness.
5. He knows all our weaknesses. He not only sees what we do and hears what we say; He even reads our thoughts and knows our secrets. He knows all our garbage!
6. And yet amazingly His love is not diminished!
7. He even loved us when they had become his enemies (Rom.5:8, 10).
8. He would do literally ANYTHING for us! In fact, He HAS done everything for us – even die for us.
9. He loves you so much that He came as a man and bore the hell we deserved so we could escape it.
10. We are His chosen ones, His children! He gave us children so we could get a taste of His love for His children.
H. He loves us so much that here in John 13:34-35 He has given an order to all the rest of His children that we must be loved with a very special love.
1. He asks those He dearly loves to love the OTHERS whom He dearly loves – in spite of all their imperfections.
2. He overlooks their sins, and calls us to do the same.
3. You see, Jesus knows our destiny – and He calls us to treat one another not according to what we’re like right now but according to what we know we will become – just like He does.
4. That’s what this commandment is all about.
I. This doesn’t mean we’re not supposed to love the rest of the world – we’re supposed to have love for both. But the love is not the same – just as my love for my wife is not the same as my love for my neighbor.
1. Those who love Christ are my family, my brothers and sisters, even if I’ve never met them before.
2. I may not know them now, but I will know them forever.
IV. And then in v.35 Jesus adds this, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
A. Now it would make more sense to us if Jesus had said, “Love non-believers as I have loved you – this is how they will know you are my disciples, because of the love you have for them.”
B. But that’s not what He said. I don’t mean non-believers can’t come to see that you are a disciple of Christ by the love you show for them. But that’s not what He said here.
C. So, why does loving other Christians have such a powerful effect on non-believers?
D. Well, people outside of Christ can see that their lives are empty and futile. Often they don’t like to admit it, but they live every day in the gloomy awareness that there is no meaning in their lives – and nothing ultimate. Life isn’t going anywhere and the world is hopeless and bleak.
E. They have lost hope that there is anything beyond, but a part of them longs for it.
F. And every once in a while, they get a glimpse of something beyond and it gets their attention.
G. And one of the ways this happens is when they see Christians having a type of love for one another which they never experience in their own lives.
H. This is what happened to me. When I came into the context of Christian people for the first time in my life, the first thing I noticed was a kind of love I’d never seen anywhere else.
I. You see, ultimately Christian love doesn’t belong to this age but to the age to come.
1. Just like you can get a whiff of dinner before it’s dinner time, so God allows us to experience some realities of heaven before we get to heaven.
2. And Christian love is one of those things.
a. It’s supernatural. It doesn’t come from earth, it comes from heaven.
b. It doesn’t come from Christians, it comes from Christ.
c. Non-believers can’t have it, but they can see it, they can smell it. And it can affect them.
3. There’s one other thing I can think of which is said to give non-believers a whiff of a better world: it is Christian hope, as we see in 1Peter 3:15 “...always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.”
a. Peter here expects that our hope is going to attract the attention of non-believers. Christian hope is another thing which non-believers never experience. But they can see it. And when they see it, it doesn’t look like anything they’ve ever seen before. And it can intrigue them.
4. But the same is true when they witness the love believers have for one another. It gives them a taste of the age to come, and it may make them more open to the things of Christ.
5. Hebrews 6:5 tells that in Christian fellowship folks “taste the powers of the age to come.”
6. That’s what I think this passage is talking about. When non-believers witness the love believers have for one another, they taste the powers of the age to come, and hopefully it impacts them.
7. This is one of the reasons why Christian witness is often most powerful when it is done in community instead of merely as individuals.
J. However, however, if we show people that we belong to Christ when we love one another, what does it do when we fail to love one another? It harms our witness, doesn’t it?
1. It either makes Christ look unloving,
2. Or it makes it look like we’re all hypocrites and not true disciples of Christ.
3. It has been a very discouraging couple of years with this pandemic and all the political tension.
4. I don’t know any time in my life when non-believers had a worse view of believers than right now – and some of that is our fault, some of it is because of our failures to love one another.
5. How we damage our witness when we treat one another so unlovingly. God help us!
V. A few concluding thoughts
A. The new commandment is much more than a commandment. It is a privilege. It is a call to recognize who we are and who our brothers and sister in Christ are.
1. We are members of an eternal family of love.
2. Other believers of all shapes and sizes, of all ages and genders, of all ethnicites and cultures, are people you will love in heaven more than you love your own children on earth.
B. When we get to heaven we will not only grieve over ways we have hurt or violated brothers and sisters. We will grieve the fact that we didn’t lavish one another with the love our Savior showed us. We will grieve that we treated them according to what they looked like instead of according to who they really were. We will grieve that we treated them like mere mortals instead of like citizens of heaven, the precious ones of Christ.
C. I think this can be especially challenging for those who grew up in the church, who have become so accustomed to other believers, and seen their weaknesses so much.
1. For me, it was not until I was 16 that I experienced true love. And it stopped me in my tracks.
2. But my peers who grew up in the church, who grew up in the context of Christian love, didn’t appreciate it like I did. For them it was expected. It was familiar. It was taken for granted.
D. Christians drive each other crazy, and I understand that.
1. Part of this is just our human differences. Part of this is our sin and pride.
2. But it’s got to be a big love if it’s going to overcome all our junk.
3. But if a person is indwelt by Christ, He is going to be indwelt by Christ’s love.
E. Of course, we’ll never really love one another as much as Christ loves us.
1. “The church is dearer to Jesus than to me or you; He has paid too great a price for her to lose her.” – Samuel Rutherford
2. But when His love is in us – and if we are true believers, it must be (1John 4:7-8) – then we look past all the crud and love the little one of Christ.