Month: July 2020

“He who has My commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves Me, and he who loves Me shall be loved by My Father, and I will love him, and will disclose Myself to him.”  Judas (not Iscariot) said to Him, “Lord, what then has happened that you are going to disclose Yourself to us, and not to the world?”  Jesus answered and said to him, “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.  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” (Jn 14:21-24).

Jesus again visits the vital link between our love for Jesus and our keeping His commandments; the vital link between love and obedience.  But it appears that Jesus has extended that connection to suggest that God’s love toward us and revealing Himself to us and coming to abide with us depends on our keeping the love and obedience fires burning.  Is that what is required?

Let’s be careful not to let our experience in the world color our belief in what God says.  So much of our cultural interactions are based on transactional relationships; I will do X for you if you will do Y for me.  And at first glance, these verses seem to imply this kind of relationship with our Father such that “If we obey God, He will love us more.”  But we know from the rest of Scripture that a transactional relationship with God is exactly what we DON’T have.  We have a union based on grace, not on our actions.  We have a relationship based on what Christ did for us on the cross, not what we did for Him to gain His approval.

We always see distinctions and “what ifs” around the topic of obedience or lack of obedience and how God responds to us accordingly.  But I think when we do this, we are forgetting “whose” and “who” we are.  As a child of God, Christ now lives in us, living His life through us.  And He is the reservoir of divine love that we have the beautiful opportunity to put into practice.  And He is the reservoir of divine power that sends us on the path to obedience.  Our love and obedience are dependent on Jesus, because He is the source of them.  Our role is to tap into what Christ has already provided.

Because of our new righteous identity in Christ, loving, obeying, and abiding is what our new heart was made to do.  It is our new normal.  Rather than worrying about if we are doing enough for God to be pleased with us; for God to abide with us – as He promises in verse 23 above -, we can rest in the promise that He will always dwell with us.  We learned this very thing in our last post.

So is this path to love and obedience just automatic?  Have we arrived at everywhere we need to be by our new identity in Christ?  No … our enemy within (the Flesh) and our enemy without (Satan) conspire to take us away from what should be our new normal; our new life we were made to walk in.  But praise be to Christ who has given us the power of His presence to overcome the flesh and the evil one.  “You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world” (I Jn 4:4).

“I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.  After a little while the world will behold Me no more; but you will behold Me; because I live, you shall live also.  In that day you shall know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you” (Jn 14:18-20).

The Holy Spirit has often been referred to as the person of the Trinity that indwells believers.  In fact, our last post was on this very topic, “And [the Helper] will be in you” (Jn 14:17).  But now Jesus extends our thinking to more than just the Holy Spirit inside with words like, “I will come to you … I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you.”

“I [Christ] in you.”  Does “Christ in you” sound familiar?  As in …

• “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col 1:27).
• “And since Christ is in you” (Rom 8:10).
• “But Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20).
• “I [Jesus] in them and You [Father] in Me” (Jn 17:23).

The bottom line is that God is in you in whatever fashion He chooses.  I think sometimes we put too much separation between the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and their roles.  God is in you in all forms of Himself, living His life through you.  I like to focus on Christ in me because Galatians 2:20 makes such a clear case of the old me having been crucified with Christ and the resurrected Jesus living His life through the new me.

And the greatest beauty of “Christ in us” to me is that it will never end.  Jesus promised in our verses above, “I will not leave you as orphans.”  He will never leave us.  Christ will always be in us.  How can we be so sure?

Because the “always” does not depend on us.  Do you see the sheer beauty of this?  Christ is in us because He came to live inside forever.  He is the one who accomplished this indwelling.  It was 100% His doing.  Because He is the one who brought it to pass, we are powerless to undo it.  His presence will never depend on my actions, my feelings, my failures, my love growing cold.  It will always depend on His promise.  He will never leave us as orphans.

In the setting of the upper room, Christ could tell the disciples that the world would soon behold Him no longer.  Why?  Because, following His death and resurrection, Christ was going to the Father.  But the disciples would behold Him, both in His post resurrection appearances and in their forever.  Because Christ now lives, we will live also.

And in our living, Christ will live in us on this earth and with us in our forever.  “Because Christ lives, we will live also.”

“And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper [Gr. Paracletos, one called alongside to help], that He may be with you forever; that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not behold Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you, and will be in you” (Jn 14:16-17).

In less than a chapter of John’s gospel, we have seen Jesus reveal all kinds of new information to His disciples.  He gave us a new commandment to love one another.  He offered a first peak into our forever home with Him in heaven.  He clarified the beauty of seeing the Father in the face of Jesus.  He promised “greater works” to those who believe.  And Jesus explained for the first time the vital link between our love for Him and a life of obedience to His commands.

Coming now to verse 16, we have another “new”; the Holy Spirit – the promised “Helper” – living in us.  We have a hint of the Spirit in us in Jesus great proclamation at the feast in John chapter 7, ” ‘He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, “From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.” ‘  But this He spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive; for the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified” (Jn 7:38-39).

But here in this passage we have the start of a fuller explanation of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus promises to petition the Father and also promises that the Father will answer by giving us His Holy Spirit.  What aspects of the Holy Spirit’s presence does Jesus reveal here?

First, the Holy Spirit will be sent to us by the Father in answer to Jesus’ prayer.  Second, the Spirit will be “another” [Gr. allos, another of the same sort; not heteros, different] meaning that He will be a “Helper” in the same way that Jesus has been to the disciples.  Third, He will be with us forever.  Fourth, He will be known as the Spirit of truth.  Jesus referred to Himself as “the truth” (Jn 14:6).  The Spirit, as Jesus’ equal, will also be known as true.  Fifth, the world will not be able to receive God’s Spirit, because the world does not know or recognize Him.  Sixth, the Spirit abides with the disciples at that time through the physical presence of Jesus.

Last, and I think the most radical idea of them all, the “Spirit will be IN you.”  Will be IN you.  Will be IN us.  Will be IN you and me.  At the time of Jesus’ words, God’s Spirit dwelt with the disciples through the presence of Jesus, the God-man.  But a future time is coming, after Jesus has physically departed, when the Spirit will literally live IN the disciples.  And by our faith in Christ and His work on the cross to bring us into His family, the Spirit will live IN us as well.

We will see more promises about the Helper in the chapters ahead.  For now, let’s embrace the astonishing promise that the Spirit of Christ is living IN us.