Love that Obeys Because of Love of the Good

How do you interpret the following?:

“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 home 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.’” (John 14:23-24).

Many of us who are serious about obeying Jesus hear Him saying something like, “PROVE your love for me by obeying me.” And I think that is fully accurate. But I believe He is saying something deeper than that as well, because He is STARTING his statement with the action of “love.” “Obeying” is not IDENTICAL TO “loving” but the PRODUCT of true “loving,” as HE defines it. He is saying, in other words, that loving comes first. And what will motivate or inspire you to begin “loving” Jesus in a way that will bear fruit in obeying Him?

You could have begun to obey Him out of acknowledgement of His divine power – His ability to control nature, expel demons, heal the sick and raise the dead. But that kind of loyalty is dependent upon displays of power, and He clearly wanted something deeper than that. When He was begged to come heal a nobleman’s son He complained, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will by no means believe” (John 4:47). It seems to me that He was criticizing that motive for believing in Him, no?

I think that the deepest reason that Jesus has always wanted for people to be drawn to Him was not because of His power or even because of the truth of His teachings, but because they recognized that He was purely “GOOD.” And the more that YOU personally love and seek to do what is “good” the deeper that your love of Him will be, with the kind of love that yearns to obey Him! Loving Him is not some version of “romantic” love, but a love based upon recognizing that He is the perfect expression of what YOU have come to love and practice!

And it is that awareness that HE alone is the perfect expression of what you know as “good” that forms the basis of even more challenging statements from Him:

“Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to ‘set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law’; and ‘a man’s enemies will be those of his own household.’ He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it” (Matthew 10:34-37).

“If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:26).

His logic for claiming such a unique and exclusive love from us is both objectively and subjectively based. Objectively, He deserves and requires that comparatively exclusive form of “love” because He is our divine Creator (John 1:3, Colossians 1:15-17, Hebrews 1:1-4). Subjectively, He demands a love that is so different and exclusive that, by comparison, we wind up decisively rejecting any comparison between a love that we have with ANY human being! And since true “love” cannot be commanded as an obligation, our exclusive love for Him must flow freely and spontaneously from our hearts. Hence, that love’s connection with our previously existing love of what God defines as “that which is ‘GOOD’.”

But, while that is very true, our problem is that we do not have it in us to give Him that kind of love because our version of “goodness” is too polluted with our self-centeredness and “hardness” of heart:

“Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me” (Psalm 51:5)

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it? “ (Jeremiah 17:9)

“If you then, BEING evil, know how to give good gifts to your children …” (Luke 11:13 – said to His own DISCIPLES!)

So, it turns out that JESUS has had to form His version of “loving what is good” within us. And that is what you see Him doing throughout the Gospels to His disciples – emptying them of self-confidence; periodically terrifying them; inspiring them; breaking their hearts by watching His suffering and death IN THEIR PLACE; filling them with the hope of His glorious victory; and then pouring into those reconstructed hearts and characters the very SAME Spirit from God that HE had received at His own baptism and then obeyed perfectly for the next three years! Through His outpoured Pentecostal Spirit, He HIMSELF was now within them – in their spirit and soul and even their body! “Christ IN you, the hope of [your] glory!” is now quite literally true for them! And when His own Pentecostal Spirit now “dwells” within you that way, it means that ALL of Him is within you – in at least a “first fruits” degree. And that includes His very OWN instincts and “goodness.” You may still be the same “flesh” after then – in the same way as His first apostles and later disciples were; but now you can FREELY choose to be in “the Spirit”! HIS Spirit! So, all that we need winds up being provided by HIM – both the ability to love and to obey:

“But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, [HE] made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and [HE] raised us up together, and [HE] made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in [HIS] kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by [HIS] grace you have been saved through faith, and that NOT of yourselves; it is the gift of God, NOT of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are HIS workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which GOD prepared beforehand that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:4-9).

All along, HE was the “potter” and THEY were His workmanshipped “clay”! –

“You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who has resisted His will?” But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, “Why have you made me like this?” Does not the potter have power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor? What if God, wanting to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, and that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which HE had prepared beforehand for glory …” (Romans 9:19-23)

Yes, those original disciples as well as you and I have had some choices to make, in the same way that we did when our parents raised us, trained us and disciplined us so that we could make decisions to be toddlers instead of crawlers, to eat our veggies, to make our beds and to be trained to eventually choose to sincerely respect their authority – and maybe even start to LOVE them!

I don’t know about you, but I take as much credit for making the choice to “accept Christ” in the same way that a man who has fallen overboard in a violent sea “takes credit” for his rescuer having thrown him a line that he “chose” to grab!
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