John 15:10
posted by Jesse on Monday, September 8, 2008 at 8:53 am
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If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love.
This is the culmination of all that Jesus has been talking about up to this point. When a true follower of Jesus abides in Him, walks in Him, and depends upon Him, he will also seek to obey Him. It is only natural to do so. But, the question that inevitably comes up is, “What if we don’t keep Him commandments? Does this verse teach that God won’t love us anymore?”
It must be understood that Jesus is not trying to make a point of God’s love being conditional towards His children. What He is saying is that in this abiding relationship, we are expected to obey Him, and that when we do we fully experience His love manifested in our lives. Jesus gives us the example of His own life. He fully experienced the love of the Father because of His obedience to Him. As Warren Wiersbe says, “Because we love Him, we keep His commandments; and, as we keep His commandments, we abide in His love and experience it in a deeper way.” (The Bible Exposition Commentary)
Usually when we think of keeping the commandments we automatically think of the “Big 10,” right? We might have the mental image of a Pharisee in ancient Jerusalem whose life is consumed with following each and every law, commandment, and ordinance in a precise and detailed fashion. The problem with the Pharisees, both ancient and modern, is that they lack one very important thing: love. Without a genuine love for the Savior, which is developed from an abiding relationship with Him, one can only merely obey commandments on the outside like a lifeless robot while having a love-lacking heart of hypocrisy on the inside.
What is very interesting is to clarify what Jesus is talking about when He speaks of His commandments. Is He saying that we should be like a Pharisee, one who “just obeys” and nothing more? Well, let’s think about what Jesus’ response was to the question that was asked of Him about the commandments. In Matthew 22, He was asked what the greatest commandment is. Jesus’ response was simple, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all they heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind…and the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Then notice that in John 14:15 Jesus said, “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” This to me is one of the great paradoxes of Christianity. In all other religions, followers are expected to obey mostly out of fear of what will happen to them if they don’t. Christians, however, are told by Jesus to obey Him not because of what horrible thing He will do to us if we don’t, but because of the great and glorious things He has done for us already! We love Him because of who He is and what He has done for us, and because of that we should want to and seek to obey Him. And what commandment does He most want us to obey? To love Him with all of our being! And this, as we will see in the coming verses, is the foundation on which God can develop a love within us for other people.
Category: John 15
