Well, we're turning back this morning to the
second passage chosen for us in the 15th
chapter of the Gospel according to John, and
particularly to the section verses 1 through 11,
but I'll also refer to the rest of
the chapter as we work our way through
it, in which our Lord Jesus, as it
happens at the center point of the teaching
of the farewell discourse, that begins with the
enactment of his saving grace in the foot
washing, and ends, as it were, with the
transcript of his high priestly intercession in John
chapter 17, and accidentally, I suppose, from our
point of view in the providence of God
chapter 15, has been allotted the central part
of this, and it gives to us what
at first sight looks like a metaphor that
the Lord Jesus is using, I am the
true vine and my father is the vine
dresser, but in the course of the passage
becomes obviously more than a metaphor, becomes an
extended metaphor that grows into this remarkable allegory
that the Lord Jesus uses of the relationship
between himself and his people as a vine
and branches, and the father's ministry as the
vine dresser or the gardener, and the spirit's
ministry ultimately as the paraclete, the counselor or
the helper in chapter 15 verse 26.
But let me begin with a question.
You know the old story about the man
who asked a rabbi, why is it that
rabbis always answer questions with questions, and the
rabbi said, why not?
And I did ask you a question last
night for your homework, if you were in
our position here and you were asked to
give a series of addresses on the topic
of holiness, would you have divided them in
the following way, planned in the purpose of
the father, purchased at the high cost of
the blood of Jesus Christ, and then finishing,
of course, with walking in the Spirit, but
would you have slid in between these two?
Would you have devoted an entire exposition to
the theme of abiding in Christ's love?
It is actually, I think, a very serious
question, and at risk of embarrassing Walt Chantry
yet again, although I delight to do that
in honor of him, I suspect that we
would not all have divided the theme this
way, that many of us would have divided
the theme, yes, holiness designed by the father,
perhaps we would have included purchased by the
son, but then I many of us would
have been instinctively likely to have given the
great central section in our exposition to the
conflict and the battle of the Christian life.
Is that not one of the great characteristics
of biblical teaching and especially caught up in
our Reformed theology?
We hold this view of sanctification, that sanctification
is a fight to the death, and I
suspect many of us might have therefore been
inclined to slide past this notion of abiding
in the love of Jesus Christ in order
to move on to the manly aspects of
sanctification and the struggle to the death and
then lead into the blessed ministry of the
Holy Spirit as we walk no longer in
the flesh but in the Spirit.
And architecturally, or to use the expression Derek
Thomas used earlier on, from an architectonic principle,
as people who think systematically about holiness, it
would be altogether appropriate that we give much
attention to the battle and the fight and
the conflict of holiness.
But sanctification at the end of the day,
as we tried to see last night, is
not a matter of architecture.
Sanctification at the end of the day is
a matter of personal character.
Holiness does not float above our heads.
Holiness is who we become in Jesus Christ.
And there is, I think, something extraordinarily insightful
about wanting to give an entire address to
this principle of abiding in the love of
Jesus Christ.
Because it's as we abide in the love
of Jesus Christ, or abide in Christ with
respect to His love, that the architecture of
the Christian life takes on a very distinctive
flavor.
I recognize that we can become thoroughly sickened
of that false emphasis that extrapolates from Scripture
that the heart of the Christian message is
love.
But the fact of the matter is the
heart of the Christian message is love.
The love of God, the Heavenly Father, the
love of Christ, the glorious Savior, the love
of the Holy Spirit with whom we are
to dwell in the sweetest of communion.
It is the fact of the matter that
the first fruit of the Spirit is love.
It is the fact of the matter that
the heart of Jesus' exhortation to us, the
summation of the law, is about loving the
Lord our God and loving our neighbor as
ourselves.
And the key to all of that is
that the Christian believer abides, remains, dwells, stays
in the love of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Alexander White, who had some failures and many
outstanding qualities, used to say, there is such
a thing as sanctification by vinegar.
When we were children, one of the games
at a certain time of the year whenever
the horse chestnuts were out and could be
purchased in the shop would be to play
what we called conkers.
We would put a chestnut, put a hole
through a chestnut and then a string through
a hole and we would bang one another's
chestnuts.
And you would get a conker, as we
called it, that was a once-er or
a twice-er or a thrice-er that
had destroyed many other people's chestnuts and eventually
there would come a point where you would
accuse this great conqueror of cheating.
And we would say, you used vinegar.
And that's what happened.
You would soak your chestnut in vinegar and
it would harden.
It was a kind of, there was no
dope testing on horse chestnuts in those days.
But if there had been dope testing, vinegar
would have been a banned substance.
And Alexander White was surely right to say
that there is a false kind of holiness
that is a sanctification by vinegar that exudes
something usually hidden from the person who thus
earnestly projects himself or herself as a model
of sanctification.
But there is something about that sanctification that
repels not only unbelievers, but actually, and this
is the sinister thing, repels weak believers.
And it strikes me often in the Gospels
that one of the things about the holiness
of our Jesus Christ was the way in
which his holiness actually attracted weak believers to
him.
And that he brings this out as a
kind of test case of our sanctification, our
holiness, inasmuch as you have done it to
one of the least of these, my brothers,
you have done it to me.
That the evidence of my holiness in my
congregation's life, therefore, is not the way I
rub shoulders with those who have it all
together, but the way I devote myself to
those who have almost nothing together.
And I show them the love of the
Lord Jesus Christ.
That's where Christ-like holiness is most likely
to emerge.
And when I go to a conference in
those whom I will seek out, I'm always
amazed at conferences, how there are people who
seem to have been extraordinarily gifted in getting
to you.
And the reason they get to you is
because you've appeared up front and in public
and they zone in upon you.
They want to discuss with you or debate
with you or whatever.
But wherever they go, they're always able to
get to you.
And I sometimes think it's a real test
of my holiness, whether I love them in
all the irritation that they cause me.
And in a conference like this, is my
instinct to mix with what kind of people,
what kind of ministers.
This is why abiding in the love of
the Lord Jesus Christ is, as it were,
what creates an atmosphere in the Christian's life.
If I can use an illustration, you go
to a beautiful home where everything is correct,
where the flowers are in the right place,
where the drapes match the carpet and where
the settee has the right level of comfort.
And everything is perfect, except when you go
into the home, you almost immediately realize that
there is a spirit of alienation in the
home.
And the way you are treated is completely
formally.
There is no affection.
There is no love.
The children do exactly the right thing.
But you catch that sense in the children
that they don't really know what it is
to experience the love and the affection of
their parents.
And this is a very real thing.
And I think it's a very real challenge,
particularly for those of us who are concerned
about the architecture of the gospel, that we
don't build our theological house and miss out
from the ingredients.
The one thing that belongs to the very
essence of the style of being a Christian
that is so characteristic of the Lord Jesus
Christ.
And so in a way that seems increasingly
to me to summarize and bring together in
one extended allegory, many lines of the teaching
that he's giving to his disciples in the
whole of the farewell discourse.
He urges upon his disciples in the context
of his exposition of the idea of the
vine and the branches.
These wonderful words in chapter 15 and verse
9.
Abide in my love.
And I want to say that this is
of the very quintessence of real holiness.
That the love that flows from me in
my ministry to others is an authentic and
genuine love only so long as I myself
am abiding in the love of the Lord
Jesus Christ for which nothing else in the
world can possibly substitute.
And I want us to think about this
really under three headings, which is a disguised
fashion probably for about 15 headings as we
try and make our way through the material
that I want to bring to you this
morning.
First of all, to think about the love
in which we abide.
Secondly, about the union with Christ by which
we abide in his love.
And thirdly, about the characteristic hallmarks of those
who thus abide in Christ's love.
First of all, the love in which we
abide.
A very interesting thing to me over the
history of the church since the days of
the Reformation, that sometimes because of a lack
of this emphasis, Christians who have struggled to
understand union with Christ have developed a very
mystical view of what it means to abide
in the love of Christ.
It is something ethereal.
It is something sometimes said so marvelous that
there's no way you could put it into
words.
The thing about the Lord Jesus teaching here
is that that's precisely what he does.
He urges us to abide in his love
and he gives us a very carefully expounded
piece of teaching about what this love is
in which we are to abide.
Beginning of verse 9, As the Father has
loved me, so have I loved you.
Abide in my love.
That is to say, the original pattern for
this love in which we are to abide
in Christ is the love that the Father
has had for the Son.
As the Father has loved me, so have
I loved you.
Therefore you abide in my love.
Now, here's a striking statistic in John's Gospel.
I think I'm right in saying that there
is only one place in John's Gospel that
speaks about the love of the Son for
the Father.
But there are several places where John's Gospel,
as it were, undergirds this statement by speaking
about the Father's love for the Son.
Now, it's self-evident that the Son loves
the Father.
But John's Gospel provides for us, right up
to this point, a way of exegeting what
Jesus means when he says, As the Father
has loved me.
Of course, it's adumbrated right at the beginning
in the prologue.
The Son who is in the bosom of
the Father.
The Word who is pros ton feon, who
is, as it were, face to face with
the Father.
And there in those descriptions of the closeness
of the intimacy, the eternal bond of love
between the Father and the Son, the whole
Gospel is set up as an exposition of
the nature of the Father's love for the
Son.
But we find this running through the Gospel.
For example, John 3, 35, the Father loves
the Son and has given all things into
his hand.
John 5, verse 20, in a similar way,
says the Lord Jesus, Here the Father loves
the Son and shows him all that he
himself is doing.
Now, whether or not, as some commentators have
suggested, the idea here may reflect on Jesus
learning his carpenter's trade in Joseph's shop and
his Father showing him all he knew about
carpentry, or whether this is a purely neutral
kind of piece of language.
And in one way or another, it speaks
so extraordinarily about the love of the Father
for his Son, that he shows him all
he is doing, that the Father has no
secret from his Son.
Now, that's obviously true in eternity.
But what Jesus seems to be speaking about
here is the way in which, in terms
of his life and ministry, there has been
no secret hidden from him in the Father's
day-by-day purpose.
Remember how the songs of Isaiah put this,
morning by morning he awakens me, he awakens
my ear to listen, and I've listened to
him.
The intimacy of love between the Father and
the Son.
And then in chapter 8, verse 42, certainly
by implication, the same thing is surely here.
Jesus said, If God were your Father, you
would love me, for I came from God
and I am here.
If God were your Father, you would do
what your Father does, namely, you would love
me.
And then in our text, in chapter 15,
verse 9, as the Father has loved me,
so have I loved you.
And in the great prayer in chapter 17,
exactly the same thing, amazingly.
He prays that the world may know that
you sent me and loved them even as
you loved me.
Verse 24, I want them to see my
glory that you gave me because you loved
me before the foundation of the world.
And then in verse 26, at the end
of the prayer, I'll continue to make it
known that the love with which you have
loved me may be in them and I
in them.
And perhaps most significantly, the text in John's
gospel that I've left out that seems to
me to be so eloquent of the nature
of the love about which the Lord Jesus
is speaking when he says, recorded in chapter
10, verse 17, for this reason, the Father
loves me because I lay down my life
that I may take it.
In other words, and I think this is
a not unimportant thing for us to grasp,
the love the Father has for his Son
itself has more than one dimension.
There is a love, an eternal love that
the Father has for his eternal Son, because
he is his eternal Son.
In the eternal intimacy and bond between the
Father and the Son and the mutual admiration
and esteem and enjoyment of one another, of
which in the image of God, I assume
a pale glimpse or reflection is given in
the mutual esteem, affection, and bond of love
that there is between the man and the
woman, Genesis 1, 26 through 28.
That what we have in the eternal love,
mutual love of the Trinity is given a
pale reflection in the mutual love of the
image of the miniature of himself that God
has made, in which a man and a
woman can spend so long doing nothing but
just being with one another.
That old question that Calvin takes up in
the Institutes that Augustine took up, what was
God doing before creation?
I won't pause on the answer that Augustine
gave.
But you know, he wasn't doing what Augustine
said he was doing.
He was loving his Son.
He was enjoying his Son.
He was being intimate with his Son.
In the bond of the Spirit, the Father
needed nothing else fully to express himself as
Father and fully to enjoy being Father.
He needed nothing else than his Son.
That's beyond our imagination.
But I say we experience a little of
it here in the bond of fellowship that
many of us have with one another.
That we leave the evening meeting and suddenly
it's way past bedtime and what have we
been doing?
We've not really been doing anything.
We've just been with each other.
And we discover in one another there is
a whole world there.
And in a sense this boggles the imagination.
Every single one of us, in a way,
don't let me get off the track.
I'll get back to the track in a
minute.
Every single one of us contains within ourselves
an entire history of the universe that's different
from the entire history of the universe that's
in every other one of us.
And so we can endlessly explore one another
without doing anything.
How we need to learn this in the
church.
If you send out an invitation to members
of your church and say, we're going to
meet 7.30 Friday night, half of the
membership will phone into the church office and
say, what are we going to do?
And if the response is actually, we're not
going to do anything.
We're just going to be.
Oh, but you see, once
we grasp the nature of the fellowship within
the Godhead, we begin to see, and this
is so abundantly clear in the farewell discourse,
that the fellowship of God's people is an
analogy.
This is what makes the church as church,
when the church is church, such a powerful
testimony to the world.
And this is what Jesus is praying for,
that they may be one, even as we
are one, that the world may believe.
Because when it sees this kind of community
that dwells in this kind of love, that
is modeled upon the father's love for his
son, and is the fruit of indwelling the
love of the son, it recognizes that it's
not normal.
It's not natural.
It's supranormal and it's supernatural.
And it's rooted in this principle that Jesus
is enunciating that the pattern of the love
in which we dwell in Jesus Christ is
the love of the heavenly father for his
son.
But back to John 10, 17, the father
loves his son as his son from all
eternity.
But there is another dimension to the love
for his son.
We might say the father's love for his
son from all eternity is absolutely unconditional.
It's conditioned by nothing except the personal in
being of the son in the Holy Trinity.
But we might also say that the love
that the father has for the son as
incarnate, as mediator, to which the Lord Jesus
is referring in 10, 17 is actually carefully
conditioned.
It's a love that is capable of development
and growth, just as your love for your
son, if you have one, is capable of
development and growth.
That you loved him when he was a
baby, that you cradled in your arms.
But as you see him grow, as you
see him go through much that you would
take to yourself and struggle with it, is
it not true there is something in your
fatherly heart that goes out to him and
you say, if ever I loved you, my
son, it's now.
And Jesus says there is a moment in
his life, in his relationship with God as
mediator, as the eternal son wearing our flesh,
there is a moment of climactic consummation to
the love of his father for him.
Yes, how much he loved him because he
was willing to become incarnate for us and
wear our flesh and enter into the abject
weakness of our humanity, become from the point
of view of his humanity, totally dependent upon
his mother, that he would enter into the
darkness of her womb, he who had forever
known only the eternal light.
Oh, what love, no wonder the angels burst
out of heaven to praise him.
But surely that paled into insignificance when on
the cross in obedience to the father, he
cried out, my God, why have you forsaken
me?
And it was in that moment that the
father sang, if ever I loved you, my
Jesus, it is now.
The reason the father loves me is because
I lay down my life that I may
take it again.
Now that is the pattern of the love
as the father has loved me.
So have I loved you.
And of course, this is really where the
farewell discourse began in terms of the washing
of the disciples feet chapter 13, verse one,
Jesus knew that his hour had come to
depart out of this world to the father,
having loved his own who were in the
world.
He loved them to the end.
Well, we're all educated people here.
Let me put it in a very educated
way.
He loved them teleologically.
He loved them to the end in the
fullness of his love.
And of course, he's speaking here about his
atoning love, just as there is in the
nature of the father's love for his son,
the kind of two foldness, his love for
his son, as he is son and his
love for his son, because of what it
is that his son does in love for
him.
So there is a two foldness in the
love of Christ in which we are to
dwell.
There is a love of Jesus Christ that
is his atoning love for us.
And that's what then is unfolded in chapter
13.
He loves us to the end.
And so there is the Johannine acted out
version of the Pauline exposition of the incarnation
and Philippians 2, 5 to 11.
And you can put this Philippians 2, 5
to 11, John 13, almost phrase by phrase
opposite one another.
And you see how clearly the Lord Jesus
was enacting before them the wonder of his
humiliation and then the marvel of his exaltation.
How he knew that the father had given
everything into his hands and that he had
come from God and although he was in
the form of God, he didn't count equality
with God, a thing to be held onto
and made a special privilege.
Why should he wash the disciples feet?
But he took on himself the form of
a servant and was made man and being
made man, he humbled himself.
He girded himself with the towel and he
humbled himself yet further.
He stooped to conquer.
He came and he washed his disciples dirty
feet.
And because he has done this, God has
highly exalted him and given him the name
above every other name.
And so when he had finished his work
of foot washing, he retook his place at
the center, at the head of the table.
Having loved them, he loved them to the
end.
I love the words of John Donne about
this very text.
When he says this, he says, whom he
loves, he loves to the end and not
to their end and to their death, but
to his end.
And his end is that he might love
them more.
You understand that's what the atonement is all
about.
It's the efficacious love of God for your
salvation in order that he may love you
more.
That's what salvation is really all about.
Salvation in this sense, for all its glory,
for all its costliness is not the end
in itself.
The end in itself is the restoration to
the love and the communion in love which
we were created to enjoy in the presence
of the Father and the Son and the
Holy Spirit.
So this fullness of love in which we
are to dwell is not only a love
that Christ has for us in terms of
what he does for us as atoning, but
once atoned for, that's the foundation of everything.
But the love that brings atonement is the
stepping stone to what the older writers called
in a beautiful expression, if odd to us
in the 21st century, not the love of
atonement, but the love of complacency.
The love that having made atonement now delights
in those for whom the atonement has been
made as the Father has loved me as
mediator and for myself.
So the Son loves us as those for
whom he has made atoning mediation in order
that having made atoning mediation for us, he
might love us with the love of complacency
in which he loves us as atoned for.
Now objects of his pleasure, of his complacency,
of his satisfaction in that sense.
And we see that here in John 15.
Owen again, who incidentally is not the only
Christian author I ever read, but he does
from time to time put things most exquisitely.
And he speaks about the love of Christ
as the love of complacency in a fourfold
manner that's magnificently illustrated here in John 15.
He must have read John 15.
He speaks about the love of complacency as
a love of delight.
The outflowing of love in appreciation and joy.
The kind of love that's described in Zephaniah
3, I will delight over you and sing
over you.
The kind of love of delight that's spoken
of in chapter 15, verse 11, to look
no further.
I've spoken to you these things that my
joy might be in you.
You see, there is a love of grace
in order to bring atonement for our sins,
but once atoned for, there is a love
that overflows in the heart of the Lord
Jesus in sheer delight over his people.
Now, my dear brothers, that's something we need
to bathe ourselves in.
Because we can so often, and yes, from
a certain point of view rightly, but from
an exclusive point of view, never safely, we
can beat ourselves into the dust because of
our sinfulness and our failure.
And we can lose sight of the Lord
Jesus Christ love of complacency that once atoned
for, we are the objects of his delight
and even his joy.
It is secondly sazone, a love of value.
He was made flesh and emptied himself, became
a servant, obeyed to the death of the
cross, sanctified himself for us.
As Jesus says in John 17, as we
are reminded, Calvin emphasizes so greatly in the
Institute's book three, and especially his commentary on
Hebrews.
Why?
Because his saving love for us expresses his
valuation of us.
Now notice, not that he dies for us
because we are valuable, but because he has
died for us, we become valuable.
Our value, your valuation, you need to understand
this, your valuation in the eyes and heart
of the Lord Jesus is nothing less than
his oblation on the cross of Calvary.
That's the value he has placed upon you.
And he loves that which he values.
Where your treasure is, there will your heart
be also.
We are his treasured possession and his heart
is toward us.
And then thirdly sazone, there is a love
of pity and compassion that's expressed in many
ways in the New Testament, but actually expressed
here in two ways, in the compassion and
pity that Jesus has for us.
Verse 18, because he knows that the world
will hate us.
And so he's at pains to explain to
us why it is that the world hates
us.
He wants to teach us to be able
to say when the world hates us and
there is something in us that is likely
to recriminate the Lord Jesus because we are
hated by the world.
He says, don't look at it that way.
Think of it like this.
This isn't really about me.
This is about him.
The world hates me because he loves me
and abide in my love.
And so at the end of the passage
in verse 26, he speaks to them about
the way the helper will come, the counselor
who will come alongside us to strengthen us.
That's the fruit of his love.
And then sazone, there is the love of
bounty that's so beautifully expressed in the words
of verse 14.
You are now my friends.
No longer do I call you servants for
the servant doesn't know what his master is
doing, but I have called you friends for
all that I have heard from my father.
I have made known to you.
Now, this is the grace upon grace about
which John had spoken in the prologue to
the gospel.
When we get to this point of the
gospel, the grace is just pouring out of
Jesus towards his disciples as he draws them
into that love in which they are to
abide.
This is the abundance of grace that is
ours in Christ Jesus.
And so we need to understand the love
in which we are to abide.
Let me ask the homework question again.
How well do you understand this in terms
of what it does to the style of
your holiness?
That you are somebody who has grasped the
love in which we are to abide.
Second, the union by which we are to
abide.
Clear to us, wasn't it in Derek Thomas's
address this morning, how deeply imbued with Johannine
as well as Pauline theology the apostle Paul
was.
Notice a number of things about this union.
Six of them, five of them I think
I want to mention.
Number one, and perhaps most important, it is
a personal union.
It is a personal union.
Abide in me and I in you.
Now one of the reasons that is so
difficult for us to expound is because there
isn't really a perfect analogy.
And Jesus uses, as it were, the least
imperfect analogy for our abiding in him and
he abiding in us in the horticultural metaphor
that he uses of the vine and the
branches united together in order that the branches
may bear fruit.
But dear friends, let's try and grasp this,
however difficult it may be for us to
articulate, that the union which we have with
Jesus Christ is a union with his person.
I think oddly enough, oddly enough, it's Bultman
who points out that the expression that the
New Testament loves to use, pistouane ais, to
believe into Jesus, is actually unique in all
classical literature.
That is to say there is something about
the nature of the gospel that demands a
different use of grammar in order to express
it.
Believing into the Lord Jesus Christ.
That is to say this union which we
have with him is a union of persons,
most nobly illustrated as far as the scriptures
are concerned by the union of persons in
marriage.
So that we have one name and we
become one flesh.
Or to put it negatively, this is not
an impersonal union.
This is not the fruits of Christ's atoning
work affecting my life.
This is the very person of the Son
of God in my flesh dwelling in me
by his Spirit and I dwelling in him
through the power of his Holy Spirit.
So that if I could put it this
way, there is nothing between the person of
the Lord Jesus and the person of the
believer as that union and communion develops and
grows.
I think this is a very important thing
for us to grasp.
Let me put it the way I sometimes
put it.
The union with Christ we have is not
that we somehow or another share his grace
because, follow me carefully, there actually is no
such thing as grace.
That actually is Roman Catholic teaching, medieval Roman
Catholic teaching.
There is a thing called grace that can
be separated from the person of Jesus Christ.
It's something that Jesus Christ won on the
cross and he can bestow it on you.
And there are at least seven ways it
can be bestowed on you and they all,
as it happens, turn out to be in
the hands of the church.
And you can have this kind of grace
and this kind of grace and this kind
of grace and this kind of grace.
There is no such thing as grace.
There's only the Lord Jesus.
Grace is not some appendage to his being
nor is it some substance that flows from
us.
Let me give you grace.
All there is is the Lord Jesus himself.
And so when Jesus speaks about us abiding
in him and he abiding in us, this
however mysterious it may be, mystical in that
sense, is a personal union.
Do not let us fail because of the
abuse of expressions.
Do not let us fail to understand that
at the end of the day actually Christianity
is Christ because there isn't anything else.
There isn't an atonement that somehow can be
detached from who the Lord Jesus is.
There isn't grace that can be attached to
you, transferred from him.
All there is is Christ and your soul.
And so he's emphasizing to them this high
and deep mystery of the Christian faith that
the union we have with the Lord Jesus
is a personal union.
And because that union, as Calvin, remember, taught,
because that union is actually grounded in his
union with our humanity and the beauty he
created in that humanity, the holiness that is
forged in us by our union with his
person follows the simple principle, you become very
like the person with whom you most intimately
live.
Now listen, that's a fundamental element of our
ministry, isn't it?
I spent, I guess, many years of my
life having the privilege of begging, borrowing or
stealing somebody else's congregation.
And one of the things I've noticed again
and again and again is the way in
which congregations over a longer ministry tend to
take on the personality of their minister and
preacher and the extent to which people model
their holiness and sanctification on what they see
in their minister.
Now we might fly from that, we might
say it shouldn't be that way, we need
a plurality of elders, but at the end
of the day there is such a close
identification inevitably in the hearts and minds of
our people between the one who preaches Jesus
and the Jesus who is preached that your
likeness to the Lord Jesus in your mutual
indwelling of him is either going to foster
a true likeness to the Lord Jesus in
your people or it's going to foster a
distorted Jesus in your people.
And that's absolutely vital that we see that.
It's a crushing thing to think.
I find it a haunting thought.
I want to fly from the pulpit and
say, please don't look at me.
Please don't think that Jesus really is the
way I preach him.
But my friends, if Jesus isn't really the
way I preach him, I shouldn't be preaching.
And the key to that is personal union
with him.
I think it's one of the great mysteries
of God's providence that when we preach, we
grow large, don't we?
Our minds operate at a level.
I mean, I know you can lose the
place, but your mind operates with a speed
that it doesn't normally operate with.
You grow large, you become conscious that you're
caught up into the Word of God and
into something the Holy Spirit is doing.
And one of the strangest of all divine
providences seems to me to be this, that
when the Holy Spirit makes us, as it
were, as large as we can possibly be,
he doesn't always hide the enlargement of our
distortion of the character of the Lord Jesus
Christ.
We pray that we will be hidden behind
Christ.
We pray that the Holy Spirit will do
that, but apparently he is not always pleased
to do that.
And so we preach a half Christ, a
distorted Christ.
And it's not so evident in our preaching
to the people that we love them as
those who are abiding in the love of
Jesus Christ.
And there is not the atmosphere in our
ministry that we are enjoying personal union and
personal communion with the Lord Jesus.
So it's a union that's personal.
It's a union, secondly, that's spiritual.
That is to say, this is point number
two and this is subheading number two.
It's a spiritual union in the sense it's
a union that's forged by the Holy Spirit.
And this, of course, is the key to
understanding what it means for it to be
a personal union.
And Jesus has just been speaking about this
in chapter 14, verse 15 to the end,
where he speaks about the way in which
this union is forged in us by the
gift of the Holy Spirit that he's going
to give to them.
And this Holy Spirit he's going to give
to them, as we heard again earlier on
today, is the gift of the very same
Holy Spirit who has indwelt him and possessed
him and empowered him, because there is no
other Holy Spirit.
There isn't a Holy Spirit who came and
dwelt upon the Lord Jesus and another Holy
Spirit who didn't come and dwell upon the
Lord Jesus.
So that when God gives the Holy Spirit,
he says, will I give them Spirit A
or will I give them Spirit B?
There's only one Holy Spirit received by believers.
And that's one and the same Holy Spirit
who endowed our Lord Jesus Christ for his
ministry with all the graces and gifts of
the Holy Spirit.
He is the Spirit of Christ who comes
to indwell us.
And look at what Jesus says here when
he speaks about this, when he says, I
won't leave you as orphans, I'll come to
you.
He's speaking not just about his resurrection, he's
speaking about coming to them in the power
of the Holy Spirit on the day of
Pentecost.
And he speaks, you notice, verse 23 about
this.
If anyone loves me, you see, as the
Father has loved me, so have I loved
you.
Abide in my love.
If anyone thus abides in my love and
loves me, then my Father will love him
and we will come to him and make
our home with him.
I don't begin to understand what that means,
but I think I begin to experience what
it means, that he more and more works
in my life to unite me to himself
by the power of the Holy Spirit, that
my life becomes more and more a place
from which Jesus is not repulsed, but to
which he is drawn.
That he loves being here.
That he knows he can go anywhere here.
That he can be ungrieved here.
And while that may be beyond our ability
to articulate, Jesus also emphasizes that this union
that is personal and spiritual is also a
union that's regulated by his word.
If he says, my word abides in you,
then you will abide in my love.
If you keep my commandments, you will abide
in my love.
It's the same thing as Colossians 3, 16,
isn't it?
Let the word of Christ dwell in you
richly, which is parallel to Ephesians 5, 18.
Be filled with the Spirit.
Give the word room.
You know, our love for the Lord Jesus
is going to be manifested by that which
we communicate to our congregation in our preaching,
that we are not experts who stand on
top of this book, who are able simply
to explain it all, but that we are
deep sea divers who have gone down into
this book and we are forever finding precious
perils to bring up and hold before the
congregation and say like excited children, do you
see what's here?
Do you see what the Heavenly Father has
embedded in the seabed of his word?
And we hold it up and our congregations
begin to sense that we ourselves are growing
in our understanding of scripture.
That we are not just schoolmasters teaching them
something we know perfectly, but we're explorers in
a world of grace.
We're constantly finding new things and we're conscious
then that we're not above this book, but
that we're below this book.
We're well below this book and we sit
where the congregation sits and we're drinking it
in and God is speaking to us and
no one is more thoroughly dealt with by
the Lord Jesus in our ministries than we
who are the conduits of that ministry.
Because our very ministry of his word is
one of the high points of our weekly
experience of abiding in Christ in a union
that's regulated by his word dwelling in us
and it's a loving union.
No longer servants, well we're still servants of
course, we don't misunderstand what Jesus is saying.
No longer servants but friends.
I really regret, I guess I'm getting old,
but I really regret the Americanization of the
Western English-speaking world so that everybody wants
to call you by your Christian name.
And it's not I think I want to
stand on my dignity, but I thoroughly dislike
going into the hairdressers and an 18-year
-old girl saying to me, what's your name?
And I say it's Ferguson.
She says, oh what's your first name?
And I know what's going to follow.
She's going to call me Sinclair.
Come over here Sinclair.
Now why do I object to that?
That's the name my mother gave me.
What I object to is this, that it
means that social grace that used to exist
when somebody wanted to draw you into their
friendship, they could say to you, please call
me by my Christian name.
I've never forgotten going in an elevator with
very famous Christian theologian that you would all
recognize his name immediately, to whom I'd always
referred as Dr. X, when Dr. X turned
to me as the doors were just about
to open and he said, please, he said,
my name is.
It was a great moment for me as
a young man to be drawn into friendship.
It was no longer the relation of master
to servant.
And I would never in a thousand years
have transgressed the honor and the esteem, but
to be drawn in.
And Jesus says to him, what a moment.
I think the thing that really just overwhelms
me about this moment is that our dear
Savior was going to die in awful excruciating
pain upon the cross within 24 hours.
And he says to them, from now on
you're friends.
It's a union of friendship.
And yes, he says, it's a, it's a
growing union.
Did you catch that in Calvin this morning?
It's a growing union.
There's more and more and more and more.
Those of you who are married, the day
you were married and you were just, I
hope just filled overwhelmed with the emotion of
the situation, maybe more than your wife was.
Can't believe this is happening to me.
She's actually done it.
She's mine.
You scarcely loved her then.
You, you scarcely knew her then, but you've
grown into that union.
You have a hundred thousand more intimate reasons
to love her today than you did then.
And so with the Lord Jesus for all
eternity.
I think it's a great mistake that people
think that when we die, we become A,
infinite and B, eternal.
When we die, we remain finite creatures and
we don't become eternal in that ontological sense
that there is no past, no present, no
future.
Otherwise the lenses that scripture gives us of
those who are in the glory are false
and untrustworthy lenses.
And this friendship that's bestowed upon us in
Christ, this union of love, we will find
a million, million, million more reasons to love
the Lord Jesus in eternity than we have
now.
It's a love of growing union.
And yet you notice it's a union that
in order to bring blessing causes pain.
Back to the Michelangelo illustration, as he chisels
away, because he sees in this block of
stone, the angel.
But the difference between the illustration and the
reality is this, that we are not blocks
of stone that have no feelings.
We are men who feel every chisel blow,
every hammer of the heavenly father.
We cry out to him, what are you
doing?
We don't see the big picture.
We don't understand that he's conforming us more
and more to the likeness of his son,
that he might be the firstborn of many
brethren.
And we allow ourselves to be dislocated and
enervated by the chisel blows of the heavenly
father or by the pruning knife that he
uses.
As he cuts away everything that will get
in the way of stable fruit and glorious
fruition.
Well, I'm almost finished.
Let me simply give you the six headings
of the third point, the love in which
we abide, the union by which we abide,
the marks of those who thus abide.
And there are at least six of them
in this passage.
Number one, in chapter 15, verse 12, universal
obedience to the Lord Jesus commands, universal obedience
to the Lord Jesus commands.
Second, a respondent friendship to Jesus himself, a
respondent friendship to Jesus himself.
You know, the privilege as you go on
in ministry, you come to this conference year
after year, or you intersect with brethren here
and there, sometimes a year passes, two year
passes, and you've no idea what's been going
on in their lives.
And yet you somehow or another, you pick
up where you left off and you think
there can't be friendships like this.
Do you sometimes think, is there another man
in the whole universe who is so blessed
by the friendships you have?
The bounty that Jesus Christ has given to
you in the gospel.
I know that friendship grows over the years
and same here.
He not only makes us his friends, but
he seeks from us a respondent friendship.
You think about yourself that way.
There are many ways in which I need
to think about myself.
I'm a sinner saved by grace.
Yes.
I continue to be a sinner, a wretched
man.
And I need to be delivered from the
body of sin and the body of death.
But he wants me also to think of
myself as his friend, to walk with him
as his friend, to go to him as
his friend, to share my life with him
as his friend.
Mark number three is a love for all
those for whom Jesus has died.
This is my commandment that you love one
another without exception.
Now they hadn't done that.
Some of them had been furious about the
way in which there were some who were
in the inner circle.
They were probably all furious with one another
as they'd sat around the room and Jesus
had washed all their feet.
You should have done it.
And he who called them to a universal
obedience called them also to a universal love
for all those for whom Jesus died.
Never my brothers let your first thought of
somebody who is a true Christian, never let
your first thought about them be anything else
but I will love this brother or sister
for whom Jesus Christ died.
And never ever transgress that principle by God's
grace.
Fourthly, a willingness to suffer in communion with
Christ.
This is what he goes on to expound
in chapter 15 verse 18.
If you are united to me again, this
is Calvin this morning, isn't it?
If you're united to me, you will suffer
in me and with me and your life
externally as well as internally is going to
be conformed to this pattern so that death
is the way to life and the cross
is the way to victory.
And it's all here in chapter 15.
Number five, a constraint to witness to Jesus'
name.
Remember how Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians
5, the love of Christ constrains me.
And here Jesus himself puts it fascinatingly at
the end of the chapter where he says,
speaking about the coming of the Holy Spirit,
when the helper comes whom I'll send you
from the father, the spirit of truth who
proceeds from the father, he will bear witness
about me and you also will bear witness
about me because you have been with me
from the beginning.
Now see the perfect analogy that he's drawing
here, the parallel lines, the reason the spirit
is such an effective witness is the very
same reason they are to be witnesses because
he has been with Jesus from the beginning.
And he who has been with Jesus from
the beginning of his ministry is able to
enable those who have been with him from
the beginning of his ministry to bear witness
to him.
That's how our union with Christ overflows.
And point number six, a mark of one
who abides in Christ, chapter 15 verse 11,
is that Christ's joy will be in him
and his joy, your joy, will be full.
I find that one of the most intriguing
pieces of language in John's gospel.
What does Jesus mean?
He says, I've spoken these things to you
in order that, does he mean in order
that the joy I have may be in
you?
Or does he mean that you may be
the reason, the cause of my joy?
I suspect actually he means both.
That as we abide in Christ's love, the
love that has as its foundation, the love
that the father has for him, the love
that he has given to us, we discover
both things are true.
That our little lives give our Savior great
joy and the great joy of the Savior
dwells in us.
And when this is true, if we can
apply all this to ourselves as ministers of
the gospel, when this is true, our ministries
really will be different and Jesus-like, Jesus
-like.
And at the end of the day, there's
nothing else worth living for except what's going
to be Jesus-like because nothing in you
will last for eternity unless it's Jesus-like.
Our Heavenly Father, we thank you again and
again for the grace that you have shown
to us in Jesus Christ and we pray
that you would teach us more and more
by your Holy Spirit what it means to
abide in Christ and grant that it may
be said of every single one of us
in the last day that abiding in Christ
we bore much fruit and so proved to
be Christ's disciples.
Bless us now as we go to lunch,
we pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.