A DIFFERENT OBEDIENCE

 

June 19, 2024

John 15:9-10

 

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.”

 

 

Our culture doesn’t like to hear about obedience. Generally, when people around us think of obedience they normally understand it as a task to be done that they have no desire to do. Isn’t that what the saying “nobody is going to tell me what to do” reveals. In our society we associate obedience with obligation rather than fulfillment. By the way, even those of us who are Jesus’ disciples have a negative view of obedience.

However, when Jesus walked among us he carried out a very different lifestyle of obedience than our culture resists. You see, Jesus’ life demonstrated for us what obedience to our heavenly Father is meant to look like. Through Jesus’ example we learn that Obedience to God is choosing to live a lifestyle of love and devotion to the God who has loved us completely.

Jesus says in John 15:9-10, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.” Let us not miss what is being said here. Jesus illustrates in these words that he lived his life returning the love he was shown by his Father. He lived his life in obedience to God out of the riches of the relationship he had with the father, not out of some obligation. And Jesus simply asks us to do the same. He invites us into the activity of receiving love and giving love as the foundation of our life. In this way of living we abide in the deepness of a relationship with our Father in heaven, as he did. Isn’t that what Jesus meant in Luke 10:27 where we read  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” 

In a world bound up in a self-seeking, self-satisfying agenda, Jesus sets us free to live for others, rather than living only for our own self interests. Jesus transforms us into people who will experience the abundant life offered to those who abide in him, the true vine.