Abiding in Christ's Love: John 15:12-13

Good morning. It is our privilege and joy here at Dillingham Moravian Church to

be able to lead you in the study of God's Word.

My name is Pastor Simon, and here at DMC, our mission is to make disciples of

Christ as we shine the light of God's Word throughout Bristol Bay,

Southwest Alaska, and beyond. Let us pray.

Father, we thank you for the privilege it is to hear from you and your Word.

Thank you that we can be able to study your word together.

And may it be you that is working in us, Lord, and teaching us and guiding us

through your precious and most holy word.

Use us and may you be our life and our treasure in all things.

In your precious Son’s name, Jesus Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit, I pray. Amen.

Turn with me this morning to John chapter 15, verse 11 through 13.

John 15:11–13

John 15, verses 11-13, where Jesus spoke to his disciples, saying,

John 15:11–13

These things I have spoken to you, so that my joy may be in you,

and that your joy may be full.

This is my commandment, that you love one another just as I have loved you.

Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.

Earlier in John chapter 15, Jesus taught his disciples that Jesus loves his

John 15 · chapter mention

abiding church because the Father loves him.

Christ was able to joyfully love us through his terrible crucifixion on the

cross because he was secure in his Father's love.

Jesus commanded his disciples to abide in his love.

And to abide in him, his disciples had to obey his commands as he,

Jesus, obeyed the commands of his Father.

And as we come to study our passage today, there are three timeless truths that God is teaching us.

The first point that I want to show you is that Christ's joy may be in us to the full.

Over the years of ministering to the Moravian Church in Aleknagik,

which is near the shore of Aleknagik Lake here in southwest Alaska,

there was at least one year that the water was so high that the water overflowed

the banks of the lake and was almost to the top of the big dock at Aleknagik.

Even last week, I was talking to one of the residents of North Shore Aleknagik

who told me that he has had to keep moving his boat this year farther and farther

up the shore because the water in the lake kept on rising.

This concept of something being full to the overflowing is similar to what Jesus

in John chapter 15 was instructing his disciples about.

John 15 · chapter mention

John 15, verse 11, these things I have spoken to you so that my joy may be in

John 15:11

you and that your joy may be made full.

As we begin to look at John 15, verse 11, there is the question that we need

John 15:11

to answer in order for the rest of this passage to make sense.

That question is, what did Jesus mean by these things I have spoken to you?

I believe that Jesus was referring to the entirety of John chapter 15,

John 15 · chapter mention

summed up in the abiding in Christ our vine and our Father God,

the vine grower, as we trust in the love of Christ and imitate the love of Jesus

for the Father and obeying Christ as he obeyed his Father.

You see, as we abide or make our home in the love of Christ and live continually

in Christ's love, Christ's joy is then produced in us and is produced in us to the full.

The word that John recorded for joy meant “to experience gladness,

joy, as brought to the highest degree.”

And here's Christ's promise. As we persist in abiding or making our home in

the love of God in Christ, as we stay in the presence of our husband Christ,

He will give us His joy and His joy never runs out.

The question is, what is this joy? The joy that Christ gives us is the joy of

abiding in fellowship with God.

The joy that Christ gives us is the joy that comes from being part of Christ's

mission and bearing fruit for Christ's kingdom.

The joy that Christ gives us is not just a small trickle of joy,

but it's always complete and full to the overflowing, like a tidal wave.

C.S. Lewis wrote this, “Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.

We are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition

when infinite joy is offered to us.

Like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slums because

he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea,

we are far too easily pleased.”

If you wish to know this joy that Jesus taught about, this joy can only be given

by God and only to those who are part of Christ's vine by the grace of God through

faith in Christ as your only Lord and Savior.

And if you're listening and you've never put your faith and trust in Christ,

I urge you heartily to do so.

The world can know some temporary happinesses, but they cannot know real joy

because joy comes from the Lord as we live and abide or stay in relationship with Him.

Again, for us as believers in Christ to continue in joy, we need to obey God's

Word as we trust in the love that Christ has for us.

We are to desire and long with our affections to abide in relationship with

Christ as Christ does with His Father.

Do you know what I mean by affections? Our affections are our love and desire

for something as our only treasure,

our only joy. This is the reason that we are to obey Christ's commands, not out

of obligation or to earn God's love but because we desire so strongly to be

in deep relationship with Christ Jesus,

God Most High. And as we fall more in love with God and obediently conform our

thoughts and actions and feelings to fall in line with God's word and God's mission,

the more Christ's joy is produced in you and me.

Psalm 19 verse 7 stated that the precepts of the Lord are right and they rejoice the heart.

Psalms 19:7

What then does this mean for us in our daily hectic and busy lives?

If you're here today and you're listening to this message and you are married.

God has called you to faithfully love Christ as your true love and out of love

for Christ, obey the Lord's commands.

By putting to death your own wants and love your spouse before your own self.

Surrender to God's will. Trust that he is working in your marriage and will

work through your obedient surrender.

Even though it doesn't seem like God is working, he is.

And the promise is that Christ will give you his joy.

I want to encourage you, trust and believe the promises of God.

And if you're a parent, It is so often difficult to teach and train our children

through Bible studies, godly discipline, godly example, and encouragement.

We're called to please Christ, and thus we are to trust that Christ is in control,

to lead the way God's Word commands us to, and then lead the results to God.

Remember that we are working for Christ, and it is His work that we are accomplishing.

Again, what's the promise? as we obey Christ out of love for Christ as we trust

him Christ gives us more and more of his joy what about if you're sick or emotionally struggling.

You remind yourself the truth of who Christ is and what he has done for you

on the cross and in his resurrection,

that he does overwhelmingly love you and has died for you and that you and I

have real value real worth to Christ we trust that he is still living in us

and that he is in control.

And in that trust, we continue abiding in Christ's love and surrendering to

Him through the Holy Spirit and obeying His word.

We also trust that God is at work in all our situations and we trust and believe

that God will use it for His good in our lives and in the lives of others.

And what's the promise? He will give us His joy!

And if you're here, we're listening and you are grieving the loss of a loved one?

So many in our villages and our own community here at Dillingham are grieving

hard for so many loved ones that have passed away.

Trust that God in Christ loves you with an everlasting love.

Also know that God loves your loved one more than you could ever love them.

Remember as Paul taught in Romans 8, verse 28, and we know that God causes all

Romans 8:28

things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called

according to His purpose.

God's plans are far beyond our ability as human beings on our own to comprehend

and yet God's plans are for the good of us who with our affections love God

by faith and have aligned our desires and thoughts with the purposes of His calling.

And as you and I grieve for our loved ones, We must remind and preach to ourselves

the promises of God And trust and believe them Especially regarding the hope

of eternal life That believers have in Jesus Christ.

Surrender to the Holy Spirit And in your trust Commit

to obey Christ in everything, in our

grief. And Christ's joy will come to you and will fill you.That is God's promise!

So far, we've learned in John chapter 15 that Jesus was teaching his disciples

John 15 · chapter mention

that as disciples of Jesus Christ persist in abiding or making their home in his love,

as they obey his commands and are part of Jesus' mission, bearing fruit for the kingdom,

Jesus Christ will give them his joy.

And Christ's joy never runs out. However, this leads us to the second timeless

principle that I wanna bring to your attention.

Not only are we to love Christ with our affection, so that Christ is our treasure

and our joy, we are also to love one another as Christ has loved us.

I've had the privilege to crew on a drift boat fishing for salmon out on the

Nushagak Bay for three seasons.

My family and I have also done subsistence set netting for the last 13 years or so.

I say this because although I've heard of cases where a fish will jump out of

the water and land in someone's boat or into their hand?

It's never happened to me. The usual way of catching fish on a drift boat is

that the fish get caught in the net that is in the water, and then we draw or

we pull that net up to us on the boat by round hauling,

physically pulling the net up, or by a hydraulic winch.

The life-giving food of the fish doesn't usually jump right into our hands without

us working for it, right?

We have to fish for them with our nets or our rods. We draw them to ourselves

so that we can pick them and use them.

Similar to the concept of bringing our fish up to us on the boat so that we can use them for food,

ao also loving others as God loves us doesn't come naturally.

We have to work at it. We have to draw that up to us. How we work at loving

others with Christ's love is to draw from the life-giving love of Christ and as we abide in Christ.

Jesus went on in John 15, verse 12-13, This is my commandment that you love

John 15:12–13

one another just as I have loved you.

I want you to see in this passage that Jesus equated personally knowing God

with remaining or making our home in the love of Christ.

And in order to remain in the knowledge of Christ's love, one has to continue

staying in Christ's love as we trust in Christ's love for us.

And the outflow of this abiding trust relationship in Christ's love is that

the believer then obeys the Lord's commands.

And Jesus boiled down all of his commands to one overarching command,

love each other as I have loved you.

Now, I want you to see that Christ did not say love each other as you would

have them love you, or love each other as yourself, as Christ's earlier summary

of the law and the prophets proclaimed.

No, Christ commanded his apostles and disciples to love each other as he has loved them.

The word that Jesus used for love referred to agape love or God's love,

which meant to have a strong non-sexual affection and love for a person and

their good as understood by God's moral character.

Especially characterized by a willing forfeiture of rights or privileges in

another person's behalf.

This new love command that Christ Jesus gave set the bar exponentially higher.

Essentially, disciples of Christ are to love each other in the body of Christ

with the same loving affection that God has for us.

And what did Jesus' affection for his church look like? To answer this question,

let's look at Philippians 2, verses 3-8.

Philippians 2:3–8

Where Paul wrote, Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit,

but with humility of mind, regard one another as more important than yourselves.

Do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.

Have this attitude in yourself, which is also in Christ Jesus,

who, although he existed in

the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped,

but emptied himself, taking the form of a bondservant, or a willing slave and

being made in the likeness of men.

Being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient

to the point of death, even death on a cross.

This is so crucial, my friends, by being obedient to his Father’s will to lower

himself in his own perspective and raise His Father and the church to be more

valuable and more important than Himself.

It was out of this humble attitude that Jesus was able to give up his position,

his authority that came with being almighty God,

to become a human slave under occupation so that he could be slaughtered on

that cross as the blood offering to pay the debt of blood that all people owed God for their sins.

This, my friends, was Christ's example to His church on how to love each other in the family of God.

What can you and I learn from this truth? that we as Christ's disciples must

love each other in the church of Christ with the same love affection that Christ loves us.

The problem here is in our human inability to love as God loves.

We can't accomplish this command on our own. We need Christ's power, through

the Holy Spirit, to love others as Christ loves us.

And what this means for us as believers is that we must be continually abiding

in relationship with God.

And that means studying the Word of God, praying, trusting in the knowledge

that Christ loves us so dearly, believing the Word of God when we read it and hear it and memorize it.

I love what Oswald Chambers said, “the affinity or affection of the saint is the Lord Jesus.”

And in response to Christ's love for us, as we by faith draw on the power of

Christ living in us, we can obey Christ's command to love each other in Christ's church.

As we love each other, we stay in the friendship of God.

To truly love others with God's love, we must draw the love with which to love

others from the love relationship we have with Christ.

You see, the more we love Christ, the more we see ourselves as who we truly are.

And we will view others as more important, more valuable than ourselves.

In our relationship in Christ, we must treasure others, especially in Christ's

Church, as Jesus treasures us in the love of His Father.

I completely understand how hard it is to sometimes love other Christians,

especially when those believers are

hard to love, or there are clashes of personality or misunderstandings.

And yet Christ calls us to intentionally love each other in the body of Christ

by firstly humbly lowering ourselves in our own perspective and raising up each

other in our own understanding as way more valuable than ourselves.

This is what it means to live with the affection of Christ towards others.

And this leads us to the third point that I want to focus on in this passage,

which is that we as Christians are to lay down our lives for our friends as Jesus has done for us.

According to one article in June 2019, “a Minnesota dad died a hero over Father's

Day weekend by saving his three-year-old son who fell off a bridge and into a lake,

according to authorities in a new report.

Christopher Franklin Nicholas Schultz, who was 32 years old,

sprang into action when the tot fell from a bridge into Deadshot Bay on Detroit

Lakes on Saturday night.

The Becker County Sheriff's Office said, Schultz struggled to keep his son above water.

Onlookers helped bring the toddler to shore, but the dad, who lived in nearby

Frazee, Minnesota, did not emerge from the water.

He was discovered by a team of divers and a fisherman around 9 p.m.

And was taken to a hospital in the city of Detroit's Lakes, about 45 miles east

of Fargo, North Dakota, where he died.

The boy suffered non-life-threatening injuries. I share this article with you

because that father sacrificed his own life to save the life of his three-year-old son.

Jesus, the Christ, gave up his life to save our physical and eternal lives.

Jesus went on in John 15, verse 13, Greater love has no one than this,

John 15:13

that one lay down his life for his friends.

Jesus went on to explain what loving others as he loved us means by explaining

that there is no greater love than laying down one's life for your friends.

The word that Jesus used for to give up or set aside meant to give up,

conceived of as laying aside one's control of our rights or possession.

As believers, we are to understand that we do not belong to ourselves.

We now completely belong to Christ.

We then are called to give up control of our rights and our life to God and

then view the other person's life and their rights as more valuable or more important than our own.

This may lead us one day to literally

sacrifice our physical life for our brothers and sisters in Christ.

But it does lead us right now and every day to put aside our own desires,

wants, and needs for the good of other believers in Christ.

Jesus connected loving each other in the body of Christ with laying down our lives for each other.

And to be Christ's friends, we must lay down our lives for each other in the body or family of God.

This is essential. So our sacrificially loving other Christians is foundational for us.

Having eternal life and this personal relationship with God that Jesus in John 17 was praying about.

Please listen to this. We cannot stay in friendship with God unless we are sacrificially

loving each other in Christ's church.

We may positionally be in a right relationship with Christ. but in the abiding

relationship with Christ we are not being a friend to Christ.

I want to encourage us today that to love others with the love that Jesus loves

us you and I must sacrifice our own lives meaning our desires and wants even

our rights for God's good for others around us especially within the body of Christ.

And this is so immensely challenging to do especially with almost everything

we read or view in almost every media source,

we are told and influenced that focusing on our own self is our right,

and it's the epitome of what is good.

This perspective of the world that the world has is absolutely wrong.

It's straight from the pit of hell.

Jesus never, ever considered himself before his Father and before us.

Jesus gave up all his rights, his needs,

his wants to be sacrificially crucified on that cross so that our blood debt

could be paid and so that we could be forgiven and brought back into a right

relationship with our Heavenly Father.

What is it that Jesus has been teaching us today? 1.The first truth that Jesus

has taught us in John 15 is that as believers in Christ,

to have the joy of Christ, we are called to trustingly desire along with our

affections to abide in relationship with Christ.

As we continually make our home in the love of Christ, as we obey Christ's word,

we will have Christ's joy.

We have also learned that we, as Christ's disciples, must love others in the

church of Christ with the same love affection that Christ loves us with.

And finally, to love others inside the body of Christ, we must daily,

moment by moment, lay down our lives, meaning our rights, our desires, our physical needs,

even one day our physical lives, for God's good for the other as Christ has done for us.

I want to strongly encourage all of you who are listening or are here today,

that true joy comes from abiding in Christ, and abiding takes work.

We must fight to joyfully abide in Christ, and this takes constant paying attention

to Christ's love and what His Word teaches us to do.

Abiding in Christ takes continuous reminders to ourselves about who Christ is

as our true vine and source of life.

Abiding in Christ takes intentional faith that Christ is dwelling in us,

by the Holy Spirit, and that the Father is growing and pruning us into images

of His most precious Son.

Abiding in Christ takes obediently putting aside ourselves and putting God as our foremost treasure.

And the more we trust in Christ's love, the more we will sacrificially love

others as Christ has loved us, and the more we will have the joy of the Lord.

You see, the Christ-like life is all about loving Christ as our supreme treasure,

as we trust Him and trust His love.

And as we trust Christ, God gives us the power and passion to obey our Lord

and demonstrate that we are with Christ as we love others, as Christ has loved us.

Let's pray. Father God, we thank you for the great privilege and joy it is to hear from you.

Teach us how to love one another by teaching

us how to love you grow our love

for you grow our love affection for you use us lord every single person who

is listening to this message but you grow them in deep relationship with you

so that they in turn can love others and make disciples for your glory.

In your precious Son's name, Jesus Christ, I pray. Amen.

I'll leave you with a blessing from Romans 15, verse 13.

Romans 15:13

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing,

so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.

Have a wonderful Sunday. May the Lord bless you.