Read the transcript from today's video devotional.
This is a really important passage of Scripture for the follower of Jesus on earth today. This is a description that really becomes essential for us to follow if we indeed want to reflect what God intended for humanity here on earth.
A New Commandment
I know I am making these very grandiose statements to start, but here's why it's so important. Right before this verse we've just shared, Jesus says to His followers, "A new commandment I've given to you, that you would love one another just like I love you." Now there are two parts of this that are really important. The first one is a new commandment.
To us reading this, with hindsight being 20/20, we see that Jesus is rewriting this story and ultimately His death, burial, and resurrection played out before all of humanity becomes the way that we see the world through those lenses. Imagine at this time, while Jesus is still there with other human people who have only known how to follow God according to the things that they learned from the Torah and the writings from generations that have passed. Now Jesus says to them, "There are commandments that you've known for as long as you can remember, but I'm going to give you a new one." That would have had to jostle their situation. It would have shaken up the gumball machine a little bit, because here come people who have only known one way to be right before God for as long as could be remembered. Then Jesus says, "There's a new way to do this, a new command."
Love One Another as I Have Loved You
What He says in this new commandment is the second part that is absolutely mind-blowing, mind-boggling. It's that you would love one another in the same way that He loved you. Now that begs the question, how did Jesus love these people? Well, right before this, earlier in John chapter 13, it tells us that Jesus—the Savior of the world, the One who should be followed by this very group of people—gets down on His hands and knees and wash their feet. The Son of Man didn't come to be served, but to serve and to give His life.
Then He goes on to say, "This is how you should love one another." This kind of self-sacrificial, elevating others before yourselves so that they would be edified. This is the example He tells these followers to love each other with.
The Watching World
Then we come back to our verse for today. It's by your ability to do this for each other that the watching world will go, those people actually know Jesus. Isn't it interesting that He doesn't say it's by the way that you talk about Him? Or, it's by the way that you share your authority of what you have in the way of knowledge and your speaking. No, no, no. It's how you love one another that will show the world that this Jesus thing is for real.
What does that mean? For me, where it challenges me deeply is in our current cultural moment. One of the things that's actually really hard for a watching world to describe as a good thing is the way that church people interact with one another. As a matter of fact, they might describe the way that we interact as the opposite of love for one another.
I think that is really notable because Jesus says, "I know that it's going to be hard for you, though you follow Me, but have differences amongst you, to find ways to overcome your own biases, your own personal thoughts about how life should go in order to die to self, in order to serve one another." But when you do this, it means that it's only by the power of the Spirit of God that it's possible. A watching world goes, there's no way they should love each other this way. But it must be true that Jesus is real if they can do it.
Today, I want you to think about what it means to love one another the way that Christ loved us, and think about how the watching world knows He is real by the way that we love one another.
