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Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia. In the name of Jesus. Amen.
Dear Saints, this morning I want to explore this preaching of Jesus from John 15, but before I close the hymnal, I want to point out one little line from Luther. It’s in stanza 6. It’s a theme that runs through the ancient church and it comes up all the time in the preaching, and we just don’t hear it that often, so it’s something that we should notice. It says this: “His royal power disguised, he bore a servant’s form; like mine he wore to lead the devil captive.”
The old church fathers used to talk about Jesus, how his cross was like a hook, and Jesus took on the form of humanity to be like a worm put on a hook for the fish of the devil. So that the devil comes to destroy him, and in being, when he takes the bait, he’s caught. Jesus hides himself in weakness, he hides himself in mortality, he hides himself in our flesh and blood to trick death into trying to destroy him, to trick the devil into trying to overcome him; and in that trick, the devil himself, sin, and the grave are overthrown by Jesus. It’s wonderful. God be praised.
Now, to the preaching of Jesus in John chapter 15, we’re continuing the sermon from last week with Jesus where he says, “I’m the vine, and you’re the branches,” and he’s talking about what that means. And I’d like to consider it under four words that Jesus gives: the words love, choice, friend, and joy.
So, if we could just kind of look at those four words, we’re going to do a little defining work, a little contrasting work, and then hopefully put them all together. The first word is love, and Jesus says, “As the Father loved me, so I love you. Abide in my love.” Now each one of these words is going to be just a miracle. You wouldn’t believe it unless it’s written down in the Scriptures. But imagine this is what Jesus is saying to us. He’s saying that the love that the Father has for me, the eternal love of the Holy Trinity—remembering that before there was anything in the entire universe, before God had created the world and everything in it, there was just the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit living in perpetual, eternal, never-ending, unbreakable love—the love of the Father for the Son, and the love of the Son for the Father, and the love of the Father and the Son for the Holy Spirit, and the love of the Holy Spirit for the Father and the Son.
This is what defines God. Remember, John says, “God is love.” This is who and what the being of God is, this love. And Jesus says, “You know that love? The love that the Father has for me, that’s the love that I have for you.” That would probably, if the whole Bible was just that verse, that would be enough—that God the Father loves the Son, and God the Son loves you.
Now this is important, but I want to think a little bit about love because we hear in the world a lot about love, a lot of conversation about love, a lot of talk about love, so we just want to make sure that when we are reading the Scriptures, we know what we’re talking about. Because one of the problems is that in the culture, in the world, apart from the church, love is understood not in line with the commandments but against the commandments, at least a lot of times.
And I think the best example that I can think of is when the guy and the girl are dating, and the guy comes to the girl and says, “Hey, you know, I know we’re not married but we could act married because we love each other.” You see, what happens is love is used against the commandment, “You shall not commit adultery.” Now Jesus wants us to be really clear that if you want to understand love, you have to understand the commandments. If you want to love, you have to keep the commandments. “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.”
We just have to be aware of this and we have to be on the lookout for it. It’s one of those things that we have to have discernment and our radar has to be aware that when someone’s talking about love, are they talking about love that lines up with the commandments of God or love that goes against the commandments of God? In fact, we can think of it this way: if you took the Ten Commandments and you put them in a dehydrator—I kind of want to see your hands if you have a dehydrator, but let’s say you put the Ten Commandments in my grandma’s dehydrator, and you leave them overnight. In the morning, you wake up and there’s two.
They’ve shrunk down to two: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength,” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And if you leave them in there for another few days, they shrink down into one. It’s just simply the command: love. Paul says it like this: “Love is the fulfilling of the law, because love does no wrong to the neighbor.” This is what God’s law is; it’s the command to love.
But here’s the problem: you say, “Oh, it’s love, so we don’t have to worry about that. You shall not steal, or you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, honor your father and your mother.” No, I’ve got the command of love, and these don’t matter. No! These commandments are what love is. So we want to understand love as keeping the commandments. Most especially, Jesus is going to come along and say, “Now here’s real love. Love understood in its fullness, perfect love—there’s no better love than this,” Jesus says: “perfect love is that a man would lay down his life for his friends.”
So that perfect love involves sacrifice. Perfect love is what we’re going to see when we see Jesus dying on the cross for us and suffering for us. That’s love that lines up with the commandments and fills up the commandments and keeps the commandments even for us.
So there’s love. Here’s another word that we want to make sure that we’re defining rightly, and it’s the word choose. This is at the end of the gospel lesson, verse 16, and the reason why this is… The word love has to do with how we talk in the church versus out of the church. The word choose is really a theological debate, and we want to make sure that we get this pinned down because in the church, there are different ideas about the freedom of the human will. Can I choose?
In fact, there’s probably a lot of Christians who are gathered in their churches right now. While we’re here, they’re over there, and what’s happening in the service is that the pastor is telling them, “Now it’s very important that you make a decision today for Christ, that you choose Christ, that you choose to follow Him, that you accept Jesus, that you give your life to Him, that you make Him Lord of your life.” In other words, there’s a free will theology that is in a lot of churches that is telling people that their faith, their salvation, their hope for heaven is dependent upon them. That faith is really an act of the will, that they are the ones who have to choose.
We just want to contrast that with what Jesus says. Jesus says, “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit.” The Bible tells us that we are born sinful, and part of that sinful nature is that we cannot, by our own reason or strength, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ or come to Him. The Holy Spirit does the work. Paul says it like this in Ephesians chapter 2: “You were dead in your trespasses and sins until God made you alive.”
So that faith is not your choice or your decision; salvation is not your accepting Jesus, but rather Jesus accepting you. It’s not your giving yourself over for Him; it’s Him giving Himself over for you. It’s not your choice for Christ; it’s Christ’s choice for you. And this should give you comfort—that not only does Jesus love you, but also that He’s chosen you.
I don’t know; you know how when you were in elementary school and you divided up into two different teams and there were captains, and you had to pick the players? You were always hoping that you were going to be picked first or at least not last or whatever, and they are always picking the fastest guys and whatever. So I just wonder—you have this picture that Jesus is choosing his team, and I would think to myself, “Well, if I was Jesus, I would… Brian would be at the end of the line for choosing.”
I don’t know if you feel that; I think we all probably feel that way if God is sitting there choosing. But here’s what Jesus is saying to us today, to you today. He says, “I chose you. I picked you. I elected you from the foundations of the earth, and in your baptism I said, ‘This is the one that I want. This is my Christian. This one belongs to me, and I belong to them.’ You are chosen!”
The next word is friend. “Greater love is no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends.” The disciples were having trouble actually getting their heads around the fact that Jesus was going to die, and it wasn’t far away. I mean, remember these words he’s teaching as they’re leaving the upper room on the way to the Garden of Gethsemane. These words are between his instituting the supper and being arrested, so this is about to all go down quick.
And Jesus is saying, “No greater love is anyone than this, that he lays down his life for his friends,” and I just wonder if the disciples look around and say, “Well, I wonder which friends? I wonder who his friends are? I don’t know.” I’m not sure that they knew that he was talking about them because look at what Jesus says after that: “You are my friends.”
Now there’s a condition on that; it says this: “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” In other words, if you just go around and do whatever you want, you don’t want to consider yourself to be a friend of Jesus—that’s not the kind of friend that he has, but you are my friends. He says, “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what the master is doing. I have called you friends.”
Now this already is a miracle—that Jesus loves us, that Jesus chooses us, that Jesus calls us to be friends. But we want to lean into this a little bit, especially in the understanding of the ancient world, is that a friend is not just like a buddy or a companion, but this is a technical term. I think the closest word that we have in our day is the word cabinet—like the president or the governor has a cabinet. He has people that he’s looked at and he said, “I want you to come and advise me. I want you to tell me what’s going on. I want you to be part of the conversation to figure out what’s happening.”
In other words, you’re going to speak, and I’m going to listen to you. In the ancient world, those were the friends of the king. And that’s what Jesus says about you: “I’ve appointed you to be my friends, to be my advisors, to be the ones that I listen to about how things should go in the world.” This has to do with prayer. Do you know that when you pray, Jesus is asking you for advice on how to rule the universe?
I have no idea what would happen if that idea—I need to preach to myself here—would be in my own mind, how my prayers would be different, how my prayers for you would be different, how my prayers for my family would be different, how my prayers for the world would be different. I think it’s the same for all of us. When we recognize that when Jesus calls us his friends, he’s saying that I’m taking your prayers into advisement for my governing of all things.
That is almost too good to be true. It’s astonishing. This is what Jesus says. He says, “The servant doesn’t know what the master is doing. The servant is just told to do something, and he goes and he does it, but the friend is different because the friend knows the mind of his friend. He knows what he’s thinking about. He knows his heart. He knows what he wants.”
And this is what Jesus is saying: “You know what I want. You know what’s in my mind. You know what’s in my heart. 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. You know, dear saints, by the wisdom of the Word of God and by the Spirit, it’s been revealed to you, especially through the death and resurrection of Jesus, what the very heart of God is, what He wants: His name to be holy, His kingdom to come, His will to be done, forgiveness of sins to be found in every corner and most especially in the darkness of your own conscience, to provide for you daily bread and to deliver you from evil so that you would live with Him forever.”
You know; you have insight into the very heart of God. And Jesus says, “Because of that, you’re my friends, and I’m listening to you when you pray.” Oh, that we would believe that.
The last word is joy. Love, choose, friend, joy is the last one. Now, Jesus says that I’m telling you all of these things so that your joy would be full. I wonder if you— I wonder if we were to maybe ask you after we’re leaving church, I could say, “Hey, is your joy full? Do you have room for any more joy, or is it maxed out?”
I’m looking at your faces now. I can see some of you might be close to the top. Some of you are like, “No, it’s not full.” Well, that’s why Jesus is talking to you. That’s why he’s giving you these words here, so that your joy would be full. There might be things that you need.
And I mean, you might be—there’s sorrow in life and there’s suffering in life, and that’s not what Jesus is talking about. He’s not saying that he’s going to take away every cause of pain or suffering. That’s not what fullness of joy means. He’s going to say that there’s nothing going on between us. There’s no problems between us. There’s no anger that I have against you. There’s no sin that’s going to keep me from you. There’s nothing that’s going to stand between you and a life that never ends.
And that is the fullness of your joy—that you can live and die in the confidence of His love. And here’s where I think it really comes down to it. These words—these things I have spoken to you—that my joy may be in you. Now, there are two different ways to take those words.
Now, I tell you how I think I normally understood them and how I’ve thought about them in the past. “My joy may be in you” is Jesus saying, “I have joy, and I’m going to take that joy and I’m going to put it in you.” You can imagine some sort of ball of light, and Jesus says, “Here’s my joy, and my joy is in you.” So you don’t have to worry about finding your own joy; I’m just going to give you mine like a gift of the Spirit. I give you my love, I give you my peace, I give you my joy, I give you a good conscience. That’s what it is. I think that’s right, and I think that’s true.
The joy that we have is a divine joy. It’s a work by the Spirit. But here is what I think Jesus is really saying. He said, “You want to know what gives me joy? My joy?” We say, “Well, your joy is in the Father.” True. “Your joy is in the Spirit.” True. “Your joy is in the will of God that you’re accomplishing.” True. But Jesus says to us, to you right now, He says, “My joy is in you. You, you give me joy. You are my delight.”
Now again, this is astonishing because if I imagine Jesus sitting at a desk, and he gets out a piece of paper, and he draws a line down the middle, and on the left he writes things that give me joy and on the right he says things that take away my joy, I would guess that I would be on that right side of the line—that I would be taking joy, frustrating Jesus, bothering Him all the time, offending Him with my sins—that I would be on the not joy side. But that is not true for me, for you.
Listen: that you are on the list of things that give joy to Jesus. That when you hear the blessing at the end of the service, “May His face shine upon you,” that you look and you say, “Wow, God is smiling. I wonder what’s making Him smile so much?” The answer is you! He loves you. He delights in you. He takes joy in the fact that you have the Spirit and that you hear the Word and that you will live forever.
I’m speaking these things to you so that my—this is what Jesus says—so that my joy would be in you. So that it’s three miracles, four miracles that we have today—things that we couldn’t, we would never imagine believing unless the Lord speaks.
But listen—that God loves you. Jesus loves you with the love that he gives to the Father. That Jesus chooses you. That Jesus calls you his friend. And that Jesus takes joy in you. And that joy, and that love, and that friendship, and that choosing will last forever. All these things are yours in Christ, who is risen from the dead and lives and reigns to all eternity. May God impress them into our hearts and minds and give us joy and peace in believing. Amen.
Christ is risen. He has risen indeed. Now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit keep your hearts and minds in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
