Presentation 83. Introduction When we first began to examine the marks of the church we pointed out that the first one Jesus mentioned was joy, now.

Study inJohn’s Gospel

Presentation 83

Mark of the Church: Love

Chap 17v25-26

Presentation 83

IntroductionWhen we first began to examine the marks of the church we pointed out that the first one Jesus mentioned was joy, now we deal with what is surely the greatest mark of the church and the greatest is kept till last and that is love. Love holds all the other marks together. It is love that gives meaning to the others. Without it the church falls far short of what God intends it to be?

Presentation 83

IntroductionIn 1 Corinthians 13 Paul looks at the Christian life under the categories of faith, hope and love - faith that looks back to the cross, hope that looks forward to the Lord's second coming, and love which looks out to the world and other Christians and he concludes, "the greatest of these is love."

With the same thought in mind, Jesus, having spoken of joy, holiness, truth, mission, and unity as essential marks of the church concludes by placing significant emphasis upon love. Here Jesus says that he has declared the name of God to the disciples in order that, "the love you have for me may be in them, and I in them" 17v26.

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When Love is GoneWe grasp the importance of love, when we observe what happens when we remove it. Suppose you remove love from joy. What do you have? You have hedonism for life’s pleasures become self-centred. Subtract love from holiness. What do you get? You get self-righteousness, legalism and judgementalism.

Take love from truth, and you have a cold bitter orthodoxy, the kind of teaching that repels rather than draws and wins folk to Christ.

Take love from mission, and you have colonialism in ecclesiastical garb. Take love from unity, and you have tyranny - with no compassion for people or sensitivity to their needs.

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When Love is GoneOn the other side of the coin when we express love in relation to God and man we find all the other marks of the church following. It leads to joy because we rejoice in God and all he has done for us. It leads to holiness because we want to be like the Jesus who has secured our salvation. Love for God’s Word leads to truth! As we study it a growing realisation of God's truth becomes ours.

Love for the world leads to mission! Love for our Christian brothers and sisters leads to unity because we see that we are bound together in that bundle of life which God himself has created within the Christian community. Is it any wonder that Jesus ends his final discourses and prayer with this emphasis? Love!

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The Source of LoveLove has its source in God. We are not talking about the kind of love that the world invents, aspires to, or imagines, but rather the love of God which is revealed in Jesus Christ and which we come to know as we come to know God. Jesus has opened the door intothis love.

What Jesus is saying is that, if we know God, we will know God's loving nature but, if we do not know a God of love, we do not know God.

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The Source of LoveYou see no Greek, no Roman, no Egyptian, and no Babylonian in Christ's day, or in any of the centuries before, had ever thought of God's nature as being essentially characterized by love. At best, God was thought to be impartial. Or, perhaps inclined to be benevolent towards those who served him.

But such a tit-for-tat understanding is quite removed from the unmerited love of God revealed in the Bible. A love that sent his only son to die in order to draw redeemed men and women into an extraordinary family relationship with God that was sensational and quite unparalleled in human understanding!

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The Source of LoveThe Greek language, in which the N.T. is written, is very rich in words for love. Yet when the writers of the N.T. wanted to talk about the love of God, they found that even this rich vocabulary to be inadequate. They had to choose a little used word, change it, and so infuse it with an entirely new character.

‘Agape’ love could be made to convey the right ideas. Does God love with a righteous, holy love? Yes. That love is agape. Is God's love gracious, sovereign, everlasting? Yes. That love is agape. And so ‘agape’ became the supreme word for speaking about God's love, a new love revealed initially by God through Judaism and then disclosed in its fullness in Jesus Christ through biblical Christianity.

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By RevelationBut how does God reveal his love? God’s love is revealed in Christ's teaching. Yet the fullest expression of God’s love is found on the cross. What does Jesus mean in v26 where he says, “I will continue to make you known”?Why the future tense? What is Jesus thinking about? It must be the Cross itself.

Jesus is saying, “The love that I have been speaking of in years past, I am now going to demonstrate in a dramatic and tangible way through my crucifixion.”

There has never been - there never will be - a greater demonstration of the love of God. It is only at the cross that you will ever begin to plumb the amazing depths of God’s love.

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Love in ActionJesus also shows where we can demonstrate love. He goes on to pray that “the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.” Love is to be shown in us personally.

Why is this of such great concern? Because it is only in his followers that anyone in the days ahead would see this great love. Death was hours away followed by a resurrection and ascension into heaven. He would not be here for men and women to see. But his disciples would. This is why Jesus prayed as he did!

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A Practical QuestionSomeone may ask, “ I can see the importance of love, as you have outlined it. I know that if we leave love out of Christian conduct, we have a distorted picture. I recognise that love comes from God, is demonstrated at the cross, and must be seen in the lives of Christian people. But in practical terms how do we do that? How do we love one another?”

First, love involves listening to one another. We live in an age in which people do a lot of talking but not a lot of listening. God listens to us.

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A Practical QuestionA family with a small boy was seated for breakfast in a restaurant. The waitress came to take their orders and asked the boy, “What would you like to eat”.He said, “I'll have a hamburger and chips with lots of ketchup.”“No, you won't,” said his mother . “You'll have a scrambled egg and toast.”The waitress took the other orders then said to the boy, “I guess it's going to be a scrambled egg and toast.” He nodded. Then she said, “But with lots of ketchup!”

When the waitress had gone the boy said, “I like that waitress; she thinks I'm real.” He liked her because she had listened to him and had learned what he really had to say. So will we, if we really love one another.

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A Practical QuestionSecondly, love lets others share with us and we should share ourselves with them. Unlike professional counsellors, who listen but don’t open up their own hearts to their clients. We have a family relationship.

We should be in a position to say something like, “When I went through that experience, this is what God did in my life and this is how things worked out under his control”.

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A Practical QuestionOur problem is that we do not like to share ourselves. We are often ashamed of our failures and afraid that if we shared our weaknesses we would go down in the other person’s estimation. We would lose the relationship. So how do we get to the point of being able really to share?

There is only one way, and that is to know deep in our hearts that before God we are fully known as we are, with all our blemishes, sin and shame, and that, nevertheless, Jesus Christ has loved us, died for us, and that we are now fully accepted in him. If you know that you are known and yet loved, then you can share your true self and love others.

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A Practical QuestionThirdly, love serves. We must listen, share, and serve. If anything has been taught in this section of the gospel, it is that we must serve. The section began with a reference to service as the outworking of Christ's love “Having loved his own who were in the world, he now showed them the full extent of his love.” 13v1.

Jesus demonstrated what this love means in the washing of the disciples' feet after which Jesus concluded, “Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another's feet”. 13v14

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ConclusionLater Jesus taught what this love means, what the Holy Spirit will do in enabling us to love and then, finally, in his prayer, for the special marks that should characterise us, he concludes with love and has in mind not a warm gooey feeling but sacrificial service.

The Christian church is not in the world to be served; she is in the world to serve in order that the love of God in Christ might be increasingly known through the day to day lives of Christian people. Do we pray and long for this love to be revealed in our lives on a daily basis? Does our faith lay hold of this provision placed in our heart by God and ask for the help of the Spirit to foster its development?

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