(Audio)
If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love
We want to remain in the amazing love of Christ, surpasses anything we ever have ever known.
"I have told you this so that
my joy might be in you and
your joy might be complete."
We want to the joy of the LORD to fill our hearts and minds. It is a fruit of the Spirit given, and so is meant to be available for all believers who have become Spirit-filled at their baptisms.
If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love
It is this middle term with which we struggle. Commandment and love seem to be diametrically opposed realities. In seems like a question of dead letter versus living Spirit.
just as I have kept my Father's commandments
and remain in his love.
Jesus shows us why commandment and love have a necessary connection. Jesus desires to do his Father's will. His Father's will is commandment, unchanging, eternal, precisely because it is the greatest possible good that can be willed. Any change would be to something lesser, to a world with less love, and as a consequence, less joy. Jesus does not need to second guess the Father's will because he lives in it and experiences the results in his own being.
Why, then, are you now putting God to the test
by placing on the shoulders of the disciples
a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear?
There are human rules that we overemphasize. We tend to look for ways in which we can judge ourselves successful and perhaps better than others. We want these to be ways in which we ourselves set the terms. We take God's good ideas and twist them for the sake of our own pride and sense of righteousness.
On the contrary, we believe that we are saved
through the grace of the Lord Jesus, in the same way as they.
The commandments are all about love. They are not burdensome (see First John 5:3). They are descriptions of how we are meant to let the Holy Spirit live in us and love through us. The yokes we create draw people away from love into pride and competition. Let us lay them down.
Say among the nations: The LORD is king.
He has made the world firm, not to be moved;
he governs the peoples with equity.
No comments:
Post a Comment