“If you love Me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15).
Elizabeth Barret was one of England’s great women poets. Robert Browning was one of the giants of the Victorian Age of Poetry. Their meeting, in 1845, which resulted in marriage a year later, marked the beginning of what came to be known as the “perfect companionship.” One evening, Elizabeth Barret Browning rose from the supper table, moved to her husband’s side, and shyly placed a sheaf of papers in his coat pocket. On those papers were written her “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” considered by many to be among the finest love poems ever written. For Elizabeth, poetry was a record of the growth of her love for her husband and his love for her. Browning was fond of teasingly calling his wife “my little Portuguese” because of her dark complexion, hence, the title, “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” When he removed that first draft of his wife’s poetry from his pocket, Browning read this beautiful line:
The face of all the world has changed
Since I first heard the footsteps of your soul.
Reflecting on those two lines of Elizabeth’s poetry, one author wrote: “That is a very beautiful thing for a wife to say to her husband. But it becomes even more beautiful when we realize that this is what the Christian says about Jesus the Christ. The face of the world has changed since we first knew a love that was closer than home” (://voicings.com/10-illustrations-on-the-power-of-love/).
Friends, what does it mean to truly love Jesus? To love Jesus is to love with two of the four types of love encountered in the Bible. The first is a brotherly love, phileo. This love maintains a warm, heartfelt, and affectionate relationship to the person we love as a brother. This love is shown by close association and giving of time. This love grows the more time two people spend with each other, sharing interests and bearing burdens. However, this love with diminish and even disappear if a person chooses to curtail time with Jesus or stop spending time with Jesus altogether. The second is selfless, sacrificial love, agape. This is the love Apostle Paul described, in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8, when he wrote: “Love is patient, love is kind and not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.” So, truly loving Jesus means we are not selfish, cavalier, smug, aloof, scornful, insulting, disrespectful, obscene, vulgar, bitter, dismissive, or spiteful in relating to Him.
The Baptist Hymn, “Where He Leads Me,” helps us to know more about what loving Jesus entails. In the refrain, we sing: “Where He leads me, I will follow; I’ll go with Him, with Him, all the way.” So, loving Jesus means willingly going wherever He leads, whether the path is into joy and plenty or into sadness and trouble. Another hymn that we sing, “Trust and Obey,” adds to our understanding of what it means to truly love Jesus. We sing: “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.” Therefore, truly loving Jesus means obeying Him in whatever He asks or commands. The third stanza of this hymn adds another dimension to loving Jesus. We sing: “But we never can prove the delights of His love until all on the altar we lay.” Truly loving Jesus means putting Him, His desires, His plans, and His will before ours. It means laying our lives down the way we want them in order to have the life He wants for us. Finally, the fourth stanza of “Trust and Obey,” that we love to sing: “Then in fellowship sweet we will sit at His feet, or we’ll walk by His side in the way; what He says we will do, where He sends, we will go; never fear, only trust and obey.” Consequently, loving Jesus means sitting under His tutelage learning from Him and going, without fear, wherever He tells us to go.
Friends, as you can see, truly loving Jesus is not based on how we feel, what we want, or outward circumstances. Loving Jesus is based on the inward ministry of the Holy Spirit in us and the transformation of our will that leads us to obey Him, and give our lives in pursue of His purpose. Loving Jesus is a deliberate choice to believe and act in accordance to God’s will. To emphasize the fact that loving Jesus is not based on emotional feelings, Jesus tells us in John 14:15: “If you love Me, you will keep my commandments.” So, anyone who says they love Jesus but does not obey Him is lying. The Bible explicitly declares in 1 John 2:4: “The one who says, ‘I have come to know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.” Therefore, dear ones, love for Jesus is proven in our obedience to His commands and will.
Moreover, take to heart Jesus’ promise to the one who loves Him in John 14:21: “He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will disclose Myself to him.” His promise is that our true love for Him results in Him making more of Himself known to us. What a promise! That we can actually get to know the God who created us, loved us enough to die for us on a cross to save us from eternal Hell, and promises to be with us, and never leave us.
I read that a few years ago, the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, made public some 1,300 recently discovered letters that the late president wrote to his wife, Bess, over the course of a half-century. Truman had a lifelong rule of writing to his wife every day they were apart. He followed this rule whenever he was away on official business or whenever Bess left Washington to visit her family back home. Scholars examined the letters for their significance to political and diplomatic history. However, we might be more impressed by the simple fact that every day he was away from his wife, this President of the United States, out of sheer and true love, took time out from dealing with our nation’s interest, national security, and diplomacy with the world’s most powerful leaders to sit down and write a letter to his wife (https://www.sermonillustrations.com/a-z/l/love.htm). Now, if a husband can show this kind of love for his wife, should every Christian not show a surpassing love to His Lord and Savior, Jesus?
John, the apostle of Jesus, said in 1 John 3:1: “See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called the children of God.” This John, the sole apostle standing with Jesus’ mother, Mary, at the foot of the cross when Jesus died, referred to himself as the disciple whom He loved.” That might seem a boast, however, when rightly understood, we know that it was a statement dripping with humility and wonder over the fact that the Messiah, Jesus, whom he and all of Israel waited so long for, had shown him such deep and holy love in saving Him from Hell, calling Him to apostleship, and treating Him as friend. John truly loved Jesus.
C. S. Lewis wrote, when considering seriously our love for Jesus, “On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him.” He did so, because He understood our human capacity to profess love, yet act with fickleness, insincerity, and lukewarmness. The word, shepherd, is filled with vivid imagery. It can be used as both a noun and verb. The shepherd is one who guides, protects, and watches over flocks of sheep or a person or group of people. David was a shepherd of sheep, before God called him to be king of Israel. In 1 Peter 2:25 and 5:4, Jesus is called the Chief Shepherd and Guardian of His people’s souls. To elders or pastors, the Bible gives the strong command in 1 Peter 5:2: “Shepherd the flock of God among you, exercising oversight not under compulsion, but voluntarily, according to the will of God.” Thus, the core of the shepherd’s work is to guide, protect, and watch over.
Each of us, beloved, are to be shepherds of our love for Jesus and to shepherd our love for Jesus. We must, therefore, take seriously loving Jesus above everyone and everything with all our being. We must, under the direction of the Holy Spirit, guide and protect and watch over our love for Jesus keeping it real, alive, wholesome, vibrant, and passionate.
So, then, what about your love for Jesus? Is it real, alive, wholesome, vibrant, passionate? If you were to die and stand at the judgment throne of God today, and the books in Heaven were opened, how would your love for Jesus truly be described?