Please open your Bibles. I'm going to add a short scripture reading. First of all, open your Bibles to 1 John. 1 John chapter 4. 1 John 4, verses 7 through 12. I think it's fair to assume that when John wrote this letter, and in particular these verses, he had in mind the instruction of Jesus that we'll see in a little bit in John chapter 13. But we'll start here, 1 John 4, verses 7 through 12. Maybe you've noticed a flow of the service today, first portion of the service, we've been reflecting on God's love for us. And what happens in the Gospel of John, and in this first letter of John, is God and Jesus tells us to love each other as He has loved us. So it begins with the Gospel, and then gives us a command to obey, and then tells us that as we do that, the whole world will know something of the glory of Jesus as it's found in the Gospels. That's what we're going to consider this morning. We'll begin again here in 1 John, 1 John 4, verses 7 through 12. Let's remember that this is God's Word. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is Love. In this, the love of God was made manifest among us that God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us. And then let's turn back to the Gospel of John, John chapter 13. I'm gonna read John chapter 13, verses 21 through 35. What we see in this whole chapter is Jesus by his life and his example and his testimony displaying a pattern of love. It says in verse one of chapter 13 that he loved them to the end. In other words, he never stopped. And because of that, then we have a new commandment. given to us beginning in verse 31, but we'll read verse 21 through verse 35 again. Remember, this is God's word. After saying these things, Jesus was troubled in his spirit and testified, truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me. The disciples looked at one another, uncertain of whom he spoke. One of his disciples, whom Jesus loved, was reclining at table at Jesus' side. So Simon Peter motioned to him to ask Jesus of whom he was speaking. So that disciple, leaning back against Jesus, said to him, Lord, who is it? Jesus answered, it is he to whom I will give this morsel of bread when I have dipped it. So when he had dipped the morsel, he gave it to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot. Then after he had taken the morsel, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, what you are going to do, do quickly. Now, no one at the table knew why he said this to him. Some thought that because Judas had the money bag, Jesus was telling him, buy what we need for the feast, or that he should give something to the poor. So after receiving the morsel of bread, he being Judas immediately went out and it was night. When he had gone out, Jesus said, now is the son of man glorified and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and glorify him at once. Little children, yet a little while I am with you. You will seek me and just as I said to the Jews, so now I also say to you where I am going, you cannot come. A new commandment I give to you that you love one another just as I have loved you. You also are to love one another. By this, all people will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another. Thus ends the reading of God's holy and inspired word. Let's turn again to the Lord in prayer. Lord God, we know this to be your word. We're thankful to know that, to know that it comes with the authority of heaven, that whatever you speak in the scriptures we know is true. And it's good for us, it's profitable to teach, to rebuke and to train us. how we should live to glorify you. And so we pray that by your spirit working in and through the word, you would strengthen us even today, you would renew our hearts so that we could believe your promises and keep your commandments. We pray this with confidence because we pray in the name of Jesus, amen. Love makes the world go round. Love will find a way. All you need is love. Recognize any of those titles? Each of these songs, and many others like them, seek to grab onto a particular theme that somehow Some way, love will bring about the solution to all of our problems. And if you think about it, if you listen to the songs carefully, it doesn't really matter what the problem is. War, racism, hatred, sickness, death, poverty, hunger, political turmoil, family, strife, all you need is love. Love is the answer. Is that true? Is it really that simple? Here's some more lyrics from one of those songs. There's nothing you can know that isn't known. Nothing you can see that isn't shown. Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be. There's nothing you can make that can't be made. No one you can save that can't be saved. It's easy. All you need is love. Was John Lennon right? Is it really that easy? Of course not. Love is hard and the kind of love portrayed in those songs, a love that exists solely on the level of emotion, a love that fluctuates based on mood or health or a circumstance, the kind of love that a person can fall into and just as easily fall out of, You can't depend on that kind of love. It can never solve the problems of the world. But there is a love that solves the problems of the world. a love that answers the problems of sin and death, a love that existed in eternity between the triune God, a love that took on human flesh in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, and a love that the Son of God made known through his sacrificial death on the cross, that love, Jesus' love, answers the problems of this world. And that love stands behind the new commandment in our passage this morning. In this passage, Jesus gives a short and simple commandment. Love one another. It's a command so simple that even a young child can memorize it and appreciate it. It's amazing, right? We have children in this room who are just beginning to learn how to sit through a worship service, and yet they can memorize this commandment very quickly. And they can even begin to understand what it means. They can't always do it, but neither can we. But they can know what it means. It's a simple command. And yet, despite the simplicity of the command, one author writes about it in this way. He says this commandment is profound enough that the most mature believers are repeatedly embarrassed at how poorly they comprehend it. and put it into practice. We can all agree with that, right? It's hard to keep. And that's the difficulty of this passage. It's a commandment that is both at once simple and easy to understand, but immensely difficult to keep. And yet, despite the depth and difficulty of this one commandment, Jesus says that it's by your obedience to this commandment that all people will know that you are my disciples. And so it's significant. It's at the heart of what it means to be a child of God. It's a fundamental mark that belongs to the church and to every believer, a mark that sets apart the church and believers before the eyes of the world, that they might know something of the truth of the gospel. That you love one another. This particular command, according to Jesus, rests at the very heart of what it means to be the church of Jesus Christ and to be a follower of Jesus, at the very heart of what it means to live as a fellowship of believers. And so we need to understand that we need to answer some questions this morning. The most basic being, what is Christian love? If we take it even further to what kind of love does Christ call his church? What is the measure, the pattern, that defines and guides us to love in this way. And this particular passage helps us to answer those questions. First of all, what I want us to see this morning is the pattern of Christian love. Jesus says in verse 34, a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another. A new commandment I give to you. Now isn't there confusion almost immediately? Don't you ask yourself as you're reading that verse, in what sense is this a new commandment? Earlier in his public ministry, in fact, we read it as our reading of the law today. Jesus summarized the Ten Commandments in two parts. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. That's the first. And the second is to love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus didn't come up with those in the moment. He was bringing them back to the Old Testament. Passages like Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19, the 10 commandments given to Moses on the mountain work out these two principles, what it means to love God and love your neighbor. The Apostle Paul picks up on all of this in the letter to the Romans. Paul says in Romans 13, verse 10, love does no wrong to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. Even a couple of verses earlier, the same chapter, Romans 13, verse 8, Paul says, owe no one anything except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. He goes on to list other commandments. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not murder. You shall not steal. You shall not covet. And he says that they're all summed up in the command to love your neighbor as yourself. So this commandment's been there from the beginning. It's always been a summary, and keeping it has always been a way to fulfill the law of God. And if that's true, what does Jesus mean then by calling this a new commandment? When Jesus describes this commandment as new, he doesn't mean that they've never heard it before. Doesn't mean it's never been recorded before. He's describing something new in this way as something of a different quality, of a different type, to another level. The love to which Jesus directs the attention of his disciples is of a quality and of a type that they and the world have never seen before. Remember John 3, 16, which would certainly be in the apostle's mind as he's writing this text. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son. That's where Jesus is directing our attention in this passage, God gave his only son, Jesus came into the world. to save sinners. And he did so by living a perfect life on their behalf, by dying a perfect death and offering a sacrifice in their place. And by doing all of that, Jesus lived out the kind of love that the world had never seen before and would never see again, except that they look to Jesus. That's where he's taking us in this passage. Love one another just as I have loved you. Jesus is saying, in essence, everything predicted about love and the law and the prophets, everything demanded of love and the law and the prophets has been and will be fulfilled in him. It's not the commandment to love that's new. This commandment is new in the sense that Jesus says, love one another just as I have loved you. That's the qualitative difference in John 13. Leviticus 19, God commands the Israelites through Moses, love your neighbor as yourself. But now Jesus says, love as I have loved you. And think about how that fits the context of the whole chapter of John 13. What has Jesus just done at the beginning of the chapter? He got down on his knees in the dirt. And with his own hands, cleaned their dirty, filthy, smelly feet. But even more so, what did he just do in verses 26 through 30? He told Judas, what you're going to do, do it quickly. He sent Judas, Jesus sent Judas into the darkness of the night for the very purpose of betraying him over to death. Jesus himself set in motion the events that would lead him to the horrible death of the cross. He made a deliberate commitment to love his own to the end, not simply by cleaning their feet, but by going all the way to the cross. The shameful, painful, awful death of the cross. And if the rest of the scriptures tell us that love is the fulfillment of the law, then this particular act of self-sacrificing love must be the very pinnacle. the complete and perfect fulfillment of the law. Here's what A.W. Pink wrote in response to these verses. He said, the light of the sun is always the same, but it shines brightest at noon. The cross of Christ was the noontime of everlasting love, the meridian splendor of eternal mercy. He goes on to write that there were many bright manifestations of that same love before. In other words, people have loved as God commanded them to love, but those other manifestations of that kind of love, they were like the light of the morning that shines more and more into the perfect day. And the perfect day was when Christ hung on the cross. This is what Jesus means by calling this a new commandment, because in this world, no one has loved and no one ever will love in the way that Jesus loved sinners. And his love becomes the pattern by which Jesus calls his disciples to love one another. Isn't that what we saw also in 1 John 4? Remember those words again, in this, the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. And then he goes on to write, beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. The gospel makes this a new commandment. The gospel fulfilled in the person and work of Jesus Christ makes this a new commandment. The gospel sets apart this commandment to love. And the first thing that we're called to as we consider this passage is simply to ask this question. Have you believed and trusted in Jesus as he's offered to you in the gospel? Have you believed and trusted in Jesus as he's offered to you in the gospel? Do you know yourself to be a great sinner and Jesus to be a great savior? And if you do, if you know Jesus to be that kind of savior who saves a sinner like you and like me, then he calls us to love after the manner of Jesus. In other words, the love of Christ, the love that leads Him to the cross, saves us and it shapes us. It changes us. So we have the pattern of Christian love and the gospel of Jesus Christ, but secondly, we're called to practice Christian love. To love one another just as Christ has loved you. And I want us to understand as we're considering this passage this morning that the love that he's talking about in particular in these verses is a love that exists among believers. He's particularly speaking to the church and saying, you in the church love each other in this way. Think about the context in which he speaks. He's in a private room with 12 disciples and then sends away Judas. So now 11 gather in the intimate setting of an upper room to meet with their savior within the confines of that small group of followers. Jesus commands them to love one another. He speaks in this passage very specifically about their love, not for the rest of the world, but their love for each other in Christ. The focus of this command in this passage is the love that exists between believers. And I don't want that to be a stumbling block for you. It is for some people who look at this passage and say, John's ethic, as if John has a different ethic than the other Gospels, but John's ethic is inferior to the other Gospels. They point to something like Matthew 5 that says, love your enemies as yourself and say, well, of course you'd love believers. But isn't it more significant that you would love those who persecute you? Now, first of all, if you know the Gospel of John, You know that he talks about that love as well over and over again. It's filled with wonderful expressions of God's love for the world. He's in chapter one, the Lamb of God, he takes away the sins of the world. John 3, 16, for God so loved the world. He goes and speaks the gospel to a Samaritan woman and changes her heart. And she says, this man is the savior of the world. He describes his work as the good shepherd of the sheep who gathers not only the sheep who already belong to the fold, but he goes out and gathers others into the fold. He sends them out at the end of the Gospel of John and says, peace be with you as the Father has sent me into the world. Even so, I'm sending you. So it's there, the love. for the world that we're called to as well. But he begins by reminding them of the love that should exist among believers. For this particular moment, that's his focus, his attention, the love that exists within the visible church. And I think there's at least two reasons within the context of this passage why he focuses there at this point in time. First of all, because their love for each other will encourage and sustain them after Christ has gone away. Isn't that the whole context? He's preparing them in the upper room for the time that he would leave them. Verse 33 says, little children, yet a little while I'm with you, you will seek me. And just as I said to the Jews, so now I also say to you where I'm going, you cannot come. He speaks this particular commandment to the disciples as they prepare for his departure. And the message is something like this, that their love for each other, will reflect his love for them. Jesus gets at this again in chapter 15 of the gospel, he explains that if you keep my commandments, including this commandment to love one another, you will abide in my love. And he promises great joy, a fullness of joy for those who know and experience what it means to love each other as Christ loved them. He said it as well in 1 John 4 verse 12 that we read before. If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. In other words, Jesus is promising them, when I'm gone, you will know and experience and abide in my love as you love one another. And what joy will be yours as you love one another. Do you understand what an encouragement this is for us today as we wait for the return of our Savior? Do you long to know the joy of God in Christ? Do you long to experience the love of God in Christ? One of the ways you experience that is right here in the fellowship of the saints as we love one another for the sake of our Savior. You abide and you know the love of God in Christ. But there's another reason, I think a more basic reason, that Jesus begins by focusing on the love that exists between believers. And it's simply this. Friends, if you cannot love your brothers and sisters in Christ, how could you ever expect to love those who are outside the church? Can I say that again? If you cannot even love your brothers and sisters in Christ, how could you ever expect to love those outside the church? In fact, John, again in his first epistle, goes so far as to argue that a Christian who cannot love his brother and sister is really no Christian at all. 1 John 4 verses 19 and 20. These are hard words and we need to hear them. We love because he first loved us. If someone says I love God and hates his brother, he's a liar. For he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. In other words, this is the very essence of what it means to be a child of God. It's at the very heart of what it means to have tasted and participated in the love of God. It overflows in love toward one another in a love that is like after the manner of the love with which God in Christ has loved you. If you've experienced his love, then you will love one another. During the Reformation, The Reformers identified true Christian churches by certain marks. Maybe you've heard this before. The faithful preaching of the word, the faithful administration of the sacraments, the faithful exercise of discipline. The idea being that if you're a follower of Christ and you're looking for a true Bible-believing church, you can look for those three marks. And those are good tools. They're helpful to us. But Jesus gives another tool. to identify a faithful Christian church. How do they love? Love is the uniform that Christians wear. It's the clothing by which others will identify you as belonging to Jesus. Love is a mark of the true Christian. And I want us to understand and I want us to reckon with the weight of this commandment, the demands that this commandment places upon us as a church. There are so many things that we want to be as a church of Jesus Christ and as followers of our Savior. We want to grow in knowledge and understanding, grow in our comfortableness with the scriptures and doctrine and theology. We're committed to certain things that we should be committed to, and we want to make it clear what we believe the Bible teaches. But remember what what the Holy Spirit says through Paul in First Corinthians 13, about all of that. If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love. I'm a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains but have not love, I have nothing. This is a defining characteristic of the church. It's an identifying mark of a believer. How do they love? And all other pursuits or qualities, commendable or admirable as they might be, they gain nothing and they give nothing if they exist without love. This is what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, that you love one another. Again, 1 John 4, in this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son for us. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. Do you see the logic of the argument that the Holy Spirit is making both in John 13 and in 1 John 4. He begins with what we know is true, what God has done for us in Jesus. And then he says, if the gospel is true, this is what it produces, love. So that we can ask ourselves some questions. Are we known as those who love others who belong to the household of faith? Do we live in such a way that gives evidence of this kind of love? Are we willing to sacrifice, to give of ourselves, even to the point of it hurting, out of love for others in Christ? That's what Jesus is calling us to. He's calling us out of our isolation. out of our selfish pursuits, and he's calling us into the kind of communion and fellowship and sharing and love that characterizes Jesus' relationship with his church. The kind of love that called Jesus down from his heavenly throne to take the form of a servant and put on human flesh, the kind of love that caused Jesus to walk and talk with his people, to suffer and die in their place so that they might have fellowship unbroken with his father. Or to put it very simply, the way that Paul says it, who loved me and gave himself for me. And his love calls us to love one another with a similar personal, intimate, involved, Sacrificial love. The kind of love that can't function in isolation, but requires intimate relationships, a willingness to enter into the suffering of another in order to bear their burdens and walk with them all the way to the other side. To love them to the end. Are we ready to love one another in that way? So we have the pattern, we have the practice, but I want us to see lastly the power of this kind of love. John, inspired by the Holy Spirit, gives us a beautiful portrait of the church at its very best. Look what it says in verse 35. By this, by this love for one another, by this, all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. This kind of love worked out in the life of a community of believers has the power to commend and defend and advance the cause of the gospel. Think about what this kind of love communicates to the world in which we live. In a diverse community of people within the church, different backgrounds, with a variety of opinions, to see this kind of love transcend differences has the power to make those outside the church stop and pay attention. I was reading this week a testimony from a man from Christianity Today, their issue back in March. He's now a pastor, but at the time of the story that he tells, he was an unbeliever in his early 50s. His life was falling apart. The family business was closing. Their finances were a wreck. The girlfriends of both of their sons had died within three weeks of each other. And as they went to these funerals, him hardened in his unbelief. Christians kept coming up and asking, how can we care for you? What can we do for your sons? It made him angry at first. But eventually, their love, their kindness, opened up his heart and his mind to the gospel. I know the Holy Spirit did it, but the Holy Spirit uses means. He opened him up, and he believed and trusted in Jesus. And here's what he wrote, the very end of this. He said, it was by the word that God caused me to love him, but he said, make no mistake, The church first sparked my curiosity. If God's people hadn't made me wonder about their peculiar love, I never would have opened the Bible. That's what Jesus is describing in John chapter 13. The power of this kind of love to open avenues for the gospel. Tertullian, an early church father, As the church was under deep persecution, many giving their lives for the sake of the gospel, he was describing how the world unbelievers responded. He said they would say, see how they love one another. See how they're even ready to die for one another. Francis Schaeffer called the love and unity of the church the final apologetic, the final defense of the gospel. The love that exists between believers, according to Jesus, becomes for the world a defining mark of the church, and it carries with it both a promise and also a warning. Later in John's gospel, chapter 17, verse 21, Jesus is praying to his father for his church. This is his prayer, John 17, verse 21, that they, believers, may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me. Friends, do you see the power of that prayer in chapter 17, the promise and the commandment here in chapter 13? It's both a warning that we can't expect the world to believe that the Father sent the Son, to believe that Jesus' claims are true. We can't expect the world to believe that Christianity or the gospel is true unless they see some evidence of the reality of his love at work in our hearts and in our lives. But friends, if we love in this way, the Spirit is at work among us. and the world stands up and takes notice. Do you want to see the church grow? Do you want to see people added to the kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? Do you want to be a church that's known for evangelistic witness, that sees people confessing and professing their faith and being baptized as they're gathered into the church of Jesus Christ? That's where it begins. May the Lord make us those, even this year, who love each other so well, that we're willing to drop everything, if that's what it takes, to care for those in need, so that Jesus might be magnified and that the world might come to know Him as their Savior. Let's pray. Our Lord and our God, we know that in and of ourselves, we're not characterized by love. We're in many ways selfish. pursuing our own desires. But we know, Lord, that by the power of your Word and your Spirit at work in the Word, that you can continually renew us, make us more like our Savior. We pray, Lord, that you would do that, that as we reflect and meditate on the glory of God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, that we would indeed be changed. and that it would be easy, we could say, by the power of the Spirit to love one another. Lord, you do that work in us, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.