Third Avenue Baptist Church Sunday School — The Gospel of John Series November 15, 2020 It was wonderful to see you this morning and wonderful to be able to turn to God's Word together, and we're continuing through our study in the Gospel of John. We're in John 15, and we are in the farewell discourse of Jesus and thus issues are intensifying, and we are also in, as we shall see, a passage of scripture in which Jesus is giving what amounts to a final briefing to his disciples. And we have the honor by the Holy Spirit of observing this. Over hearing it. Let's pray. Father, we're just so thankful that you give us the opportunity to hear these words even as the disciples heard these words from Jesus. And Father, this means that you intended these words for us, even as Jesus intended these words for his disciples, and may they have the same effect on us as they had upon the disciples. May we receive these words with great joy because we receive your word with great joy. And may we live it faithfully. We pray in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen. So when we were together last, we worked our way to John chapter 15, verse 11, and you'll recall that in verse 11, Jesus said, “these things I spoke to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full.” Now, one of the challenges we face in John chapter 15 in this farewell discourse is that it is the Farewell Discourse. It is Jesus knowing that in a very short amount of time, he is going to be arrested and taken away from his disciples. Before his crucifixion these will be the final words. Now what we have are three chapters here, John chapter 15, which we will conclude shortly. John chapter 16 coming, and then of course the high priestly prayer in John chapter 17. But that last part is the prayer between Jesus and the Father and the disciples were not a part of that. So the time with the disciples is getting very short. The intensity is very high. We're at a fever pitch. This is the greatest tension in the drama of what's taking place in the life and ministry of Jesus as he has headed for the cross. And thus, the words that he's speaking take on a particular poignancy. Now there's something else that takes place in this farewell discourse, and that is that all of this belongs together, but it is not just a matter of Jesus going through an outline. It's not like if you've ever been on a cruise ship and you have a briefing of what to do, if you have to go to the lifeboats and on every cruise, you've got to do this. You've got to go through the drill. It's an international maritime rule. And so when you're on the cruise ship, eventually like the second morning, you've got to meet out at your life boat posts and you have to put on the vest and you have to listen to what's being told. And, and yet, you know, it's a beautiful sunny day. You're in the Caribbean, you're in the Mediterranean. No, one's thinking about the boat sinking. The Titanic's long in the past. And you know, you really do need to know this, but you really want it to be over. And it doesn't go too long, and besides that, the people doing it are reading off of a clipboard so that they can check off everything that they've done. I think of that when I see airline pilots doing this, when I get on an airplane. I look back in the cockpit, looking for a little reassurance that somebody in there looks like he's not 14, and that has some competence to fly this plane. And generally they're going through a checklist. And I'm just thinking,” you know, if I did that two or three times a day, I might get a little careless. I'm hoping you don't.” This is not a checklist in the sense that it's just going through a sequential order. Jesus here, the authenticity of the conversation, this discourse Jesus is having with his disciples, a part of the authenticity is how Jesus goes back to an issue and circles back and will say, “this is why I told you.” Now in looking at that, I have to say that I look at this passage differently as both a father and a grandfather than I probably would have looked at this passage at an earlier point of life, or as a teacher, I look at this differently. And it's because when you are communicating the most massively important matters to people, you're also reading them. And you're looking at their faces. That's one of the reasons why, and you have all these teachers saying that even in person, education is much more difficult because with these children wearing masks, it's much harder to see, “do I have their attention? Do I not? What's going through their minds? Is anything going through their minds?” You know, just the act of watching as one as communicating. And so what happens here is as we come to the passage that begins in John chapter 15, verse 12 is that Jesus is actually repeating much of what he said, but he adds something. So as we saw the last verse was “these things I've spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” And remember, Jesus has told them, he's getting ready to leave them in a little while. “You will not see me.” But now he says in verse 12, “this is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: Then someone lays down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I commanded you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not 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 did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. These things I command you so that you will love one another.” That's a very tight passage. And there are about four huge issues here each of which you could say would be deserving of a book unto itself, but because of the context and the fact that this is a temporal tension, the time is running out. Jesus gives the disciples these truths. And he does so in such a way that he obviously is not saying everything that he might say about them, but some of these things he's spoken of before. So for example, in verse 12, when he begins by saying, “this is my commandment, that you love one another, as I have loved you,” this is the same Jesus who said, “if you love me, you'll keep my commandments.” If you love me, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And we saw the fact that this is not only the fact that Jesus has commandments, this is Old Testament biblical theology coming alive in the New Testament. Only God may give commandments. And so this is a clear assertion of the deity of Christ, as he is here speaking to his disciples, and he doesn't give them maxims and principles and rules and regulations, he gives them commandments. And that is as God the Father gave the commandments to Moses. And we know most famously is the 10 Commandments, But what commandments has Jesus given? When we looked earlier, John 14 and 15, that Jesus has commandment, we saw that he'd given many. We think of the Great Commission, just to give an obvious one. But there are actually something like 400 commandments that Jesus gives, and they're not given in the same spirit of the law, they are instead indeed principles that he has commanded. They are attitudinal. They’re action. But he gets right to the heart. “This is my commandment.” So this is the summary. If you say,” this is the law.” If you have an attorney making a case before a jury or a lawyer making a case for the oral arguments before the United States Supreme court. And, there are two senses in which that lawyer may make reference to the law. He may make specific reference, as he may say, “as in US criminal code, you know, section two, paragraph three,” you know, he may make specific reference as to whether or not that law is actually in play in this. But even more often before the Supreme Court, you will hear attorneys make reference to “the law” as one body. As making basically one argument: it is the rule of law. And so you say, “as the law teaches us. As the law constrains us.” And the same thing is true in the Bible. You need to say, “well, this is the law of God.” Well, God gave laws and God gave commandments, but you can speak of the law and say, there's a distinction between the law and the gospel. Which law do you mean? You mean all of it. The body of the law. And that's exactly what Jesus is doing here. He says, “I'll tell you what, I'll tell you what, everything I've taught you comes down to. It's not that I haven't given you other commandments. I've given you other commandments, but I mean,” and by the way, some of Jesus' commandments are attitudinal, “such as ``fear not,” but you'll notice here he says, “this is THE commandment.” In other words, you're going to summarize everything here. Now in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus summarizes all of the Old Testament law, the law and the prophets, when he was asked, “what is the most important of the commandments?” And he says that “you should love the Lord, your God with all your heart and soul and mind” going back to Deuteronomy. But then he goes to Leviticus and he says, the second is likened to it, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commands, hang all of the law and the profits.” So everything comes down to this, but now Jesus speaks of his own commandments. And he says, “it all comes down to this. My commandments, come down to this, that you love one another, as I have loved you.” Now, that's one of the sentences that rings in our ears with such familiarity. “You shall love one another as I have loved you,” because we know It's familiar to us and John will come back to this in his epistles, but what are we to do with this right now? Well, we're to read it as an ent
