God's Love and Your Obedience

If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.

-John 15:10-11 (ESV)

   Jesus' love precedes our love for him and we know this in Scripture (1 John 4:19). Abiding or remaining in his love is linked to our obedience. Now this connection may not be obvious. The key is in recognizing that a Christian's relationship with God is the same as the Son's relationship with the Father.

    A true Christian enjoys a loving relationship with God with the same kind of affection that the Father and his Son have with each other. God's love creates in us a desire to obey his commandments with the same gladness and willingness as the Son obeys the Father. The by-product of this relationship is joy to the fullest. What kind of joy? The same joy that Jesus has with the Father. This is the nature of our relationship with God. And we have it through faith in Jesus Christ.

    Hard to believe isn't it? Sounds impossible, you may think, as you look at the mess in your life. Maybe not. God's gift of salvation is infinitely lavish in accord with his glory and majesty! God does not give cheap gifts. The apostle Paul says this,

He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?

-Romans 8:32 (ESV) 

Two implications, one is a call to self-examination of your Christianity and the second is a clarification of your Christian identity.

1. God's love is not in you when your Christianity does not culminate in practical righteousness.

And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says "I know him" but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him, but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him: whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.

-1 John 2:3-6 (ESV)

    Alexander MacLaren commented, "We are tempted to make too much of the emotions of the religious life and too little of its persistent, dogged obedience." When we only seek the "spiritual high" on Sundays and prefer not to listen to sin-convicting, weighty sermons but only uplifting sermons that make us feel good, how can we learn how to live in righteousness? If we neglect the pursuit of holiness and tolerate the presence of "small, respectable" sins in our daily living, can we truly say that we're Christians? Unless your life backs it up, your public demonstrations of your love for Jesus are in vain.

2. The reality of God's love in you shows in how you live your life.

   John Piper says that when you experience God's love in your heart, you will renounce all known attitudes and behaviors that contradict this demonstration of love to you. Righteousness is attained first by faith then by love. We come to know and believe that God loves us, we love him in return, and love is perfected when we keep his commandments. Some Christians are frustrated that they are struggling in sin and hence, wonder about the reality of their faith. Yet this is exactly how the love of God works in us. We will hate the presence of sin in our lives, we will get rid of sin's entanglements, we will resist the enemy, and we will strive to obey the commands of Jesus Christ.

  So where do you think you stand? Does your Christian life affirm the love of God or does it confirm the absence of divine romance?