God is love - a Lenten series 33 Love is the only commandment

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farewell discourse
John 15:9 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command. 15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. 17 This is my command: Love each other.

Unique to John's gospel is the upper room discourse. As I prayed through it this morning on Good Friday, I was struck with this passage in chapter 15. John's later epistles reiterate this command over and over again. Love one another. St. John is stuck on repeat, like a broken record. Love, love, love. Everything else depends on it. Without love, Paul says, your good works are empty.

Friends do stuff for each other because they love each other, not because they are worried their friend will punish them with eternal fire. Friends do not threaten each other with an undying inferno. Friends do not fear each other. To demonstrate his friendship to us, Jesus says in verse 13, he laid down his life for us. That is what is so good about Good Friday. Paul writes, "God demonstrated his love toward us, in that while we were still sinners (enemies) he died for us." There is no one Jesus did not die for. Everyone is a friend/child of God. God's love knows no end. He will literally go to hell to extend his love to us!

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