You go first…

If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.” ~John 15:7,8 The teaching in John 15 unfolds like a flower in the morning sun. Jesus repeats a promise of which we’ve already spoken. Somehow, bearing fruit and answered prayer go together. He is inviting us to wholesale prayers so long as these arise from remaining, or sojourning in him.

But now Jesus will drill down to the very heart of the matter – the thing that makes his teaching so universal, so axiomatic, so qualitatively different, and, I would add – possible: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.  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. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” ~John 15: 9-13
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Always, with Jesus, it is about love. It is not about power and control. It is not calculating. It is not judgmental. It is not about self-interest or self-indulgence. It is about a love that reaches such depths, such heights and such breadths that it’s willing to die.

We can easily grasp the logic of what he is saying.  If everyone in the church would simply respond to this teaching it would be: “His kingdom come, His will be done on earth as it is in heaven” instantly. Our problem is with the “If everyone” of that last sentence.  We are waiting around for the other guy to go first.  We sigh out, “If everyone…” And of course, that gets everything backwards. We’re not responsible for the otherness of “If everyone”, we’re only responsible for the “If one…” I’m the one, today – this moment – that needs to get with it. Jesus understood this. He didn’t wait around for the other guy: “Love each other as I have loved you.” It becomes terribly personal and urgent – a now assignment for me. A now assignment for you. We’re not commanded to worry over the progress of anyone else. The command is singular to each one of us yet universal to all of us.