John 15:12–17

Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. The love of God in Jesus went far beyond this. It has to stand alone, and it is right that it should. We ought to lay down our lives for the brothers and sisters, as we are taught elsewhere. But what is that worth if our hearts do not go out day by day to the common needs and sufferings of God's children? The Lord at once binds love up with obedience, without which it is only self-pleasing.

Such was His love that He could lay down His life for His friends. Here He does not present His death as the sacrifice that pays for sin, which could be no pattern for us. He presents it as the highest expression of love for one's friends. These verses hold a whole history of love: the Father's love to the Son, the love of Jesus to His people, and the love of His people to one another. Each stage is both the source and the standard for the next.

This is a completely different thing from laying down His life for sinners. Here it is for His friends. It shows the intensity of His love: I sacrifice Myself for him. He does not say, I am your Friend, but we are His friends. He was the Friend of sinners when He gave His life for them. We are His friends when we enjoy His confidence... If I have a friend, I tell him what is on my mind, even things that have nothing to do with him. I share all my thoughts with the one who is my friend.

No one can boast of greater love / Than dying for a friend; / You for Your enemies were slain, / What love can compare with Yours?... The thought expressed in the hymn is quite different from the Lord's thought in John 15. In the hymn we think of ourselves as His enemies, which is the exact opposite of "You are My friends."

In John's Gospel, two statements from His own lips show how He expressed His love to God and love to man... He expressed love to His Father and love to His friends in full, when He laid down His life for them both. On the one side for the Father's glory and on the other for the need of His own.

"By this we know love, that He laid down His life for us." If you want to know what love is, look here. This was love indeed. "And we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers and sisters." The same life that we live by was in Him. Should it not show the same love? He may not often ask us to lay down our life for our brothers and sisters. But are there not plain, simple, common ways to test that love every day? My brother may be in need. It is no use talking about being ready to die for him if I at once shrink back from meeting his ordinary, and maybe urgent, need.

The Lord at once binds love up with obedience, without which it is only self-pleasing, with nothing of Him in it or before the soul. "You are my friends if you do what I command you." He is not speaking of reconciling enemies, but of why He calls us His friends. Obedience is the character and the condition. He treats us as friends according to His perfect love, for He lets us into His secrets instead of merely pressing our duty. In principle this is the cherished privilege of the Church — to know His mind, and to read the tangled web of human life by it. But in practice we must be constant in obedience, or the privilege is a bare title and not a living reality.

We all know how the sweetest and most tender relationships and feelings are the easiest to disturb and break. "You are my friends, IF you do what I command you." The life, with its relationships and intimacies, is ours, but we can well understand the meaning of the IF. None of us cares to tell everyone his secrets; we keep them for our intimate friends. But someone may show by his ways that he undervalues his friend's confidence. This may grieve that friend, and, in the very nature of things, the intimacy stops. Distance takes the place of nearness.

He is treating them with perfect confidence. He treats the true disciple with the confidence of being His friend. Otherwise He would be betraying His Father's confidence in telling His secrets. If I go to a person on a matter of business, I simply tell him my business and have done with him. But if I go to a friend, I can tell him everything on my mind, even what does not concern him at all. I do this because I have full confidence in his love and his interest in what concerns me.

One more thing goes with this in verse 14: "You are my friends if you do what I command you." How unspeakable the privilege! To be treated not as servants who receive their orders and nothing more, but as the trusted friends of Christ! He tells them His mind — all that He has heard from the Father. So they keep it in a world that has seen and hated both Him and the Father, and it shapes them as witnesses for Him.

How beautiful it is to see an example of true friendship in Abraham. The Lord said, "Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? For I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice," and so on. Abraham was trustworthy. It is as we do what our Lord has commanded that we continue in His love, and, like Abraham, we become trustworthy.

But can He trust us? Are we really His friends? "If you do what I command you." This is the proof. Not doing what we think, but what He commands. And He has said, "If anyone serves me, he must follow me." There is no such thing as knowing the Master's mind apart from the intimacy of communion. This involves separation from this world and its ways, and nothing but His love can draw us to Himself. As He draws us in this way, our hearts will close against every other voice. In the quiet of His presence we shall learn His secrets and receive His commands.

The disciples of the Lord Jesus were greatly favoured in being called His friends. Earlier He had spoken of them as His sheep, and in resurrection He would call them His brothers. But now He says, "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." Great as the privilege of being servants of the Lord was, this place of friendship was higher, for it brought them into nearness and intimacy with the Son of God, where He made known to them the most wonderful secrets it is possible for men to know.

The Lord treats His own not only as servants, whom He gives directions. He treats them as friends, whom He tells His secrets. He can say, "All that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you." The disciples were indeed servants of Jesus Christ (2 Peter 1:1; Jude 1; Rom. 1:1). But they were more than servants, they were friends, and, if "the privilege of being servants is great, that of being friends is greater."

The servant, as such, "does not know what his master is doing." He only knows the task given to him, and he gets only the direction he needs to carry it out. The servant whom his master treats as a friend knows more. His master tells him the secret purpose behind the work. And there is more. A friend is someone we tell our own affairs to, knowing they will interest him deeply, though they do not touch him directly.

When Abraham was on the mountain with the Lord, the Lord said, "Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?" He was the friend of God, and God took him into His confidence. And the Lord Jesus says the same thing of us... So the whole mind of God — all that He is for man — has been told out in Christ, and by the Spirit now given.

Their right to all this high privilege rests on this — the Son is their prophet. The Son Himself has spoken to them, and He is "the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature." He says, "All that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you." Israel never stood in such privilege as this. God spoke to Israel in many measures and in many ways through His prophets. But their prophets were not the Son. They did not come from the bosom of the Father.

Obedience was the order, but He recognised them as friends. Then He makes known His mind. He tells them all that He had heard from His Father. What friendship! What friend is there to whom we could tell everything?... How the secret of the Father's love must be in Him, and on us too, that we should be the confidants of all that the Father makes known to Him!

The Lord at once ties love to obedience. Without obedience, love is only self-pleasing, with no thought of Him before the soul. "You are my friends if you do what I command you." He is not speaking of reconciling enemies, but of why He calls us His friends. Obedience is the character and condition.

He treats us as friends according to His perfect love, for He lets us into His secrets, instead of merely pressing our duty... It ought to be the treasured privilege of the Church to know His mind this way, and in principle it is. By His mind we read the tangled web of human life, and even the world's changing fortunes. But in practice we must be in earnest and constant in obedience, or the privilege stays a bare title instead of a living reality.

How unspeakable the privilege! He treats us not as servants who receive their orders, and that is all, but as the trusted friends of Christ. He tells us His mind — all that He has heard from the Father. So we keep it in a world that has seen and hated both Him and the Father, and it shapes us as witnesses for Him.

"These things" that the Lord has been speaking about began with the love of Christ for His own. Their end is to bind the disciples together in love for one another. So we can appreciate how fitting the Lord's words are.

As a reminder of how closely love among the disciples is bound up with these things, the Lord repeats His command in verse 17 that they love one another. The Lord knew in advance how much His people would need this word through their history. So He gives this command no fewer than three times in these closing words before He suffered.

The Lord had laid it down in John 13 as a new commandment that marked them out. Here He repeats love to one another, following the pattern of His love to them. How pure and unbounded that love was! Do we believe this is His will for us? Do we love as if we believed Him and valued His love?

Love is the great command the Lord lays on His disciples — the love of each other. It is not the general moral duty of loving one's neighbour, but the mutual love of Christians, with His own love for them as the standard. The nature of the case rules out the love of God that went out to them in their guilt, hostility, and weakness. At that time they were objects of sovereign grace. They were now born of God and therefore they love; for love, since it is of God who is love, is the energy of the new nature. Whatever else the Lord may command, this is His commandment: He loved them, and would have them love one another in the same way. So Paul told the Thessalonians that he did not need to write to them about it. Young as they were in the things of God, they were taught by God to love one another (1 Thessalonians 4:9).

Loving one another is of the greatest importance, along with the truth. This does not mean loving only those who think alike. Least of all does it mean loving only those who agree on some small and outward point. It means loving those who are Christ's, despite ten thousand things that try our nature. And it is safeguarded here by a measure: loving one another as He loved us. He delights in love that goes as far as death.

Our Lord commands love as the bond between His disciples. That command gains force from the world's hatred. Love circulating inside, hatred pressing from outside: this is the situation He has in view as the result of His rejection and death. Let us take this to heart. All through the centuries the tendency has been to reverse this. As the hearts of believers stray into loving the world outside and courting its favour, coldness, division and even hatred find a place inside.

Verses 17 and 18 show a remarkable contrast: love inside the circle, hatred from the world outside. Christianity, in the true sense, is a love circle. You have the Father loving the Son, and the Son loving the Father. You have the Son loving the disciples, and the disciples loving the Son. You have the Father loving the disciples because they loved Jesus. You have the disciples loving one another… Here is a love circle, and through grace, though we are few and weak, we are in it.