Series: Jesus Model – P2 – Loving Others

Sermon Series:  The Jesus Model – Part 2

 Message Aim:  Jesus didn’t come to just tell us what to do, but to model how to love others.

 Sermon Title:    “Loving Others Like Jesus”

 Scripture:   John 15:9-17

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.

Message Synopsis:

Everyone loves love! We want to be loved and we want to give love. The problem is—our love is lacking just like we are. It’s often conditional upon our own mood or our loved one’s actions, appearance or attitude. When it comes to love, all of us fall a little short, don’t we? Some of us are as confused about love as little five-year-old Kari who told her teacher, “Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they get together and smell each other.”

My question for you today is—how do we develop and nurture a love worth giving like Jesus every day? The answer, I believe, is found in God’s Word—John 15:9-17 to be precise.

Jesus had a lot to say about love, and his final night with his followers was no exception. During the course of the evening (which began in John 13 and carries on through chapter 17) Jesus uses the L-word no less than thirty times in eighteen different verses. It doesn’t take a Bible scholar to see that love meant a lot to Jesus, that this was his central message to his disciples. Zeroing in on this brief excerpt from the evening, though, I believe Jesus reveals for us how to obtain a love worth giving. It all begins when we receive his love for us!

• RECEIVE HIS LOVE
Jesus knew that the time for him to leave this world had come. He knew that the time he had left with his disciples was short. And he wanted to spend that time showing them the full extent of his love. “I have loved you even as the Father has loved me. Live within my love” (vs. 9 TLB). “I love you,” he told them!    He loves you too.

The second step is to • RETURN HIS LOVE
In Jesus’ day, a rabbi’s disciples were generally known as his servants. But Jesus changes that. He says: “You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know what his master is doing. But I call you friends, because I have made known to you everything I heard from my Father” (vs. 14-15 NCV).

Now, as we continue to receive and return God’s love, there is a third ingredient that completes the recipe—• REAPPLY HIS LOVE
Repeatedly throughout this passage and the rest of the chapter, Jesus says, “This is my command: Love each other” (vs. 17 NIV). Once we’ve received the love of Jesus into our lives and returned his love, then we’re ready to reapply that love—to share that love with the rest of the world.

Nothing, according to Jesus, is more important than loving God and loving people. Let’s make that our motto—in our hearts every moment of every day. If we love each other as God has loved us, then we will become a church of love that will act like a magnet, drawing people who are starving for love into the presence of Jesus and the salvation that he offers.