Slideshow image

The love-obey-love paradigm 
John 14:21 “Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” 

This is not telling us how we come to love Jesus. We come to love him by being loved, chosen, saved, and forgiven, by him first. “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

This tells us two things. First, it tells us how we can recognize those who truly love Jesus. Only those who keep his commandments, actually love him. Talk is cheap. Obedience is costly. 

Second, it tells us what happens to those who love and obey Jesus. Their obedience is rewarded: they receive more love from the Father and Son. They have more and more of Jesus revealed to them. The deep desire of the human heart—to be fully known and fully loved—is experienced more and more as we obey Christ’s word with hearts of love, souls of faith, minds of truth, and hands of service. 

So it is that God’s love both moves us to obey him and is also the reward for obedience. 
Hendriksen writes in his commentary:

 “But why cannot God’s love both precede and follow ours? That is exactly what it does, and that is the beauty of it: first, by preceding our love, it creates in us the eager desire to keep Christ’s precepts; then, by following our love, it rewards us for keeping them! Nothing could ever be more glorious than such an arrangement.”

Here is the promise of the Christian’s life with God: we can have a foretaste of heaven on earth in the glory of the Father’s love, manifest in Jesus’ growing fellowship with us, through the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. 

We have tried nearly everything else. Jesus tells us to pursue loving obedience to grow in grace. 

 “Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” John 14:21