John 15:9-17. "You Are Not Alone"

Some portrayals may display God as a lonely creator in need of company in the beginning of creation. That God isn’t the God Christianity describes. That Creator isn’t the Creator we meet in the Bible. The Bible tells us that, in that incomprehensible eternal past, God was not alone.

This sermon illustrates how God's nature of love is evident in the way he interacts with the world and humanity. Through Jesus Christ, God demonstrated this love by establishing relationships, serving others, and ultimately sacrificing his life: defining the highest form of love. This act not only exemplifies perfect love but also ensures that humans are not condemned to eternal separation from God, which is the ultimate punishment of sin. We as Christians are called to emulate this love in interactions, highlighting community formed through love, thereby never being alone.

This Sunday sermon, based on John 15 verses 9-17, was preached at Grace of God Lutheran Church on May 5, 2024.  This sermon is preached by Pastor Timothy J. Walsh, a member of WELS (Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod). Scripture selections come from the New International Version.

Our services are at 9:30am every Sunday morning, at our campus in Dix Hills on Long Island. Visit our website for more information, at www.graceofgod.church 

Intro Music "On the Way" by Vlad Gluschenko https://soundcloud.com/vgl9
Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0

Outro Music "Divenire" by Ludovico Einaudi
copyright (℗) by: Ludovico Einaudi (in 2006)       

Transcript

Peace and joy are yours in Jesus, friends. Amen.

Picture, in the incomprehensible eternal past, God. All-powerful, all-wise, all alone. Lonely God, floating around, moping. He decides he needs a pet. And so he makes a universe. He makes people. When we’re good, treats. When we’re bad, we get whacked on the nose. 

Or maybe he thinks of us as even more lowly than that. As the cosmic equivalent of an ant farm. And when God gets bored, he shakes the ant farm to see what we do.

That God isn’t the God Christianity describes. That Creator isn’t the Creator we meet in the Bible. The Bible tells us that, in that incomprehensible eternal past, God was not alone.

God is - the word we use - triune. “Three in one.” In that incomprehensible eternal past, God had company. God had relationship. God had family. God had love. God loved, and was loved. 

If the doctrine of the Trinity weren’t true, what we heard in our reading from First John couldn’t be true: “God is love.” God’s essence is love. I’ve got a water bottle here; what is water? Hydrogen and oxygen atoms, arranged in a particular configuration. God is love. And love is - despite what we often think - not really an emotion. Love is action. Love occurs in interaction. One being, one entity, by itself, cannot love. Love requires plurality. For God to essentially be love, God must essentially exist in plurality.

Our God - the Biblical God, the God who created our universe - is triune. “Three-in-One.” Never alone. And when God created the universe, created you, it was not the action of a frustrated and lonely neurotic who craved stimulus. The Creator God is love. He has always loved, has always been loved. God is - to use some modern terminology - well-adjusted.

God showed this when he entered our world. When he lived as a human being. God the Son, the eternally begotten Son, who had always been perfectly loved by his Father (who is God), and who had always perfectly loved his Father with eternal praise and honor - God the Son, Jesus Christ, the man from Nazareth in Galilee, loved. He created relationships with people. He used the gifts and abilities he had to serve and help others. He shared helpful knowledge with others. Again, as we heard in First John, “No one has ever seen God.” John there refers to God the Father. But in Jesus, John himself saw God face-to-face. He saw what God is like through Jesus’ life. God is love. Jesus loved. 

Jesus explained this to his disciples one night, the night before he died on his cross, on a Thursday evening about two thousand years ago, as they walked from an upper room in Jerusalem where they’d just celebrated the Passover to a garden outside the city.

He said, verse one, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.” “As the Father has loved me.” 

How had the Father loved Jesus? We can’t describe, can’t fathom, as limited mortal beings, what the active love of the eternal Father toward his Son before the creation of the world looked like. But from the very beginning of the world, as soon as we come into the picture, we can see the love of the Father toward the Son.

Creation comes about as God speaks: “Let there be light.” The Gospel of John tells us that the Word of God, by which God creates, is the eternal Son of God. The Father loves the Son by giving him the honor of bringing about the world.  The world which is, we also learn in Scripture, made for the Son. As the Father speaks to the Son in the second psalm, “I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession.”

The Son, in turn, loves his disciples as he was loved by the Father. He sends them out with the promise that all the world is open to them, open to their mission. There is no place where they cannot go. “Go and make disciples of all nations,” he commands the disciples after his resurrection. The world belongs to the Christian Church! And not in the foolish way in which some have understood that truth. Throughout the history of the Church, people have heard that the world belongs to us, and have then assumed that they need to bring that about by political force, military force, governing power. Wrong. The Church does not need to capture the world. The world belongs to the Church already, as we are, for it belongs to Christ our Lord, who rules it from heaven’s throne.

The Son loves us, his disciples, by giving us this world; opening it to us, sending us out into it. Just as the Father loved him and gave him all of creation, so the Son loves us. As the apostle Paul writes to the Corinthians, First Corinthians six, “We will judge angels” at the end of time. Nothing in all creation is or will be above the people of God.

So we have a handle on one aspect of God’s love here. In love, God honors. The Father honors the Son by giving him dominion over all creation. The Son honors the Father as he rules. He brings praise forth from those whom he calls into his Church. He teaches his people to honor and pray to the Father with the prayer we call the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father, who art in heaven…” The Father and the Son love one another. The Son, who has been given all things, gives his people freedom in this world. And he gives us that freedom as he gives to us his Spirit.

We’ve talked about the Father and the Son primarily so far. But God is triune, not biune. God’s eternal Spirit, who hovered over the waters of creation, is given to God’s people. He sets us free, as Paul explains in Second Corinthians three: “The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” When we hear the Gospel - the good news that Jesus died to pay the price for our sin and rose to guarantee our eternal life - the Holy Spirit enters our hearts and brings faith - or trust in God - to life. And he sets us free. Without faith, we can only assume that God is angry with us, could be angry with us, or will be angry with us, because our consciences tell us, “You are guilty.” 

But the Gospel message tells us, God has forgiven you. The punishment for your sin is over and done. It happened on a cross, and it wasn’t you hanging there. 

So John tells us in our second reading, verse eighteen, “Perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.” Knowing God’s perfect love - that love which is essential to who God is - it drives out our fear of punishment. 

Our consciences can’t tell us what the punishment we deserve is. We only know that we deserve something. But God explains what the punishment for sin is in the Bible. It’s eternity spent in the place called hell. A place which is described variously in the Bible: As a fire, burning forever. As a moldering graveyard where worms eat bodies that are never completely consumed. Jesus uses both those pictures in his own teaching on hell. But the poignant description he most often uses is simply to describe hell as being a darkness outside of God’s home, where people weep and gnash their teeth.

Hell is not described the way we often picture it, with devils in red running around with pitchforks to torment their poor victims. The agony of hell is not inflicted by the demons. The Bible never pictures that. The agony of hell is produced by our separation from God. 

Humans were not made to be separate from God. We were made to commune with God and with one another. Hell is eternal separation from God and from one another. In the story of the rich man and Lazarus, the rich man is entirely alone in his torment. Lazarus is taken to heaven by angels and seated with Abraham at God’s table. He has fellowship and company. The rich man is alone. And of course that’s the ultimate punishment for sin! To be left entirely alone. God, who has never been alone, executes his judgment with the sentence that modern justice advocates decry, with good reason, as inhumane. Solitary confinement. Fifteen days of solitary, according to the United Nations, is torture. 

Our sin deserves solitary confinement. When we sin, we harm others. We should, for everyone else’s good, be kept away from them! We lie. We slander. We steal. We hurt. We deserve to be alone.

But you are not alone.

Again, in our Gospel reading, now verse thirteen: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” This is what Jesus did. He laid down his life for us. And he did so in such a way that the punishment we deserve - separation from God, eternal loneliness - he experienced. He cried out to the Father from his cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” “Father, where are you?” What Jesus experienced on his cross was hell. Separation from God. How God himself can experience such a thing - how God the Son can experience separation from God the Father, how the perfectly united one God can experience separation - we cannot understand, just as we cannot understand how, in the depths of eternity past, this God expressed love internally.

But because the Son did experience this, we know that we are not, and will not be, alone.

We know that we are his friends. He laid down his life for us. We know that the punishment we deserve has been administered. Justice has been done. We need not fear punishment. And we know God himself, because we know his love. 

From First John again, “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

“Everyone who loves.” Who is that? It’s us. It’s Jesus’ church, his little flock of lambs, scattered all throughout the world. The way John defines a Christian is important. A Christian is not simply, according to John, someone who has learned some facts and can regurgitate them. John tells us - because Jesus told him, that Thursday evening outside Jerusalem - that a Christian is one who loves because they are loved. “We love because he first loved us.”

We had one example of Christian love in action in our first reading, with the story of Tabitha. Tabitha helped people. Tabitha made clothes for people. Tabitha loved. As we heard last week, every one of us has different gifts, and different opportunities to show love. The Christian father or mother loves by modeling forgiveness in their home, and by bringing up their children to know God and God’s love. The Christian young person loves by using their youthful energy profitably as they work dependably for their employers in the marketplace. The Christian older person loves, as Tabitha did, for example, by using their wisdom, their experience, their time, to care for others. The Christian child loves by obeying their parents.

Over all of those categories, Jesus says that each one of us - mothers and fathers, young and old, children - belongs to this category. His friends. “You are my friends if you do what I command.” That might sound kind of controlling, right? But instead, it’s a far healthier definition of friendship than we generally understand. Our culture has a very shallow understanding of friendship. “Friend” could mean, “someone I occasionally chat with out and about in the community.” Those kinds of relationships, what sociologists call weak ties, are important to our emotional health. But the Bible doesn’t call such relationships “friendships.” A friend, Biblically, is someone who makes you better through your interactions. A friend inspires you to virtue. A friend calls you out when you need it. And the inverse gets to be true as well.

Jesus doesn’t have a one sided friendship with us. Yes, he is the one who gives commands. But his commands are not onerous. We heard it: “Love each other.” Jesus does something interesting here, when we read his words in the original Greek. In verse twelve, he says, “My command” - one single command - is “love each other.” But then in verse seventeen, our English Bible obscures some of the Greek grammar. He doesn’t say, singular again, “my command,” as the Bible we’re reading says. Instead, he says, literally from the Greek here, “These things are my commands to you all: Love each other.” Plural commands, singular actual command. Jesus’ point: “Everything I’ve asked you to do, every last thing, to do is summed up with this one command: Love each other.”

You cannot love if you’re alone. And you are not alone. God is with you; God the Spirit living inside you, Jesus the Son your friend. God is with you, and those who are God’s friends are with you. You belong to a body, a community, defined by and formed through love. 

First John four verse seven. “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God.” Amen.