"My Lord, I Did Not Choose You"

What I see in the Bible is God loving and desiring love. In love He predestinated His chosen ones and lavished grace upon grace in making them His own.

Listen to Jesus. “Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you, abide in My love” That’s verse 9 of our text. Then in verse 12, “This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you.”

In every case He has used the Greek word ‘agape’ or ‘agapao’, denoting an all self-sacrificing, self-giving love that is proffered without condition and even undeserved. This is the love He has for the Father and the Father for Him, it is the love He has shown us in His sacrifice for sin, and it is the love He commands of those for whom He paid the ultimate price and purchased.

In sharp contrast, in verse 19 of this chapter Jesus tells His apostles that if they were of the world the world would love them as being part of the world. The word He used there is ‘phileo’, which denotes a friendly affection; a feeling of acceptance as an equal and a friend.

He could not use the word ‘agape’ because the world cannot ‘agape’.

It is a word for the Spirit of Christ and all who have the Spirit of Christ. Do you understand, believer with the Holy Spirit in you, that He has given you a love that can only be shared in the Spirit and that He now requires you to live in that love toward God and toward one another?

It is a privilege, you know, since no one else in the world can have or know this kind of love.

Anyone who watched the movies made about the Spider-Man knows the line “With great power comes great responsibility”. Along that same line of thought, and an infinitely more pertinent application, what solemn obligation do we have as Spirit-filled believers in Christ to obey this command of His, since we are the only ones in the world who have this gift to share?

And how must it grieve the loving (agape) Spirit of Christ who indwells us, who will never leave us, when we quench that love and treat one another, live with one another as though the very best we can muster for each other or even for God is phileo – at best?

I’ll ask you a question for you to answer in the privacy of your own thoughts. And I’m not teaching eschatology here – about the last days and the rapture and the tribulation and the order of how things will happen – I’m just painting a brief scenario and asking you to weigh things according to your personal knowledge and observations.

If Jesus was to suddenly come to the earth today, right now, to the church in our society, to our state, to our town, to the very churches with which we are supposedly affiliated, would He find this kind of love in practice and in evidence?

Now I’m not going to try to list ways that we should be demonstrating agape love. Jesus didn’t do that. He didn’t say, “Love one another, and here are the things you should do to show this love”.

What He did say is ‘just as I have loved you’, and since He gave His life for us I guess that tells us what He is calling for, doesn’t it?