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Sermon for Midweek of Trinity 18
Deuteronomy 10:12-21 + 1 John 3:1-8 + John 15:1-17
Our three lessons this evening are all related to the answer we heard Jesus give on Sunday to the Pharisee who asked Him which was the greatest commandment in the Law. His answer: You shall love the Lord your God will all your heart, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love for God. Love for your neighbor. Those two commandments summarize everything God requires of mankind.
Those two commandments were not spoken in the Garden of Eden. They didn’t need to be spoken; they were understood, because Adam and Eve were created in the image of the God who is love. So, intentionally avoiding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was THE most obvious way to show love for God, by respecting and honoring His commandment to avoid it. It was also the way to show love between Adam and Eve, to keep one another faithful, to keep one another in God’s love, to keep one another from falling into sin and ruining the perfect life they’d been given. They each had that love for God and for each other by nature. They each had the ability to remain in that love. But they each fell away from both kinds of love—for God and for each other—and so ruined the perfect life they’d been given.
After that, nothing changed about God’s will for mankind, about God’s expectation of love: love for Him, and love for one’s neighbor—because God didn’t change. He remained the essence of love, of heartfelt devotion among the Persons of the Holy Trinity and toward His creation. What changed was mankind’s nature and our ability to fulfill God’s expectation. In short, what changed was our ability to be like God.
Isn’t it ironic? The devil tempted Eve to think she could be like God if she ate from the tree. In reality, she was already like God in the perfection of love before eating. That’s what Adam and Eve gave up when they gave in to temptation.
So what about all the commands to love, to serve, to obey in the Old Testament? As we saw on Sunday, they remain good commands, reflecting God’s own Being. But what good are those commandments for fallen creatures?
They’re good for showing you what God considers good and evil, starting with the attitudes of one’s heart. They’re good for showing you what you would have to do—what you would have to be like—to earn God’s favor. But with those commands come threats, too. Love as God commands you to love, love as God loves, or pay the price.
That’s where Christ comes in. Because, in His great love for us, God chose to give us another way into His home and into His family. God’s eternal Son entered the world in time and became man in order to love in man’s place. He also paid the price for mankind’s lovelessness. He did that, not just to show us the way we are to be, but in order to become the way so that, through Him, we may be born again in the image of the God of love.
The way into God’s home and into God’s family—the only way that actually works for sinful man—is the way of repentance and faith in Christ, being grafted into Him like a branch from a bad tree might be grafted into a good tree. When we’re grafted into Christ through Baptism and faith, then we’re brought into God’s family. We’re made into a new creation, being renewed throughout this life in the image of Christ.
Now, knowing that the tree is good, because the tree is Jesus Himself, the branches that have been grafted into Him—you and I—are rightly expected to produce good fruit. And that fruit is love. Love for God, and love for our neighbor. And especially love for our fellow Christians. That’s specifically whom He was referring to when He said, This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
We Christians, we baptized believers in Christ have been made into children of God, branches grafted into Him who is the Vine. The Apostle John, in his epistle, was very careful to point out both the gift that we have in being called God’s children and also the responsibility that we have to behave as God’s children, with a new nature that is being renewed in the image of its Creator, and a new ability to choose love. Yes, not so much to “feel” it but to “choose” it, to walk in it, to cooperate with the Holy Spirit. You can’t get rid of the sinful desires that bubble up from your flesh, but you don’t have to act on them. You can fight them. And with the help of the Holy Spirit, who was given to you in Holy Baptism, you can keep those sinful desires from ruling over you.
If you let sin rule over you, if you willfully give in to the desires that bubble up from your flesh, if you refuse to be molded into the loving image of Christ, that’s when you become one of those unfruitful branches that the Father will cut off, as Jesus warned His disciples. And if that ever happens, then repent and return to Christ before it’s too late. Right now, there still is time. Right now, God’s love still pursues them. Right now, Christ is still near, here, in the Word, in the preaching of the Gospel, and the Holy Spirit still is working to bring those chopped off branches back to Christ, back to faith, before they get tossed onto the burn heap with the rest of the unbelieving world.
Love is God’s requirement for mankind. Love is what moved God to send His Son to redeem fallen mankind. Love is what God now produces in His children, and what He expects them to produce, with the power of His forgiveness and His love. Abide in Christ, the true Vine, and be the kind of branches that imitate His love: for God, for your neighbor, and for your fellow Christians. Amen.
