THE PATH TO JOY
John 15:9-12 NKJV
9 "As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you; abide in My love. 10 If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love, just as I have kept My Father's commandments and abide in His love. 11 "These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full. 12 This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
I intended to title this devotional The Backdoor To Joy. However, I abandoned that idea. Following the ways of God is never the backdoor. They are not conventional, nor are they always convenient. But there is nothing sneaky or backdoor about it. Jesus made it clear that there was a path to joy. And it's a clear path. The challenge is in walking that path out.
This 15th chapter is one that I find myself going back to on a regular basis. It is a chapter that contains some of Jesus' most in-depth teachings to His disciples before He went to the cross. The apostle John is the only one who details out these important words.
In our verses for today, Jesus is speaking of abiding in His love. The first 17 verses of this chapter involve Jesus speaking of abiding in Him. That He is the vine and we are the branches. This speaks of our connection to Him. The apostle Paul wrote a great deal about our position in Him. These are powerful verses worth spending some prayer and thought time with.
Jesus stayed in the Father's love and loved us in the same way. He is now commanding His disciples to abide or stay or remain in His love. The key to remaining in His love is keeping His commandments. Jesus said that He kept His Father's commandments and stayed in His Father's love. As we keep Jesus' commandments, we abide in His love.
Jesus stops speaking of love for a moment and communicates that He is sharing these things so that His joy would remain in us and that our joy may be full. I am continuing to seek God regarding what it means for Jesus' joy to remain in us and for our joy to be full. But I do not need full understanding to discern that His joy and my joy to the full is bound to be a good thing.
And the path to this new level of joy is keeping Jesus' commandment to walk in love. Jesus is talking about the selfless love that does what is best for others. He is talking about the kind of love that He showed for us. The love that is more of a decision as opposed to a feeling. And, here is where we tend to go off the rails.
For too long we have looked at love through the lens of feelings. If I have loving feelings, then I act on them. If I have no warm and loving feelings for you, then it's no love for you. But if we look at love as a choice we can make. If we see love as a decision that is made independently of feelings, then we are on a better footing. I believe some of the biggest challenges to obeying Jesus' command to love is that we don't look at love as a command but as a situational option. And we have viewed walking in this kind of love as weak. Love is anything but weak. It requires much more strength to love than to be selfish. We need a better understanding of what loving as Jesus loved looks like in our lives.
In 1 Corinthians chapter 13, Paul gives us the best revelation of this divine kind of love.
As we spend some time treating this passage as important, we'll see more clearly how to obey Jesus. And if we stop looking at love as a loss on our part and instead view it as the strong path to joy, we help ourselves better express this love to others. And then we can expect our joy level to rise.
PRAYER
Lord, help me see, understand, and walk in the love that You have commanded. I know this love is a key to more joy in my life.