In John 16:26, Jesus tells his disciples that no longer “do I need to ask the Father on your behalf,” because, verse 27, “the Father himself loves you.” Which was great; it meant they could have the same direct and very personal relationship with the Father they’d seen Jesus have.
Jesus then explains in verse 27 why it is that “the Father loves you” – the reason being, “because you have loved me.” So in approaching the Father take into consideration, Jesus is saying, what the Father loves. As Jesus said back in John 14:21, “He who loves me will be loved by my Father.”
To experience the love of the Father, then – which was the wonderful new world that would be opening up to the disciples – it was good to know this crucial point about the Father himself, that he loves those who love his Son. In which case, “How do we love his Son?”
Jesus himself answers that in John 14:21 as well, when he says, “Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me,” and in verse 23, “If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching.” And in John 15:10, “If you obey my commands you will remain in my love.” And verse 14, “You are my friends if you do what I command.”
So obeying Jesus is how we love him. And it was no different in how Jesus loved his Father too: “I love the Father,” John 14:31, by “doing exactly what he commanded me.” And in John 15:10, “I have obeyed my Father’s commands and (that’s how I) remain in his love.”
Jesus knew, therefore, what the love of the Father was like, because he’d set his heart on fulfilling exactly what the Father had sent him for, to “testify to what he’d seen and heard” of the Father as being utterly “truthful” (3:32-33). And the Father loved him for it, which Jesus experienced in the Father enabling him to do the grandest job of fulfilling his wishes exactly, and the joy Jesus experienced that came with it.
And that was exactly what Jesus said would happen to his disciples when they set their hearts on obeying what he was sending them to do, because in them loving him that way, they too would experience the love of the Father in a promise in John 15:16, that “the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name.” Which sounds amazing, but “What does ‘in my name’ mean?”….(next blog)
