Why was it so important for Jesus to say to his disciples in John 16:33, “Take heart, I have overcome the world”? 

He gave two reasons: first of all, that “In this world you will have trouble,” because he knew the world would do to his disciples what it had done to him. And secondly, when that trouble hit, “in me you may have peace.”

Because in an hour or so trouble would hit, and trouble the disciples weren’t prepared for either, because they thought they’d got everything sorted out already. What more did they need to know, or questions did they need to ask when they’d always had Jesus close by with all the answers (29-30)?

But Jesus knew their confidence would evaporate when he was taken from them. They’d scatter off back home, and in Peter’s case even deny knowing Jesus at all. So Jesus told them ahead of time that “You will leave me all alone” (32), but not to criticize them. It was to let them know that, no matter what the world threw at him, he would be able to overcome it all “for my Father is with me.” 

Now that’s something the disciples could relate to, because in the three years they’d been with Jesus they’d noticed the amazing relationship he’d had with the Father. Jesus clearly loved the Father and he knew the Father loved him. He totally trusted the Father as well, to live to perfection in him all that the Father wanted said and done. And when it came to seeking his Father’s will and wisdom Jesus always got an answer. 

But the disciples were merely observers during this time, never experiencing this relationship with the Father themselves, having always relied on Jesus’ relationship with the Father to see them through.

But that was about to change, and in a wonderful way, because with Jesus gone the disciples would receive “another” helper, the Holy Spirit, who would bring Jesus’ relationship with the Father to life in them (14:17-19), so they too would experience it. They too, therefore, could experience the same peace Jesus experienced in his relationship with the Father when trouble hit. That’s why Jesus could say, “Take heart, for I have overcome the world,” knowing they’d discover the Father was with them too. A new world would be opening up to them, therefore, of “The love of the Father”….(next blog)

In John 16:25, Jesus says to his disciples, “I’ve been using figurative language, but no more of that, just plain talk about my Father.”

What Jesus had been aiming at in his “figurative language” about the Father began back in John 14:2, when he told his disciples that “In my Father’s house are many rooms” – to stir a picture in their minds that being with the Father in his home was their ultimate destiny and that’s what Jesus was preparing them for (2-3, 6).

The second analogy Jesus uses about his Father is in John 15:1, when he says, “I’m the true vine and my Father is the gardener.” Again the focus is on their ultimate destiny that the “gardener” Father had planned for them, and again Jesus being the instrumental “vine” in the Father’s garden to bring that purpose about. 

The third analogy Jesus uses about his Father is in John 16:21, when he compares the pain and anguish of a “woman giving birth” and the joy she receives when the baby is born, to the pain and anguish his disciples will feel when he leaves them, but the joy in store for them too when they realize his leaving them is to open up the same direct relationship with the Father for them that he had, in which “my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name” (23). So it’s the same purpose as the other two analogies – to focus their attention on the Father’s plan for them, and Jesus being the one who made it possible. 

But enough of analogies, Jesus says, it’s time now for speaking plainly about his Father. And it’s a simple point Jesus makes in verse 27, that “the Father himself loves you because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.” All these analogies Jesus had been using about his Father, then, were actually – and primarily – about the Father’s love. It’s important to Jesus, then, to get this point about the Father loving them fixed in their heads first. 

But second point, it’s also important to Jesus that his disciples love him too, to focus their minds on him being the ultimate expression and proof of the Father’s love, which is why the Father had sent him – to love them and care for them on his behalf. And it was both these simple points Jesus wanted his disciples to know, because he knew what the world would throw at them after he was gone, and how it was that he was able to say, “I have overcome the world”….(next blog)

When Jesus told his disciples in John 16:20, “your grief will turn to joy,” it’s an amazing promise and it illustrates one of the wonders of God’s creation, that, yes, there’s bound to be suffering and grief in this life of ours – and Jesus didn’t shy away from saying so either – but just as inevitable is the cause of the suffering becoming the cause of joy. 

Jesus illustrates this by “a woman giving birth” (21), which inevitably involves “pain and anguish,” Jesus’ own words. And what is the cause of all that discomfort and worry? The baby. But the suffering only lasts until out pops junior, and unless there are complications all that discomfort and anguish melt into irreplaceable joy. And what is the cause of that joy? Again, it’s the baby. So what caused the suffering for the mother is also what causes her joy. 

“And so with you,” Jesus continues in verse 22, “Now is your time of grief.” And the cause of it? Him. By leaving them he would cause them pain and anguish too; it was the last thing they wanted him to do – “but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.” And the cause of their irreplaceable joy? Him again, when he came back to them. So Jesus being the cause of their suffering would also become the cause of their joy. 

And that’s what Jesus wanted his disciples concentrating on, because he knew “a time is coming, and has come, when you will be scattered each to his own home, and you will leave me all alone” (32). All their love for Jesus, and their belief in him being sent by God (27), and their confidence in him “knowing all things” (30) – all of it would fly out the window when he was taken from them. 

And he wouldn’t be around anymore to answer their questions either (23). So now what? How could that be a cause of joy? Jesus’ answer, same verse: “my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name,” and in the Father’s answer “your joy will be complete” (24). So in Jesus causing them suffering by leaving them it would also become a cause for joy as they experienced the Father himself now answering their requests, just as he had for Jesus.

So they were about to embark on a whole new relationship with the Father, which they’d seen Jesus have but not experienced themselves yet. It was time, then, for some “Plain talk about the Father”….(next blog)

It was Jesus leaving his disciples that stirred his comment to them, “Now is your time of grief” in John 16:22, because he knew they’d miss him terribly. They’d miss sitting and talking with him and asking questions when they were confused. They’d miss his love. They’d miss the peace and joy he exuded too.

Jesus also knew what they were in for after he left them, like “the world hating you” (15:18-19) and persecuting them just like they persecuted him (20). People would even “kill them believing they were doing God a service” (16:2). And while his disciples would “weep and mourn” at his leaving, “the world would be rejoicing” that he’d gone (16:20). So how could it be “for your good that I’m going away” (16:7)? 

Jesus answered that in the second part of John 16:22. “Now is your time of grief – but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.” So yes, “You will grieve,” verse 20, “but your grief will turn to joy.” 

And their grief did turn to joy when he came back to them after he was killed. But that wasn’t the joy Jesus was really getting at, because as he said in verse 28, “I’m leaving the world and going back to the Father,” so he’d be leaving them again and this time permanently. So where would their joy come from then? 

Jesus answered that in verse 23, when he told them the time was coming when “you will no longer ask me anything,” because “my Father will give you whatever you ask for in my name.” Up to that point they’d never asked the Father directly for anything (24), because they’d always had Jesus to go to. But Jesus knew the real source of joy was his Father. It was in “asking and receiving” from the Father, therefore, that “your joy will be complete” (24).

Jesus wanted them to get the point that “the Father himself loves you” (27), so when asking the Father “in my name” it didn’t mean Jesus would do the asking on their behalf (26). Now they could go directly to the Father just as Jesus had done, and the Father himself would answer (15:16). And the reason he’d answer was “because you have loved me” (16:27), which is why we pray in Jesus’ name, in recognition of our love for him and the Father’s love for him for “entering our world” (28) to make our direct access to the Father possible. Which his disciples would need, because the Father is the expert at “Turning grief into joy”….(next blog)

In John 15:11 Jesus says to his disciples, “I told you this to fill you with my joy, real joy filled to the brim.” And the source of such joy? “Remaining in his love” (9) by loving each other as he’d loved them (12). 

In other words, joy, the kind Jesus experienced as a human, comes from loving and being loved. Jesus knew he was deeply loved by his Father and remained in his love always, which in itself was a source of great joy to Jesus, but included in his joy in verse 9, was loving others with the same love his Father had for him. 

And that’s the joy Jesus wishes on us. He got that point across in verse 13, when he said, “There’s no greater love than laying one’s life down for one’s friends.” And I imagine his disciples nodding in agreement, because the willingness to sacrifice one’s life for someone was such an obvious sign of love. But then Jesus says in verse 14, “You are my friends,” because that’s how much he loved them too. 

So they got the point that they were deeply loved. But Jesus then added that being his friends also included “if you do what I command” (14), because it was in his command for them to love each other like he’d loved them (12) that would fill their joy to the brim, or make their joy “complete” as other translations phrase it. 

So again it was both: joy included both being loved and being able to love. But, Jesus added, it was able to love on an even higher scale than love for each other, because back in John 14:21 Jesus told his disciples, “Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me.” Included in joy, then, would be the ability to love Jesus too. And it didn’t stop there either, because Jesus adds in verse 21, “He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him” – so both he and the Father would be constantly showing the disciples how much they were loved.

So Jesus keeps pouring in the reasons for joy, which must have seemed overwhelming to the disciples, because how could they fill up on them all? Jesus’ answer was: “my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete” (16:23-24). In other words, recognize the source of such joy. It comes from the Father who gave it to Jesus who gives it to us. It’s a gift just begging to be asked for. But didn’t Jesus also say, “Now is your time of grief”?….(next blog)  

In John 15:9, Jesus told his disciples, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.”

Which may not have been that difficult for the disciples to grasp because they’d “remained” in his love for the last three plus years. He’d deeply loved them and they’d grown to love him – but that meant they’d be “filled with grief” when he left them (16:5-6), so how could they “remain” in his love when they couldn’t see or feel his love in person anymore? 

Jesus answered that in John 15:10, when he told his disciples, “If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love.” And Jesus was speaking from experience too, because his Father had not been with him in person either, yet he’d lived as a human in the constant knowledge of his Father’s love. Fortunately, then, he knew from his own experience the exact combination to open that lock for his disciples too. 

The combination being obeying known commands. And that was exactly the same for Jesus as it was for his disciples. But how do the two tie in together? How, for instance, did obeying his Father’s commands translate into Jesus knowing his Father deeply loved him?

Well, what did his Father command him to do, first of all? Jesus answered that back in John 10:18, when he actually spoke of the “command I received from my Father,” the exact command being to “lay down my life for the sheep” (15), which he willingly did “of my own accord” (18).” And that was “the reason my Father loves me” (17). He knew his Father loved him, because that’s what the Father made Jesus fully aware of in response to Jesus’ willingness to lay down his life for his disciples. 

Which takes us back to John 15:12 and Jesus’ specific command to his disciples, which was to “Love each other as I have loved you.” In other words, “lay down your life for others like I laid down my life for you.” Which is exactly what Jesus went on to say in verse 13, that “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.” Result? For their willingness to lay down their lives for each other, Jesus said, “You are my friends if you do what I command” (14). Like his Father did for him, Jesus makes it known to us that we are his dearest friends, constantly and always, to which he adds: “So that my joy may be in you”….(next blog)

In John 16:5-6, Jesus knew his disciples would be “filled with grief” on hearing he was leaving them, so in his last few days with them he “showed them the full extent of his love,” John 13:1.

How he showed his love included one key point: that yes, he was leaving – but – he would “come back and take you to be with me so you can be with me where I am,” John 14:3. So, yes, “the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me” (19). And he threw in more comments along the same lines, like “I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you” (18), and “I’ll love you and show myself to you” (21), and “we (my Father and I) will come to you and make our home with you” (23).

In which case, verse 28, “If you loved me you’d be glad I’m going to the Father,” because it’s “for your good that I’m going away,” John 16:7. But what “good” would that be? Jesus answered that in verse 7: “If I don’t go away the Counsellor won’t come to you; but if I go I’ll send him to you.” So the “good” that Jesus was leaving them for, was to ask the Father to give the disciples “another Counsellor,” the Spirit, because in the Spirit “living with and in them” (14:16-17), this was how Jesus would “come back” to them.

But come back to do what exactly? It was to “take you to be with me so you can be with me where I am” (14:3). Jesus expressed that same wish in John 17:24 when he said, “Father, I want those you’ve given me to be with me where I am.” He also hinted at it in John 14:19, when he told his disciples, “Because I live you also will live.” In other words, whatever existence Jesus was about to enter, they would enter it with him. So rather than Jesus coming back to them in a physical human body like before, the Spirit would lift the disciples into Jesus’ world, which is where the Spirit would open their minds to the realization in verse 20, that “I (Jesus) am in my Father, you are in me, and I am in you.” 

Jesus dropped a clue to help explain what he meant by that in John 16:32, when he told his disciples, “You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me.” Jesus lived in the constant knowledge of his Father’s love. So when Jesus said, “you are in me and I am in you,” his disciples would experience living in the constant knowledge of his love too – just like they had when he’d been with them in person before. So leaving them wouldn’t change that. What they needed to concentrate on instead, then, according to Jesus in John 15:9, was to “Remain in my love”….(next blog)

Twice in John 15, verses 12 and 17, Jesus says, “This is my command: Love each other,” because, as Jesus goes on to show, the disciples’ love for each other would make the Father’s love known. 

That’s why the Father sent Jesus to gather a group of disciples, because by Jesus loving them with the Father’s love (15:9) and teaching them the Father’s words (17:8) they’d come to know the Father and his love themselves (17:26).

At the end of his human life Jesus could then say to his Father in John 17:22, “I have given (those you gave me out of the world, verse 6) the glory you gave me,” the “glory” being his Father’s love (24). So by loving the disciples like his Father loved him, Jesus had given them a jolly good dose of what the Father’s love was like. 

But why? Why did his disciples need to experience the Father’s love? Because, as Jesus explained in the second part of verse 22, “that they may be one as we are one.” Or, “that they come to love each other as you and me, Father, love each other.” So in Jesus loving his disciples with the same love his Father had for him, they then would love each other with that same love too.  

And what was the purpose of that? Jesus answers that in verse 23: it would “let the world know that you (Father) sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” It would be the love of the disciples for each other that would make it clear to the world why the Father had sent Jesus. 

He was sent by the Father to provide visible evidence of the Father’s love. How? By loving his disciples with the same love his Father had for him. This was the Father’s brilliant way of making his love known – by sending Jesus to love some disciples with his Fatherly love first, so that they would pick up on that love and love each other in the same way. And in so doing they would then provide visible evidence of the Father’s love all through the ages too. 

But how would the disciples pick up on the Father’s love through the ages without Jesus present with them? Jesus answered that in John 14:18 with a promise: “I will come to you”….(next blog) 

In John 15:8, Jesus says to his disciples, “This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples” – which was hugely important to Jesus because if they were truly his disciples the “fruit” they produced would bring glory to his Father, which was exactly the fruit Jesus had dedicated his own life to (17:4).

So what kind of fruit in their lives would do that? Jesus answered that in John 13:34 when he told his disciples, “A new commandment I give you: Love each other like I’ve loved you,” because, verse 35, “this is how you’ll be recognized as my disciples.” So the fruit that would identify them as truly his disciples would be their obvious love for each other. 

But a very special kind of love it would be, because as Jesus explained in verse 34, they were to love each other like Jesus had loved them. And that was a very special love too, because Jesus goes on to say in John 15:9, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.”

So Jesus takes his disciples right back to the Father’s love as the starting point, because that was the love Jesus had loved them with. So if his disciples loved each other like he’d loved them, they too would be bringing glory to the Father, since it was the Father’s love they’d be revealing. But how would they know it was the Father’s love?  

It helps that Jesus dropped two clues in how the Father loved him – the first one in John 3:35 when he said, “The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands,” and the second in John 5:20, “the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does.” Put together they create a picture of the Father’s love in his total openness with Jesus, sharing everything about himself and his plans with him.

Jesus then loved his disciples the same way: he was totally open with them too, “for everything I learned from my Father I have made known to you” (15:15), and “I too will love you and show myself to you” (14:21). So, just as the Father had made everything known about himself to Jesus, Jesus in turn “made known to his disciples” everything about himself (16:14-15). So both the Father and Jesus expressed their love in the same way. 

All of which formed the basis for the fruit that the disciples would now produce in bringing glory to the Father – the fruit being their “Love for each other”….(next blog) 

In John 15:8, Jesus told his disciples, “This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.” 

Jesus had chosen his disciples for just that reason too, “to go and bear fruit,” verse 16 – fruit that would uniquely identify them as his disciples. So what kind of fruit did Jesus have in mind? He answered that in verse 8: it would be fruit in their lives that would bring glory to his Father. It would be “lasting fruit” too (16), so a disciple’s life would become a lifelong legacy to the Father’s greatness. 

Which sounds like a tall order for any disciple to fulfill, but Jesus explains how such fruit is produced. Using the analogy of a fruit producing vine, he said, “No branch can bear fruit by itself” (4). To bear fruit a branch has to remain attached to the main stem of the vine – to which Jesus then says in verse 5, “I am the vine; you’re the branches. To bear fruit, then, you must remain attached to me and I to you, because on its own a branch cannot produce anything.” 

So Jesus wasn’t saying, “Go to it lads, bear much fruit to the glory of the Father” – leaving it up to them to figure it out. That would be like asking branches on an apple tree to figure out how to produce apples on their own, without being connected to the tree. 

Instead, Jesus says, “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, you can ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you.” (7). This was a new world his disciples were entering, where the means of fulfilling what they’d been chosen for would be totally provided by Jesus – in both instruction by word and direct help. He’d already provided the instruction by word (3), but from now on he’d provide the direct help to fulfill it too. 

If, then, they wished for what he’d chosen them for – to bear fruit to the glory of the Father –  and they took that wish to Jesus, asking him to make it happen in their lives – he would guarantee an answer. So when Jesus says back in verse 4, “Remain in me, and I will remain in you,” it’s like a tree saying to its branches, “I exist to help you produce a ton of fruit. So stay attached and I’ll feed through whatever you need whenever you need it.” 

And in this way they could produce the kind of “Fruit that brings glory to the Father”….(next blog)