If You Love Me
“Jesus replied, ‘Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Anyone who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me.’” — John 14:23–24 (NIV)
I think a lot of us often overcomplicate our relationship with God. I personally sometimes overthink what it means to love Him. Maybe you do too. That is understandable! We can’t physically sit across the table from Him like a friend, hug Him like a sibling, or help Him carry a heavy box like a neighbor. So many of the ways we express love involve someone physically present. Loving God can feel harder to put into practice — or recognize in ourselves. We may start examining our feelings, wondering whether we feel close enough, grateful enough, or whatever it is we imagine we should feel during the third worship song in the set at church.
But Jesus gives us a rather uncomplicated picture of what it looks like to love Him:
“Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching” (John 14:23, NIV).
That is definitely more concrete than simply saying we love Jesus. It gives our love a direction. It also makes the question more searching. Jesus connects our love for Him to whether we actually do what He says.
Jesus spoke these words during the Last Supper, only hours before His arrest and crucifixion. He had spent years teaching His disciples, correcting them, answering their questions, and showing them what the Father was like. Now, as He prepared them for His departure, He explained what their love would look like when they could no longer walk beside Him: they would keep following His teaching.
John returns to this connection again and again. Earlier in the same conversation, Jesus says,
“Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me” (John 14:21, NIV).
Later, John writes,
“We know that we have come to know him if we keep his commands” (1 John 2:3, NIV),
And:
“In fact, this is love for God: to keep his commands” (1 John 5:3, NIV).
Biblically, love for Jesus includes affection, but it reaches into our actual decisions. We can feel deeply moved by His words and still resist what they ask of us. Admiring His teaching about forgiveness is considerably easier than forgiving someone who has yet to become more likable (and probably won’t anytime soon).
Which raises a practical problem: We cannot obey teaching we do not know.
The disciples had spent three years listening to Jesus teach. They had heard His sermons, watched His miracles, asked Him questions, and lived alongside Him. They had a front-row seat to the life and teaching of the Son of God. We do not have Jesus physically sitting across the breakfast table explaining a parable to us—which, admittedly, would clear up quite a few wonderings—but we have been given His Word.
If we want His teaching to shape our lives, it needs our regular attention. We have to know it. We read it, study it, return to it, and think about it until it begins shaping how we respond to temptation, disappointment, difficult people, and ordinary afternoons.
Paul puts it this way: “Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly” (Colossians 3:16, NIV).
Not visit occasionally. Dwell. Settle in.
But familiarity with Scripture is not the whole goal. It is possible to know exactly what Jesus says and develop an impressive collection of reasons why our situation is an exception. Bible knowledge can even become a way of avoiding obedience if we keep looking for something new to learn while postponing what we already know to do.
The question becomes: Does His Word have authority over me? When it confronts my preferences, my resentment, my spending, or my treatment of someone who irritates me, am I willing to yield?
There is something especially striking, then, about the promise Jesus attaches to obedience:
“My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them” (NIV).
He promises the presence of the Father and the Son. The God whose love can feel difficult to grasp makes His home with His people. Obedience belongs within that relationship of love and nearness.
And Jesus knows the people He is speaking to. These disciples will soon fail Him badly. His words are not based on an inflated estimate of their spiritual competence. Only a few verses earlier, He promises them:
“another advocate to help you and be with you forever—the Spirit of truth” (John 14:16–17, NIV).
God does not hand us commands, wish us luck, and wait to see how embarrassing this gets. He gives us His Spirit. The Father, Son, and Spirit are all present in this passage: the Father sends the Son, the Son speaks the Father’s words, and the Spirit comes to help His people live in them. Our obedience grows out of God’s work in us. The same passage that calls us to obedience also promises the divine help we need to walk in it.
That matters because obedience is not the price of salvation. We are saved by grace, through faith, as God’s gift, not by our works (Ephesians 2:8–9). Yet the very next verse says we are:
“Created in Christ Jesus to do good works” (Ephesians 2:10, NIV).
Grace puts obedience in its proper place. We obey because we belong to Jesus. His love comes first:
“We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19, NIV).
But we should be careful here. “I don’t have to earn salvation” can become a very comfortable place to hide from something Jesus has clearly asked us to do. The grace that forgives our sin also begins changing our relationship to it. We will still stumble, but belonging to Jesus means we can no longer treat disobedience as something He should simply learn to live with.
Jesus Himself shows us love expressed through obedience:
“I love the Father and do exactly what my Father has commanded me” (John 14:31, NIV).
His love for the Father was expressed through obedience to the Father—Ours should be too.
So perhaps the question is not merely, Do I love Jesus? (Most Christians would answer yes without much hesitation) — A more searching question might be: Does the way I live suggest that His words actually matter to me?
Do I know what He teaches? Do I return to His Word often enough for it to shape the way I think? When His teaching confronts something I want, which one gets the final word? Am I learning Scripture simply to know more about Jesus, or am I allowing what I learn to change the way I live?
Jesus does not separate knowing Him, loving Him, and obeying Him as neatly as we sometimes do. We know Him, and in knowing Him, we love Him. We love Him, and because we love Him, we increasingly want to obey Him. And even in our imperfect obedience, He has not left us alone—He has made His home with us.
And thankfully, Jesus does not ask us to manufacture this kind of obedience on our own. Just before telling His disciples that those who love Him will obey His teaching, He promises His Spirit. The command to obey comes with the promise of the One who will help us obey.
The point is not to spend the afternoon panicking over whether we have ever truly loved God. It is to respond honestly where His Word exposes us. Love for Jesus grows through repentance too: admitting our sin, receiving His forgiveness, and taking the next obedient step.
And we take that step with help. Paul later says that
“it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose” (Philippians 2:13, NIV).
Even our growing desire and ability to obey are evidence of God at work within us. We still have to know His Word, listen to it, and choose to follow it, but we do so with the Spirit of God dwelling in us—teaching, reminding, convicting, and transforming us.
Jesus asks for our obedience. And then He gives us what we need to obey.
We do not have to untangle every feeling before we respond to Jesus. We can open His Word, listen honestly, and act on what He says. What has He already made clear that we keep putting off?
bytaylormcgee
