THE OBLIGATIONS OF LOVE
Terry W Lock
John 13: 3-5, 12-14; 21: 7-12 to “dine”
Philemon v 11-18
I have been thinking, beloved brethren, in relation to these scriptures, about the obligations of love. There are, indeed, many things to be enjoyed in a company like this where the love that exists is according to the love which comes from God. It does not have its origin in man: it has its origin in heaven; it has its origin in the One whose very nature is love. That is where everything that we have, everything that binds us together, everything that claims us and sets us together begins, with the love of God. God who “has not spared his own Son, but delivered him up for us all”, (Rom 8: 32); “God, being rich in mercy, because of his great love wherewith he loved us ...” (Eph 2: 4); God setting out all these things according to Himself. That is a glorious and a wonderful thing, and I hope we are all settled in that. I hope that we are absolutely sure of what our origins are, absolutely sure, indeed, that we have a personal link with the God who loves us so, because it is of the utmost importance. I feel exercised to speak this way about it because if it is not there, these other things will fail.
The obligations of love are the things that the Lord took on in John's gospel. He took them on in John 13. You go through the whole of the book up to this point and there is what is there in His public testimony, there is what is setting out the glory of Himself, there is what He is in Himself, what He is as the I AM; but you get to John 13 and this is private, what is going on secret from the world, but it is the obligation of love, the Lord setting Himself in relation to the maintenance of what was precious to Himself. Beloved brethren, if the saints are precious to us, if the things of God are precious to us, if Christ is precious to us, we have an obligation. Love lays an obligation upon us, not indeed to maintain things in a legal manner; the Lord did not maintain things in John's gospel in a legal manner: the Lord maintains things in John's gospel according to the glory of His nature.
So in John 13, we might wonder why the Lord does this; after having supped He takes this linen towel and girds Himself and goes and puts water in the washhand basin to wash the feet of His disciples. The Lord here is maintaining what was true of Himself, and He did it by washing them. He does not tell them that they may have been defiled by the places where they had had to walk, or by some of their associations of life; He does not do any of that. He maintains what is true in them that is according to Himself. He does it by washing them and He does it with gentleness. He also shows them the necessity of the action by His reply to what Peter says (v 10), but what an obligation of love this was. Indeed, you think it was the Lord of glory here, the One who will indeed come out in a coming day amidst His holy myriads, that Man is this Man, and yet He takes this linen towel and, speaking very reverently, in humility takes a place where He washes the feet of His disciples because they were precious to Him. They were going to carry forward the testimony of Himself. He wanted to maintain them in that; He wanted them in comfortable conditions.
Beloved brethren, do we have this obligation? Indeed we do, and the reason we have this obligation is found in what the Lord says to them; He does not just leave it that He has washed them, “When therefore he had washed their feet, and taken his garments, having sat down again, he said to them, Do ye know what I have done to you?”; and then He says, “Ye call me the Teacher and the Lord and ye say well, for I am so. If I therefore, the Lord and the Teacher, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another's feet”. The obligation of love lies on us as it was expressed by Christ. Christ is the model, and that is quite a test. You may say, 'Well, I cannot do it like Him'. Why? That would be the test, why? You can, beloved brethren; we all can. We can all take up this exercise. The Lord has shown us how; the Lord has given an example and the Lord never puts things before us that He has not shown us how to do. This is one of them. The maintenance of things, the obligation of love in relation to the maintenance of things, is of all importance for our day. Do we want everything to go through to the end for the Lord's sake? Do we want to have here a testimony suited to His own glory? Do we want to have here what pleases His own heart? Then the obligation of love is upon us to do what He has shown us to do. The first thing here in John's gospel is that you wash the saints’ feet to maintain them as He would according to His love.
But then it goes on to the end of John's gospel. This chapter is almost like an addendum, it is almost like a piece that is added on to the end of the gospel, but it is a very precious chapter. We were reminded recently in our fellowship meeting, in relation to what one of the brothers who has gone before has said, that here in this chapter there was night, nakedness, and nothing, JT vol 74 p374. Well, that was true. You might say there were moral conditions that were abominable. The Lord knew they were abominable too: He had to die because of them; He knew better than any, and He knows better than any about the conditions that exist now. There is no point in time, ever, that the conditions govern the affections that are true in Christ; they are never altered by conditions. How He may be able to express Himself may be a different thing but it does not alter the love. You cannot alter the character of the nature of Christ, speaking very reverently. God is never put aside by what He is in Himself due to the failures of men. It has never happened and it never will.
So in these conditions you might think that the disciples would know better, and that is true, and you might say, 'How is the Lord going to meet this?'. Well, here the Lord feeds them. Does He say to them they were wrong? Does He say to Peter he was wrong? If you think about Peter's history here, Peter had denied the Lord and been recovered. Now he has no sooner been recovered than he is away again fishing, naked in a boat. That is after his recovery. You say, 'How can those conditions exist? Why does the Lord not correct them?'. He does correct them, and He does it by feeding them. The obligation of love as the Lord showed here was to feed the man He loved, so that he could come to a moral assessment of his own condition himself, and bring himself into line with the Man who loved him and died for him and who had restored him already. That is what the Lord did. What a wonderful thing that is! Beloved brethren, are we going to feed the saints? Are we going to do that? It is a wonderful thing. I was thinking about this in relation to Abigail who is, in a certain sense, a perfect type of what I have in mind, because David was going on in a vengeful spirit in relation to Nabal’s house and there he does not shine as an example of Christ. He was going to go on in impetuosity to do something that he ought not to do in a manner that fulfilled his own rights with nothing in it for God. What does Abigail do? She brings food, and as she brings food, and as she feeds him and his men, what does she say? ”The soul of my lord shall be bound in the bundle of the living”, 1 Sam 25. She raises him up to see the estimation that God had of him, and she did it by providing food for David so that he had the constitution to take in the moral import of what she was saying. Beloved brethren, it was an obligation of love.
Here the Lord fulfils an obligation of love. Peter gets restored. The Lord goes on from this point here, and He says to Peter, “lovest thou me?”. He lays it on Peter. Peter then needs to search himself. How did he have the capacity to do this? How did Peter have the capacity to judge where he had been and what he had done? How did he have the capacity to move from where he was to being alongside the Lord, to preach at the beginning of the Acts, to be the lead apostle there? How did Peter move to that point from where he had been as naked on a boat? How had he moved? He had moved by the food that the Lord had given him so that he had a moral constitution according to the glory of the Man that had saved him. That was the result of the obligation of love, and the fruit of it was an apostle able to preach the glad tidings. What a glorious thing. The obligation of love accomplished that.
But then you come to Philemon, and Paul was one who was very aware of how much Christ had paid to save him. He was well aware of the debt that he owed. Beloved brethren, so should we be, well aware as we see, “that for your sakes he, being rich, became poor, in order that ye by his poverty might be enriched”, 2 Cor 8: 9. We should never forget what it has cost Christ to purchase us. We should never forget what it has cost God to purchase us “with the blood of his own”, Acts 20: 28. That is the level of the love that has set us together. Paul understood that. Paul was willing to take on the pain, to sacrifice what was his own, what was his right. Did he have an obligation in relation to Onesimus? Yes, he did. He had an obligation of love to pay another's debts. He was willing to sacrifice what was his by right that another should be set free as a brother in the Lord. So that is what he takes on here. He says in relation to this, “but if he have wronged thee anything or owe anything to thee, put this to my account”. Paul was a wealthy man in Christ. He was able to take on others’ debts and pay them in full so that the brotherly covenant could go forward in all the glory of what it is in Christ. What a wonderful thing that is, it was an obligation of love.
Beloved brethren, we all have it, we all have an obligation of love. If we are attached to Christ, if we love what He loves, we need to love what He loves as He loved it, and in order to do that we have an obligation to care as He cared, to act as He acted, to love as He loved, to hold what He holds so that what goes through to the end of the testimonial day is according to the glory of the Man who has died for us.
May it be so! For His Name's sake.
Word in a ministry meeting in Edinburgh
5th February 2019