TEXT: John 13:1

SUBJECT: Attributes of Christ #7: Love

For the last few months at the Lord’s table, we’ve been thinking about the human attributes of Jesus Christ. I stress the word, human, because though the Lord is God, He is not only God: He is also a Man—as human as you and I. He became a man in His mother’s womb; He lived as a man on earth; and when He rose from the dead and ascended to heaven, He did not shuck off His humanity. Jesus Christ is no less human today than He was when He learned a trade in His father’s shop.

This is a central teaching in the New Testament—and one we ought to prize more dearly than we do. It means God understands us; it means we can know God; it means we can become imitators of God.

The trait we’ll look at this morning is the one you cannot miss when reading the Gospels! It is the love of Christ. This love—Paul says—was given to us when we did not deserve it! No one deserves it, of course, but it was given to us when we were least deserving it: when we were yet in our sins—it was then that He commended His love toward us. He goes on to say that this love passes understanding, and yet, God wants us to know it and to grow in that knowledge.

When we think of Christians growing in knowledge, we usually mean in the knowledge of the Bible or of doctrine—and that’s good, we ought to. But, chiefly, we ought to be growing in the knowledge of Christ’s love for us.

Robert Dick Wilson was a professor of Old Testament at Princeton Seminary. For fifteen years, he studied Hebrew, Aramaic, and every other language related to the Old Testament. For the next fifteen years, he mastered the whole literature of Old Testament studies in English, German, Dutch, and French. The next fifteen years he spent in writing scholarly books and papers. When asked to sum up his forty five years of learning, he said,

The song many of us learned in the crib is also the highest and happiest attainment of human learning—to know the love of Christ fills us with all the fullness of the God.

Give me a Savior who loves me and I have enough!

What is this love?

I Corinthians 13 shows us how a loving person acts—patiently, humbly, kindly, and so on. But it doesn’t tell us what love is. Colossians 3:14 says love is the bond of perfection—but that’s what love does—not what it is.

Love is many things, of course, but at the bottom love is a choice. It’s a choice of putting another person above yourself—of making his or her happiness a higher priority than your own.

That’s what love is and that’s what our Lord Jesus Christ had for His disciples in the day and what He still has for them—and for us.

His love is on display in our text, John 13:1. Observe the time: the Passover is but hours away—and the Lord knows that the Lamb to be sacrificed this year is Himself! He is under no illusions: He knows what a cross is and He knows the special agony that He must bear as God’s Sacrifice. He’s going to die an awful death the next morning—but it’s far worse than that: that death will under the curse of God and without the comforting Presence of His Father.

David’s panicked scream will soon be His own—"My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?"

If ever a man had an excuse to think of Himself it is our Lord at this hour. His needs are overwhelming—and yet, they don’t matter to Him. The Man who’s about to die a ghastly death puts other people before Himself.

And the people He prefers to Himself are not worthy of His love. In the next few hours, one of them will betray Him, another will deny Him three times, and every one of them will be ashamed of Him—and pretend they don’t know Him.

Yet it is these people—these weak and disloyal men—whom Jesus loved to the end.

The word, end, doesn’t refer to time—the end of His life, but to capacity—that is, He loved them to the end of His love. Think of all the great acts of human love, put them all together, and you’ve got nothing compared to the love of Christ! That’s how much He loved them. And loves us.

His love had a practical bent to it. He does many things in the next few hours: He eats with them, teaches them, warns them, prays for them, and so on. But the first thing He does is wash their feet.

I know there’s a symbolism in this—a lesson acted out. But, chiefly, He washed their feet because their feet were dirty and love—true love—is always practical.

Telling an aged mother how much you love her is good, but running errands for her or taking her to the doctor or mowing her lawn is better! It’s a matter of loving—not in word and tongue—but in deed and truth.

Are you busy? Have you got other things to do—things that can’t wait? Of course—we all have. But love trumps busy-ness. The Lord had only a few hours to live—and so much to do—yet He found time to wash dirty feet. Because He loved His own who were in the world.

His love for His people has not changed in the last 2,000 years. He still loves us; our happiness matters to Jesus Christ. He does what is necessary to secure it.

If Christ loves us, we ought to be humbled, thankful, and thoroughly content.

If Christ loves us, we ought to love Him in return. We ought to love others as He loved us.