Probably my text is best understood as the Revised Version understands
it, which reads, 'If ye love Me, ye will keep My commandments,' making
it an assurance and not an injunction. Christ speaks with the calm
confidence that love to Him will have power enough to sway the life.
His utterance here is not the addition of another commandment to the
list, but rather the pointing out of how they may all be kept.
The principle that underlies these words, then, is this, that love is
the foundation of obedience, and obedience is the sure outcome and
result of love. That is true in regard to those lower forms of love,
which may teach us something of the operation of the higher. We all
know that love which is real, and not simply passion and selfishness
with a mask on, delights most chiefly in knowing and conforming to the
will of the beloved, and that there is nothing sweeter than to be
commanded by the dear voice and to obey for dear love's sake. And you
have only to take that which is the experience of every true heart, in
a thousand sweet ways in daily life, and to lift it into the higher
region, and to transfer it to the bond that unites us with Jesus
Christ, to see that He has invoked no illusory, but an omnipotent power
when He has rested the whole force of His transforming and sanctifying
energy upon this one principle, 'If ye love Me, the Lawgiver, ye will
keep the commandments of My Law.'
That is exactly what distinguishes and lifts the morality of the Gospel
above all other systems. The worst man in the world knows a great deal
more of his duty than the best man does. It is not for want of
knowledge that men go to the devil, but it is for want of power or will
to live their knowledge. And what morality fails to do, with its
clearest utterances of human duty, Christ comes and does. The one law
is like the useless proclamations posted up in some rebellious
district, where there is no army to back them, and the king's authority
from whom they come is flouted. The other law gets itself obeyed. Such
is the difference between the powerless morality of the world and the
commandment of Jesus Christ. Here is the road plain and straight. What
matters that, if there is no force to draw the cart along it? There
might as well be no road at all. Here stand all your looms, polished
and in perfect order, but there is no steam in the boilers; and so
there is no motion, and nothing is woven. What we want is not law, but
power, and what the Gospel gives us, and stands alone in giving us, is
not merely the knowledge of the will of God, and the clear revelation
of what we ought to be, but the power to become it.
Love does that, and love alone. That strong force brought into action
in our hearts will drive out from thence all rivals, all false and low
things. The true way to cleanse the Augean stables, as the old myth has
it, was to turn the river into them. It would have been endless work to
wheel out the filth in wheelbarrows loaded by spades: turn the stream
in, and it will sweep away all the foulness. When the Ark comes into
the Temple, Dagon lies, a mutilated stump, upon the threshold. When
Christ comes into my heart, then all the obscene and twilight-loving
shapes that lurked there, and defiled it, will vanish like ghosts at
cock-crowing before His calm and pure Presence. He, and He alone,
entering my heart by the portals of my love, will coerce my evil and
stimulate my good. And if I love Him, I shall keep His commandments.
Now, brethren, here is a plain test and a double-barrelled one, which
tries both our love and our obedience with a sharp touchstone. 'If ye
love Me, ye will keep My commandments.' That implies, first, that there
is no love worth calling so which does not keep the commandment. All
the emotional and the mystic, and the so-called higher parts of
Christian experience, have to be content to submit to this plain
test—do they help us to live as Christ would have us, and that because
He would have us? Love to Him that does not keep His commandments is
either spurious or dangerously feeble. The true sign of its presence in
the heart and the noblest of its operations is not to be found in
high-pitched expressions of fervid emotion, nor even in the sacred joys
of solitary communion, but in its making us, while in the rough
struggle of daily life, and surrounded by trivial tasks, live near Him,
and by Him, and for Him, and like Him. If I live so, I love Him; if
not, not. Not that I mean to say that in regard to each individual
action of a Christian man's life there must be the conscious presence
of reference to the supreme love, but that each individual action of
the life ought to come from a character of which that reference to the
supreme love is the very formative principle and foundation. The
colouring matter put in at the fountain will dye every drop of the
stream; and they whose inmost hearts are tinged and tinctured with the
sweet love of Jesus Christ, from their hearts will go forth issues of
life all coloured and moulded thereby. Test your Christian love by your
practical obedience.
And, on the other hand, there is no obedience worth calling so which is
not the child of love; and all the multitude of right things which
Christians do without that motive are made short work of by that
consideration. Obedience which is formal, mechanical, matter-of-course,
without the presence in it of a loving submission of the will;
obedience which is reluctant, calculated, forced upon us by dread,
imitated from others—all that is nothing; and Jesus Christ does not
count it as obedience at all. This is a sieve with very small meshes,
and there will be a great deal of rubbish left in it after the shaking.
'If ye love Me, keep My commandments.' The 'keeping of My commandments'
which has not 'love to Me' underlying it is no keeping at all.