By Pastor Chad
When I was a teenager, every once in a while, the youth would play a game called “If You Love Me…” The concept of the game was simple: One student would kneel before another and say, “If you love me, you will smile for me.” Sometimes the student requesting the smile would voice the appeal in a funny voice to better coax a smile. To stay in the game, however, the one asked to smile had to refrain from smiling and say, “I love you, but I am not going to smile.” If he or she smiled, they were out of the game. It was always a silly game with lots of laughs.
In our actual personal relationships, we always have to be careful having unrealistic expectations of others, and we must take care never to request an act of charity that is overwhelming or severely burdensome. In our human-to-human relationships, however, we always establish certain social parameters for our relationships. For example, it is hard to be friends with someone that never returns your calls or texts back. These conditions for personal relationships are understandable, and needed for healthy, vibrant fellowship.
But what about our relationship with Jesus? Are we able to set any conditions? Or put another way, do we have any right to set some standards for our fellowship and communion with God? This may be somewhat offensive to you, but we are not talking about a relationship with an equal. We are talking about a relationship with God. The parameters for our relationship with the Lord are set by the Lord. We do not get to determine the conditions and stipulations of our relationship with God.
So when Jesus says in John 14:23, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word…” He is establishing the environment for our relationship with Him to flourish. He is not simply saying, “If you love me, here is how you will show it.” He is going a step beyond that. He is saying that if we love Him, it will be evident in how we live. If we love Him, we will obey Him. This isn’t simply Jesus' love language. This is the condition in which our relationship with Him must exist. Furthermore, obedience is the marker that indeed one does love Jesus.
Jesus has every right to demand these conditions because He is the one that initiates, sustains, and designed the relationship. Additionally, it isn’t as if Jesus is making these requests with His equals. After all, He is God. He is the Almighty. He is the Creator. Therefore, He can make demands that we cannot. This shouldn’t anger us, nor should we feel like we aren’t getting a say in this relationship. Here’s the deal: We don’t deserve this relationship with Him, but in His mercy and grace, He comes to us, calls us to be His friend, and beckons us to follow Him.