¹⁰ “If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.”

So how do we abide in Christ’s love? We abide in His love by keeping His commandments. That is the pattern we have from Jesus Himself, how He abided in His Father’s love. Now, we need to be careful about how we understand this. Some erroneously get this backward, that if God sees us obeying His commands, then He will love us. The motivation of that is to do good deeds in order to procure or earn God’s love. But that is impossible, we have all come short, and could never live in such a way that we become worthy of a perfect love. In fact, the very act of doing the good works would undermine the thing that would make us worthy of love, namely, the good works would be done in self-interest, which is antithetical to love. It is “self-interest” because the motivation is to gain love. Does that not sound like a child who goes through life haunted by the fear of losing her or his father’s love or never gaining it? Love that is earned that way is a fallacious love.

God’s love, rather, is perfect and He loves the unlovely, those requiring patience. He loved us “while we were yet sinners” (Romans 5:8). He didn’t wait for us to “keep My commandments” because we have failed and come short of His glory (Rom 3:23). We were already under judgment of God and dead in our sins, unable to do anything to merit His love. If we ever could merit God’s love, then we would have something to boast about, but Eph 2:8 tells us, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph 2:8–9).

God’s love is unconditional toward us, perfect and complete. But how do we live in the love, enjoying and relishing in it? By doing as Jesus says, just as Jesus does what His father says. Where is the motivation in that, some might say? The motivation is the fact that we are loved by Christ. “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love” (1 John 4:18).

Motivation by love always trumps motivation by fear. Certainly there is a sort of Machiavellian sort of efficiency to motivation by fear; that is the ultimate human manipulation of behavior. But such fear never accomplishes the glory of God. But when we abide in His love, and extend that progression of love from the Father to the Son to us, and then to our fellow Christians and ultimately to the world, that is what brings glory to God.

Lord, because You love me, I want to do as You command. That is the desire of my heart, though I continually fail. Thank You for not condemning me.