Christ’s New Commandment
Relevant Scripture
Deuteronomy 6:4-9 . . . Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
Leviticus 19:8 . . . Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself.
Mark 12:28-31 . . . One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
Matthew 5:43-48 . . . “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Matthew 12:46-50 . . . While Jesus was still talking to the crowd, his mother and brothers stood outside, wanting to speak to him. Someone told him, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.” He replied to him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”
Jesus Speaking to His Disciples at the Last Supper
John 13:34-35 . . . “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
John 15:9-25 . . . As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other.
“If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also. They will treat you this way because of my name, for they do not know the one who sent me. If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin. Whoever hates me hates my Father as well. If I had not done among them the works no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin. As it is, they have seen, and yet they have hated both me and my Father. But this is to fulfill what is written in their Law: ‘They hated me without reason.’
Hebrews 10:25 . . . We should not stop gathering together with other believers, as some of you are doing. Instead, we must continue to encourage each other even more as we see the day of the Lord coming.
Photograph by Larry Ricksen
Excerpt from Sermon by Charles Spurgeon on
Christ’s New Commandment
This is a new commandment, because it is a new love, springing from a new nature, and embracing a new nature. I am bound, as a man, to love my fellow man because he is a man. But I am bound, as a spiritually reborn man, to love my fellow Christian still more because he also has been born anew. Still the ties of blood ought to be recognized by us far more than they are. We are too apt to forget that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth.” So that by the common tie of blood, we are all brethren.
But beloved, the ties of grace are far stronger than the ties of blood. If you are born of God, you are brothers in a brotherhood that is stronger even than the natural brotherhood, for brothers according to the flesh may be eternally separated. But brothers, who are truly born of God through faith in Jesus Christ, share a brotherhood which shall last forever. They who are now brothers in Christ shall always be brothers.
It is a very blessed thing when we are able to love one another, because the grace that is in any one of us sees the grace that is in another, and discerns in that other, not the flesh and blood of the Savior, but such a resemblance to Christ that it must love the other one for His sake. As it is true that, if we are of the world, the world will love its own, so is it true that if we are of the Spirit, the Spirit will love His own. The whole redeemed family of Christ is firmly bound together. Born of God ourselves, we keep looking to see others who have been “born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible.” And when we do see them, we cannot help loving them. There is a bond of union between us at once.
The love which Christ commands His followers to have towards one another is not the ordinary love of man to man as such, but the love of the new-born man to the new-born man. Let us, who love the Lord, love each other fervently in that sense. This is a love which arises out of a totally new union. A man who is a Christian belongs to a very special family. That family circle does not comprehend the whole human race—it is a family inside the larger human family, yet separated from it by an inner spiritual life.
In this Christian family, we are no longer Frenchmen or Englishmen, Americans or Russians, black or white, bond or free, but we are “all one in Christ Jesus.” There, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails. There, the barbarian is no less and the Greek is no more than any other member of the redeemed family. We are brethren because, in Christ, we are all in one family and hence it is that we are called to a new kind of love—a love which is like the love of the brothers of the same house, only more sublime, and with better reasons lying at the bottom than even the love of consanguinity can boast.
And beloved friends, this is a new commandment because it is enforced by new necessities. Christians ought to love one another because they are the subjects of one King, who is also their Savior. We are a little band of brothers in the midst of a vast multitude of enemies. “Behold,” said Christ to His disciples, “I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be as shrewd as snakes and harmless as doves.”
If you are truly Christians, you will not receive the love of worldlings. They will be sure to ridicule you, and call you fools, or hypocrites, or something equally uncomplimentary. Well, then, cling the more closely to one another. Whatever opposition you meet with outside, let it only weld you into a firmer union the one with the other. We are like a small company of soldiers, in an enemy’s country, strongly garrisoned by the vast battalions of the foe, so we must hold together as one man, banded together in closest fellowship as our Great Captain bids us.
Further, dear brethren, this is a new commandment because it is suggested by new characteristics. In our fellow men, there may be something lovable, but in our fellow Christians, there must be something lovable.
There is a beauty about the lambs in Christ’s flock as well as the full-grown sheep. There is nothing more lovely to be seen in the whole world than an aged believer, who has lived very near to God. How calm is the old gentleman’s spirit—and when he begins to talk about the things of God and to testify concerning the love of his Lord—how charmingly he talks!
There is much that is beautiful about all true Christians, so try and search out their excellences rather than their defects. If we are ourselves in a right state of heart, we are all the more likely to admire that which is good in others. There is a beauty about your friend that there is not about yourself. Do not be always gazing in the mirror—there are fairer sights to be seen than any you will find there. Look into your fellow Christian’s face, and as you see anything there that is the work of the Spirit, love him because of that.
And once more, this is a new commandment because it is a preparation for better prospects than we have ever enjoyed before. We, who believe in Jesus, are going to live together in heaven forever, so we may as well be good friends while we are here. We shall see each other there in one common glory and be occupied forever in one common employment—the adoration of our Lord and Savior. The remembrance of this truth ought to break down many of the barriers which at present exist in society.
Let us consider the ways in which Jesus exemplified His love to His disciples which we are commanded to copy?
First, Christ loved them unselfishly. He certainly had nothing to gain from associating with them and nothing to learn from them. It is true that He used them to help in the extension of His cause, but He first made them fit to be used. He owed nothing to them and they owed everything to Him.
Jesus also loved them very trustingly. He never wore any armor when He was alone with his disciples. In the midst of skeptical scribes and Pharisees, we can see Him standing like a man on His guard, but as soon as He gets among His own followers, He opens His heart to them, and tells them many things that He does not tell others—so many, indeed, that He once said to them, “If it were not so, I would have told you,” as if He had no secrets from them, but unveiled His very heart to them.
Next, Christ loved His disciples sympathetically. He grieved with them in their sorrows and rejoiced with them in their joys. He entered into most intimate fellowship with them in their varied experiences. Let us try to do the same with our brothers and sisters in Christ. Let us weep with those that weep and rejoice with those that rejoice. Nothing tends so greatly to oil the wheels of life as loving sympathy—let us be always ready with a good supply of it wherever it is needed.
Our Lord also loved His disciples patiently. They must often have grieved Him by their ignorance and unbelief. If any of us had been in His place, we should have said, “You set of stupids, we cannot bear with you any longer.” But our loving Lord did not talk like that. After He had told them the truth twenty times and yet they still did not understand, He went on in the same fashion and told it to them again and again until they did. As He was so patient with His disciples, it ill becomes us, who are ourselves so imperfect, to not likewise be patient with our fellow brothers and sisters.
Finally, our Lord loved His disciples practically. His love did not consist in the mere effervescence of transient emotion or in kind words only, but He loved them deeply and shared all that He had with them. He even condescended to wash their feet as though He had been their servant. Yet He did far more than that, for He laid down His life for them. He gave up all He had for them that He might save His people.
What a marvelous exposition of the precept the whole life and death of Jesus Christ make up for us! May we have the grace to follow where the path is so plainly marked out for us and learn to love our brothers and sisters as our Lord loved us.
My Brother
By Brian Doyle
At a stoplight one morning, I burst into tears, thinking about my brother who will soon be dead from cancer, which no one says but everyone is thinking, and I get honked at by a huge angry guy in a car the size of a toaster, which makes me laugh while crying.
The rest of the day I think how thankful I am for fifty years of this brother, years of fistfights and basketball and stealing shirts from each other and mud and laughter and surfing and postcards and first terrible little goat beards and banging shoulders in the kitchen with our other brothers and picking on our mom as she piped imprecations, and silly gifts and awkward conversations and unbelievably deep conversations, and digging cars out of the snow, and taking each other for granted until we didn’t, and awkwardly holding hands while praying at funerals, and bobbing each other’s kids on our knees, and a thousand thousand other things.
He stood up recently, tall and gaunt and fragile and illuminated, at our family reunion, and he said quietly that he loved us with a deep and inarticulate love, and that he was who he was because of us, and nothing in life ever made him so happy or so proud as to be milling around jostling with all of us, nothing, and if he had never been very good at saying that to us, he was sorry, but he felt that way most powerfully and deeply, and this was damn well the time to say it, wasn’t it? Which it certainly was. Which it certainly is. And all day I have thought this: Why do we not tell each other every hour that we love each other? Why is that? Because we should. Maybe right now, right after this sentence ends.