We learned that the first part of God’s divine love is that He loves us in a way that enables us to see His glory. But that is only half of what Jesus wants in these final, climactic verses of his prayer. I just said we were really made for seeing and cherishing His glory. What he wants is that we not only see His glory, we cherish it, savor it, relish it, delight in it, treasure it, and love it. In short that we would delight in Him; that we treasure Him; and that we would love Him.
Jonathan Edwards writes:
“When God is loved aright, He is loved for His excellency, the beauty of His nature.” What does it mean to love Him? That Jesus would truly be as precious to us as He is to the Father. That we would love Him with a “peculiar love”. So, consider verse 26, the very last verse:
“I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”
Let us look at this carefully. Jesus' request to God is that He desires the Father’s love for the Son to be in us in order for us to love Him. Have you ever thought that Jesus wants you to love Him not merely with your love but with love that the Father has for Him? My love is weak and inconsistent. My love is conditional and moody. My love is selfish and prejudiced. My love is limited and finite. My love is human and sinful. Therefore, my love for Him is totally inadequate in loving Him, the God of glory; therefore, it is inadequate and in reality, impossible, for loving others with His love. That is why Jesus asks the Father for his love to be given to us. God makes it possible for me, a sinner, to love such a worthy, glorious being like God in a manner of love that He so richly and worthily deserves! In short, Jesus is praying for the Father to love us in order to help us love Him by making much of him!
How is this possible? First, because of the knowledge of the God of love. "I have made known unto them thy name, and will make it known." We cannot love a God whom we do not know: a measure of knowledge is needful to affection. However lovely God may be, a man blind of soul cannot perceive him, and therefore is not touched by his loveliness. Only when the eyes are opened to behold the loveliness of God will the heart go out towards God who is so desirable an object for the affections. Brethren, we must know in order to believe; we must know in order to hope; and we must especially know in order to love. Hence, the great desirableness that you should know the Lord of love (1 John 4:8, 16) and His great love which surpasses knowledge.
“I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge-that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God" (Ephesians 3:17-19).
You cannot give in return love which you have never known. Some of us in our lives have been deprived of love. Perhaps we have never known much love in our earthly relationships. Love for us has been as the song goes “the Elusive Butterfly”. In reality, we all are deprived of God’s love! Not because of Him but because we have never received His love due to our sinfulness. Without the inflow of love, no wonder there has been no outflow of love. So until the love of God has come into your heart, and you have been made a partaker of it, you cannot rejoice in it or return it.
Second, it is possible because the knowledge here spoken of is knowledge which Jesus gave them. “I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known.” O beloved, it is not knowledge that you and I pick up as a matter of book learning that will ever bring out our love to the Father: it is knowledge given us by Christ through his Spirit. It is not knowledge communicated by the preacher alone which will bless you; for however much he may be taught of God himself, he cannot preach to the heart unless the blessed Spirit of God comes and takes of the things that are spoken, and reveals them and makes them manifest to each individual heart, so that in consequence it knows the Lord.
This knowledge, dear friends, comes to us gradually. The text indicates this. “I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known." As if, though they knew the Father, there was far more to know and the Lord Jesus was resolved to teach them more and more and more and more.
Third, it is possible because of the new birth. Becoming a Christian means getting a new nature which is given by God. Practically speaking this means that God comes into our lives by the Holy Spirit and begins to give us new affections, new emotions, namely the emotions and affections of God: the love that the Father has for the Son! It is the presence of God the Spirit in our lives that causes us to love Jesus with the love of God the Father. Romans 5:5 says that “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us”. Indeed the Holy Spirit may be viewed as the love of God in a Person. To be ruled by the Spirit is to be ruled by a divine love for Jesus. Jesus is simply praying that we may be filled with the Spirit who is the divine Person who expresses the love that the Father has for the Son. Thus we will be filled with the very love with which the Father loves the Son. The result is divine love flowing into your soul and pouring out of your life to God and others. No wonder why Paul speaks of love as the fruit of the indwelling Spirit (Galatians 5:22).
So what kind of love does Jesus desire for you to have? A peculiar love. “The love with which you have loved me.” This is a kind of love whereby Jesus is as precious, as valuable, to us as He is to the Father in Heaven. There is no greater love in the entire universe than the love flowing between the Father and the Son in the holy Trinity. No love is more perfect, more powerful, more intense, more continuous, more pure, and more full of delight in the beloved, than the love God the Father has for the Son. It is energy of joy that makes atom bombs look like firecrackers. Oh, how the Father delights in the Son! Oh, how precious the Son is to the Father! "This is my beloved Son, with whom 1 am well pleased," God said at Jesus' baptism (Matthew 3:17). "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him," God said at the transfiguration (Matthew 17:5). Jesus is the living Stone-rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him” (1 Peter 2:4). In the entire universe none is more precious to God the Father than His Son, Jesus Christ. He is loved with perfect, infinite, divine love. That is how precious He should be to us.
Oh how much does the Father love the Son! Is not this a wonderful thing,—that God's own love to Jesus should dwell in our hearts? And yet it is so. The love wherewith we love Christ, mark you, is God's love to Christ: "That the love that You have loved Me may be in them.”
All true love, such as the Father delights in and accepts at our hands, is nothing but his own love, which has come streaming down from his own heart into our renewed minds. Jesus' longing and goal is that we see his glory and then that we be able to love what we see with the same love that the Father has for the Son. And he doesn't mean that we merely imitate the love of the Father for the Son. He means the Father's very love becomes our love for the Son – that we love the Son with the love of the Father for the Son. This is what the Spirit bestows in our lives: Love for the Son by the Father through the Spirit.
Oh what grace He gives us. And I say it is his grace, because the best thing he has to give us is his love and joy. "These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full" (John 15:11; see also 17:13). It would not be fully gracious of Jesus simply to increase my love and joy to its final limit and then leave me short of his.
My capacities for love and joy are very confined. So Christ not only offers himself as the divine object of my joy, but pours his capacity for love and joy into me, so that I can love and enjoy him with the very love and joy of God. This is glory, and this is grace. We will love and enjoy the Son of God with the very love and enjoyment of his Father. God's delight in his Son will be in us and it will be ours. And this will never end, because neither the Father nor the Son ever ends. Their love for each other will be our love for them and therefore our loving them will never die.
This is what Jesus prays for us: "Father, show them my glory and give them the very delight in me that you have in me." May we see Christ with the eyes of God and savor Christ with the heart of God. The love of God is so working as to change you so that you enjoy making much of him forever and ever and ever. And that's the end of your quest. Do you want this? Do you desire to be loved by God for God? That is the essence of heaven. That is the gift Christ came to purchase for sinners at the cost of his death in our place.
When Karl Barth, the famed German theologian, visited the United States, a student in seminary supposedly asked, “Dr. Barth, what is the single most important truth you have learned as a theologian?” Barth replied, “the most important thing that I have learned is this: Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” May we never forget not only that Jesus loves us but also the peculiar and precious way that He loves us: to be free to love Him the way the Father loves Him. There is no greater gift than this.
A PRAYER:
Father, please answer Your Son's prayer for us even now as much as we can bear that the love with which You loved Him may be in us and He in us. We confess that our love for Christ is not all He deserves. We long to love Him more. More purely. More intensely. More consistently. More joyfully. For Your own sake, Father, and for the glory of Your Son, satisfy us with His glory. In His name we pray. Amen.
