IBS Application for John 15:15

“No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.”

There’s much that could be said about this verse and the rest of the section it belongs in. I want to discuss what He says here about what it is to be a servant of the Father. It’s made clear in this verse alone that Jesus doesn’t consider any who follow Him to be merely servants anymore, but friends. He says that He’s able to call the disciples friends because He has revealed all the Father’s wishes for their lives to them; none of them is in the dark about the plans the Father has for Jesus or for the disciples.

The promise of salvation has been delivered through Christ; now, none of us is counted as mere servants in Christ, but friends of God. We know not only that God always intended for us to have salvation, but that it was always His intention to bridge the gap between us and Him and make us His friends. But how was this accomplished and what is expected of us in response?

To the first part of that question, we find the answer in the the verses prior to this verse: Christ was able to accomplish this by fulfilling the will of the Father, which He did by laying down His life for the sake of His friends. This is a fulfillment of what Jesus Himself says is one of the two greatest commandments, which is that we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves. He fulfilled the Law where we failed to uphold it.

Now, how do we respond? We now know that the Father’s will is that we have salvation from sin and that He seeks to call us His friends. How do we live as friends of God? I believe that this is accomplished by abiding in the words of Christ, as He says in a few verses prior to our verse here that it is in abiding in His words that the Father is glorified, and our joy is made full. He also tells us to love one another as He has loved us. Given that the Father’s will is for us to receive love from Him, it seems logical to me that the response to that love which pours out upon us in overflowing abundance is to love others in the same manner.


A practical application for this verse was a bit hard for me to pull out of this verse. But I believe that keeping it simple is the best way to go about applying the Word sometimes. For my application, I’ll spend my devotion time over the next few days praying for a loving heart that will make me willing to do for my friends here in Ignite what Christ has done for me, to the point of laying my life down in service to them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

James 1:5 IBS Application “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him.” This passage from James is fascinating to me. It would be all too easy to determine it’s meaning at face value without looking at the larger context. It wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to look at the singular truth contained within this one sentence without the context, but I feel as though some of the greater meaning is lost without reading all that James has to say in this first chapter. The immediate context has to do with talking about how the members of the Church ought to see trials. It’s initially an encouragement to not necessarily look forward to trials, but rather to take heart in the midst of a trial, because through trials, we are made more like Christ, more like the complete creation God made us to be. In this way, trials are necessary to a Christian’s growth. This passage, relative to the immediate context, i...
Read more
IBS Application for Philippians 3:10 “...that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like Him in His death...” Here, we see that Paul was willing to make sacrifices in his life to the point of suffering for the sake of Christ. Not only that, but as he says, “becoming like Him in His death.” He was willing to die for the sake of Christ. Paul saw his own life as forfeit when it came to serving Christ. But this makes sense when considering the heart he had in his service to the Lord: To follow Christ’s example and walk as He walked in life. This meant going as far with that mentality as God called him to go. And he certainly did go far with it. He was beaten several times throughout the book of Acts. He was even stoned at one point. While we don’t have the specifics of this one particular instance, we know from 2 Corinthians that he and some other disciples came under such heavy persecution at one point in their ministry i...
Read more
IBS Application for Ephesians 6:1 & Colossians 3:20 “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” “Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.” I can’t talk about these passages without immediately thinking about all the ways in which this command has been abused in my own life. God’s command here has never been a hard one for me to follow. But it has led to some instances of strife in my life. Sometimes intense strife. Don’t get me wrong; neither of my parents have ever told me to do something that was outright and obviously morally compromising. But there was a time of my life when being obedient was actually the wrong thing to do. Not because the act of obedience was bad in itself; rather, it was because both I and the parent in question were refusing to be obedient to our Heavenly Father. I imagine that the part about how me acting in obedience to my parent was sinful doesn’t make much sense. Essentially, my parent was ...
Read more