He Loves You to the End

I was just a little boy when I first professed faith in Jesus, younger than all three of my children are now. Coming up from the baptismal waters on an Easter Sunday night, I didn’t know much, but I knew that I loved Jesus. I wanted to belong to him, to follow him, to serve him.

No doubt the eleven young men seated at this table in John 13 felt the same way. After nearly three years with Jesus, they now loved him with intense devotion. All were prepared to follow him anywhere, and to do anything that he asked. One of them professed that night his readiness to die for Jesus (13:37); all of them felt the same way. In a few hours’ time, they will discover how badly they had overestimated themselves.

Peter’s public denials of Jesus are the most famous, but they would all abandon him. This was after a string of other failures, so embarrassing in retrospect: their insensitivity to his distress throughout that night; their inability to grasp the most basic points he tried to teach them; their petty arguments over who was the most important; their failure to stay awake and pray for him. Tonight, they will all learn the same painful lesson: they do not love Jesus as much as they thought.

In the thirty years since I began loving Jesus, I have made the same sad discovery on many occasions. I do love Jesus. But I have also wandered from him, in long seasons of aimless apathy. I have denied him, loving my foolish, deceitful sin more than him. I have dishonored him, with my pettiness and pride and unbelievable selfishness. I have cried hot tears in the cold light of day over what I have said and done in the darkness. I have boasted of doing great things for him, then run away when following became uncomfortable or inconvenient. At best, my love for Jesus is weak, inconsistent, and unreliable.

This is why John 13:1 has become so precious to me, as it would have been to the first disciples.

As Jesus looks around this table, he is under no delusions about the quality of their love for him. He foresees all their failures with perfect, searing clarity (just as he does all of mine, and yours). And Jesus responds to their sorry lack of commitment with….total commitment: “…when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end (13:1).”

For all their failures to love Jesus, Jesus loved them. They were his own. And he would love them to the end. In these next chapters of John, the worst of their denials will bring out the best of his love. He washes their feet. He patiently teaches them. He prays for them as their High Priest, and shields them from the soldiers as their Good Shepherd. He stands trial alone, while they hide in the shadows. He is condemned to die on a cross, where he bears away their sin as their Passover Lamb. Finally, he rises from the dead and comes back to these same disciples. He gently draws them to faith, reassures them of his love, and restores their dignity and purpose, and fills them with unshakable joy. And the love of Jesus for these men is only getting started. He loves them to the end.

All of my comfort, in life and in death, hangs on John 13:1. I belong to a Savior whose glory is to love weak and sinful people like me, all the way to the end (Phil 1:6). It is staggering for me to look back at all my years of up-and-down love for Jesus, and realize that at no single moment did he ever waver in his love for me. He never will. He will love us to the end.

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Article by Eric Smith
Senior Pastor, Sharon Baptist Church