The Humble Love of Christ

His love is beyond compare, beyond comprehension, beyond understanding.

Its height and depth and length and breadth are outside our capacity to conceive. He came all the way down to an ignominious criminal's death that He didn't deserve, came all the way down to take our death so that He might go all the way up and express His eternal love to us. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. The world wants you to believe that love is simply an emotional, romantic feeling, one that you have a right to experience. But how does that perspective mesh with God's Word? Today, John MacArthur digs into a biblical passage that explains God's perspective on love through the example of Christ Himself. It's a message that can invigorate all your relationships, and it starts in just a minute.

But first, this being February 14th, Valentine's Day, John, a question on the more personal side. Tell us a little about the love of your life, your wife, Patricia. I think listeners might not be aware of the significant role she has played in your life and ministry. Well, first of all, she's genuinely faithful to the Lord. She loves the Lord. She loves His Word. She honors His Word, and she desires to live according to His Word. There's just a beautiful consistency about her Christian life, and that translates for her into her expectation that I live everything I preach all the time.

Which is—it's a good kind of pressure, but it is a real pressure. I'm not only expected to live as a godly father and husband, but as somebody who's telling everybody else all the time how to live. So the expectation that she has is that I would be honest in my own life so that there's nothing different in my living than in my preaching.

Truthfully, I would lose her so fast if that were the case. You know, marriage stays together on trust and respect, and it's particularly true if you're the preacher and the pastor. So I think the joy of my heart has been to live with her now for all these many years. We just celebrated our 60th anniversary and know that the affections for both of us run very deep, and the trust is deep, and the confidence and the genuine love of Christ that we both share is stronger than it's ever been. So whatever critics may say about me, I always think to myself, if my wife and my kids would defend me, then I'm okay, because I can't protect myself from all the people who want to do damage to me. But I find complete love and rest and assurance and blessing in the, I guess you could say, the womb of my family, because they know my life, and the kids have followed in obedience to the Lord as well.

So yeah, and she is really, from a day-to-day basis, the architect of that whole reality, the perfect gift to me. Tom with John MacArthur. He will be arrested early in the morning, really in the darkness of the middle of the night. He will undergo a false trial in the wee hours of Friday. He will be executed on Friday.

He will die as the true Lamb of God, the Passover Lamb. This is Thursday night, the night before. This is that Thursday night when Jesus, with the twelve alone, nobody else was there for obvious reasons.

The Jews were after Him, and He had to hold this feast with them in secret before He was arrested later in the garden that same night. So it is Thursday night, and on that Thursday night, our Lord gave a series of promises to His disciples that extend to all of us. Those are contained in chapters 13 through 16, four monumental chapters loaded with the promises of the Lord for those He loved.

Certainly, it started with the disciples, but it extends to all believers through all of history. We pick up the scene in verse 1. Now before the feast of the Passover, Jesus, knowing that His hour had come that He would depart out of this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.

That sets up this whole scene. It is an expression of that love. It is an expression of that love. This is about Jesus' love for His own who were in the world, believers. First, the apostles who were gathered with Him, and then second, all who would believe after them as He makes clear. This is a night of love. This is a night when the Savior out of love deposits in the bank of the apostles and all who would ever believe all the riches of heaven. This is His gift to all of us. 13, 14, 15, 16, then chapter 17, He prays that the Father would fulfill it knowing that He will. It's an incredible portion of Scripture. Five whole chapters dedicated to the Son of God expressing His love for His own. This is how He loves us. When it says He loves us, to the end, to the max, to the full, eternally and infinitely. As much as an infinite, eternal God can love, that's how much He loves. Immeasurable and conceivable.

Its depth, its height, its length, inconceivable. This is all about love. Now, as we look at this section, going down to verse 17, we will read one of the more familiar incidents in the life of Christ, but I want you to see it in the bigger context of His love.

So let's pick it up then. Verse 2, during supper, the devil already having put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, to betray Him, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands and that He had come forth from God and was going back to God, got up from supper and laid aside His garments and taking a towel, He girded Himself. Then He poured water into the basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel with which He was girded.

So He came to Simon Peter. He, Peter, said to Him, Lord, do You wash my feet? Jesus answered and said to him, What I do, you do not realize now, but you will understand hereafter. Peter said to Him, Never shall you wash my feet. Jesus answered him, If I do not wash you, you have no part with me. Simon Peter said to Him, Lord, then wash not only my feet, but also my hands and my head. Jesus said to him, He who has bathed needs only to wash his feet, but is completely clean, and you are clean, but not all of you. For He knew the one who was betraying Him.

For this reason, He said, not all of you are clean. So when He had washed their feet and taken His garments and reclined at the table again, He said to them, Do you know what I have done to you? You call Me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. If I then, the Lord and the Teacher, washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet, for I gave you an example that you also should do as I did to you. Truly, truly, I say to you, a slave is not greater than his master, nor is one who is sent greater than the one who sent him.

Since you know these things, you are blessed if you do them." The humility of love. Selfless humility is the soul of love.

Put it another way. Only humble people love. And your capacity to love is directly related to your capacity to humble yourself.

You understand that? That is a simple biblical truth and principle. Only humble people love. The humbler you are, the less interested you are in yourself, the greater your capacity to invest yourself in somebody else.

They are related to one another proportionally. The lower you go in self-concern, the higher you go in concern for others. The more you sacrifice for you, the greater you will sacrifice for others. True love, biblical love, the love that we're talking about here, is full devotion of the one who loves to the needs and well-being and blessing and joy of the one loved. Now, I understand that in the world, it is possible for people to have a sacrificial love for other people to make great sacrifices and to genuinely care on a human level for someone else. But for us as believers, we are commanded to love everyone like that, everyone, without regard for any returning benefit. In its purest form, biblical love is completely unselfish. That's not true of human love. There's a reciprocating reality there that gratifies the person who loves. But for us, love in its purest form is completely unselfish. It is indifferent to personal gain.

It has no concern about personal satisfaction or fulfillment. This kind of love in its pure form is complete commitment to the joy, satisfaction, and fulfillment of others at any cost, at any point, at any sacrifice. That's the kind of love that we are called to demonstrate. Now, Paul summed all that up by one statement, love seeks not its own. Love seeks not its own. It is not looking for what gratifies the person who loves. Love is completely indifferent to its own desires.

It wants only to spend itself on others. Paul says that in 2 Corinthians 12. He said, if I spend myself on you as an expression of love, are you going to love me less? He saw love as an expenditure of his entire life.

In that 11th chapter, prior to chapter 12, he says, look at my life, beaten, beaten with whips, beaten with thongs, shipwrecked, in danger my whole life, going from one mad escape to another escape from people who are plotting to kill me. On top of this, the care of all the churches, which means when somebody's weak, I feel the pain. When somebody sins, I feel the pain. Why am I doing this? Why am I in a position, for example, to minister to the Corinthians and to have to live with this terrible thorn in the flesh that has come from the false teachers who've come into Corinth and torn up the Corinthian church, and it's like a stake driven through my heart.

Why do I do this? Because it's never been about me. One day, he laid his head on a block and they chopped it off his body. I mean, it was sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice, and he always defines that as an expression of his love. And he asks the Corinthians, you know, do you give me back hatred and rebellion for all this love I've spent on you? He understands what love is, and so when he says love seeks not its own, his whole life is a model of what he means by that. His whole life is an exposition of that statement. That is unlike the world's love, which has to be somewhat self-fulfilling, somewhat indulgent, somewhat self-satisfying. Only Christians have the capacity to love like this and to love everyone like this all the time.

Now, we need an example of that. We need a model for that, and that is the Lord Himself. In Philippians 2, it says that He, being equal with God eternally as a member of the Trinity, thought it not something to hold onto, to grasp tightly, but emptied Himself, literally emptying Himself of all the rights and privileges of deity, to take on the form of a man and the form of a slave and be humbled unto obedience, even death on a cross. He came all the way down.

Now, think about it. He made the greatest condescension and He loves the greatest. He has most humbled Himself, and since love is in direct relation to humility, He who humbled Himself most has demonstrated most love for others. His love is beyond compare, beyond comprehension, beyond understanding.

Its height and depth and length and breadth are outside our capacity to conceive. He said of Himself, I am meek and lowly, Matthew 11, 29. He came all the way down to an ignominious criminal's death that He didn't deserve, came all the way down to take our death so that He might go all the way up and express His eternal love to us. But we see the humility of love and the relationship between humility and love manifest most dramatically, most perfectly in Him. Now, we understand this kind of love, this biblical love. Jesus described it this way, greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends, John 15, 13. So the greatest act of love possible, if love is humble sacrifice, then the greatest act of love possible is to make the ultimate sacrifice, right? So if you love your little girl and the car's coming down the street and you dive in the street and throw her off onto the edge of the road so she is saved and you're crushed under the car, we say that's an expression of the greatest kind of human love.

If you give your life like the apostle Paul did in endeavoring to reach people with the gospel and you end up in jail and you end up being decapitated, you say this is a great kind of human love, and it is. But you can only do that once, right? You can only do that once, and then you can't do it anymore because you're not here.

You're in heaven. So we'd like to stall it off as long as possible. None of us is in a big hurry to be a martyr, but we can't die for people's sins. So we can't die some kind of efficacious death. Dying a sacrificial death doesn't gain us anything with God. Blowing yourself up with bombs strapped to your body sends you directly to hell if that's what you believe. You don't get to heaven by any kind of self-sacrifice. You don't earn favor with God by that.

That's not what we're talking about. What we're saying is that if you are a believer, you have been transformed, and now you have a capacity to love everybody in a way that the world doesn't understand. In fact, it's a love that separates us completely from the rest of society, and it is a love that should be willing to take up the cross, right? To die, if need be, for the salvation of someone else. But you only do that once.

The rest of your life, you need to love in a way that doesn't bring your life to an end. I don't know. In this room, maybe somebody will end up dying, taking the gospel to someone. Somebody might. Some of us might. It could happen to me as a preacher that somebody is so offended by me preaching the gospel to others that I'm doing that somewhere and somebody decides to take my life.

But that is not likely to happen to me or any of you. But what is happening every day is that you are called to love one another, and you are given a capacity to do that, and you need to have a model for that that's something short of dying. So what does that look like?

What does that look like? Well, it looks like Jesus here in this passage. This is an unparalleled section where the Lord Jesus with His own apostles teaches them by example what it means to love, what it means to love fully, what it means to love to the end. I love you to the end, and here's your first lesson. This is how love acts. It's a critical lesson because loving one another, first of all, assures us of our salvation.

You remember what John said? When you love, it removes fear in the face of judgment. Perfect love casts out fear. You're looking at the judgment of God. You don't have any fear because you know you've escaped the judgment of God. There's no condemnation.

Why? How do you know that? You know that because you have a love that is a deposit by God, which means you belong to Him. God is love, and those who love belong to God. Not only does the world know us by our love, but we know our own condition before God by our love. If you say you're a believer and you hate your brother, you're a liar. So if you say you're a believer and you love your brother, then you know the truth is in you.

So this is very, very personal in that sense. We love one another, and it becomes assurance for us. We love one another, and it becomes a testimony to the world. As I commented on earlier in verses 34 and 35, look at it in John 13, a new commandment I give you that you love one another even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this, this love, all men will know that you are My disciples if you have love for one another.

This is how we put Christianity on display. The most devout of us don't murder people. The most devout of us love people. We love the world in the way that God does, but especially do we love the brotherhood, others in Christ.

And we manifest that love in humble expressions like this one. Now, foot washing was a necessity. Foot washing, in case you didn't know, is still a necessity. I just want to remind you of that. I don't want it to fade away. I think you know that. There are certain benefits to keeping your feet clean for you and all the people you connect to.

So we get that. We walk through the world. We walk through the world. Well, in ancient times, sandals didn't do a whole lot with dusty roads or muddy roads or damp roads, and so feet were dirty and dusty. And before every house, there was a water pot in the front of the house because you didn't go tracking mud into the house. So there was a water pot outside for the accommodation of foot washing. It would fall to a humble person, or in some cases, the lowliest slave or the lowliest servant to do the foot washing because it was the lowliest task.

Very unskilled and not the most enjoyable duty, but very necessary. In ancient times and biblical times, when they had a meal, a meal like the Passover lasted for hours and hours, and they would recline. They wouldn't sit in a chair, but they would recline. And so your head was here, and somebody's feet were here. And simple courtesy would indicate that we ought to have taken care of those feet. So that's how it was. So when you went to a house like today, sometimes people make even now, today, me and Patricia take our shoes off at the door to go in. I understand that, but I actually think sometimes that could be worse. But anyway, we'll get on to something else. I don't know.

But you understand the point. So they were meeting in the upper room on this Thursday night, the Lord and His disciples. His earthly ministry was coming to an end, and it says that in verse 3, He knew that He had come forth from God and was going back to God. That's what it says in verse 1. He knew He would depart out of this world to the Father.

That's a big feature here. He's on the way back to glory. He's going to go back to the glory He had with the Father before the world began.

He's going to go back to glory. It seems like maybe this is a moment when somebody should wash His feet, right? Maybe after all these 33 years of humiliation, somebody might step up and realizing that He's on the way to the cross and the resurrection and the ascension that maybe it's time for us to recognize His royalty, His majesty, His glory. Somebody stepped up, washed His feet.

He is about to receive the name that is above every name, the name Lord, at which name all knees will bow in heaven and earth and under the earth. But nobody does. Nobody does any foot washing. So that sets the stage. They're all reclining at dinner with dirty feet. This is a very discourteous thing. So in that context, the Lord must have been very disappointed, very disappointed. But remember, they were having an argument. They were having an argument at that very moment, according to Luke 22. They were arguing about which of them was the greatest in the kingdom.

See? So they were all about their own dignity, their own honor, their own elevation. And in that setting, nobody wanted to take the role of a slave.

Also nobody did. This has to be grieving to the Lord. This is just another indication of their weakness, their spiritual indolence. But He loved them anyway. And this is what makes His love so incredible because they were so ugly at that point, so ugly. And then there was Judas.

How ugly was he? But that's how we come to understand what it means that He loved them to the max, to the end, to the full, in spite of it. So as we look at this, just a few points to consider. First, His love stated, verse 1.

And we've already done that. Having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end. That states His love. And that's John making that inspired statement under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. He knows His hour is coming. He knows He's headed to the Father. He repeats it again in verse 3. His glory is on the horizon. Yeah, of course, His death is imminent and immediate, but through that, out of the grave into glory at the ascension, He knows all of this. And He should be the one being honored, being exalted, being lifted up, being treated with courtesy, but He's not. He's not. So He puts His love on display to, listen, undeserving, weak, selfish, self-centered, self-absorbed disciples, who with that kind of an attitude aren't going to do a whole lot to advance the testimony of the church.

That doesn't help. If by this shall all men know that you're My disciples, you have love for one another, what are they going to think about you behaving like this? I mean, the apostles write about that later, about devouring and biting one another and not preferring one another in love. And if that is what's going on in your church, if there's contention and strife and factions, we know all of that is laid out by the apostles in the epistles.

If that's what the world sees, what is going to be their conclusion? Not that we've been transformed to manifest some divine kind of love that is unlike anything the world knows. This would have been a time when He might have rebuked them, when He might have just shredded them like He did the Pharisees that week. But He doesn't. He just loves them and He gives them a model of how they are to love. He protects them. The last acts of Jesus stand out as acts of love all the way through chapter 17. His love, no end or measure knows.

No change can turn its course eternally the same it flows from one eternal source. And eternal love, He loved them before they were ever born. He loved them from eternity into eternity.

He loved them with an everlasting love. You're listening to John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. His current series is called Love No Matter What, here on Grace To You. And this being Valentine's Day, it seems fitting to reflect on how you can improve your most important relationships and the place to start is God's Word. Let me encourage you to order a copy of the MacArthur Study Bible. John's extensive notes will help you apply the Bible's principles on love and every other topic.

Order your copy today. Call us at 800-55-GRACE or order the MacArthur Study Bible online when you visit our website, gty.org. And while you're at the website, keep in mind you can download over 3600 of John's sermons free of charge. If there's a New Testament passage you don't understand or you want to know better, John has a sermon on it. The website also has multiple daily devotionals that you can read whenever you have time. And there's a blog with articles from John and other staff members. There are John's sermons, the daily devotionals, the Grace To You blog, and more.

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Or you can simply email your story to letters at gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson with an important question to consider. How radical a sacrifice did Christ have in mind when He commanded believers to love one another? Find out tomorrow. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time on Grace To You.