Today, I am reading and commenting on John 14-16.

In today’s passage Jesus tells His disciples, and us, that those who love Him will keep His commands.  He sums up all of His commands in telling us to love each other as He loved us, reminding us that He died for us (I use the past tense here because John wrote this after Jesus’ death, and is clearly referencing that death here even though at the time John was unaware to what Jesus was referring).   If we live according to Jesus’ commands, we will live in Him, and He will live in us.  That last part is what allows us to keep His commands, Jesus living in us will enable us to obey His commands.  That reciprocal relationship between obeying Christ’s commands and Christ living within us can be the hardest part of following Christ to understand and explain.  In order to obey Christ we must be in Him, but we must obey Christ in order to be in Him.  Only by being in Him can we bear the fruits of the Spirit, if we fail to bear the fruits of the Spirit, we will be cut off from Christ.  On the other hand, as we bear fruit, we will suffer being trimmed and pruned in order that we might bear more fruit.  Thus we should embrace what suffering we do experience as it will enable us to bear more fruit to the glory of God.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.