Love One Another
Text: John 13:34-35
Series: Restoration Sermons
Date:
Speaker: Ed Rangel
Location: Waupaca Church of Christ
Bible Version: NASB 1995
Sermon Type: Expository
Learning Objectives
By the close of this lesson the hearer should be able to:
- Explain why Jesus calls the command to love one another a "new" commandment (John 13:34) — what makes it new in his mouth.
- Define hate as more than an emotion — as an orientation of the will that places itself against truth, the church, and all that is good.
- Articulate why loving enemies is not merely a counsel of personal virtue but the method by which Christ himself conquered — and the method that produces the greatest victories.
- Distinguish between love and selfishness at their root, and apply the standard of 1 Corinthians 13:4-8.
- Hold together the two movements of love: love the sinner, hate the sin — not as a slogan but as a theological position grounded in Christ's own conduct.
Thesis
Love is the defining characteristic of the disciple of Jesus — toward God, toward enemies, toward the brotherhood, toward the sinner. The test of Christian identity that Jesus himself set is not doctrinal precision but visible love: "By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another" (John 13:35).
Burden
This is the third sermon in a sequence: God's love for man (Outline 92), man's love for God (Outline 93), and now the horizontal dimension — love for one another. The sequence is deliberate. Love flows from its source (God) through its receiver (man responding to God) and then out to others. A Christianity that receives God's love and develops a rigorous personal obedience but produces no warmth toward other people has missed the shape of the thing. "If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing" (1 Cor. 13:2).
Introduction
"A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another" (John 13:34-35). This was spoken in the upper room on the night of the betrayal — hours before the cross, with the shadow of Judas's departure still in the room. Jesus chose this moment to give a new commandment about love.
The newness is not in the content — Leviticus 19:18 already commanded "love your neighbor as yourself." The newness is in the standard: "as I have loved you." The commandment to love neighbor was always present; the love of Christ himself as the measure of that love is the new element. The standard has been raised to the height of the cross.
Love as a principle takes two directions — toward God and toward man. The preceding two sermons addressed the vertical dimension. This one addresses the horizontal. Love is synonymous with Christianity; there is no Christianity without it.
I. Hateful Men
The sermon begins, unusually, with the negative — not with the command to love but with the description of those who hate.
"Hateful" means full of hate — not merely disliking, not merely preferring alternative company, but constitutionally oriented against something. Wicked hearts hate truth. This is not an exaggeration: the person whose life is organized around what is false will respond to what is true with hostility, because what is true judges what is false. Pilate asked "What is truth?" (John 18:38) — and then handed the truth over to be crucified.
They hate the church. The institution that exists to embody and proclaim the truth about God and human sin is the natural target of those who reject both. "If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you" (John 15:18). The hatred the church receives from the world is not evidence of the church's failure; it is evidence of the church's fidelity. A church so accommodated to the world that the world has no reason to hate it has become something other than the church.
They hate all that is good. This is the comprehensive description: the orientation of wickedness is against the good wherever it is found. The hatred of truth, the hatred of the church, the hatred of righteousness — these are not isolated preferences. They are expressions of a single orientation away from God and away from everything that reflects him.
Why begin here? Because love is always defined against its opposite, and because the disciple of Jesus lives in a world where hatred of this kind is real and active. The call to love is not a call to live in a protected environment where the hostility of wickedness is absent; it is a call to maintain the posture of love precisely in the environment where hatred operates.
II. Loving Enemies
The second section moves from the description of hateful men to the command that addresses them directly: love your enemies.
Jesus had enemies — people who sought to discredit him, entrap him, and ultimately kill him. He loved them. Not sentimentally, not by pretending the hostility was absent, not by accommodating his message to remove the offense. He loved them by going to a cross for the sins they were in the process of committing against him.
"Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matt. 5:44). This is not advice; it is a command. And Jesus is the model for its execution. Stephen, as he was being stoned, echoed the prayer Jesus prayed from the cross: "Lord, do not hold this sin against them" (Acts 7:60). The pattern of loving enemies under active attack is not theoretical in the New Testament — it is demonstrated.
Jesus conquered through love. This is the central claim of the section. The cross looks, from the outside, like defeat — the innocent man executed by the enemies who hated him. From the inside, it is the decisive act of conquest: "Now judgment is upon this world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out. And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself" (John 12:31-32). He conquered not by overcoming his enemies with superior force but by absorbing their hatred and responding with love.
The greatest victories in Christian history have followed the same pattern. The early church grew under persecution, not despite it. The martyrs produced more Christians than the apologists, because the willingness to die for what you love is the most compelling argument for its reality. The greatest victories through love — this is the empirical testimony of the church's first centuries.
III. Love Versus Selfishness
The outline identifies the fundamental opposition at the root of the human problem: love and selfishness are mutually exclusive at the organizing level.
Paul's description of love in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 is the most thorough analysis of love in Scripture: "Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails." Every phrase in this description is the negation of a corresponding form of selfishness. Impatience is selfishness. Jealousy is selfishness. Arrogance is selfishness. "Does not seek its own" is the summary: selfishness always seeks its own; love never does.
The highest values are obtained through love, not through self-promotion, self-protection, or self-assertion. The counterintuitive logic of the kingdom is that the path to greatness is service (Matt. 20:26), the path to life is the willingness to lose it (Matt. 16:25), and the path to honor is humility. Love operates on this logic; selfishness cannot.
Love promotes all good. This is love's productive function — it is not merely the absence of harm but the active promotion of what is good for others. The Samaritan of the preceding outline (Outline 88) is the image. His love did not simply refrain from harming the man in the ditch; it actively promoted his recovery at personal cost.
IV. Loving What God Loves
The fourth section addresses the scope of love: must we love what God loves?
"For God so loved the world" (John 3:16). The world that God loved is the world that contains every person who has ever lived, including the people who are most difficult to love. If the source of Christian love is God's love, and if God's love extends to the world, then the scope of Christian love cannot be narrower than the scope of its source.
The outline quotes a cynical church member: "God may love them, but I cannot." This is the confession of a Christianity that has accepted the doctrine of God's love without receiving the disposition of it. A person who can say "I cannot love them" has placed his comfort, preferences, or offendedness above the source of love himself.
Jesus taught us what to love: "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you" (Luke 6:27-28). The specific list — enemies, those who hate, those who curse, those who mistreat — is a list of the people who are hardest to love. That is the point. Jesus is not describing the easy cases; he is defining love by its hardest test.
V. Love the Sinner: Hate the Sin
This pairing has been trivialized by overuse, but its content is both theologically precise and practically demanding.
The distinction between the sinner and the sin is not a concession to sentimentality — it is a necessary theological position. A person is not identical with his sin. He was made in the image of God before he sinned; he retains that image even in the condition of sin; he is a person for whom Christ died. The sin is what corrupts the image, harms the person who commits it, and harms those affected by it. The sin is to be hated; the person is to be loved.
Jesus demonstrated both. He was called "a friend of tax collectors and sinners" (Matt. 11:19) — he ate with them, he spoke with them, he healed them, he welcomed them. He also said "go and sin no more" (John 8:11) — he did not pretend that sin was neutral. He loved the person, confronted the sin, and left the person with both the experience of love and the requirement of holiness.
Man must separate himself from sin to be blessed by God's love. This is the practical application of the love/sin distinction to the person who is receiving the love: God does not love you into remaining where you are. He loves you toward what you were made to be — which is not the place where sin keeps you. The love that does not require repentance and change is not genuine love; it is indulgence. Genuine love presses toward the good of its object, which sometimes requires confrontation with what is harming the object.
VI. Love the Brotherhood
The sixth section narrows the scope of love to its specific community application.
"Honor all people, love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the king" (1 Pet. 2:17). This verse gives four commands with four different objects and four different verbs. Honor (respect) is for all people. Love — the specific word agapē — is reserved here for the brotherhood. The distinction does not mean outsiders receive no love; it means the church as a community has a specific love for one another that is its particular identity.
"This means love the church." The church is not an organization to be tolerated or an institution to be used for personal spiritual development. It is the body of Christ, the community of those who share the same Lord, the same baptism, the same table, and the same hope. Love for the church is inseparable from love for Christ. The person who claims to love Christ but has no particular love for his body has not understood what love for Christ requires.
A passion for the salvation of others flows naturally from love of the brotherhood — and from love of those not yet in it. The early church's evangelistic urgency was not a program; it was the expression of love that could not bear for others to remain outside what it had found. "We cannot stop speaking about what we have seen and heard" (Acts 4:20). The speaking was love's compulsion.
Application
This sermon ends the three-part sequence by pressing the third dimension into practice:
Are you loving as Christ loved — with the cross as the standard? The new commandment is not "love as you naturally incline to love" but "love as I have loved you." The standard is self-giving, enemy-absorbing, cost-bearing love. This is not what comes naturally; it is what comes from the source.
Who are you struggling to love? The cynic who says "God may love them but I cannot" is the warning. Name the person or the category. Bring it to the posture of prayer: "pray for those who mistreat you." The discipline of praying for people we find difficult to love is the practice that produces the love prayer asks for.
Are you distinguished by love? Jesus said this is the mark the world will recognize. Not doctrinal precision, not worship style, not organizational sophistication — love for one another. Is this what the people around you would say about this congregation?
Conclusion
"By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another" (John 13:35). This is the test Jesus himself established. Not the test he imposed from the outside, but the test that emerges from the nature of what he gave: if you have received the love of God, if you have responded to it with obedience, if you are being transformed by it — it will be visible. The visibility is love.
The sequence is complete: God loves man (Outline 92) → man loves God in return, expressed through obedience (Outline 93) → man loves those around him, expressed through the same self-giving love with which God loved him. The circle closes not at doctrine but at visible, costly, enemy-loving, brotherhood-sustaining, sinner-welcoming love.
Invitation
The love Jesus commands is not available on demand from human resources. It is the overflow of having received something that produced it. "We love, because He first loved us" (1 John 4:19).
If the love this sermon describes is absent from your life — if the command to love enemies feels impossible, if love for the brotherhood feels thin, if the passion for others' salvation has never been lit — the answer is not trying harder. The answer is going to the source.
Believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Repent of the life organized around self-love at the expense of love for others. Confess him. Be baptized for the remission of your sins (Acts 2:38). Receive the gift of the Holy Spirit — whose first fruit is love (Gal. 5:22). And begin the life in which the only mark the world needs to read is visible.
Word Study
| English Term | Greek Term | Basic Meaning | Usage in This Sermon | Sermon Significance | Key Texts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New commandment | entolēn kainēn | qualitatively new, new in kind | not neos (new in time) but kainē (new in character) | not neos (new in time) but kainē (new in character); what is new is the standard: "as I have loved you"; the model has changed from neighbor-love to cross-love | John 13:34 |
| Hate | miseō | to hate, to regard with active hostility | in the New Testament, hatred is not merely an emotion but a moral orientation against something | in the New Testament, hatred is not merely an emotion but a moral orientation against something; "everyone who hates his brother is a murderer" (1 John 3:15); hatred is love's opposite in the will, not just the feelings | John 15:18; 1 John 3:15 |
| Brotherhood | adelphotēs | the community of brothers and sisters | the specific word for the family of believers | the specific word for the family of believers; used only twice in the NT (1 Pet. 2:17; 5:9); the love commanded for the brotherhood is the community expression of the love that was individually received | 1 Pet. 2:17 |
Scripture Interlock Table
| Theme | Boles' Outline | Supporting Scripture |
|---|---|---|
| "Love one another as I have loved you" — the new commandment with new standard | Intro | John 13:34-35 |
| "If the world hates you, it hated Me first" — hatred of the church explained | I | John 15:18 |
| "Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you" | II | Matt. 5:44 |
| "I, if I am lifted up, will draw all men to Myself" — conquest through love | II | John 12:31-32 |
| Love does not seek its own — the opposition to selfishness | III | 1 Cor. 13:4-8 |
| "God so loved the world" — the scope of love that defines its source | IV | John 3:16 |
| "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you" | IV | Luke 6:27-28 |
| "Honor all people, love the brotherhood, fear God" — the fourfold command | VI | 1 Pet. 2:17 |
| "We love because He first loved us" — love's source and direction | Invit. | 1 John 4:19 |
| "The fruit of the Spirit is love" — love Spirit-produced, not self-generated | Invit. | Gal. 5:22 |
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Converted from H. Leo Boles, Outline 94. Primary text: John 13:34-35 (stated by Boles). OCR corrections: "Loved opposed" corrected to "Love opposed." Doctrinal audit: this sermon completes a three-part sequence (92 God's love for man → 93 Man's love for God → 94 Love one another); "love the sinner, hate the sin" developed theologically from Christ's own conduct without sentimentalizing either side; the call for Christians in denominations to "come out" from Outline 91 carried forward implicitly in "love the church" (love for the church means love for the body Christ built, not human substitutes); invitation retains full obedient response (Acts 2:38).
