What Do We Really Believe?

If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love. - John 15.10

I am far too Baptist to believe that Jesus intends to lay down any sort of works salvation here. If entrance to Heaven requires straight A's on the commandments of Christ, nobody's getting in and that includes Saint Francis and even my mom. 

I think what the Lord means here is that until Kingdom Culture ceases to be a sampler on the living room wall and becomes our basis for living, we haven't got a clue as to what unconditional love looks like. 

Tae Hea Nam, managing director of the venture capital firm Storm Ventures, makes a similar point about corporate value statements. "No matter what people say about culture, it's all tied to who gets promoted, who gets raises, and who gets fired." If an employee violates the values and his stock goes up, or abides by them and gets the boot, everyone knows what attitudes really govern reality.

In the clutch moment, I do what I think moves the down marker. If I return a slapped cheek for a slapped cheek, trade insults until I come out ahead, cling to what is mine when generosity beckons, I define promotion, raises, or rejection in terms of this present world and no amount of profession to the contrary means anything. It isn't that Jesus kicks me out of a love I had formerly enjoyed; I wasn't there to begin with. It works the same way at the level of Christian community: Church covenants are nice; what people watch is who moves up, who moves ahead, and who gets moved out. Might be good to ask of the congregation at large: What really buys a person some stroke around here?

The good news - and the hard news - is that we can always try again. . .but that we must always try again. As C. S. Lewis says in his essay, "A Slip of the Tongue," "He will be infinitely merciful to our repeated failures; I know of no promise that He will accept a deliberate compromise. For He has, in the last resort, nothing to give us but Himself; and He can give that only insofar as our self-affirming will retires and makes room for Him in our souls." 

So let us keep Christ's commandments so that we can abide in his love, until that great morning comes when we discover that we abide in his love, so we keep  his commandments.