Obedience and Love
Revelation 3:8: “I know your
works. See, I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut. I know
that you have little strength, yet you have kept my word and have not denied my
name.”
Our Lord begins by saying, “I
know your works.” The Greek verb He uses for “know” here indicates a complete
and detailed knowledge of all of the production in that congregation. Nothing
escapes His notice. Then there is a break, and rather than going straight into
the evaluation statement, which usually includes a list of things for which the
congregation is praised, He interrupts the normal flow that we have seen in the
last five evaluation reports and He gives this note of encouragement: “See, I
have placed before you an open door that no one can shut.” This is a
parenthesis. Literally it says, See, I have given before you,” not set or
placed before you. The Greek word there means to give and it indicates God’s
grace in providing opportunities to this congregation related to evangelism and
missions. The opportunity for outreach to the unbelieving community in
We know that this phrase
about opening the door is an idiom that indicates evangelistic opportunity
because of the way that it is used in other passages in the New Testament. For
example, in Acts 14:27: “On arriving there, they gathered the church together
and reported all that God had done through them and how he had opened the door
of faith to the Gentiles.” 1 Corinthians 16:9: “because a great door for
effective work has opened to me, and there are many who oppose me.” 2
Corinthians 2:12: “Now when I went to
“…no one can shut it.” This
is an ongoing opportunity. The tense of the verb there, “I give before you and
open door,” is a perfect tense, indicating an action that has been completed in
the past and the emphasis is on the ongoing result of that past action. So
there is an ongoing opportunity for the congregation at
“…you have a little strength.”
What that means essentially is that they were apparently insignificant; they
were small in number. But there was something else about them. Despite the fact
that they were a small congregation and did not appear to have much impact in
the eyes of the culture around them because of their size or numbers they were
spiritually strong. He says, “you have kept my word.” In
John’s vocabulary this is a phrase that is just loaded with meaning. When we read that we thing just that they have been obedient, and
that is the end of it. But if we go back to the Gospel of John this is a
phrase that the Lord Jesus Christ used numerous times as He was communicating
with His disciples. It is a phrase that John himself picks up from the Lord
Jesus Christ and utilized it several times in his first epistle.
In John 14 there are four
different uses related to this phrase “keeping my word.” John 14 is part of
what is known as the upper room discourse, the last lengthy teaching from the
Lord Jesus Christ to His disciples before He went to the cross. He was instructing
the disciples related to church age doctrine and He began to teach them about
their responsibilities and obligations as apostles in the coming age and of the
coming of God the Holy Spirit. In the midst of this He is expounding upon the
great commandment that He gave at the end of chapter 13 that we should love one
another even as he loved us. So there is much that He said in the next few
chapters related to love. In
One of the things we see in
this verse is a progressive knowledge of who Jesus is and who the Father is
that comes as a result of our knowledge of the Word of God and our application
of the Word of God. It is not enough just to know the Word of God and to have
notebooks filled with notes, it is what goes into our soul and becomes a part
of our life resulting in a change of thinking (Romans 12:2), having our thought
transformed so that it changes the way we think about life and the way we
interact with those around us and the way we interact with our Lord. So Jesus
says the one who keeps His commandments and keeps them is the one who loves
Him. This is clearly assuming that there are going to be believers who know the
commandments but don’t keep them. They are not demonstrating a love for Him. How
do we love Him? Learning His Word; keeping His commandments. You cannot apply what
you don’t know, and you can’t know something unless you take the time and the
discipline to study it, learn it, and to be taught it—the
Word.
As Jesus prayed to the Father
at the end of this night in what is called the high-priestly prayer in John 17,
“Father, sanctify them by means of truth; they word is truth.” This is why we
emphasize the teaching of God’s Word, because the change agent in our life,
along with the Holy Spirit, is the Word of God. The Holy Spirit doesn’t operate
apart from the Word of God and the Word of God doesn’t produce fruit apart from
God the Holy Spirit. We must know the Word of God. So when the chips are down,
when life is tough, when we lose friends, when we go through marital
difficulties, when our children are going through rebellious stages, when we
are having to deal with parents who are going through health crises, when we go
through financial crises, and any other kind of adversity, the only thing that gets
us through, that focuses our thinking and stabilizes our emotions and gives us
the right perspective for understanding how to deal with life, is the Word of
God. It is great to know hymns, and there are hymns that we know that give us
great comfort because they reflect the doctrine that is in the Word of God, but
when you really go through those dark times in life what gets you through is
not your friends, not fellowship. When you are alone at night in your bed and
you are having to face the crisis the only thing that
comforts and stabilizes in the Word of God.
So we have to know the Word
of God, and we are told that when we learn it and obey it there is this
progressive understanding of the Father that comes to us. As you grow in the knowledge
of the Word Jesus Christ will reveal more and more of Himself
to you. John 14:23, “Jesus replied, If anyone loves
me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him
and make our home [abide] with him.” Here is that word related to the Greek
word MENO [menw], to abide, that
emphasizes that rich intimate fellowship that the believer ca have with the
Father. As we learn His Word and apply His Word there is the development of a capacity
of love for God the Father, and as a result of that we have a richer fellowship
with the Father and the Son. John 14:24, “He who does not love me will not obey
my teaching. These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who
sent me.”
As they left the upper room
and were on their way to Gethsemane Jesus has the discourse on the vine. As he
concludes that He again restates this principle: John 15:10, “If you obey my
commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's
commands and remain in his love.” Again, abiding is related to intimate
fellowship with the Father and it is related to walking and living our life in
obedience to the Word of God. John 15:20: “Remember the words I spoke to you: ‘No
servant is greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute
you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also.”
Then we see a commentary on
this upper room teaching in the first epistle of John. The first epistle of
John is John’s mature reflection on what Jesus taught on that night in the
upper room and afterwards. The vocabulary overlaps, the terminology is very
similar, the themes are the same. But what John does since he is in his late
eighties or early nineties by the time he wrote the first epistle he is
reflecting on all that he has learned since he was a young man when Jesus first
taught what he heard in that upper room. 1 John 2:3: “By this we know that we
know him, if we keep his commandments.” There are many who misunderstand what
this verse says. That is usually because they are the products of the sloppy
vocabulary of 20th century evangelicalism. The wrong interpretation
of this verse would be: “By this we know that we have come to be saved, if we
keep his commandments.” So that keeping the commandments then becomes the
barometer for how we know if we are saved. But the reason we know that we are
saved is because of the promise of God in the Scriptures that he who believes
in the Lord Jesus Christ has eternal life. There is an assurance of salvation
which comes through the indwelling of God the Holy Spirit who bears witness to
our spirit that we have become the children of God, according to Romans chapter
eight. In fact, what we see in 1 John 2:3 is the same kind of vocabulary, the
same verb tenses, that occurred in a conversation that Jesus had with Philip
back in John 14. “Philip, how long have I been with you and you don’t know me.”
If knowing Jesus equals being saved then what Jesus just said would imply that
Philip was not saved. That would contradict John chapter 13 where Jesus said; “All
of you are clean, except one [Judas Iscariot].” The phrase indicated that all
of them had been cleansed from their sin, which happened at the time they put
their faith in Jesus as their savior.
When we get saved we don’t
really know very much about Jesus. We know that He is the God-Man who died on
the cross for our sin, and that if we trust in Him we will have eternal life.
But that is just a small amount of information compared to all the information
that is given in the Scripture that we can learn about our Lord Jesus Christ.
That comes after we are saved, it is the process of
growth. So in 1 John 2:3 John is saying, “This is how we know we have come to
know Him.” That is, this is how we can measure our advance to spiritual
maturity. Spiritual maturity isn’t based just on what you know, but you can’t
have spiritual maturity in ignorance. We have to know the Word of God before we
can apply the Word of God. Knowledge of the Word of God plus application of the
Word of God leads to spiritual growth in the child of God. 1 John 2:4: “Whoever
says, ‘I have come to know him,’ but does not obey his commandments, is a liar,
and in such a person the truth does not exist.” He is saved but he is an
immature baby believer. 1 John 2:5, 6: “but whoever obeys his word, truly in
this person the love for God has
reached perfection [been brought to maturity]. By this we may be sure that we
are in him: whoever says, ‘I abide in him,’ ought to walk just as he walked.” For
John the “in him” is related to abiding in fellowship.
So when we read Revelation
3:8 the Lord is praising the church at
“…and have not denied my
name.” Denying Jesus’ name is an idiom for rejection of Christianity and
biblical truth. The implication here is that, yes, as a believer you can deny
Jesus, you can turn your back upon the Word and can indeed become involved in
extended carnality. This is the warning that we find in 2 Timothy 2:10-13: “Therefore
I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that
they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory.”
Attaining salvation is not, again, obtaining eternal life,
it has that idea of that full realization of salvation once we enter into
heaven. “Here is a trustworthy saying: If we died with him, we will also live
with him [positional truth]…”
You have eternal life the
instant that you put your faith alone in Christ alone, but one you have this
new life then the next issue is what you are going to do with this new life. Are
you just going to stay a spiritual infant, a spiritual baby, or are you going
to press on to spiritual maturity and spiritual adulthood. Think back to when
you were about ten or twelve years of age and probably got involved in some
sort of argument with your parents because you wanted to do something and they
didn’t want you to do it. In frustration you said, “Why won’t you treat me like
an adult?” You realized when you were at that age that your life begins when
you are an adult. Real life isn’t when you are a child and under the authority
of your parents where you have to do everything the way they want you to do it,
real life begins once you have grown to maturity and you can then engage all of
the things that are going on in the world on your own as an individual person. The
same thing is true in the Christian life. We are born as spiritual babies, but
the real benefits, the real depth and quality of that eternal life that Jesus
offers us, that abundant life, comes with spiritual growth and spiritual
maturity. The problem is that most Christians are just satisfied with getting
into heaven and they don’t understand that there is more to the gospel than
just getting into heaven when they die. There is a richness
and a fullness of life today that comes only as a result of your growth and
maturity in the spiritual life. And if you don’t spend the time studying the
Word of God and letting God the Holy Spirit transform you into the character of
Christ you never develop that capacity for life that the Lord has for you. Only
with that mature capacity of life are we then able to truly glorify Him in
every area of our life.
So Paul goes on to say: “…if
we endure [post-salvation growth], we will also reign with him. If we deny him,
he will also deny us; if we are faithless, he will remain faithful, for he
cannot deny himself.” The implication is that if we don’t endure we won’t
reign. But we are still saved. Reigning with Him is part of the reward package that
the faithful believer receives at the judgment seat of Christ. We are developing
today the capacity to rule and reign with the Lord Jesus Christ in the coming
kingdom as kings and priests. If we deny Him His place of authority in our life
He will deny us the ability to reign with Him. That is, if we spend our life
focused on the details of life, seeking happiness apart from the Lord, not
putting the Word of God first as the priority in our life and our relationship
to the Lord, then He will deny us the privilege and responsibilities that we
could have had if we had only trusted the Lord and grown to spiritual maturity.
He remains faithful to His promise to save us. What happens to many believers
at the judgment seat of Christ is that after that evaluation and all of their
works are immolated there, and nothing is left, the text says that they shall
enter into heaven, yet as through fire. They don’t lose their salvation, they just lose their rewards and the potential of
serving the Lord in the Millennial kingdom.
So what the Lord Jesus Christ
is reminding the church at