31 When he was gone, Jesus said, “Now is the Son of Man glorified and God is glorified in him. 32 If God is glorified in him, God will glorify the Son in himself, and will glorify him at once.
33 “My children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come.
34 “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
36 Simon Peter asked him, “Lord, where are you going?”
Jesus replied, “Where I am going, you cannot follow now, but you will follow later.”
37 Peter asked, “Lord, why can’t I follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.”
38 Then Jesus answered, “Will you really lay down your life for me? I tell you the truth, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times!
According to this passage, there are three distinguishing characteristics of a genuine Christian - the desire to glorify God, to love one another, and to be loyal to God.
For 33 years Jesus had abandoned His glory as a human on earth, but beginning the very next day, He would be glorified again. He would be glorified in the cross. As we saw in another passage recently - He defeated death, He defeated sin, He satisfied God's justice, He provided salvation and redemption to mankind, He demonstrated love and mercy beyond imagining.
God the Father was glorified in the death of His Son as well through His death on the cross. It was also an incredible display of God's holiness. When Jesus took the entire sin of the world on His shoulders, God the Father turned His back on His only Son because He is holy.
The cross also displayed God's faithfulness. He had promised a Saviour, and at the cross that promise was fulfilled. All the attributes of God are on display - and that really is what it means to glorify Him.
And God would be glorified through Jesus in many more things to come - the resurrection, the ascension, the exaltation of Jesus on the throne of heaven, and of course, still to come, the second coming.
Probably the biggest, most practical, most visible mark of a Christian is love. Love for each other. Loving the way Christ loved us. Sacrificially, indiscriminately, selflessly love one another. Forgiving each other.
MacArthur referenced something in another sermon that really struck me. As humans, our natural focus is to love ourselves, to serve ourselves. But, if you really think about it - we are actually served more when we all serve each other. If we are all only concerned with serving ourselves, we are all only served by one person. But if we all serve each other, in (for example) a church of 700 people, we'd all have 700 people serving us! 700! Instead of 1! Isn't that amazing to think of it that way?
Love requires humility. And that's tough. It requires a commitment to acknowledge our own wrong doing and to forgive the wrong doing of others. Humility.
And the last thing is loyalty. Aren't we all guilty of promising God something and then not delivering? Bargaining with God in our prayers. God, if you'll only do x, then I'll .... pray more, read my Bible more, become a missionary, etc, etc. We're quick to promise, but slow to deliver. That's not loyalty.
Peter failed in his loyalty to Jesus. He and all the disciples were very quick to promise that they would die for Jesus. But what happened when that moment came? They all fled. All of them. Their promised loyalty and their actual loyalty were two totally different things. Peter boasted, counting on his own flesh, and then later that night in the garden, he fell asleep instead of praying, then he acted impetuously (cutting off the soldier's ear) and followed Jesus from too far away - he didn't stay close to him and all those things together added up to the disastrous results of denial and failed loyalty.
I think we've all been guilty of disloyalty to our Lord.
But there is hope in this story.
Peter turned it around. With the help of the Holy Spirit, (and from the lessons he learned from this disastrous life lesson), he went on to preach fervently, suffering and ultimately dying for Jesus. He became loyal to Jesus. He changed. And it doesn't matter how disloyal we've been in the past - we can change too. We need to boast less, pray more, act a little slower, and follow a whole lot closer.
God's glory, love for each other, loyalty to God - the marks of a genuine Christian. Are you marked?
Tomorrow's scripture focus: John 14:1-14
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Workin' on it!
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