Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript
## John 13:1-35
### Reformation Covenant Church
### Pastor Dennis Tuuri

The station of the deep, deep love of the Lord Jesus Christ. Our sermon text today is found in John 13. We’ll read verses 1-35. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

John 13, beginning at verse one:

Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come, that he should depart from this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. And supper being ended, the devil, having already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray him. Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hand, and that he had come from God and was going to God, rose from supper and laid aside his garments, took a towel, and girded himself.

After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel with which he was girded. Then he came to Simon Peter and Peter said to him, “Lord, are you washing my feet?” Jesus answered and said to him, “What I am doing, you do not understand now, but you will know after this.” Peter said to him, “You shall never wash my feet.” Jesus answered him, saying, “If I do not wash you, you have no part with me.”

Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head.” Jesus said to him, “He who is bathed needs only to wash his feet, but is completely clean. And you are clean, but not all of you. For he knew who would betray him. Therefore, he said, ‘You are not all clean.’”

So when he had washed their feet, taken his garments, and sat down again, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me teacher and Lord, and you say, ‘Well, for so I am.’ If I, then, your Lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example that you should do as I have done to you.

Most assuredly I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master, nor is he who is sent greater than he who sent him. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them. I do not speak concerning all of you. I know whom I have chosen, but that the Scripture may be fulfilled, ‘He who eats bread with me has lifted up his heel against me.’

Now I tell you before it comes that when it does come to pass, you may believe that I am he. Most assuredly I say to you, he who receives whomever I send receives me, and he who receives me receives him who sent me. When Jesus had said these things, he was troubled in spirit and testified and said, ‘Most assuredly I say to you, one of you will betray me.’

Then the disciples looked at one another, perplexed about whom he spoke. Now there was leaning on Jesus’s bosom one of his disciples whom Jesus loved. Simon Peter therefore motioned to him, asked who it was of whom he spoke. Then leaning back on Jesus’s breast, he said to him, “Lord, who is it?” Jesus answered, “It is he to whom I shall give a piece of bread when I have dipped it.” And having dipped the bread, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon.

Now after the piece of bread, Satan entered him. Then Jesus said to him, “What you do, do quickly.” But no one at the table knew for what reason he said this to him. For some thought, because Judas had the money box, that Jesus had said to him, “Buy those things we need for the feast,” or that he should give something to the poor. Having received the piece of bread, he then went out immediately and it was night.

So when he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man is glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and glorify him immediately. Little children, I shall be with you a little while longer. You will seek me and as I said to the Jews, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ So now I say to you, a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another as I have loved you, that you also love one another.

By this all will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.”

—

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word and we thank you for this marvelous text of Scripture before us. We thank you for the Holy Spirit who indwells us and causes us to delight in the simple hearing and reading of the text. Cause us now, Lord God, by the preaching of your word to be transformed. May your Spirit help us to understand and apply this text and transform us by it. We pray this in Christ’s name and for the sake of his kingdom, not ours. Amen.

Please be seated.

There’s a really awful song by Hank Williams Jr. I think it’s called “Family Tradition.” And you know, he’s kind of a wild guy in the country music scene, and years ago they didn’t like him, and now the whole country music scene has moved more that way. It seems they like him. The song is about why does he engage in drugs and drunkenness and womanizing, and you know, why aren’t you like your dad, a nice guy? And his point was that his dad, Hank Williams Sr., was also into drugs, alcohol, and women.

And so it’s just a family tradition, and he was kind of making fun of or striking out at the family tradition of the Grand Old Opry in the country music scene, which was always thought to be at least portraying an image of wholesomeness. And he says, “Well, you know, our real family tradition is drugs, drunkenness, and womanizing.” And that’s what I do.

Well, today’s text tells us what the family of Jesus Christ is noted for. We’ve come now to the second half of this gospel. He came to his own, his own did not receive him. But to many, as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become the children of God, not born of themselves, of God’s sovereign election. So now we’ve left behind his interaction with the Jews through all these chapters—those elements of the community of Judah, the praisers of God who would not praise Christ. And we now move to interaction with his disciples.

We got a big chunk of Scripture here. Frankly, you know, this is this chunk of Scripture that was one reason why I have been reticent over the years to preach through the Gospel of John. And the very thing that is delightful about it is the thing that is intimidating for preachers about it: it is deeply textured and layered. There are huge themes going on in symbolic ways and then in this long discourse by our Savior. It is an absolutely beautiful and deep text of Scripture. So that beauty is there in what we’re going to talk about today.

You know I’ve talked about how going through these last few chapters in John’s gospel is like driving up between Banff and Jasper up in Canada. Every time you turn the corner a beautiful new one of the western Alps—so to speak—these huge mountain peaks roar up in front of you, each different and just spectacular.

Well, we come to a huge peak here, but it looks like we’re going into a valley. We’re starting to head toward the cross. He knows his hour has come, the hour of his glorification, the hour of his death has come. Seems like a valley, but we get into the text and it’s a beautiful mountain peak—just a gorgeous picture here of the Lord Jesus Christ. And this picture informs us about who the household of faith is.

You know, my wife has relatives back who, you know, did battle at Agincourt with Henry V and took a guy into captivity, and they were awarded a coat of arms. A coat of arms, you know, would have—I don’t remember, I think it had something about the French guy that he captured on the coat of arms and maybe a walnut tree for power or something. But a coat of arms, you know, was a frequent way in the Middle Ages in certain parts of Europe to picture what the family was all about, right?

Well, this text gives us what the family tradition of Christ’s church is. It tells us what should be on that coat of arms, and it is in sharp contrast to what Hank Williams Jr. sang about in his song. Our family tradition is clearly etched out. When we get done with this text, we should know very clearly what it is that marks us out as Christians. What is the tradition of the family that these children were just received into the household of faith? What is set before them? What’s on their coat of arms as Christians, as disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ?

Now, I want to just address very briefly—on your outline, I’ve got two structures. And the first one is an overview of this section: John 13-17. Big unit. We are easy to get lost in it. I wanted to give you just a quick overview of it. And very specifically, it kind of helps us again to see what’s at the heart of chapter 13: the love of the Savior.

So you’ll see there John 13-17. This is from a book called “The Literary Development of John 13-17: A Kayastic Reading” by Wayne Brower. And so this is his outline that I’m presenting to you here. This is pretty much the way I’ll go through the text. I think it’s really a very good approach to these complex chapters. And very simply, you know, we have here in this big section the clearly marked section of Jesus with his disciples.

We have at the beginning of it this ritual action of footwashing and his call for his church to have as their family tradition love for one another, acts of service, deeds of kindness, usefulness to each other. And then at the end of there is a long discourse—chapters 14, 15, and 16—and then in 17 we have what many of you know as the high priestly prayer of Christ. This is really the Lord’s prayer: the Lord praying for his disciples and for us the disciples who would come. And that prayer is all about love as well—them being united to the Father through him, having love for one another, and being love, receiving love from the Father.

So the bookends of this big section, where Jesus is intimately discussing and discoursing with his disciples, have a commonality of unity—being unified together. He prays for their unity in John 17. And that unity is exhibited in acts of deeds of love and service interior to the body of Christ.

And you’ll see that the way Brower has outlined this section, he looks at the middle of this text as being the vine and the branches. Again, at the center of this discourse is the unity and love of Jesus Christ and his community, his family tradition. And he establishes it, and then there’s discussions around that. You know, at the beginning and end: middle, love and unity. And in the context of that there’s difficult trials in the world, and there’s Jesus promising the Holy Spirit. This is really a section that is very much given over to teaching about the Holy Spirit. There are seven references to the Holy Spirit by different names in this long discourse that our Savior gives.

So an easy way to think of this part of your Scriptures is: it starts with love and unity in the supper being pictured through footwashing. It ends with love and unity that Jesus prays for us to the Father—that we’d have love and unity, acts of deeds of kindness to one another in love. The center is love and unity: Jesus and the branches. And throughout that discourse is the giving of the Advocate, the Spirit, who strengthens us against the world and empowers us then to conquer that world through this love and unity that our Savior pictures for us in the beginning in 13-17, in the middle of the discourse.

So that’s kind of where we’re going over the next few months as we look at these chapters—these very dense, wonderful chapters where Jesus is now dealing directly with those that he has called into relationship with himself as children of God.

What I want to do today is simply look at this particular text. And I produced my own outline of this text. I’ve laid it out in a way that has the same kind of thing. There’s kind of a center to it. There’s bookends to it. And I just want us to look at these a little bit and then talk about some applications. We’ll look through the text now. We’ll note particular points of emphasis as we go through it and then draw the very simple and yet profound application at the end of the sermon.

So if you look now on the second part of your outline, the text itself, you’ll see that it begins with the persevering love of the Son and the Father. The Son/Father. Jesus knows that his hour has come, that he should depart from this world to the Father. You know, it’s how important it is when you send—when you go out for an evening, you have the babysitter in, and just as you’re going out the door, you tell them the most important stuff, right? Don’t let them near the pool outside if they got a pool outside. You know, Johnny’s got a cold—make sure he takes his medicine tonight. Whatever it is, you give last words as you’re going out.

And throughout the Bible, there is this idea of last words that are very important. Joshua on his deathbed gives these last words at the end of that book—so important for understanding what the next generation’s to do. Jesus is now knowing that his hour has come. It’s before Passover. The reference to Passover is that this is where the Paschal Lamb, the Lord Jesus Christ, will be slain. So what we’re going to have in these five chapters are the last words of our Savior. So they have tremendous significance to us, as last words always kind of have.

They also serve as kind of a prologue to this section. You know, particularly the end of verse one: he knows he’s going to depart from this world to the Father. And then there’s this just absolutely gorgeous phrase: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

So what a wonderful description of the ministry of our Savior. Notice the particularity of the love of Jesus Christ for his own. We cannot obscure the fact that this gospel clearly makes a distinction between those that are his own, his lambs that he will die for—particular redemption, particular love being placed upon a particular group of people, not because we’re better but because of the sovereign foreknowledge, the placing upon us of God’s love, his knowledge of us, his love of us.

This is what’s portrayed again here: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loves them to the end.” And the indication of course is that he’s going to love them finally. The great act of love will be his death on the cross—the cross for us. You know, no matter what you think about crosses, some people think they’re idolatrous symbols or whatever. But you know, the Lutheran that we inherited this building from understood the importance of the cross and the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ. He’s going to love us to the end.

You see, but that doesn’t exhaust the meaning of this verse because it doesn’t just mean to the end chronologically. It means he loves them to the end, you know, kind of theologically, the eschatology. He goes to the very end. He loves him to the limit. He lays down his life. And more than that, he also instructs them in how they are to carry on this love to one another. So he loves them to his end. There’s a particular love here.

I couldn’t help but think of parents. You know, I’m on the other side of, you know, that 40 or 35-year-old slope, whatever it is—52, got a 10-year-old, got a couple of teenage boys. And, you know, there’s a sense in which once you go past all of that, now you’re in a position where you’re trying to love your children to the end. You know, when Lana got married, it was not the end of the relationship, but the end of our specific parenting tasks in a particular way. And there’s a completion of that.

And you children have no idea—you have no idea of the self-sacrificial love that your parents in this church go through regularly for you. And they will continue to love you to the end because they’re loving you with the love of the Savior. They will love you to the end of their lives. They’ll love you to the completion of helping, in the providence of God, to be the formers, the nurturers, and guards of who you are and preparing you then to go out and be in charge of your own household.

This is the kind of persevering love that’s described by our Savior. This persevering love of the Son and the Father. And then at the end of this text, you know, that’s what he calls us to do. He loves us. The Father loves us as is evident by the Son. And he calls on us to love one another. So just like the entire section, the bookends are our love and unity. Now this particular portion of the section—this section of chapter 13 that we’re looking at—it also has these bookends of love and unity: unity of the Father and the Son, love of the Savior. Here the unity of the church and the love of the Savior flowing from one to the other.

The text goes on in verse two to talk about betrayal by Judas. “Supper being ended.” Now I should explain that. What does it mean? Well, it’s this is either a bad translation or maybe a bad text. Solid guys like Matthew Henry point out that the supper being ended doesn’t mean the supper is over. The supper being prepared—the supper having already been prepared—perhaps is what’s being talked about here. We know it can’t mean it’s over because later he dips, you know, bread into something and he gives it to Judas.

The supper is still ongoing. And the washing ritual was a ritual before supper actually went on, typically. So it means supper being prepared, perhaps the supper having already been prepared. But it puts the whole thing—it puts this entrance ritual, this threshold rite of baptism—into the context of the feast, the banquet. And there’s a lot of discussion over which supper and all that. We don’t need to get into that.

But what we do need to notice is that this text is telling us explicitly that there will be betrayal coming. And now it puts it there. And then as we go later, as we get through the center of the text, Jesus goes back to the same point at a much more extended section. Later he talks about Judas and the betrayal of Judas. And so betrayal is in the context of this.

And as I said earlier, you know, Judas—I mean, we don’t know for sure, but it seems very likely that Jesus washed every disciple’s feet before sending Judas out. And therefore, Judas had his feet washed by our Savior.

And so, again, here, the point is that we’re to treat one another in the context of the historic church. The church that you see around you is the church of Jesus Christ. That doesn’t mean that there are not apostates in it. There may be today some who are gathered here who are Judas’s in the context of the church, but we are to treat each other with this kind of self-sacrificial love—the footwashing being the picture of that—even if some of us are apostates. So it tells us that we’re to treat one another not by trying to figure out in the eternal decrees of God if you’re elect or not. We don’t do that. We treat each other according to our objective status in the context of the visible church of Jesus Christ, the historic church, the real church. This is the church.

And then the other side of that is this means there are tremendous warnings this text brings to us as I made in relationship to baptism. You’re here today. You had your feet washed. Your sins were, you know, you confessed them. You were assured of Christ’s forgiveness of them at the beginning of the service. You’re going to partake of the Supper. Does that mean you can sit back and say, “Well, I can live wherever I want to”? No.

The warnings, you know, that if you come to this table and you do so in an unrepentant way, if you really don’t believe in Jesus, you’re not going to conform your life to him, if you’re not going to engage in these self-sacrificial acts of love—you know, then you really have no assurance. You have a great warning against you. Hebrews tells us that it is possible to leave obedience to Christ and be cast out of the institutional church. And that doesn’t mean you’ve lost your salvation, but it does mean that you are now outside of the body of Christ, and you were never saved to begin with.

So those warnings are real to us. And as much as we want to give each other an assurance of our incorporation into the body of Christ, we want to really warn each other as well to not take our standing lightly, to not rely too heavily upon the external forms because God says they must be matched by obedience in life or the church will demonstrate by their suspension or your excommunication from the table your apostate status. We have that here.

We also then move on to the knowledge of the Savior in verse three. “Jesus knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands and that he had come from God and was going to God.” He’s going to do something. So there’s a knowledge, a context for what’s going to happen. The context for what Jesus is going to do is his knowledge that he’s going to the right hand of the Father, from whence he shall reign over all things, right? He’s King of Kings, Lord of Lords. He knows that’s where he is going.

So as we come around this bend of the text, well, what the Scriptures want us to meditate on a little bit is that Jesus is going to the Father. He’s going to a position of reign and authority. He’s going to the highest heights of power. Power. Okay, that’s the context for his actions relative to the washing of the disciples’ feet. He is King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

Now, we don’t know this of a certainty, but this relates to what seems to be the case for this particular action. John’s gospel is talked about this. It’s the capstone of the four gospels, right? So we’re reading John. We should have read Matthew. We should have read Mark. We should have read Luke by now. Now we come to John. John leaves out almost every detail of what the other three gospels give us about the Last Supper.

In fact, there’s no direct reference to the Last Supper at all. This is, as some commentators have said, a Eucharistic feast of words, not of the elements of the table, right? A big long discourse. They get all washed up for food and then basically what he gives them is a long discourse. You see, there’s this relationship between the ritual of the Lord’s Supper and the word of God. So John leaves out all these details, but we are supposed to bring an understanding of those with us as we come to this text.

And one of the details pointed out in the Synoptics is that it was at the Last Supper that the disciples had an argument. They began to argue about who was greatest among them. Who would be most—who is most important. And many commentators have imagined that this action of our Savior is in response to that argument.

See, there’s this relationship between power and authority now being given over to the children of God, those who are his own that he loved. They’re going to have power and authority like Jesus. But Jesus then immediately shows them by example that their idea of how to exercise power and authority is 180 degrees out from what his concept of how power is exercised in the world.

So this statement of the knowledge of Christ has great significance as we move to his particular actions.

And again in the context of the outline here that I’ve given to you, dropped down to C prime, we have the knowledge of the disciples. He begins to instruct them about what this act of love was all about. He teaches the disciples, bringing them to a proper knowledge of their rule and reign in relationship to humility as well.

Moving on then in verses four and five, we have a specific action of the Savior. He rises from supper—and that’s the best way to translate it. It’s not “rose,” it’s not past tense, it’s present: “rises from supper, lays aside garments, takes a towel, and girds himself. After that he poured water into a basin, began to wash the disciples’ feet, to wipe them with the towel with which he was girded.”

So, there’s this action that he goes through. He rises. He takes off his external robe, the heavy robe. He washes the disciples’ feet. There is here pictured, I think, a voluntary humiliation of the Lord Jesus Christ. We don’t think about clothes, you know, clothes don’t mean a whole lot to us. But in the Bible, that outer garment was, you know, rule, authority. It had weight to it, and you were supposed to have weight when you had that garment on.

Jesus takes off the external adornment of the outer robe. You know, we don’t dress just to cover our bodies. We try to dress nice, whether it’s here or during the week. We dress in a way that’s pleasing to ourselves, pleasing to others. The robe has the idea of attractiveness to it. Jesus lays aside voluntarily his robe, his authority and his external adornments to go about doing the service that he will do.

This humiliation before them of taking on the role of the servant. This is a threshold to the meal. And as I talked about earlier with baptism, it’s this purification ritual that our Savior engages in as he washes the disciples’ feet.

We this comment by Bruce Barnhard from his book “The Good Wine”—here within this room, the life and teaching of Jesus will pull to a fullness—wonderful quote: Jesus is bringing us into now by means of this threshold. We go over the washing that he does of his disciples. He goes through that washing to bring them into this Eucharistic feast of words and a discourse about the coming of the Holy Spirit and then his great prayer at the end. But we don’t get into all of that.

You see, we don’t begin to be transformed by the effective, declarative words of the Savior until we enter in through this liminal threshold, this transition of going through the purification waters to be brought into that room of Jesus, so to speak. And in the context of that, then as these children were brought through the threshold of the church, they enter into the worship of the church, the proclamation of Jesus’s words.

And this is where their lives now begin to take on and manifest this transformational character of the Christian life. And here in a summary sort of fashion, we have our Savior laying aside his external glory, taking up the role of service, bringing his disciples over the threshold of water into the promised land where his word feeds us, invigorates us, matures us, and directs us to fulfill the family tradition, the coat of arms that he has in mind for us.

So we have this transition given to us here.

Then we have Peter’s objection, and this is interesting to me. I’ll make application a little bit more later. You know, basically what it says is Peter says, “Master, you—I? How can this be?” And that’s more literally how the Greek works. “Master, you, I” is the way the order of the words go. He’s astonished and surprised. Peter resists the Savior.

This King of Kings, Lord of Lords, who is going to the glorification due to him at the right hand, going to sit at the right hand of the Father—and that’s the context now—he humbles himself to do what women and children only—or rather gentile servants—were supposed to do in the households of Israel at this time. They thought it was demeaning, most demeaning work of all, to wash somebody’s feet. You know, there were dirty feet back then, unlike us. We got socks and shoes and pavement. But in those days it wasn’t like that. Feet were dirty. You had to bend down. You had to take off whatever is getting in your way—external garments that hindered your work. You had to bend down and wash those feet.

This is what our Savior does. This is the action by which he opens up this panorama of this discourse to us in 13-17. This is the tremendous picture of this flooding up of water, the washing of the water of God’s word, instructing us on how true power is exercised in the context of the kingdom of voluntary humiliation and submission.

We remember here the washing of the Savior’s feet. Do we not remember the next to last supper? There was a next to last supper a few days before this. And Mary washes his feet and anoints his feet. And so we’re reminded of that. Jesus is imitating here, and the disciples couldn’t have missed this. He’s imitating the action of this woman.

So not only is he imitating the action of a woman or a child or a servant, involuntarily engaging in a position of functional inferiority to the disciples, he’s actually imitating the actions of a woman prior to that. He’s elevating the status of course of womanhood here. And this is reminded to us as well when we get to the New Testament church. If you’re going to support a widow, a woman who needs help from the church monetarily, one of the requirements is she’s supposed to have washed the disciples’ feet. She’s supposed to have manifested the actions of Jesus, which manifested the actions of the church, pictured by the woman washing the feet of the Savior.

So it goes round and round, and the power of the Spirit works here to bring us all into a mutual submission to one another and a service to each other.

Now I mention the next to last supper because something else happened there, didn’t it? The next to last supper when Mary did that—somebody objected to the footwashing, right? It was Judas. Now here in this text, somebody objects to the feet washing. Who is it? It’s Peter.

Now, we’ll see this in a much more marked fashion next week when we deal with the second half of chapter 13, including some of what we just talked about. But there’s a definite parallel in the text here, beginning in this section, between Judas and Peter. There are two betrayals that happen, showing us, you know, at the center of this that really none of us come into this the way we should. We’re all traitors and betrayers. The Lord Jesus Christ in his sovereign love and grace places his love upon some of us and brings us to repentance and assures us of our forgiveness.

So at the middle of this text, we have this objection by Peter to what’s going on, and we have this relationship to Judas, and we have Jesus telling him, as I mentioned earlier: obey first. Knowledge follows obedience. Our problems are never intellectual. They are ethical. Peter needs to submit to the Savior, and as we submit to the Lord Jesus Christ and his requirements of us, our understanding will follow.

Understand too, as I said earlier in the baptism part: Jesus says, “If you don’t let me wash your feet, you have no part in me. You do not get to inherit the kingdom. You do not get to receive all the blessings that this meal is going to picture to you. You do not get the power and strength of the Advocate, the Holy Spirit. That is the only means by which you’ll resist the onslaught of the fallen world. You don’t get any of that stuff if you don’t let me do this ritual action.”

Jesus wasn’t content to say, “Well, I think you get the point, but I won’t bother you by washing your feet now.” See, what we do at the center of this text—we’re told that the actions we partake in, the actions we do, are vitally important. Baptism is an exceedingly important ritual in the context of the church. This is what, you know, Zach came to a ministerial camp. This is why he’s got his kids here today. He understands this is important. None of us understand the full implications of it, but you know, it’s something we have to do. It’s a ritual we have to partake in, bring our children to receive.

And that’s true of what’s going on here. You see, at the end of this, Jesus says, “You’re blessed if you do these things.” Once you’ve got the knowledge of what all this is about, once you’ve been exhorted by our Savior to wash one another’s feet and to enter into acts of love, loving kindness to one another, blessed are you if you do it. The benediction, the end of this service, will reside on those who do the things Christ requires, not those who give intellectual assent to them.

See, but that’s told us here: the importance of actions, of what we do.

Then moving on, we have the finishing of the washing in verse 12. Jesus puts his garments back on. He sits back down. So, it’s the same sequence of words but in reverse order. You know, he took his robe off. He rose up, took his robes off, washed. He finishes the washing, puts his robe back on, sits down. So, we’ve come into a center point and now we’re backing out of the center of this text.

And we move then to the knowledge of the disciples in verses 12 to 17, and Jesus then begins to explain this action. Rituals are important, but our Savior now adds his words so that we cannot miss what it is that’s going on here. He says to them: “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord, and you say, ‘Well, for so I am.’ If I, then, your Lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.

So he’s giving them this culmination. You know, this threshold at the beginning of this last words he gives them a ritual action—the only one we see recorded here—and this action becomes vitally important for forming up our family tradition. Who are we? We know we’re of the family of Christ if we do this. And he says you are also then supposed to wash one another’s feet. “I have given you an example that you should do as I have done to you.

Most assuredly I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master, nor is he who is sent greater than he who sent him. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.”

He says you’re supposed to engage in acts of love, kindness, and service, self-humiliation, putting the other more important than yourself. This is what Christ requires us to do. So the knowledge of the disciples is that this act of love that he engaged in is to be what we engage in as those who are the household of faith as well. He is our Lord and teacher, and we’re to follow his example.

And then we have the long section of betrayal by Judas in verses 18 to 30. And in the context of that he says that it’s very important that belief is what is going on here. What separates out Judas from the rest of the disciples is his failure of belief. And so that’s vitally important, but we’ll talk more about that next week when we talk about these two betrayals by Judas and by Peter.

And so we have this section of betrayal by Judas.

And then finally, the persevering love of the Son’s disciples or children in verses 31-35. So when he had gone out—so now Judas is left—Jesus says, “Now the Son of Man is glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and glorify him immediately.”

Five-fold repetition of the glorification here that is occurring. That’s the context for our Savior’s actions again: his exalted position that he is going to. And then he calls us, “Little children, I shall be with you a little while longer. You will seek me and as I said to the Jews, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ So now I say to you, a new commandment I give to you that you love one another as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are my disciples if you have love one for the other.”

So the section now reaches its climax, in which the example is now explicitly explained and a new commandment is given to love one another. We have the persevering love of now us being called for. Jesus loved us till the end. We’re to love one another in the same way. This is the commandment of our Savior.

There is this relationship between what he did—this act of serving, humiliating love—and glorification. This section of Scripture is used in liturgical churches as informing what they do on Maundy Thursday, Holy Week. You got Palm Sunday leading up to Easter, Good Friday. We all know about that. But Thursday—some churches celebrate Maundy Thursday. “Maundy” is from the Latin, the same word as “mandate” or “command.” And it, this last verse is what it’s based on: “A new commandment I give you.” Maundy—command—law, new law, Thursday. This is the day before the crucifixion, and this command usually—a Maundy Thursday service will include a ritual footwashing as well. So liturgically, some churches have for many years, centuries, gone back to this text every year and engage in a ritual washing of feet as they celebrate this new commandment that Christ gives us to love one another.

Well, should we do that? Should we actually have a Maundy Thursday service that includes ritual footwashing? Is our Savior commanding us to literally wash each other’s feet?

Well, I don’t think so. He used an example then that had a lot of significance in a time when they didn’t have shoes, socks, and all that stuff—sandals, dusty road, etc. But then more importantly, the text tells us that this example that he did is really to teach us what this command is. And the command is not to just simply wash each other’s feet. The command is to actively love each other with deeds of love and kindness, with service one to the other. That is required.

However, when we get down to thinking through what it is that this text tells us, it tells us a couple of things. And the first is obvious. The first is found at the climax here. The first thing says that if you are a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, if you’re going to walk in the family tradition of the household of faith, then you do not have an option. You must engage in acts of service to the members of the body of Christ.

Right now, you know, we all can think of opportunities that we missed, maybe this morning even, last night, last week. We can probably think of hundreds of opportunities that you and I did not take advantage of to serve somebody else, to take somebody who is next to us who has a need, whether it’s our brother, our sisters in our family.

You know, the big thing we pray for in these prayer groups every month is “sibling rivalry, sibling difficulty. Help me be patient with my brother and sister.” You see, we’re to train our kids. The family tradition of Jesus is to humble ourselves to each other. Not just to put up with each other, but to actually go out of our way to serve one another. Someone spills something—don’t say, “You ought to clean it up. You spilled it.” Jump to serve them. You see, we all miss opportunities like this regularly. Jesus says it’s of the essence of who we are as Christians to engage in active love to one another.

Now, notice that this love is focused on the household of faith. There is a proper place—and we do this, we’re doing this better as a church—for loving people outside of the church, loving people that aren’t yet Christians, evangelistically engaging in benevolence ministries of the church. These are all great things, but that’s not what’s being talked about here. In the first and foremost direct application of the text, Jesus doesn’t wash the feet of the Jews. Now, he does things for them. He fed them and all that stuff. But here what’s really the focal point again is the household of faith.

And I would ask you: if you’ve engaged in benevolent activities, have you done so in the context of the church of Jesus Christ here at Reformation Covenant Church or whatever church you attend? What acts of service, going out of your way to do something that is humiliating to yourself, like bending down and washing somebody’s feet? We may not need the ritual, or maybe we do, to remind us of what it feels like to bend down and do something a little distasteful—wash somebody’s smelly feet. They may not be dirty today, but maybe because of the socks and all, or maybe they’re a little smellier. I don’t know. But it’s an act of humiliation.

You see, we don’t require it, but you know what? You see what I’m saying? This is the sort of act that is at the core of Jesus’s description of what the community of Jesus Christ is all about. He tells us here to engage in these acts. It won’t take you long, I hope, to think of things that you didn’t do for someone this morning or yesterday or last week. And I hope you husbands and wives think of this immediately in terms of the application of this morning if you were impatient. But forget that—more than being patient, you’re supposed to be kind and useful one to the other, actively serving each other.

Why don’t we do it? And we know what Jesus has done for us. It just takes a moment’s reflection, you know, glancing up at the cross here to remember what he did for us. Why can’t we love him and his people? What gets in our way?

And I think there are several things that seem to get in our way. Part of it is our culture is self-absorbed. We’re always thinking about ourselves. You know, I heard a great talk by Doug H. at the ministerial conference, in which he pointed out that our senses are outward-oriented. Take the most obvious: sight. God could have given you bodies, kids, with little—you ever see crabs? They got these little stems, I think, and they have eyes at the end of stems. Well, he could have given us bodies with eyes that look at ourselves, right? He could have done that, but he didn’t. He gave us eyes that look away from ourselves.

You see, he—you know, I—they tell me that you can’t smell your own self. Other people can smell you, but you can’t smell yourself. God has us pointed away from ourselves. Our senses are pointed away. Until we get to taste, where we enter into communion with the faith. But our senses remind us that God wants us looking away from ourselves.

We’re so self-focused and self-centered that we forget. We don’t even see the opportunities around us because we’re all engaged in a self-absorption. You know, if you have trouble in the Christian life and are thinking about it all the time, knock it off. Get serving. You’re never going to figure it out. You take the bread and wine, you swallow it. Where is it? You don’t know what’s your body doing to it. You don’t know. You might have read a textbook that tells you something, but you don’t know. You can’t say “stomach, let’s halfway process it and do it later.” You have no control or knowledge really of what’s interior to your body, do you?

Well, see, the same thing’s true in terms of our spiritual life. I mean, it’s an illustration and it’s not perfect. But Jesus calls us here—when we want to assure our hearts before him—not to be self-contemplative, but to be other-oriented, you see, and specifically to minister to Jesus by ministering to his people.

That’s one problem we have: self-absorption.

Another problem is distractions. I fall into this. This is my big sin. There was a letter that C.S. Lewis wrote to a Roman Catholic bishop that he was having a dialogue with about Christianity, and they were talking about political affairs. And this is what Lewis said: “I believe that the men of this age, and among them you, Father, and myself, think too much about the state of nations and the situation of the world. We are not kings. We’re not Senators. Let us beware lest while we torture ourselves in vain about the fate of Europe, we neglect either Verona or Oxford”—their local cities that they lived in—”In the poor man who knocks at my door, in my ailing mother, in the young man who seeks my advice, the Lord himself is present. Therefore, let us wash his feet.”

We get distracted by the things of the world, particularly in our day and age. Mass media, communication, news everywhere, war everywhere. We get distracted. Those things are important, but relatively unimportant if they’re getting in the way of you looking for and responding to opportunities to serve one another.

Our pride, of course, is what gets in the way. We don’t want to bend down or do whatever it is. Our children, young men and women, are going to India. This is another opportunity for them to do just what we talk about here. Now, you don’t, may not do what you do. It depends on what attitude you take to it. But you should have a willingness to voluntarily humble yourselves before the people in India that you’ll be ministering to, and you can fulfill this family tradition. You can say, “Yeah, I’m doing what Jesus wants me to do.”

Amy Carmichael was a great missionary to India in the first half of the twentieth century. And at that time, the caste system was still pretty much in place. She used to require the higher-caste converts to hew stones and dig foundations for a house right in front of a lower-caste coolie. In other words, to do what the lower class or caste system would were supposed to be doing. She’d require the higher-caste converts to do that.

Jesus showed her, as she put it, quoting her now: “It’s honorable to preach. And grace and repose would have been enough for a preaching tour. But ditch digging lent dignity to nobody. Grace and rigor was required for this. Day to day, they grew in manliness.”

So, you bring a convert to the faith, they want to preach. There’s a lot of honor in that. No honor in digging a ditch for someone who may be a lower caste than you. She would build their manliness. You hear what she says there? They grew in manliness as they grew in service and in a self-deprecation, a service to the broader body of Christ in the context of other tasks.

Our pride is one of the great things that gets in our way. Too much of us—we want to stand on our dignity, right? Instead of kneel to serve someone else. And God would have us humble ourselves and put away our pride.

So pride is another thing that gets in our way. And so we want to make sure that we contemplate the work of the Lord Jesus Christ and that contemplation drives us to a self-sacrificial service to one another. And this is at the core of who we are.

I think that you know, I want to say something here first to the officers of the church. What we have here is I think Bill would call these kind of things a staff meeting, right? Jesus has the disciples who will become the officers of his church. They’ll become the elders, the apostles. And so he gives us a picture of what they’re to do. I mean, in other words, in its really primary application, this text tells the officers of the church to humble themselves to the members of the church. It’s ultimately what he’s saying to do.

And so, the elders of the church must lead in having a heart to do what God wants us to do—to have a love for the Lord Jesus Christ, a recognition that Jesus is present in the household of faith and the people that comprise the church—and to self-humiliate ourselves and to serve them with the proper attitude and actions.

But then God also gives us officers that are called deacons. And the word “deacon,” as I said earlier with Brian’s coming into membership, means “servant.” The deacons were table ministers, right? In Acts—Acts six—that’s what they are. Here Jesus is calling on those men to be like he is: a table servant, preparing the people for the table, the discourse of food and sacrament that he’s going to give them.

I guess what I’m saying here is that Jesus not only calls us to this kind of family tradition, but he says explicitly that the officers of the church are to model this to the rest of the church, the way that he models it to the future officers of the church. And so if there is anybody in our church who should be known for having a heart that moves in terms of active service to the body of Christ here at Reformation Covenant Church, it should be her officers.

The pressure this morning from the text, the transforming power of God’s word, is being applied first to the elders and deacons and the elders and deacons in training, and evaluation of this church. Men, we must be people that are known for our actively seeking out ways to minister, not by having somebody else do work. There is that aspect to it. We’re overseers and managers, but we must be known of having a heart to want to help whatever difficulty arises in the context of the life of this congregation. God wants us to be that kind of thing.

We’re developing into that sort of thing. It was wonderful being here yesterday, you know, doing a teacher training meeting, seeing Bob Evans here working away on the bathroom downstairs. Howard was here getting files off Microsoft Money to do some financial reports for the church. Active service going on. Guys giving up a portion of their Saturdays, humbling themselves, not doing what they’d like to do, but doing things that are ministering in a sense to the broader body here. May God grant that the officers of our church are known increasingly as men who have this great motivation to want to serve other people and in ways that is not pleasant, in ways that may be very humiliating, in ways that are self-sacrificial.

May God grant us that kind of exercise of authority because authority is what it’s all about. What Jesus introduces here in this family tradition is an understanding of how power works in the context of the community of Christ that runs diametrically opposed to the way we think of it.

There’s an old movie, a science fiction movie of some type, and there was this big ugly alien and he went around saying, “I want the power. The power.” He wanted this power cell or something. I don’t know why I’ve thought about that for years. All men properly want power. We want to exhibit, you know, engage in the dominion acts. Men and women do, boys and girls do. We want to have degrees of authority. God places us in that kind of a position whether it’s over ourselves, our household, the church, the state, your business, whatever it is. But we’re all tempted to try to attain power and exercise it improperly.

Here in the great statement of what Christ is—as he goes to the cross—he says the way to change the world, the way to transform this fallen world, is through power that comes from service, not from the raw exertion of authority. Not from the raw exertion of authority.

The vision statement for our church is loving the triune God who died for us. We love him because he first loved us. And out of that love—which in Corinthians is described as patience, kindness, usefulness—that love that we have for the triune God must reflect itself in a love for Christ’s people. And the Scriptures tell us here in this text that’s the way the world will know. That’s the way the fallen world will be transformed: by this dynamic of the exertion of power through acts of service one to the other.

May God grant us an understanding of this that goes deep into our souls.

And one last point: at the heart of this text—at the climax of this text—was this call for us to exercise authority in that way by serving one another. But at the heart of the text is something very interesting: it’s Peter’s objection to being served. And men, I think that more often than not, you and I are more willing to serve than to be served.

If we’re going to develop a community that bears this family tradition, that on our family coat of arms, on our crest, as the church of Jesus Christ is a basin and a towel, okay? Not a sledgehammer bashing people’s heads in, but rather service, the way our Savior taught us to serve. If that’s our family crest, if that’s what we’re going to develop as our family tradition, we must also be willing to receive service from one another, to share with each other what parts of us are having difficult difficulty with, where we need ministering to, and when someone sees that in us and comes to us to engage in that service, in a way that we accept those acts of love from the Lord Jesus Christ.

You see, pride can either exhibit itself in a pulling back from doing things for others, or pride typically in men of the church manifests itself in a pulling back from allowing other people to minister to us or to our families.

This text is a wonderful picture of what the family tradition that Christ gives us here in the context of his church is. That family tradition is loving acts of service that, as a result, exercises power and authority in the world. It is the love of the triune God that will transform the fallen world, and that love should be evident first and foremost in the context of the community of Jesus Christ, the local churches represented here.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this wonderful text. We thank you for the deep love of the Lord Jesus Christ for us. We pray that you would give us a depth of love that overflows into service toward one another and a willingness to be served as well. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

—

Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to thee. Take my moments and my days, let them flow in endless praise, let them flow in endless praise. Take my hands and let them move at the impulse of thy love. Take my feet and let them be swift and beautiful for thee, swift and beautiful for thee. Take my voice and let me sing always, only for my King. Take my lips and let them be filled with messages from thee, filled with messages from thee.

Take my silver and my gold, not of might I withhold. Take my intellect and use every purpose thou shalt choose, every power as thou shalt choose. Take my will and make it thine, it shall be no longer mine. Take my heart, it is thine own, it shall be thy royal throne, it shall be thy royal throne. Take my love, my Lord, I pour at thy feet is treasure store. Take myself and I will be ever only all for thee, ever only all for thee.

—

We have a great opportunity this Lord’s Day to exercise ourselves in serving the Lord and serving one another in the prayers that we bring forth from this place corporately and in our own hearts. Just so happens that today is the International Day of Prayer and Fasting for the Persecuted Church. And in years to come, we hope to emphasize that more at this time of year when that day comes up. But for this Lord’s Day, as we pray in the context of Psalm 133, let us remember those in the world who are our brothers and sisters in unity and yet who suffer much for their faith, much more than we do in this nation. Let us pray together.

Lord God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the three in one, the same in substance, equal in power and glory, hear our prayer. Yahweh Shalom, oh God of our peace, grant to your people the peace and unity that you possess in yourself. For with you there is no division, no strife, no cross purposes, no infighting. Yours is a covenant of peace within yourself. And we praise and magnify and glorify you in being called your children.

Make us to be like you, we pray, preserving the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. For behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity. Cause our newly elected government officials on all levels and in its many forms to be unified under the great truths of your word. We pray that you would bring unity of godly purpose to all the government officials and military leaders who surround President Bush, especially in regards to dealing with terrorism and particularly with Iraq and with Saddam Hussein.

Make them to have your mind and to prayerfully discern your will clearly before sending more of our troops into battle. Keep us from war if it is possible. Have mercy upon us and defend us. Cause this nation called by your name to once again turn our hearts back to you.

On this International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church, we unite our hearts through our prayer with churches all over the world on behalf of your children who are suffering mightily for their faith. We know, dear Lord, that more than 200 million Christians face persecution each day in the world, 60% of whom are children. We are tempted to be fearful, gracious God, our Protector, when we see that over 300 Christians are killed for their faith each and every day. These are our brothers and sisters, and we weep with them. And we reach out through prayer in love to them.

Guard and defend the Christians of the Sudan as they stand in the face of torture and rape and murder at the hands of their Arab rulers. Dear Lord, deliver them. Guard and defend your people in Bhutan where two months ago 40 of your people were arrested and tortured for their faith. Dear Lord, deliver them. Guard and defend your bride in Jordan, where children of believers are being taken by government, by force of arms, from their believing parents. Dear Lord, deliver them. Guard and defend your children in Indonesia, where imprisonment and threatened imprisonment is threatened to any who attempt to preach the gospel to Muslims. Dear Lord, make your kingdom victorious there.

Guard and defend the Christians in India who are standing up for the Dalit—the untouchables—who are converting to Christ in the midst of persecution and murder by the radical Hindu government. Deliver them, dear Lord.

We ask you, loving Father, to rouse yourself and to take up the sword on behalf of the portion of your church who is hounded and abused. Defeat all who would harass your beautiful bride and bring their efforts to destroy her to nothing. Grant us unity with other churches in Oregon City. Give Dennis and I opportunity to meet and to get to know the pastors of this city, to learn about them, to learn from them, to serve them, and to humbly be used of you to help them in their ministries and in their personal lives.

Give Reformation Covenant Church opportunities to join with other churches in Oregon City to evangelize and disciple this community, to shine the love and the light of the gospel into every aspect of life here. Use this building, dear Lord, we pray, as a center of ministry, of benevolences, of political action, of education, and of counseling. We pray again that you would relieve us from the debt of the building so that those resources could go into even greater service for your kingdom.

We pray that you would grant us unity with like-minded churches in the Portland, Vancouver, and Salem areas. We pray your great blessing upon Westminster Presbyterian Church in Vancouver and upon Pastor Boardwine, on Evergreen Presbyterian Church and Pastor Nathan Lewis, on the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Portland, and Emmanuel’s Reformed Church in Salem, and Evergreen Presbyterian Church in Salem, pastored by Steven Lewis. We pray your blessing on their shepherds. Bless them and make them to be great shepherds of their flocks. Encourage and teach them from your word.

Grant them the skill to bring forth your word to their congregations this day and every Lord’s Day. Make them to be men of prayer, men of humility and meekness, men of courage and devotion to the truths of the gospel and of the faith once delivered to the saints. Make us all to be men of service and devotion to our wives and children, to be men of honesty and integrity. We pray you’d bless their sheep and grow their flocks to the glory of your most holy name.

May the truths of the Reformation in regards to the sovereignty of your rule and the inerrancy of your word penetrate the Portland, Vancouver, and Salem areas. We pray that you would bless and unite the families and individuals that are gathered together this Lord’s Day at Trinity Reformation Church in Salem. We praise you for Corey Sariah accepting the call to be the first pastor of this congregation. We pray that you would grant mercy to the Sarahs as they prepare to move to Salem early next year. We praise you for how you’ve grown and matured the congregation of TRC. We ask you for your continued protection and growth of the dear saints there.

Give them unity of spirit and purpose in this labor. Cause them to be meek and humble before one another and in community, communicating with the other churches in the area for your name’s sake. Unite the families and individual sheep here at Reformation Covenant Church. Cause the anointing of your Holy Spirit on our lives to flow down and touch the lives of every member here. Cause the children to love and to appreciate and to guard their own brothers and sisters.

Grant unity between parents and their children, particularly between teenagers and their parents. Give patience and love to the parents and thankfulness to the teens toward their parents, that your peace might reign in the families of this church. We pray for those who are sick among us. In particular, we pray for Howard L. this day, and we thank you for the healing you’ve worked in his body by means of the doctors, and we pray you’d continue to use the chemotherapy and the other means that are being employed to help him.

We pray that you would bless and heal Tanya Schubin for the embolism that they found in her lung this week. We pray that you would heal that and remove it miraculously or by means of doctors and medicines. We pray for any who are sick here that you might raise them up to healing, that they might praise your name and be of service to you in a greater way in your kingdom.

We pray for the upcoming Christmas program that you would cause the development of the script to be used in the play, song selection, and all the other logistical things that need to take place. And we pray you’d give special blessing to Dennis and to Teresa and John as they prepare that program. We pray for the caroling that will take place in this town from this church. We pray for the ministry at the McLoughlin Senior Center.

We thank you, God, for the children that were baptized this morning—for the Walters Dorf children and for Rebecca Meyer. We pray God that you would bless them and cause them to be faithful believers. Cause them to walk in accordance to their baptism, faithfully following you in your word and serving. We pray God you would grant us grace and faithfulness to love them, to teach them, to be examples to them of faithful soldiers in your army.

We thank you for the coming of the Erlands once again into membership at this church. We thank you for Brian and Peggy and Katherine and Andrew and Jeremy. May you make us useful to them and may you cause them to be used in the giftings that you’ve given them to serve this body, and that we might mutually be comforted by them, mutually be encouraged by them, and encourage one another.

We pray again for Bill Pequard this week. We thank you for the good work that he’s accomplished under Bob’s supervision in helping us to beautify this building. And we pray God that you would continue to bless him and strengthen him in his faith. We pray that you would grant him grace of the parole board to allow him to travel to Minnesota to be with his wife as she has given birth now to their new daughter Nicole. We pray that you would grant him to be a leader in his home and an example in his household of a man of faith.

Use our tongues to bless and encourage one another. Help us to put away gossip and slander from among us. Cause us to be tender-hearted towards one another and forgiving, seeing how great is the sin and evil in us that has been forgiven in Christ. Let nothing be done among us through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind, let each of us esteem others better than ourselves.

Make us yield what we view as our rights to be understood or esteemed or treated fairly and lay them at the cross where you bore all of our unrighteous sins. Let not the small debt that others in this congregation may owe us overshadow our thankfulness for the great debt of sin that you have forgiven us. Give us grace this week to be light and salt in our world. Make us to be as the dew of Mount Hermon, which refreshes the world. Unite men and women of all peoples to yourself in one covenant of peace.

Reap a great harvest of souls and use us to speak boldly and to bring conviction, repentance, and faith to your chosen ones even this week. In all these things we will thank you and we will give you all the glory and praise in the name of our precious Son, the Lord Jesus, who taught us to pray always, never giving up, saying:

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts as we forgive those. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.