Stay Where the Love Is

On that last night, walking from the supper toward the garden, Jesus said this to His friends:

"Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; remain in My love." — John 15:9 (NET)

Hear what He does not say. He does not say go and produce love. He does not say work up enough love to satisfy Me. He says remain. Stay. Do not wander off from the place where the love is already flowing.

He had just handed them a picture to make it plain. I am the vine, He said, you are the branches. A branch does not strain and sweat to make grapes. A branch makes grapes by one thing only — by staying joined to the vine, by letting the life of the vine rise up into it. Cut the branch off and it cannot make a single thing, no matter how hard it tries. But leave it joined to the vine, and the fruit simply comes. Love is exactly like that. You do not manufacture love by force of will and then present it to God. You stay joined to the One who is love, and love rises through you the way sap rises through a branch — because you are connected, not because you are straining.

But I promised you honesty all the way to the end, so I will not hide this either: staying joined is not always warm and easy. Jesus said, the same night, that the gardener prunes the branches that are bearing fruit — cuts them back — so that they will bear more. Read that carefully. The pruning is for the good branches, the ones already growing. The knife is not punishment. It is care. He cuts back what is already growing well so it can grow better still. And it hurts. Both are true at once. The cutting hurts, and the cutting is love.

So when you hit the dry seasons — the prayers that seem to go nowhere, the love that costs more than it returns, the grief so heavy that your praise comes out as barely a whisper — do not read those as proof the connection has failed. More often they are the sign that the One who loves you most is doing His most careful work on you. The branch cannot see next season's grapes. The gardener can. He knows exactly what He is growing in you, and He is not careless with the knife.

There was a man named Enoch, far back near the beginning, and the whole of his life fits in one short sentence: Enoch walked with God; then he was not, because God took him away. That is the entire biography. Not Enoch achieved great things. Not Enoch impressed God. He walked with God — beside Him, day after day, year after year, through whatever the years held, at God's pace and in God's direction — until one day the walking and the going home were the same thing. That is the life that pleases God. Not a performance. A walk, taken at His side, that simply keeps going.

A woman named Julian, who lived six hundred years ago and spent decades turning over what God had shown her of His love, came back again and again to the same answer, no matter which way she approached it. Let me give her the next-to-last word:

Would you know your Lord's meaning in this thing? Know it well: love was His meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did He show you? Love. Why did He show it? For love. Hold yourself in that love and you will know and understand more of the same — but you will never know or understand anything else from it, forever.

Love was His meaning. Whatever you are walking through right now — whatever it is costing you, whatever season you are in — that is the thing at the center, holding all the rest of it together.

So let me bring it home, the way I would say it to you if we were sitting at one table, with the evening coming on.

The One who is love made you to look like Him. He came down and taught you how to love by loving you in ways that cost Him everything, all the way down to a cross, all the way through a cup He begged to be spared and drank anyway, for the joy of having you home. When you love, He looks at you and sees Himself, and it makes Him glad down to the depths. He shouts for joy over you. And all He asks is that you stay close — stay where the love is flowing — and let Him keep growing it in you.

Knowing God starts with knowing He is love.

Knowing He is love means loving Him back.

Loving Him back means pleasing Him — both in what your hands do and in what your heart wants while they do it, willing to be held in His hands, and to walk through your whole life right beside Him.

That is all of it. And it is enough to fill a lifetime, with plenty left over.