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49.  Jesus answered and said to him, ‘If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him. He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine but the Father’s who sent Me.”                -John 14:23-24

Those who are true believers keep Jesus’ word. Those who do not keep His word don’t really love Him. An unrepentant person who flaunts disobedience to God’s word thus can have no assurance that he is a true believer. It doesn’t matter how many times he’s walked an aisle, raised his hand, been baptized, etc… No outward expression can guarantee an inward reality. I John 5:13 says we CAN know that we have eternal life, and that this assurance comes only after evidence is seen that a person has been born of God and does the things Christians do. I have that assurance. Christ is my life and His word is my guide and the life I live I live for Him. You can have that assurance too, and it will help you serve God out of gratitude instead of constant fear that God is angry with you. Check this out…

 

50.  “Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. You have heard Me say to you, ‘I am going away and coming back to you.’ If you loved Me, you would rejoice because I said, ‘I am going to the Father,’ for My Father is greater than I.”        -John 14:27-28

Jesus has given true believers peace with God the Father. When two countries make peace with each other, they are ending hostilities between each other, paving the way for relationship with one another. The peace that Jesus gives is a lasting peace we can be secure in. He asks us here not to be troubled or afraid. We would only be troubled or afraid if there was a possibility that God would again view us as His enemy and end the peace Hee has with us. Jesus says here that the peace He gives to true believers is a lasting peace that keeps us from being troubled or afraid. Jesus is one with the Father (John 10:30). As God the Son He shared full glory with the Father from before Creation (John 17:5). He temporarily set aside His rights as God to come to earth and become fully human (Phil. 2:5-11). During that time on earth, Jesus did not use His Deity to His personal advantage. He did use it to prove He was the Messiah, the Son of God. It was during that time on earth that the Father was functionally “greater” than the Son because Jesus was restraining the full use of His deity. He did that to be the peace broker between Heaven and earth, equally representing both parties! Having secured eternal salvation and peace for all who believe, Jesus has now returned to Heaven and the glory He deserves (John 17:5).

 

51.  “I am the True Vine, and My Father is the Vinedresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it will bear more fruit. You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the Vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me.”                 -John 15:1-4

Some have tried to use this passage to say, “Look, a person can lose their salvation because they were a branch, but through refusing to obey and bear fruit they lost their salvation.” Such thinking not only does not fit with what John has already reported Jesus saying, but doesn’t fit with the context of the rest of this chapter either. Such twisting of this passage gets away from the central points of it: our power to bear fruit comes not from trying to create fruit but in abiding in Christ, and that the pruning God does on true believers through trials they experience will actually help them to bear more fruit. When true believers struggle, they need to know that God has a purpose and the end result will be fruit for the Kingdom. Note that they can do this because they are already made clean by Jesus (verse 3).