Just As I Have: Part 2 of 3- The Shape of Obedience
How Jesus Fulfilled the Father’s Commands
“A new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” — John 13:34
I have a friend I’ll call Joshua. That isn’t his name; where he works, using his real one could cost him.
He is one of the most effective communicators I have ever met. He can preach to five thousand or five with exactly the same engagement, which is rarer than it sounds. He is also, at about five foot four, one of the most unassuming men I know, you would not pick him out of a room. He has a serious weakness for sweets and a passion for the lost that has cost him more than most of us will ever pay.
His ministry has multiplied into over a hundred thousand house churches, much of it in places where following Jesus can get you killed.
We are peers, in one sense. Close friends. We’ve equipped leaders together in Jordan and Iceland, and the USA, and we’ve traveled into frontier countries looking for a man of peace and an open door. We text about our families frequently. He knows how I take my coffee.
But he is also, in another sense, my mentor, and here is what I’ve had to reckon with. I cannot tell you what he taught me. Not really. There was no curriculum. We have never sat down so he could impart something. What happened is simpler and much harder to reproduce: I spent time with him, and I became a better communicator, a better evangelist, and, this is the part that matters, a better man. Something passed from him to me that neither of us put into words.
That is the way it has gone with most of my formative relationships, in Concentric and in the marketplace with friends at the Union League here in Philadelphia. I keep getting to sit with giants. And almost none of what I’ve received from them arrived as instruction.
I’ve thought about that a great deal, because my whole vocation assumes that something transferable is happening when we make disciples. So what exactly is passing between us?
Jesus answers that question, and his answer is stranger than anything I would have designed.
In the first part of this series, we looked at what Jesus meant when he said remain in my love, that abiding is a location rather than a mood, that the way into it is obedience, and that Jesus was doing something staggering when he made his own relationship with the Father the template for ours.
Which left a question open. If keeping his commands is the road into abiding, we had better know what his commands are.
Are Jesus’ Commands the Same as the Father’s?
When Jesus says my commands, does he mean Torah? A new set of rules? Something else entirely?
Earlier in the same discourse he narrows the field dramatically: “A new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another” (13:34; repeated at 15:12 and 15:17). He calls it new — yet he has just quoted Leviticus 19:18, which is ancient.
What’s new isn’t the content. It’s the measuring stick.
The old command set the standard at yourself: love your neighbor as you love you. That is a real standard, and a demanding one, but it’s self-referential, and self-referential standards are notoriously easy to lower. I know this because I have lowered mine. Repeatedly. Usually around 4:30 on a Thursday, when loving my neighbor as myself has quietly come to mean loving my neighbor roughly as much as I love answering email.
Jesus replaces it with a standard outside us and above us: as I have loved you. Within twenty-four hours the disciples would see precisely what that meant. The standard is no longer the self. It is the cross. You cannot grade yourself against it, negotiate with it, or quietly adjust it downward on a hard day. It only ever confronts you, and it only ever drives you back to him for the power to meet it.
So are Jesus’ commands and the Father’s identical? In content, they overlap enormously: love God, love others; this was always Torah’s heartbeat (Matthew 22:37–40 makes it explicit, folding the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4–5 together with Leviticus 19:18). But Jesus is doing more than repeating Moses. He is fulfilling and re-centering the commandments around himself as the definitive revelation of what the Father’s love looks like in a human life. To keep Jesus’ commands is to keep the Father’s, because Jesus is now the lens through which the Father’s character and will are seen without distortion (John 14:9).
The “just as”pattern isn’t only about obedience patterned after Jesus. It’s about the content of obedience being patterned after Jesus.
Betrayal is part of life. It is very much part of ministry.
I’ve had my share, and I’ve inflicted my share, I have needed to apologize for wounds I caused as often as I’ve needed to forgive wounds caused to me. But the ones that don’t heal quickly are the ones that come from the people closest in. I once watched a close friend stand by while I was mistreated. He said nothing. I assume he was protecting himself, which I understand better now than I did then. It felt like a death.
I forgave him. I’d like to tell you it was purely because I wanted to be like my Savior, and that was part of it, and the deeper part is that Jesus forgave me first, which makes the arithmetic hard to argue with. But I’ll be honest about the rest of it: unforgiveness is exhausting. Resentment and bitterness take energy I don’t have and give nothing back. Releasing someone turns out to be more life-giving than holding a grudge, and I’ve never once regretted the trade.
As I have loved you. The standard is not what he deserved. It’s what I received.
More Than the Shema — But Not Less
Is this an echo of the Shema? Almost certainly, in part, and I’ll say up front that this next stretch is the part where a preacher starts stacking Old Testament references and half the room begins wondering about lunch. Stay with me, because the stack is the point.
The language of total, singular devotion, and the fusion of hearing and obeying, since the Hebrew shema means both, was in the air for anyone raised on the daily recitation of Hear, O Israel.
But John 15 reaches further. It also gathers in:
Israel as vine (Isaiah 5:1–7; Psalm 80:8–16; Ezekiel 15, 17, 19). Israel was repeatedly pictured as a vine God planted and expected fruit from, and which repeatedly disappointed him. Jesus’ declaration a few verses earlier, I am the true vine (15:1), is a direct claim on that history. Where Israel-as-vine failed to bear fruit, he succeeds. And then he grafts his disciples into himself. I am the true Israel. Be in me, and you are the true Israel.
New covenant promise (Jeremiah 31:31–34; Ezekiel 36:26–27). A coming day when God’s law would no longer sit on stone tablets outside a person but be written on the heart, when a new Spirit would be given to enable obedience from within rather than compliance from without. John 15 is arguably that promise landing in real time: abiding, Spirit-empowered obedience is exactly what Ezekiel foresaw.
God’s dwelling among his people. Menō has deep resonance with tabernacle and temple traditions, where God’s glory dwelt (shakan, the root behind Shekinah) among Israel. John has already used tabernacle language for the incarnation itself: the Word dwelt, literally tabernacled, among us (1:14). Now that same dwelling is offered to ordinary disciples. Not divine presence merely near them. Mutual indwelling.
So: Shema-shaped, layered with vine imagery, covenant renewal, and temple theology at once, the kind of dense, multi-textured allusion John specializes in.
And notice what all three strands have in common. Each one describes something God does to a people so that they can do what they could not do before. He plants the vine. He writes the law inward. He comes to dwell. The obedience Jesus asks for is never obedience by willpower. It is obedience made possible by an indwelling that precedes it.
This is why the question “what kind of obedience produces abiding?” has an answer that surprises people: the kind that isn’t primarily yours.
The Pattern That Multiplies
If just as is a fractal, the same shape reproducing at every scale, then it should not surprise us that it runs all the way to the Great Commission. Matthew 28:19–20 sends the disciples out to make more disciples, “teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”
Notice what that is not. It is not teaching them facts about Jesus. It is teaching them obedience to Jesus, the very thing John 15:10 says produces abiding.
Here is the whole logic of disciplemaking laid bare. Jesus abides in the Father by keeping the Father’s commands. He invites the disciples to abide in him the same way. He then sends them to teach the next generation the same pattern: obedience that produces abiding, abiding that produces fruit (15:5, 8), fruit that includes more disciples who learn to obey and abide in turn. Concentric rings, each the same shape as the one before, spreading outward from Christ himself.
This is why obedience can never be reduced to compliance, and why disciplemaking can never be reduced to information transfer.
You cannot multiply what you have not entered.
I have sat in a great many meetings about discipleship strategy. Curriculum, pathways, cohorts, metrics, some of it genuinely useful, and I’ve built my share of it. But none of it can do the one thing that actually has to happen. You can hand someone a workbook on abiding. You cannot hand them abiding. What passes from one generation to the next is not the material. It is the pattern, carried in a person who is living inside it, offered to someone close enough to catch it.
Which is, at last, the answer to the question I’ve been carrying about Joshua.
Nothing was transferred because nothing was taught. What I caught from him was the shape of a life that stays attached, and I caught it by being near enough, long enough, to see it.
Making disciples as Jesus made disciples means inviting people into that same abiding-through-obedience relationship you are living in yourself, not managing their behavior, but drawing them into the vine.
My first ministry job was in a church of three hundred in a college town in south-central Pennsylvania. Fledgling youth group. Not much budget, not much strategy, not much of anything except a lot of time spent with a handful of kids.
I could not have told you then that anything was happening.
What still amazes me is how many of those students went into vocational ministry. Three of them are on staff together at a megachurch today. And here is the part I did not see coming: I have met their disciples. I have met some of their disciples’ disciples.
Three rings out. Names and faces I would never have known existed.
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to tell that story as an accomplishment, and it isn’t one. I didn’t build it. I couldn’t have. I was a young youth pastor who mostly showed up, ate bad pizza, and tried to stay close to Jesus in a season when I had very little idea what I was doing. The multiplication was never mine to engineer.
That’s the whole point, actually.
A branch does not produce grapes by effort or technique. It stays attached and the vine does the rest.
What I gave those students was not a program. It was proximity to someone who was, imperfectly, and with a great deal of stumbling, abiding.
Which is all any of us has to give.
Which Leaves the Hardest Question
So the commands turn out not to be a list. They’re a person, the shape of a life, offered as both standard and source.
But that raises the question I find hardest, and it’s the one we’ll take up last.
All of this assumes a world where the vine means something. Jesus told his disciples that the world would hate them (15:18), and he was right, but at least it was a world that argued with him. My neighbors mostly don’t. Faith registers to them as a private preference, roughly on the order of a taste in music, fine for you, faintly embarrassing at work.
What does abiding look like there? What does salt do when it has forgotten what food tastes like without it? That’s where we’re going next.
Mike Harder is President of Concentric Global and the author of The Master’s Blueprint.
This is Part 2 of a three-part series on John 15. Part 1, “Just As I Have,” looked at what it means to remain in the Father’s love.
