Just as I Have: What Jesus Meant by "Remain in My Love”- Reflections on John 15- Part 1 of 3

Just As I Have: Three Reflections on John 15

Editor’s Note: This three-part series explores one sentence of Jesus that has shaped my life for decades: “If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love…” (John 15:10). My hope is that these reflections help you discover that obedience is not the price of God’s love but the pathway into enjoying it more deeply.

Part 1 of 3: Just As I Have: What Jesus Meant by “Remain in My Love”

“If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love.” — John 15:10

In college I went to the Urbana Missions Conference and came home certain God had called me to the mission field. I was eager to pursue that calling. Then he sent me to a church youth group. And after that, to an executive pastor’s office. And after that, to a lead pastor’s study. Good work, all of it, work I loved. But every few years someone would call about a global role, and every time the answer came back the same: not now.

I’ll admit something. Part of me was relieved.

Missionaries raise support. They sit across kitchen tables from friends and relatives and ask them to fund not a project but a person: themselves. I had raised money for building campaigns and mission trips and youth budgets without blinking. The thought of asking someone to underwrite me made my stomach turn. So when the answer was not now, I heard the call of God. I also heard, quietly, a door closing on the one thing I most wanted to avoid.

Then in 2018, at fifty-three, God said now.

Now, Lord? Really?

Now. Trust me.

I said yes with roughly equal parts excitement and dread, and God showed up, which is not the same as saying it was easy. It has been harder in ways I didn’t anticipate and richer in ways I couldn’t have engineered. I’ve watched God work in over a hundred countries and been given a small part in it. I’ve learned, at depths I didn’t know were available, that everything I have is his. And I’ve learned something about obedience I would not have believed at twenty-two: that the yes I dreaded most was the doorway into the closeness I’d been asking for all along.

That is the strange logic Jesus lays out in the upper room. And most of us, if we’re honest, don’t quite believe it.

We file “obedience” and “love” in separate drawers. Obedience goes in the drawer marked duty: checklists, rules, things you do because someone with authority said so. Love goes in the drawer marked feeling: warmth, closeness, things that happen to you rather than things you do.

So when Jesus sits his disciples down hours before his arrest and tells them that keeping his commands is how they will remain in his love, something in us reaches to pull the two ideas back apart. Surely he means obedience is the result of love, not the road into it.

Except that isn’t quite what he says. And the way he says it is more surprising than the claim itself.

The Hinge Word: “Just As”

Look at the structure again: “If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love.”

That little phrase, just as, is carrying enormous weight. In Greek it’s kathōs, and it functions as one of John’s signature moves. It appears roughly thirty times across his Gospel, almost always drawing a line of correspondence between Father and Son, or between Son and his disciples. Just as the Father has loved me, so have I loved you (15:9). Just as the Father sent me, so I am sending you (20:21). Just as I have loved you, love one another (13:34).

John isn’t being repetitive. He’s showing us a pattern that reproduces itself downward; the same shape appearing at every scale of the relationship.

So when Jesus says just as in 15:10, he is not offering a loose comparison. He is saying: what exists between me and my Father is the same kind of thing I am inviting you into. My obedience-and-abiding is the template for yours.

Whatever it means for me to keep my Father’s commands and remain in his love, that same architecture is now available to you. Not admired from a distance. Entered.

This is the astonishing move of Jesus’ entire Farewell Discourse.

Jesus isn’t merely commanding obedience; he’s inviting us into the

very relationship he has with the Father.

He does not issue orders and dangle love as their reward. He opens his own life with the Father and says: come inside.

What the Words Are Carrying

Four terms are heavier than their English translations let on. I studied Greek for four years in undergrad; two of my classes had three students in them, and one had just me, which is a humbling way to discover there is nowhere to hide. I quizzed out of it in seminary and have forgotten most of it since. These four words stuck anyway, mostly because I kept running into them in places I’d rather they had left me alone.

Remain / abide (menō). This word dominates John 15, eleven times in the vine passage alone. It doesn’t mean a visit. It means to take up permanent residence, to dwell, to stay put. Jesus has just used it of the vine and branches: apart from him you can do nothing, because life flows only to what stays attached (15:4–5).

Menō is not an emotional state we manufacture. It is a location we occupy. Union, not mood.

Which is a mercy, if you are German. My family did not do effusive. To this day Teresa has to take my word for it that I am delighted with a birthday gift, since my face is unlikely to volunteer the information, while hers tells you everything before she’s finished unwrapping. If abiding depended on my capacity to feel something visibly, I would have washed out decades ago.

Command (entolē). In Greek this can mean anything from a specific instruction to an entire body of authoritative teaching. But remember that Jesus and his disciples were almost certainly speaking Aramaic, and John, writing in Greek decades later, is rendering a conversation steeped in Hebrew categories. The natural Hebrew equivalent is mitzvah, a word inseparable from covenant. In Torah, the mitzvot were never freestanding rules. They were the stipulations of a relationship, the terms by which Israel lived as God’s covenant people. “Keeping the commandments” was covenant language long before it was legal language.

Love (agapē). John uses agapē for a love defined by will and commitment rather than sentiment; the kind proven by what it costs you (15:13). When Jesus says remain in my love, he is not describing a feeling he hopes they’ll sustain. He is describing a space, his committed, self-giving love, that they can dwell inside of or wander out of.

Just as (kathōs). Not comparison. Reproduction. A relationship replicating its own shape in a new generation.

Put together, the verse reads less like obey the rules and I’ll keep loving you and more like: Take up permanent residence in the same covenant love I share with my Father, and the way in is the same way I walk it myself.

Would a First-Century Jew Have Found This Strange?

Decades ago Teresa and I stood in front of a church and said vows to each other and God. What we did that day was, legally speaking, contractual. There is a certificate in a file somewhere with the Commonwealth’s seal on it, and it means something real: property, next of kin, medical decisions, the whole apparatus.

But I promise you we were not thinking about the apparatus. I was mostly thinking about not locking my knees, advice I have since given to a hundred grooms, with the authority of a man who was not entirely sure he’d stay upright.

Ours was not an arranged marriage negotiated between two families with land to consolidate. We got married because we loved each other. We consented to the shape God gives marriage in Scripture, and we have spent decades trying to serve each other inside that shape, not because a document requires it, but because we love each other and we love Jesus.

The legal covenant is not the point of our marriage. It is the floor our

marriage stands on.

Remove it and the whole thing becomes something less than it is. But no one confuses the floor with the house.

This is roughly what the commandments meant to Israel, and it’s why Jesus’ statement, in one sense, would have sounded entirely familiar to the men in that room.

Deuteronomy makes the same argument: “I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commandments… that you may live” (30:16). The commandments were never a cold contract. They were the grammar of a love relationship that already existed. God redeemed Israel out of Egypt before he gave a single command at Sinai. Obedience was a response to love already given, and the ongoing fruit of obedience was continuing to dwell, secure in the land, under blessing, in relationship. Language remarkably close to remaining.

So the shape of Jesus’ statement would have felt native to Jewish ears. Obedience and covenant closeness were already wired together.

What would have stopped a listener cold is whose commands, and whose love.

Jesus does not say “keep the Father’s commands and you’ll remain in the Father’s love,” a claim any devout Jew could nod along with. He says keep my commands and you’ll remain in my love, and then holds up his own relationship to the Father as the model for it. He is putting himself in the position Torah occupied. He is claiming the allegiance, the intimacy, and the life-giving authority that the covenant God of Israel claimed at Sinai.

That is either blasphemy, or it is one of the highest claims to divine identity anywhere in the Gospels. John has spent fourteen chapters building the case that it’s the latter.

What We’re Left Holding

So here is where the passage leaves us.

Abiding is not a mood we work up. It’s a place we live. The way in is obedience, not because obedience earns our place in Christ, but because obedience is how those who already belong continue to live in the enjoyment of his love. And the one making the invitation is not offering us a technique. He is offering us his own life with his Father, and claiming the authority to do it.

Which raises a question I’ve had to sit with for years, and which I suspect you’re already asking.

If keeping Jesus’ commands is the pathway into abiding, what, exactly, are his commands? Is he talking about Torah? A new set of rules? Something else? And how would we know whether we’re keeping them?

That’s where we’ll go next.