I. The new commandment has been once for all uttered the new law is given; and each generation, at whatever point of the advance to its fulfilment God may have ordained its place, is bound by it equally. Every individual Christian lives under the force of that law, and is responsible to Him for obedience to it. Such obedience is, in fact, each generation's portion of that upward work into fulness of love, which the Holy Spirit is carrying on in the whole race. And the same may be said of every individual Christian; his obedience to Christ's law of love is his contribution towards the universal recognition of that law, in God's good time. No generation, no man stands alone. Even the humblest may contribute something, and all are bound for their own lives, and for God's great work, to do their utmost in the matter.
II. Now, our Saviour has not left this, His new commandment, in mere abstract vagueness; He has fixed it on us, and brought it home to our consciences by a definite and specified pattern: "As I have loved you, that ye also love one another." Of what kind was His love to us? (1) It was a self-denying love. (2) It was a boundless love. (3) It was a love of gentleness and courtesy. If we would love one another as He loved us, there is but one effectual instrument, but one genuine spring of such love. No mere admiration will effect it; no mere sensibility will call it forth; no romance of benevolence will keep it up; it can come from nothing but faith in Him; that faith which purifies the heart. It alone is powerful to dethrone self in a man by setting up Christ instead, and until self is put down within, there can be no real presence of love, and none of its genuine fruits; until Christ reigns in a man's heart there can be no imitation of His love, for it will never be understood by me till I behold it as a personal matter; till I measure its height by the depth of my unworthiness of it, its vastness by my own nothingness.
H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons,vol. iv., p. 223.
I. When our Lord said "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another," He appealed directly to the personal experience of those to whom He spoke. It was the eleven alone who could know to what extent He had loved, for they alone had felt His love. They had lived in sweet familiar intercourse with Him for some years. They had known His care, His kindness, His gentleness, His patience, His longsuffering, and it is not too much to say that they had never known anything like it. It is plain that our Lord intended this original experience of the eleven to become generally intelligible to vast multitudes who had never shared their experience.
II. As long as we regard the love of Jesus as a thing only of the past, displayed once for all, even though we may believe ourselves to have been the objects of it, I think it will have but little power on our hearts or conduct. What is it, then, that is wanting to make the love operative and effectual? A very important question, involving the essence of the whole matter. The element that is wanting, then, is clearly this: to see in the love of Jesus for His disciples, not only a love in which we were concerned, and a love embracing us; not only the love He evidenced when He said, "Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also who shall believe on Me through their word"; but a love still going forth, still reaching out to us, of which love all that was done by the Christ of history was, so to say, the pattern and the image. Now, it is impossible that the love of Christ could be thus energetic and operative if He was nothing more than man, however great. You do not and cannot feel any satisfaction or any real benefit from the present love, which you believe to be extended towards you by your deceased relatives. You would not like to think that they felt no such love, but whether they do or not, it is impossible, in any true sense, to reciprocrate that love, because you have now no evidence of its going forth towards you. But Christ's love has been with you from the first day of your life till now. It has not been merely an utterance recorded in the history of a great tragedy which was enacted eighteen hundred years ago; but it has been shown to you, it has been felt by you under ten thousand special dealings with you in your own inmost being, of which you alone are conscious and all the world besides is ignorant. The love which the life and death of Christ displayed was none other than the love of God. If this was not the love of Christ, then the utterance "As I have loved you, that ye also love one another," becomes meaningless and trivial. It no longer corresponds with the precept, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect," but substitutes in the place of a Divine standard of love a merely human and earthly standard.
S. Leathes, Penny Pulpit,No. 532.
References: John 13:34. Contemporary Pulpit,vol. viii., p. 309; Preacher's Monthly,vol. iv., p. 133; J. H. Wilson, The Gospel and its Fruits,p. 233.