What the World Needs Now
John 15:9-17

In 1965 Burt Bacharach wrote a song he didn’t believe in. He and Hal David offered it to performer Dionne Warwick, who turned it down.
Bacharach was reluctant to play it for Jackie DeShannon, but he finally did, and she liked it. Together they recorded, “What the World Needs Now is Love.” The hit made it to #7 in the U.S., #1 in Canada. (Later, even Warwick sang it!)
Since then, it has been performed by over 100 artists in a variety of settings, some wholesome, some not so much. It has also been used in times of crisis. For instance, when Robert Kennedy was shot in June 1968, LA radio stations played it over and over for a 26-hour vigil until he died.
Pop stars sang it at the 2016 Democratic National Convention as a protest against gun violence. Broadway for Orlando recorded it later that year to raise money for the victims of the Orlando night club shooting.
Think about the song’s title: “What the World Needs Now is Love.” Isn’t that the truth? Love is the antidote for loneliness, for apathy, for worry, for hatred, for bitterness, for purposelessness.
Love fills the voids of our lives. Our world is in desperate need of love, and we have it. Loves comes from God. In fact, 1 John 4:8 tells us, “God is love.” To know the true character of love, get to know God.
In today’s passage, Jesus is preparing his disciples for his imminent departure to heaven. He has trained and led them for three years. Now he only has hours to live. And what does he talk about? He talks about love.
This is not your puppy love from school days. This is not romantic love. This is a different kind of love, agape love: willful, purposeful, decisional, sacrificial. Jesus teaches us at least three things about it as we listen in with the disciples. First, he urges us to...
1. Draw on love’s source (v. 9)
In verse 9, Jesus says, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.” From Father to Son, to all of God’s children, God’s love flows to us.
Notice the tense. The Father “has loved” Jesus. Jesus “has loved” us. It’s already happened. Our job is but to “remain” in that love. Other translations use the word “continue”, “dwell” or “abide.”
In modern lingo, we might say to “hang out” with Jesus’ love. One translation called The “Passion” says, “You must continually let my love nourish your hearts.”
Love as described by children:
• When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn’t bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That’s love.”—Rebecca, age 8

• “Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your French Fries without making them give you any of theirs.”—Chrissie, age 6

• “Love is what makes you smile when you’re tired.”—Terri, age 4

• “Love is when my mommy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip before giving it to him, to make sure the taste is OK.”—Danny, age 7
• “If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who you hate.”—Nikka, age 6

• “Love is like a little old woman and a little old man who are still friends even after knowing each other for most of their lives.”—Tommy, age 6

• “Love is when Mommy gives Daddy the best piece of chicken.”—Elaine, age 5

• “You really shouldn’t say ‘I love you’ unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget.”—Jessica, age 8
God is our source of love, and his supply never runs low. When you have trouble loving someone, whether friend or enemy, ask God for the love you need. He will surely supply it, for it is in his very essence and will. Draw on love’s source, and ...
2. Choose to love (vv. 10, 12, 17)
Our society likes to portray love as a feeling, and it is. But much more so,
love is a decision.
If you’ve been married more than a week, you know that at times you have to choose to love your spouse. Marriage is a laboratory to learn selflessness.
Every healthy marriage requires commitments of both husband and wife to choose to love at times. And the funny thing is,
as you make that choice, the feelings usually follow. But it’s not just in marriage do we choose to love.
Listen to Jesus’ language here: Verse 10: “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.”
Verse 12: “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.” And Jesus’ wrap-up in verse 17: “This is my command: Love each other.”
You cannot command an emotion! I cannot say to you, “Be happy!” I guess I can say it, but whether you’re happy or not can’t be forced. So, if love was simply an emotion, how could Jesus command us to do it?
Therefore, love is more than an emotion; it is a decision. And Jesus links it irrevocably here to keeping his commands. To summarize, he says, “If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love. And by the way, one of my commands is to love each other the way I have loved you.”
What radical love this is! It sounds nice, until someone really gets on your nerves.
• You know they’re cheating at that card game!
• You hate the way they gossip about everybody.
• You feel hurt they left you out of their gathering.
• You’re angry they never call you.
What will you do then? Will you give into temptation to think ill of them in your heart? Or will you CHOOSE to love them, and in so doing, stay in Jesus’ love?
Choose love and see what God will do. And lastly,
3. Love until it hurts (v. 13)
Jesus gives an example of love that Veterans can identify with. In verse 13, he says, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
This is the ultimate love, the love that sacrifices whatever the cost for the well-being of the other. This is the primary reason soldiers pull the trigger: not for love of country, or for self-preservation, but primarily to protect those on either side of them.
Without doubt, this verse would be fulfilled most perfectly just a day after it was spoken: Jesus would lay down his life for his friends. He would give himself up for you and for me, for all who would believe. He knows what it’s like to love until it hurts.
Whether we’re talking marriage partner, friend, son, granddaughter, neighbor, staff member: it doesn’t matter. Every relationship in your life requires some level of sacrifice.
If you’re going to love, you’re going to need to go to the source for that love; you’re going to make a choice to love; and sometimes you’re going to love until it hurts.
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It's the only thing that there's just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love,
No not just for some but for everyone.
What if it began right here, right now, in this place today, with each one of us? What if we chose today to remain in Jesus, to obey his commands, to allow his love to fill us and overflow to those around us?
ILLUS: About 10 years ago there was a famous study called Alameda County Study overseen by a social scientist from Harvard. It tracked the lives of 7,000 people over nine years, and what they found was:
The most isolated people were 3 times more likely to die than those with strong relationships.
In fact, people who had strong friendships but bad health habits lived significantly longer than the people who had GREAT health habits... but isolated.
As one person commented after seeing the results of that study “In other words, it is better to eat Twinkies with good friends than to eat broccoli alone.”
The point is this... we need friends. We desperately need friends - people who are there for us and people who care for us. And God knows that. In fact, the very 1st problem God saw with His creation had to do with loneliness.
When God had created stars and the plants, and fish and the birds – every time He created something, He’d say “that’s GOOD”. And when He created Adam, God declared: that’s “very good”. But then God after He created Adam... God said: “It is NOT good that the man should be alone.” (Genesis 2:18)
It is NOT GOOD that a man, or a woman, should be alone - and God knows that. That’s why Jesus created the Church. Ephesians 5:25 tells us that “Christ... loved the church and gave himself up for her...” And Jesus died to establish the church, in part, so that we could have a place where we could be with other Christians and build friendships.
You see, Christianity is built on friendship. Jesus said: “You are my FRIENDS if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you FRIENDS, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.” John 15:14-15
When you and I became Christians THEN we became friends of Jesus. And that’s the pattern Jesus intended us to have in the church - we are HIS friends... and we so we should be friends of EACH OTHER.
That’s why Hebrews 10:24-25 tells us – that as Christians – we should
24 And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, 25 not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.
You see, part of the purpose of church is building FELLOWSHIP - developing friendships.
So John 15 tells us that Jesus is OUR friend. And then other scriptures explain that NOW Jesus expects us to use HIS friendship with us as a model of how we should develop friendships with each other. That’s why our church motto should be: “Where Visitors Become Friends And Friends Become Family.
(Cool, huh? I thought that one up all by myself... or else I stole it from someone. I can’t remember which).
I wanted a way to help to illustrate this truth... and as I was thinking, a Bible story came to mind – the story of Jesus and a man named Zacchaeus. You remember Zacchaeus? He was a “wee little man”.
“Zacchaeus was a wee little man, and a wee little man was he.
He climbed in a Sycamore tree, for the Lord he wanted to see
And as the master passed that way He looked up in the tree
And He said ‘Zacchaeus you come down.
For I’m going to your house today. Yes I’m coming to your house today.’”
Now when Jesus visited Jericho that day, it was just a few days before his trial, conviction, and crucifixion in Jerusalem. And most scholars believe that when Jesus visited Jericho that day, Zacchaeus was the ONLY person he met there.
Now Zacchaeus was not a popular man. He was short, disliked and despised by almost everyone in town. He’s climbed up in a tree to see Jesus – because nobody would let him be at the front of the line. But here we have Jesus walking through Jericho for the last time, stopping beneath that sycamore and - never having met Zacchaeus before - calling him by name.
Then Jesus goes to this guy’s house and eats with him. Nobody who was anybody would do that. Zacchaeus was a worthless reject of humanity. But Jesus did that. By His every word and action, Jesus declared that Zacchaeus was important to Him. And Jesus gave Zacchaeus something everybody craves: acceptance.
Jesus made Zacchaeus a friend.
Teddy Roosevelt once said, “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.”
And, in a way, that’s what the Bible tells us about Jesus. Jesus became like us... He took on flesh and experienced a life just like ours. As Hebrews says “... we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” Hebrews 4:15
Jesus came to be our friend. To be God in the flesh and experience the same temptations, and frustrations and pains ... ultimately to endure the worst thing imaginable - DEATH - so He could be like us. Jesus came to be... like us.
He came to change our lives. To give us peace. And to show us – by His death, burial and resurrection that we mean something to God.
Jesus came to be our friend.
CLOSE: I want to close with this story by syndicated columnist Deborah Mathis. She wrote about the day she was passing through the busy Union Station in Washington D.C..
The first thing she noticed was the noise and the hubbub of sounds. The public address announcer calling out arrivals and departures. There were pagers, and walkie-talkies,
and cell phones. You could hear horns honking, machines clinking out change, and babies crying. And there were voices from EVERYWHERE.
A security guard was yelling at a man about to enter a forbidden area. Three women were standing by a bench arguing with one another, and the man in line in front of her was agitated and pacing around.
BUT then, she heard something that caught her attention. She heard someone singing.
(Singing softly) "What a friend we have in Jesus,
All our sins and griefs to bear;
What a privilege to carry
Everything to God in prayer."
And slowly but surely a change came over the crowd. The noise began to subside as you could hear:
"O what peace we often forfeit,
O what needless pain we bear,
All because we do not carry
Everything to God in prayer."
Mathis noted that the quarreling women quit yelling and quietly took their seats. People began to noticeably relax. And as the lone voice sang the remaining verses of the 150 year old hymn Mathis realized she was singing along now. So were the three women who had been bickering. And so were several others.
The man in front of Mathis said: "Nice, huh? I don't even believe in Jesus, but that's nice."
Just the knowledge that you could have a friend in Jesus has an impact on people. You see, you can talk all you like about how nice a church building you have, or how pleasant a congregation this is, or how handsome your preacher is... but in the end, the only thing that matters is that people come to realize that you truly believe in this one concept: you have a friend in Jesus.
INVITATION