Morning, brothers and sisters. It’s good to be back. Seems like you haven’t been here for weeks.
Can we turn to a scripture for a moment? It is in Luke Chapter 22, starting with Verse 8.
And He sent Peter and John, saying, Go and make ready for us the passover, that we may eat.
And they said unto Him, Where wilt Thou that we make ready?
And He said unto them, Behold, when ye are entered into the city, there shall meet you a man bearing a pitcher of water; follow him into the house whereinto he goeth.
And ye shall say unto the master of the house, The Teacher saith unto thee, Where is the guest-chamber, where I shall eat the passover with My disciples?
And he will show you a large upper room furnished: there make ready.
And they went, and found as He had said unto them: and they made ready the passover.
And when the hour was come, He sat down, and the apostles with Him.
And He said unto them, With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer.
Let’s pray.
Our Heavenly Father, we thank You that You have a desire for us. As we come to You today and open Your Word, we ask that that desire would come forth from Your Word and into our spirits.
We pray that we would see You this morning—not as a man can tell a story about You, but as Your Word reveals You. Lord, we ask for Your Holy Spirit to open the Word to us today, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Before we get into John Chapter 13, which is what we want to look at today, I opened with this verse for this purpose. This is exactly where we are in John Chapter 13. It is Passover time. John Chapter 13 begins, “Now before the feast of the passover.”
There is no longer a public ministry for the Lord Jesus. He is no longer going to be about the crowds and the multitudes—teaching, healing, and doing things out in public. That time is now past. It is over.
But the time He has left is for His disciples alone. These next five chapters in John—Chapters 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17—are all about Him and His disciples.
Matter of fact, this is probably the most intimate part of the Scriptures, as far as the Lord Jesus is concerned. He is more intimate with these disciples than He is with anyone, and the reason is because they are His disciples.
The world cannot hear what He tells these men. It is not for the world; it is for His disciples. This is a very personal time. It is personal for the Lord, and it is personal for His disciples.
Theodore Sparks says about these chapters that it goes from being an objective message to a subjective message. It is very personal. It is not for everybody; it is for those who are disciples.
Finally, it is intimate. I want to dwell on that concept of intimate, because that is what this is all about. First of all, we see from this passage in Luke that this is what our Lord Jesus desires most of all: “With desire I have desired” this time.
More than anything else, I have desired this time, because it is intimate.
What does intimate mean? There are just a couple of things I want to use in stretching out our understanding of intimacy.
If I were going to take my wife to an intimate place for dinner, it would not be Chuck E. Cheese, all right? Because that is not very intimate. Why is it not intimate? Yeah, it is noisy. You cannot even hear each other talk.
There are only a few times I have been to Chuck E. Cheese, and I am so glad my children grew up. That is all I can say. Although my wife feels that once in a while at school, she is bopping those little gophers.
Secondly, intimacy is a quiet, private atmosphere. If I want to take my wife to an intimate place, I would take her somewhere where they put us off where we do not see a lot of other people and do not hear a lot of other people. We just see one another. We just hear one another. That is what intimacy is.
Another way to look at intimacy is that it is a close—not in proximity—but a close, familiar, and affectionate relationship with another.
It is not just close. It is close and familiar. Familiar means I know the one with whom I am intimate. I have drawn to a closeness where it is not superficial anymore, but I know who I love.
Finally, it is affectionate. Affectionate means that it is tender. The bottoms of my feet, before summer starts, are very tender. In other words, they are very sensitive to touch, and touch can move them.
Being tender means that I can be moved by the one with whom I am intimate. The way they feel and what they say can move me because I am tender toward them. I am sensitive toward them. So that is what intimacy means.
Another thing about being intimate is that, in intimacy, there is a liberty that you do not have when something is superficial. When things are superficial, you have to guard yourself so people like you. You have to make sure you are always on your toes so you do not let anything slip out.
Once you are intimate with someone, you do not have to worry about whether they like you, and you are able to be free. I am not saying that you say, “Okay, they like me now, so I can do anything I want.” But it means that when who you really are slips out, they still like you. They still love you.
You do not have to worry, “Oh my gosh, I do not know if I can do this.” In John Chapters 13 through 17, the disciples are free to say, “Where are You going? We do not know,” or, “Show us the Father.” They can be who they are and not be afraid that Jesus is going to say, “I am through with you guys,” because He knows them and He loves them.
Finally, in intimacy there is a depth—not only of affection, but of the knowledge of the person with whom you are intimate. There is a deepness in how you see the person and in your understanding.
You have heard the phrase, “You drink deeply of something.” You drink all that there is. It goes beyond merely saying, “Oh, it tastes good,” and putting it away. You drink it fully. You drink deep of it.
This is what the Lord desires. This is what the Lord desires of all His disciples: “With desire I have desired” this intimacy with you.
He has called us into this type of intimacy. He knew each of His disciples intimately. He knew who they were. He knew their weaknesses and their strengths, and it did not affect the way He saw them. It did not affect the way He loved them. He knew them fully.
Now, these men had an intimate relationship with the Lord Jesus. They lived with Him daily for almost three years. But their understanding of Him was not full. They were always finding out something different about Him.
The wonderful thing about intimacy is that, in finding out new things about the person with whom you are intimate, it is not finding out something that drives you away. It is finding out something that draws you closer—drawing you further in to who He is.
Intimacy is for disciples, and all of us who are Christians are called to be disciples. When the Lord was raised from the dead and spoke with His disciples in Matthew Chapter 28, He said, “Go into the world, and make disciples.” He did not say, “Make converts.”
What is the difference between a convert and a disciple? I think a convert is somebody who has changed their mind. A disciple is somebody whose heart has been gotten hold of and drawn in.
The Lord does not want converts; He wants disciples. He wants the same relationship that He had with these twelve to be ours. That is every one of us.
We think about His disciples and say, “Of course He was intimate with Peter. Of course He was intimate with John.” But what about Simon the Zealot? What about James, the son of Alphaeus? Just because they were not in the forefront does not mean that the Lord did not desire intimacy with them.
A lot of times, we think it is the people in the forefront whom the Lord really wants to get hold of. No. He wants everyone.
We are all called into the fellowship of His Son. That is what it says in 1 Corinthians 1:9. We are all called into the fellowship—into that type of relationship, into that intimacy. All who believe in Christ are called into it.
This is the desire of the Lord. This is why He spilled His blood, which we celebrated today. It is not so that He can keep us at arm’s distance, but so that we can be drawn in close to Him.
Being drawn in, touching Him and letting ourselves be touched by Him, we are transformed into His likeness.
When we begin looking at this section of John Chapter 13, we need to keep this in mind: this is just for the disciples. We are let into something that the world is not let into, something the world cannot understand. But disciples can, because of an intimate relationship.
Remember, intimacy does not begin all at once. There is always a beginning. That beginning is when the Lord gets our attention and turns our heart toward Him. Then He begins to draw.
Let me tell you one other thing about intimacy: the Lord will never hold back from intimacy. It is us who hold back from intimacy. What they say about men is that we do not want commitment.
With this in mind, let us look at John Chapter 13. We are not going to read the whole chapter. We are going to look at the most talked-about part of it and then go on. Let us read, starting with Verse 1.
Now before the feast of the passover, Jesus knowing that His hour was come that He should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved His own that were in the world, He loved them unto the end.
And during supper, the devil having already put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray Him,
Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He came forth from God, and goeth unto God,
riseth from supper, and layeth aside His garments; and He took a towel, and girded Himself.
Then He poureth water into the basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith He was girded.
So He cometh to Simon Peter. He saith unto Him, Lord, dost Thou wash my feet?
Jesus answered and said unto him, What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt understand hereafter.
Peter saith unto Him, Thou shalt never wash my feet.
Jesus answered him, If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with Me.
Simon Peter saith unto Him, Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head.
Jesus saith to him, He that is bathed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit: and ye are clean, but not all.
For He knew him that should betray Him; therefore said He, Ye are not all clean.
So when He had washed their feet, and taken His garments, and sat down again, He said unto them, Know ye what I have done to you?
Ye call Me, Teacher, and, Lord: and ye say well; for so I am.
If I then, the Lord and the Teacher, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s feet.
For I have given you an example, that ye also should do as I have done to you.
Verily, verily, I say unto you, A servant is not greater than his lord; neither one that is sent greater than he that sent him.
If ye know these things, blessed are ye if ye do them.
A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; even as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.
Brothers and sisters, I am not going to give a rundown of the washing of the feet. Many great sermons have been preached on these things, and I am neither eloquent nor do I have the capacity to speak in that way. But this is what I saw in these things.
Again, this begins a time of intimacy between the disciples and their Lord. His disciples are called to service. When He called them, He sent them out to serve. When they fed the five thousand, they served. After He rose from the dead, they served the living God. That is what they were called to do.
They were to serve out of this intimate relationship. But where does service come from?
I think this chapter gives us the answer in a nutshell:
We want to look at these things in a way that gives us further understanding from this washing of the feet.
What did the disciples know about the Lord Jesus? If we went through the four Gospels and asked what they had seen that helped them know something about their Lord, it is mind-boggling.
They saw a Man who had authority and power over nature. They saw One who could still the seas and say, “Peace, be still,” and it came to an end. They had that knowledge. Not everybody saw that, but they saw it.
They saw Him have power over sickness and even death. They saw Him touch a leper, and the leper was clean. They saw Him raise Lazarus, Jairus’s daughter, and the widow of Nain’s son. They saw them raised from the dead.
They saw that He had power over the spiritual realm and over spiritual beings. They saw a man with a legion of demons. A Roman legion was anywhere from three to six thousand soldiers. When you read about the demoniac of the Gadarenes, and he says, “My name is Legion,” can you imagine that?
We think the power of one demon is tremendous. What about this man who was under the power of three thousand, where the Lord, with a word, could say, “Depart”? They saw that He had this kind of power.
Some of them saw Him transfigured. They saw a glory to Him that had not been seen in man since Adam. Even Moses had a fading glory from being in the presence of the Lord, but only Adam had that glory. They saw this.
When you come to this chapter, they had seen Him in all these ways, but they had not seen Him do what He did here. Here is this Man whom they knew was capable of doing all these things, who strips Himself down and washes their feet.
What were they seeing? Verse 13 says, “Ye call Me, Teacher, and, Lord: and ye say well; for so I am.” They knew Him as Lord. What lord does this?
They saw Him as Philippians 2:7 describes Him: “He emptied Himself.” To wash their feet, He made Himself of no reputation. He removed His garments.
We could look at this as a picture of Him coming down from Heaven, laying aside His glory, as Philippians Chapter 2 speaks of. But these men had never seen anything like this. They had never seen a Man with such authority take it off and wash their feet.
Peter rightly said, “Lord, dost Thou wash my feet?” That was a right response for Peter. It is the same with us. We would have to say, “How can You wash my feet?”
Peter said what we would all have said: “You will never wash my feet,” because we think we need to be worthy. “We will wash our own feet. We will make ourselves presentable to You.” That was not even in question here.
For the first time, they saw something in the Lord Jesus that they had never seen. They saw His condescension.
When we speak of condescending, it has a bad connotation with us. “Do not be so condescending to me.” We use the term to mean that someone thinks they are better than us and is stooping down for us.
But here, this was true condescension. There was no sense in the Lord Jesus of saying, “I am better than you, so I am going to wash your feet.” There was none of that. This was true meekness.
This was a meekness that men had probably never seen, especially in a ruler.
The first hymn I ever learned after I became a Christian was hymn number 98, “Down from His Glory.” Floyd Paoli—who thanks you for the prayers that have gone up for him, incidentally; he is very grateful—started studying the Gospel of Luke with us and said, “We have to have a theme song.”
We were all these hippie-like people, and Floyd said it went to the tune of O Sole Mio. But I knew that was not right. It goes to Elvis’s “It’s Now or Never.” That is why I could sing it.
The second verse says:
What condescension, bringing us redemption,
That in the dead of night, not one faint hope in sight,
God, gracious, tender, laid aside His splendor,
Stooping to woo, to win, to save my soul.
Stooping to woo—to draw. Stooping to win. Stooping to save my soul. That is true condescension.
The third verse begins, “Without reluctance.” He did this without reluctance. He took the form of man, and Philippians tells us not only the form of man but also the form of a bondservant. He laid aside all of that and suffered even death on the cross.
We do not know in what order the disciples had their feet washed. A couple of people, like Edersheim and Morgan, feel it was Peter first, and I can kind of see the point. If Peter was washed last, it could have been merely his bravado: “You can wash the others, but not me. I know who You really are.” I think it was Peter first.
But he let Him wash his feet. That is the first thing: the intimate knowledge of the One they serve is knowledge of His meekness, which they had never seen before and which they would see again when He stood before Pilate and when He was on the cross.
Secondly, our service comes out of intimate personal dealings. I think those personal dealings are really shown when the Lord washes our feet—or, in this passage, the feet of the disciples. I say our feet because He does the same for us.
Why the feet? Why could He not just wash their hands, or maybe their hair?
I thought about that. Why the feet? If He washes the head, the head just gets bigger. The Lord is washing my hair, and all of a sudden our head gets bigger.
But the feet are where we touch the earth. That is where we come into contact with the earth. So He washes our feet.
When our feet touch the earth, they get dirty. They pick things up. I was reading about the Roman public baths. You would go in and take a bath, and once you got out and dressed, they washed your feet.
That seems kind of redundant, does it not? “Well, I just took a bath.” But the thing was, from the time you got out of the bath and got your clothes on, you had picked up all this stuff on the floor. So they washed your feet, then you put your sandals on and went out.
It is the same thing with us. We can be cleansed by the Lord in the morning. We come to the Lord in the morning and say, “Oh, Lord, cleanse me. Bring me into fellowship with You.” Then we go out and do our day.
Who knows where we have been? A lot of us will not tell people where we have been. But the whole thing is, our feet get sullied because they touch the world.
We get captured by the world around us. How many of us, on a weekday, might start the day with the Lord, but by the end of the day, where is the Lord? I am not saying this in a judgmental way. I am just saying that this happens to us.
As we touch the world, we get enamored with what is temporal, what passes away. But it has a sheen to it that is so attractive that we think we have to have it, that we have to pursue it.
What the Lord does is that He takes our feet. He takes our feet into His hands. Think about this: in taking our feet, He takes the part that, for these people, would be the dirtiest.
It is not as though He says, “Oh, Peter, where have you been? Oh, geez.” I do not think there was any emotion like that. He just took their feet, matter-of-factly, and washed them. No fanfare. No scolding. Nothing like that.
He took His hands, took that water, and put it over your feet. But you have to let Him do that, because most of us are like Peter: “Thou shalt never wash my feet.”
Why? Because I do not want You to see them. I do not want You to touch them. They are dirty. Peter had that problem at the beginning, did he not? “Lord, depart from me; for I am a sinful man,” in Luke 5:8.
“Lord, just give Me your feet.”
Joe Daly, a man in the Bay Area who taught at some retreats on the West Coast, brought out that in the Old Testament there were always two offerings. The Lord prescribed a morning offering and an evening offering.
The morning offering is an easy offering. We get out of bed, and we have not done anything yet. We are clean. We come in, thank the Lord, and say, “Oh Lord, I want to live for You.” We put ourselves on that altar.
The evening offering is a tough offering. We have been busy with the day. We forget about Him, and sometimes we go to bed just forgetting Him.
But when is this washing of feet? In the evening. At the feast, it is in the evening. He says, “Come to Me the way you are now. Just let Me wash your feet.”
He washes the things that would stick. The things of the world that we do not let Him wash will stick to us. If they stick to us, they will grow. If they grow, we will be ensnared by them.
So He says, “Give Me your feet. Let Me take off the things that are sticking to you.” When we get into His presence, those things fall away.
Another thing about this ministry is that this foot washing was private. It was not out for the world to see. It was intimate for these men, and He did it to each one as an individual.
I think that is important to understand. If we are going to have an intimate relationship with the Lord, we have to have a private relationship with Him. Some of us only have a public relationship with Him. We are just seen in the places where we need to be seen.
But the Lord desires that quiet, private place where He can deal with us one on one. It is not for everybody to know what is stuck on your feet.
It is for you to know that He knows what is stuck on your feet. It is for you to know Him saying, “I need to wash that off. That needs to come out.” That is His intimacy with you.
I am so glad that the Lord deals intimately with us—certain aspects of my life. I fear that day when everything is made known, but I am grateful that for now I have that intimate place where He can come to me and say, “Jim, this has to be gone. I have to wash this.”
My tendency is, “No, Lord, let me wash it. I will get it out.” And He says, “No, I have to wash it.” So He does this ministry in secret.
If you allow this ministry of the Lord in your life, you will find out what the apostle John found. It is after this, in this very chapter, that John first lets himself be known as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”
How did he know that Jesus loved him? Because he let Him wash his feet. That is how he knew He loved him. He washed his feet.
That is a big thing—to let someone wash your feet. John let Him wash his feet, and then he could lean on the Lord and rest because he knew he was loved. You cannot lean on somebody in that way unless you know they love you.
That is one of the things I have missed since my daughters have been in their twenties: those times when they leaned on me. Those are such precious times.
Service comes out of these intimacies. Notice that service comes through a personal command to them.
In Verse 34, He says, “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; even as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.”
This is a new command. Does it sound new to you? It should.
You are thinking, “Wait a minute. Does not the law say, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’?” That is in Leviticus 19:18. Jesus also said that the greatest commandment was to love the Lord your God, and the second was like it: to love your neighbor as yourself.
The world will take that and agree with it. “You should love one another. Everybody should love.” You hear it in the newspaper: we should tolerate things and love everybody because that is what Jesus taught, that is what Buddha taught, that is what whoever taught. Even Hillel and the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
So what is new? Look at the commandment again: “That ye love one another, even as I have loved you.” There is the new part.
It is not that you love your neighbor as yourself. That love is not high enough. “I want you to love one another”—not the world, but one another, other disciples—“as I have loved you.”
Do you notice what is missing? There is no self in this love. “Love one another as I have loved you.” There is no self there.
Self, with its garment—our condescension that says, “Well, I am better than you”; our pride; our sense of position—is gone. It is smothered up in what we see in the Lord and in how we see the Lord loving us.
That is really the question. When He says, “Love as I love you,” this is not generic love. As Christians, we can get to the place where we think the love of God for us in Jesus Christ is generic.
We think, “Oh yeah, Jesus loved me and died for my sins,” and it just goes right by. It rolls right off us. It is not generic love.
It is the love with which He loved me personally.
We can say, “He took away my sin,” and that is wonderful. When you really see who you are, really see your sin, and see how He took it away—without judging you, but taking the judgment Himself—that is a wonderful thing.
But I want to challenge you: go home and ask, “Lord, show me again how You have loved me.” Look back through your life, and let the Lord take you through it. Let Him show you how He has loved you.
Beyond the generic statement, “Oh, He died for my sins.” Please forgive me; I do not mean that lightly. But many of us take it lightly because we have heard it so much, and it has not really sunk in.
Go back through your life with the Lord and say, “Lord, show me. Show me where You loved me. Show me how You have loved me.”
That is the way He wants you to love others. He wants you to see how He has loved you. He does not want His love to be something that you miss. He wants you to know it: “I have loved you in this way.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning said, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” We should go to the Lord and say, “How have You loved me? Help me count the ways. Help me look at it. Help me just see it. Help me realize it. I have been loved in this way.”
This love for others is a response to His love.
It is not that we say, “Well, I have got to go out and love everybody.” The Lord will show you how to express the love He is commanding you to give.
The Lord said, “I do only the things which I see the Father doing.” This showing of love to one another is going to come out of your relationship with the Lord Jesus. It is not something you put on. It is not something you just try to do.
You go to the Lord, and out of that relationship, the Lord shows you: “That person needs to be loved like I love you. In this situation, you need to do this.” It comes out of that relationship.
It is not a law, so to speak; it is a command. There is a difference. A law is something you put on the wall and say, “Okay, I have to obey that.” A command is something that comes in time, in a circumstance, in a situation where the Lord says, “This.” And you obey.
We were studying Genesis, at the time when Isaac was offered up. The Lord said to Abraham, “Now this is what you do.” It is the same with us. The Lord says, “This is what you do,” and He looks for that obedience—the obedience to the command to love.
“I do not know how to do it. I do not know what to do.” Just do what I have done to you. That is tough.
I want to close with this, because it is nearing the noon hour. I want to go back to the first verse.
We understand that there is this intimacy, and all this service comes out of this intimacy. Our whole relationship is to be intimate. This is what the Lord desires.
In the first verse of John Chapter 13, it says that He knew His hour had come, that He should depart from this world unto the Father. Then it says, “Having loved His own that were in the world, He loved them unto the end.”
What does that mean? “He loved them unto the end.” To His end? After He died on the cross, He did not love them anymore? What does it mean?
One translation says, “He loved them to the uttermost.” But we do not use the word uttermost anymore. You might think it has something to do with a cow—which cow has the uttermost?
G. Campbell Morgan put it in a very interesting way. He said, “Having loved them”—in other words, having brought them into this relationship, having loved them—“He saw it through.”
I began to think about that. “He saw it through.” It could mean that He could go through the cross because He loved them, and I think that is one way to look at it. But I think there is something even greater than that.
The work of Christ and the salvation of Christ did not end at the cross. It is to bring us to full salvation.
Maury chose hymn 755, and I was struck by a line in the first verse:
So virgin-chaste, how fair to view
The saints so loved, to Thee kept true,
And spotless all the journey through.
How do we keep spotless all the journey through? We can start saying, “Well, I have to do this and this and this.” But I think it is in this verse: having loved them, He saw it through.
He has taken ownership of you in such a way that He has the willingness, the desire, and the wherewithal to take you all the way through.
He loved them to the uttermost. It is not that He merely reached down; it is that He lifted you up to the place where you should be. That is to the uttermost.
It says that He loved them to the uttermost. We should take hope in that. That is to be our hope. Our hope is not, “Oh, how can I love the Lord?” Our hope is this: having loved them, He loves us.
We cannot even love others until we find out how His love is for us. It brings us right back to Him.
Do you see Him as condescending in such a way as to lift you, and not as condescending in a way that looks down His nose at you and judges you?
Do you see Him as the One who would wash your feet?
Do you see Him as the One who says, “I will love you to the uttermost. I am not going to leave”?
There is a wonderful thought in Psalm 16. It speaks of how He will not leave Him in corruption. The Word of God Community in Ann Arbor, Michigan, translated it in a song this way: “You show me the path for my life,” and then, “You will not leave me for dead.”
I think that is such a good picture. We are coming along, faltering and falling, and the Lord does not say, “Well, I am just going to let you die. I am moving on.”
The way they sang it was, “You will not leave me for dead.”
Let us leave it with that. That is our Lord. This is the One who saves us. Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, we want to thank You for such a Savior as Your Son, Jesus Christ. We want to thank You for all that He is to us and for how He shows us who You are.
Oh Lord, we pray that our eyes would be opened to the place where we believe, and then, in believing, we would be drawn into that place where You want us to be—that place of intimacy, where You can touch our feet and we will not mind. We will let You.
Lord, grant this, we are asking in Christ’s name.