I spent this morning doing a task I don't enjoy doing, which was trimming shrubs and vines around the house. The effort involved crawling on my knees, getting my hands dirty, and perspiring in the Florida heat, and I dislike all of those. I don't object to cultivated plants in the yard, but I have always been more fascinated by wildflowers that survive without depending on being fed, watered, trimmed, and weeded.

There is a wonderfully important reason why I trimmed the plants this morning: my wife asked me to. Because I love her so much, I saw this chore as an opportunity to demonstrate my love for her, and that made the dirty hands, the sore knees, and the sweaty hair all worth doing.

This passage conveys a similar thought. Jesus expressed that a believer's best way of showing love to Him is to follow His commandments. Repeatedly through the Bible we are urged to be obedient not because we are ordered to do so, but because we love God enough to willingly comply. My morning's task was not in response to a command I was given, but was my affirmative choice to my wife's question. A fundamental step in Christian maturity is growing from "I have to" into "I want to".

But the more I pondered this metaphor of a loving response, the more I found it fails to capture this passage. All I gave up for my wife was a few hours, and I was free to take whatever breaks I wanted during that time. I fully understood what I was to do and why I was doing it. I have already been rewarded for my efforts by my wife's enthusiastic "thank you"s.

In contrast, Jesus asks us for everything with no promise of a reward in this life, for God's commandments to love are all-consuming. My relationship with my wife would not be seriously damaged by something as simple as declining to do yard work, but our defiance of the fundamental commandments to love God and love others does disrupt our relationship with God. There was no danger to me in the shrubbery, but Jesus calls on us elsewhere in the gospels to lose our lives for His sake.

What caught my attention in this passage was the command from Jesus to "keep My Word". The word used for "keep" also means to "guard", and the Word—the logos—is the same Greek word used in John chapter 1 as the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us. In restating our loving response to Him, Jesus asks us to obey, treasure, and preserve something so profound that we cannot possibly understand it. In that way, the Word we carry with us and that lives through us can speak in ways we don't recognize to those that God seeks to touch.

If I can switch metaphors in mid-passage, we demonstrate our love to God by willingly becoming paper cups to contain the Living Water. This is the best modern equivalent to Paul's description of believers as disposable clay jars in 2 Corinthians 4:7. God carries us (and we often don't know to where) to give a loved one a gift of Living Water (and we sometimes don't know to whom). It is the water, not the cup, that is the gift, and the Kingdom of God needs a multitude of paper cups.

True Christian obedience, then, is our willing offering of all of ourselves to God, trusting entirely in God with our lives and our souls, without expecting that we will receive recognition or see the results of our service, and without knowing when, why, or how we will be used. Our part is to love, serve, and adore the living Word, so that God can take care of all the rest.