By Jared Warner
Willow Creek Friends Church
May 25, 2025
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John 14:23–29 (ESV)
23 Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. 24 Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me. 25 “These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. 26 But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. 27 Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. 28 You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I will come to you.’ If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I. 29 And now I have told you before it takes place, so that when it does take place you may believe.
“If anyone loves me, he will keep my word.” This is an interesting place to begin today. It is interesting because it shows us the deeper meaning of what it means to be a follower of Christ.
If we were to look a few verses prior to today’s text in verse 21, it says, “Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me.” And if we were to look today’s passage in the New International version, instead of word it says teaching. There are two different words being used here entolas (command) and logon (message, teaching, word). And in this final teaching of Jesus prior to his crucifixion Jesus is showing us the relational aspect of life with God.
When we think of the word commandment, we think of rules we must obey. Commands in our mind are nonnegotiable and when they are broken consequences ensue. We gain this idea from human interactions and society. The concepts of law and order are derived from these thoughts. And most of these ideas come from authoritarian or tyrannical ideologies. The king, the president, the dictator has set up the law and we are required to comply or else. This is entolas, command.
When we think of God many of us have this concept going through our minds. We have enshrined the 10 commandments in our minds, we have taught them to our children as the standard of righteousness, and we are currently arguing about if schools should have them displayed in every classroom in some states. The concept is that this is what God requires of us. These are the things that we must or must not do as Christians. And when we happen to stumble, we joke around that God will strike us with lightening or something dire. We joke, we know in our minds that this is not the nature of God, but deep within us we still wonder if that is the case.
Why do bad things happen to good people? Why are there wars, poverty, famine? Why are innocent children subjected to abuse? We struggle with these questions, and often the answer we come up with is that we have broken a rule, we have sinned or our parents have sinned, or someone close to us has sinned and we are paying the price. We do not like that answer, and people have turned their backs on faith because of these answers. This is by in large the ideology of God’s wrath being inflicted on the sinful because we broke a commandment.
We can take this another way, because there are teachings within some spheres of the church where God wishes to heal every disease. That God will shower blessings and riches on every devout individual. And we can see this seemingly being worked out in front of us. But then someone is not healed in the way we expect. Some people continue to carry a burden even though they have released it to God in prayer. What do we say in these situations? Unfortunately it comes back to this tyrannical God concept. You did not have enough faith, or you have some un-confessed sin that is holding back the blessing.
Many of us are fixated on commandments. We focus on the wrath of God. We say we worship a God of love, yet we often portray this God as a vengeful tyrant. And we wonder why people lose their faith.
Jesus does not speak of a wrathful God, He says instead, “He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” Jesus is teaching us that God wants to come, He wants to draw near to us as we draw near to him. “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”
Logon, this second word I mention is rooted in logos but refers more toward the message or the content of what was spoken. In this Jesus is telling us that the commandments can often get misunderstood. We see them as hard fast rules, and we miss the point of what God was trying to share with us when he gave us the commandments.
I want us to step back into Israel’s history. They had spent over four hundred years in bondage in Egypt. They were slaves, beaten down, forced to work in grueling conditions. Yet the were able to maintain a just a small portion of their identity as a people. They would cry out to the God of their fathers, to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And God heard their cries. From the midst of the people, God used the injustice of Egypt to preserve his inheritance his portion, as Moses’ mother made a basket out of reeds and sent that basket down the Nile to be found by the daughter of Pharaoh.
This daughter raised Moses as her own, and even living in the lap of luxury, this daughter of Pharaoh did not keep from her child the reality that he was of Hebrew origin. And eventually Moses could not bear to watch his own people being brutalized by the culture that accepted him as one of their own. He watched the taskmasters beat a man, and he was filled with rage and was lead to violence.
He knew that his actions would cause trouble so he turned to his own people, and they rejected him, saying, “Will you kill us as you did the Egyptian?” Moses was lost. He was a man without a nation and a man without a culture, and he ran. He ran for his life, knowing full well the consequences of his violence. He ran into the wilderness, and he finally came to rest at a well in Midian.
He saw the brutality of Egypt, he experienced it. He ran from that life and lifestyle hoping to find something different somewhere else. As he sat in the distance, he saw shepherds and shepherdesses coming to the well to draw water for the flock. He watched as the men treated the women with the same brutality he witnessed in Egypt as they restricted them from access to the source of water. Moses could not stand to see this brutality, and could not stand by any longer. He came out from his resting place and stood up to the shepherds driving them away, and assisted the women as they watered their flocks.
This man without a nation, without a people or a place to call home, helped the helpless and the women brought him back to their father and their father accepted him into their family telling his daughters to call him to come and share a meal and dwell with them.
For forty years Moses lived in Egypt and for forty years he lived in Midian. He married one of those daughters, had a son and made a home in this land he did not previously know. And as he lived in that land he saw a different kind of life. A lifestyle that was not based on brutality and force, instead he experienced a life where the stranger was welcomed and bread was shared.
All this while Israel remained slaves, brutalized by Egyptian hands, and they continued to cry out to God concerning the plight they faced. And one day while Moses was tending the flocks of his father-in-law he was visited by the angel of the Lord, that appeared to him in a flaming bush that was not consumed. God spoke to Moses from out of that flaming shrub, and charged him to bring his people out of Egypt.
Moses had spent years in that land he knew their ways. He understood that for humanity, the only way to liberate the children of Israel was to defeat the armies of Pharaoh. So he spoke up, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?” God told him that He would be with him.
Moses continued to hesitate, but God eventually convinced Moses to trust him. And he went. He and all of Israel watched as God removed the might and power of Egypt little by little. Each aspect of their culture was laid low, the Nile, their fertility, their health and prosperity, until eventually God cut off the dynasty of by taking the lives of the first born males of Egypt. We often look at this story, and that is all it becomes. We marvel at the power of God, but we often do not look deeper. Each of the plagues God brought to Egypt through the words of Moses, challenged that culture and society. Each of the plagues challenged the Egyptian deities. With each progressive plague, God was dismantling ever aspect of Egypt that they held as important. He challenged Egypt, but why did he do it?
It is through Israel that God chose to reveal himself to humanity. It is through Israel that God was going to bring the light, the word, or the teaching of true life with Him to the nations. It was not only that this brutality was happening to Israel, but God was showing us all the weakness of a life and lifestyle built on falsehoods and a life built on the truth.
Jesus taught us that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over others, but that is not so with us. This is the kingdoms of men, the kingdoms and nations of those that do not listen to the teachings of God. They use force and brutality. They exploit the labor of others and make laws to ensure that the injustice remains. They use might and because their might overpowers the weak, the might is seen as right.
God brought the people out of Egypt, and they carried the wealth of their brutal taskmasters with them into the wilderness. God led them out of slavery where they could worship Him properly, and he brought them to a mountain, and as they gathered a cloud enveloped that mountain and a voice thundered from the lightening. It was here to all of Israel that God, gave us what we call the Ten Commandments, but to the Hebrew people they did not know them as commandments they knew them as God’s teaching or words. The idea of commandments came much later after the Hebrew scripture was translated into Greek, and in that translation aspects of Greek culture and use of the language was incorporated into our understanding.
The Greek culture was one of law and order, not teaching. They had hierarchy, where the Hebrew people had family, tribes and nations. The Hebrew culture was based on community and living together in mutual profit, where Greek culture was more individualistic.
We are more comfortable with the Greek aspects we see in scripture than we are of the Hebrew. We like the stoic individualism of righteousness where we can achieve righteousness, but this is not the teaching. The teaching God gave at that mountain, was to build a community. It was given to make a nation out of broken people and redeem out of the broken something that would draw all people to himself. He wanted to dwell with us again.
Jesus said in this farewell teaching, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word.” We will understand and live out his teaching, we will understand and embody the content of his message. “and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”
I want us to think about this for a moment. People within our culture will spend thousands of dollars with the hope of eating in the same room as the next potential president. We spend money just for the potential to be near, yet that does not mean we have any relationship with that potential world leader. To be honest, we would be lucky if he had the opportunity to shake their hand. Yet the Father and Jesus want to make their home with us. They want to move into our community. They would love to live next door, play catch in the back yard and throw some choice cuts in the smoker. Well Jesus might opt for a fish fry.
The commandments, or the message that Jesus is giving us is not that we should judge or reject, not that we should push people away. Instead it is hospitality. It is inviting the neighbors over and sharing a meal. He wants us to tear down the walls of separation and challenge the concepts that divide us.
Jesus says, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and we will make our home with him.” but he follows this with the shadow, “whoever does not love me does not keep my words.” And he clarifies it just a bit more by saying, “the word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me.”
This means that the words that Jesus taught, the message that he brings is the intended message from the very beginning. The life and lifestyle that Jesus shows us is the life and lifestyle that God intended and created us to live. Anything contrary to that is darkness, and it will crumble just as Egypt crumbled before God.
What is this life and lifestyle Jesus is calling us to conform to? Prior to this teaching, Jesus and the disciples gathered together in a room. Jesus took off his outer garment and wrapped a towel around himself. He then knelt before them and began to wash their feet. Each of the disciple sat in utter confusion as their teacher performed the lowest task of the lowest servant of a house. To them Jesus was the king, he was their great teacher, yet he bent low to scrub the grime from the callouses of these working men’s feet. My dad was a mechanic and farmer most of his life. I know how dirty a working man can get over the course of a day, I know what can be stepped in and how it smells. This is all over these men’s feet and Jesus is there washing it off.
After he washes their feet he begins his teaching, and he says to them a new command I give to you, that you should love one another as I have loved you.
This is the life Jesus is calling us to. We should not seek praise or power, but to share life with each other. We should not wish others to do things for us, but instead we should bend over and provide them with aide. This is difficult, because how can I do this when I can not stand to be in the same room with some people. How am I supposed to tear down a wall when everyone around me seems to want to build one up? How am I to live according to the teachings of Jesus in a world that seemingly rejects him and me? We are like Moses lost in the wilderness. Running from the brutality of one empire only to be faced with the brutality of another. And Jesus says, “Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”
Of all the words of is passage troubled and afraid are the only imperative verbs. Meaning this is what we should focus our energy in. We are to let not your hearts be troubled, or be afraid. We should instead remember the life and lifestyle of Jesus and rest in that place. Instead of worrying about the terrible events happening all around us, we should focus our lives on loving God, embracing the Holy Spirit, and living the love of Christ with others.
I say this as if it is easy. It is not. I am a flawed and broken man. And every day I am reminded just how hard it can be to speak and live the message of Christ. I fail, often I find that what I have shown is about as far from God as it can be. We cannot do this on our own. We were not meant to. God, the Father and the Son want to make their home with us. And as the dwell with us they will provide a Helper, the Holy Spirit. The helper in Greek is paraklhtos. This term means an advocate, or legal council. This helper, is the one we come to for advice as we encounter various challenges. There are many things about contracts, and the legal system I do not understand and thankfully there are lawyers available that will look at and advise the best way forward. Their advise should keep us out of legal trouble and they will stand with us if need be. This is who the Holy Spirit is.
I often find myself siting in my chair thinking about which direction I will go, or how I can approach a situation. I sit in that chair and often I am at a loss and unable to see a path forward. I have sat in that chair years. And somehow we have found a way forward. As I sit in prayer, the Spirit prompts things in my mind and I remember times in my past, a story, or a passage of scripture. At times they are profound and at other times its just a simple nudge in a direction that does not seem to be relevant. But there are promptings, leadings, or urgings. The Spirit prompted Moses, to help the women at the well, the spirit prompted Moses through the bush. The Spirit prompts and helps. And it is the spirit that will lead us as we face the challenges of today.
I do not have the answers to the big questions. I cannot tell you why if God is good there is suffering in the world. But what I can tell you is that I feel called in many ways to speak up when I see injustice. I am urged to give money to support a cause. And to make a phone call to encourage someone. The suffering around us is from sin yes. It is from a world system that is opposed to the teachings of God, but we each are called to dwell with each other. To encourage one another to walk forward even when it seems all hope is gone. “Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” Love God, Embrace the Holy Spirit, and Live the love of Christ with others. And let God take down Egypt for us.
Previous Messages:
Living Stones
By Jared Warner Willow Creek Friends Church May 03, 2026 Click here to Join our Meeting for Worship Click to read in Swahili Bofya kusoma kwa Kiswahili 1 Peter 2:2–10 (ESV) 2 Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation— 3 if indeed you have…
Endure
By Jared Warner Willow Creek Friends Church April 26, 2026 Click here to join our Meeting for Worship Click to read in Swahili Bofya kusoma kwa Kiswahili Query 4 (Faith and Practice of EFC-MAYM pg 61) Do you provide for the suitable Christian education and recreation of your children and those under your care, and…
Ransomed to Love
By Jared Warner Willow Creek Friends Church April 19, 2026 Click here to join our Meeting for Worship Click to read in Swahili Bofya kusoma kwa Kiswahili 1 Peter 1:17–23 (ESV) 17 And if you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time…
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