If You Love Me, Keep My Commandments: Faith, Love, and Obedience in the Christian Life
Scripture Reading: John 14:15-20
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.
“I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.
If You Love Me, Keep My Commandments: Faith, Love, and Obedience in the Christian Life
Preacher: Pastor James Huenink
Scripture: John 14 | 1 John 3:23
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God, our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Does Free Grace Mean Christians Can Do Whatever They Want?
Lutherans face a recurring challenge when people encounter our doctrine of grace — especially the beautiful and wonderful truth that God's grace is a free gift, given by Jesus Christ with absolutely zero strings attached.
The heart of this doctrine is simple: Jesus died for us, rose for us, and through His Word and Sacraments delivers His forgiveness to all of us — no questions asked. It's just a gift. There is nothing you can do to earn it, and nothing you can do to lose it. God does all the work, both in bringing you into salvation and in keeping you within it.
And then people point to passages like this one and ask: Wait a second — what about when Jesus says, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments"? Are Lutherans just preaching free grace and doing whatever we want? Can we show up on Sunday, say "awesome, Jesus, thanks so much," and run out to do whatever we please?
Sort of — actually, yes. We do get to do whatever we want. But not in the way you might think.
What Jesus Really Means by "Keep My Commandments"
What Jesus is telling us here is that Christians want to do what God commands. "If you love me, you will keep my commandments" — and the way we understand how this works reveals the beauty and joy of receiving God's free grace.
A careful reader of this passage might say: Pastor, I see love, I see commandments, but I don't see faith. How are you getting to faith from this?
It's worth noting that John may not draw as sharp a distinction between Law and Gospel as Luther and C.F.W. Walther would write about 1,500 years later. John uses words a little differently than a systematic Lutheran theology might. So rather than reading John through the lens of the Lutheran Confessions, let's understand what John himself is trying to say.
The Commandment That Comes First: Belief
Looking at all the places where John — both in his Gospel and in his letters — uses the word commandment, we find a key passage. Just before this, Jesus says:
"A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another."
And in John 15, He says something very similar:
"This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you."
But there is another passage that I think is especially illuminating. In 1 John 3:23, John writes:
"And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of His Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another, just as He commanded us."
Notice: the commandment begins with believing in Jesus. I don't think we can keep His words or His commandments without first keeping that foundational one — that we have faith in Christ.
And we know that this faith comes not as a work we build in ourselves, but as a gift of the Holy Spirit.
The Gift of the Holy Spirit: The Helper Who Transforms Us
So while most of the time when John talks about the commands of Christ, he means love one another — that love builds on the foundation of faith. We believe first, and then we begin to work in the commands of God.
And that faith is accompanied by an amazing gift. Jesus says:
"I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper to be with you forever, even the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him."
Jesus gives His Church, by faith, the gift of the Holy Spirit — the Helper, the Comforter, the one who guides and leads us in all the works Christ calls us to do. This gift of the Holy Spirit is transformative. He turns us from who we were into who Christ calls us to be.
From Faith to Love to Obedience
So here is the path Jesus lays out for us:
Faith → Love → Obedience
We begin with faith — a gift given to us by the Holy Spirit. That faith leads us to love, because the Holy Spirit calls us into love for God and for one another.
We begin loving God by loving His gifts — the gifts He gives us here in this place. And that love generates thankfulness to Him. This is why, when we gather together, we receive the Holy Spirit through His Word and Sacrament and respond with joy as we sing and praise. He generously pours out His Holy Spirit on us every time we gather, and how could we not respond with love and peace?
How could we not respond with thanksgiving for the amazing assurance of salvation we have every time we come here — when our sins are forgiven, when we receive Christ's Body and Blood for our salvation? Our worship is designed to give us this amazing gift of the Spirit, transform us, generate the love of Christ in us, and send us out into a world that desperately needs that love.
And that's what leads to obedience: "If you love me, you will keep my commandments."
The Holy Spirit at Work — You Can See It
When I started my pastoral career, I believed that the best way to get people to follow the rules was to stand in the pulpit and use a really big stick. You laugh — because maybe it works for a little while, and then people get mad and do it begrudgingly.
But the more I observe how God's people respond to the Holy Spirit, the more I see how — when they hear His Word and gather together and love one another — they all want to do what Jesus asks. I don't have to be the "Jesus police," policing your lives and telling you what to do. You actually love Jesus and want to do what He says. Amazing, right?
You can see it in the simplest ways. The number of people who spontaneously offer rides to fellow members so they can come to church — it just happens. People show up together, smiling, happy — nobody whipped them into it or threatened them. The volunteers who are here every Sunday morning to set up hospitality so you can have coffee and snacks. These are simple, beautiful ways the love of Jesus shows up — the Holy Spirit working in you to live out the commandments of Christ.
It's such a joy to see a people of God who just do what God wants them to do, because they love what God wants them to do.
A Warning: Don't Run This Process Backwards
There is one important caution here. We should not try to use this process in reverse.
Sometimes people will say: "If you love me, you will keep my commandments — so we can test how much you love Jesus by how much you keep His commandments. Does your obedience prove that you have faith?"
The reason we cannot use this process in reverse is that the tests we tend to use are arbitrary. This kind of "fruit checking" — examining whether the good tree produces good fruit — usually produces a very narrow checklist: How much time are you volunteering at the church? How many people have you talked to about Jesus this week? And what this does is threaten people by looking at their works and causing them to question their faith based on a limited, man-made test.
Sometimes we do this in our own hearts: I should be doing more — therefore, I must not really be a Christian. That is not how this works.
We do not develop our own tests to see if you have faith. Instead, we look to the gift of Christ. We look to His means of grace. We look to the promises He gives us. We turn to these good and gracious gifts and receive that faith in Christ. We let the Holy Spirit develop the love we need in our lives, which then leads to this beautiful and good obedience.
We do not use obedience as a test for faith, because Christ points us not to ourselves, but to His promises.
Conclusion: The Promise That Leads to Obedience
The promises of Christ lead us to obedience. That is how we know we keep His commandments — not by measuring ourselves against an arbitrary checklist, but because the Holy Spirit drives us, by His love, to obey.
Faith. Love. Obedience. That is the beautiful, joyful order of the Christian life — all of it a gift, from beginning to end.
In Jesus' name. Amen.
Transcribed and formatted for publication.