Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from God, our Father, and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Our text is the Holy Gospel reading from John 14 which has already been read.

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, over the past several Sundays Jesus has been preparing His Church for His ascension into heaven and then the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, which we celebrate today. Several weeks ago we heard about the "work of the Holy Spirit," what He would do when He came. Today we will expand a bit on that theme as we learn that "The Spirit Teaches What It Means to Love Jesus." He teaches us this through the very words of Jesus that St. John recorded in our Gospel reading, when He said, "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. 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."

Here the Spirit teaches what it means to love Jesus: it means keeping His Word. Jesus Himself shows us that the word "love" is not simply emotional when He says, "I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father. Rise, let us go from here." Jesus said that He would prove that He loved His heavenly Father by obeying the Father's will that the Christ suffer for the sin of the world, die, and rise again on the third day. If Jesus had not kept His Father's Word, then it would have showed that He did not love His Father. However, we know that the perfect love Jesus had for His Father led Him to completely trust God and lay down His life willingly, dying under God's wrath against your sin to save you from hell and win everlasting life for you. Jesus loved the Father, and the Father loved Jesus by keeping His promise to raise the Son from the dead on the third day and exalt Him. This is how God loved the world, including you: by giving His only-begotten Son into death for the life of the world.

And so it is clear that God's love involves not just feelings but also actions, and God's love is the pattern that we are to imitate. Jesus said, "If anyone loves Me, he will keep my Word." Love involves action. To keep the Word of Jesus means to hear it, believe it, treasure it, and then put it into practice by living according to His Word. And just as the opposite of love is hate, so also the opposite of loving Jesus by keeping His Word is to despise Him by not keeping His Words, by refusing to hear His Word, by disbelieving the Word, or by failing to put the Word of Jesus into practice.

Everything is at stake when it comes to how you receive the Word of Jesus. The Word of Jesus is not simply human words but actually the Word of God the Father who sent Jesus, so to reject and fail to keep the Word of Jesus is to hate God the Father as well as to hate Jesus, who is God the Son, as well as to hate God the Holy Spirit, who is the one who brought these Words of Jesus to our remembrance through the Scriptures. And so the reject the Word of Jesus means to lose everything; it means to remain in your sins and under God's everlasting condemnation.

But on the other hand, look at the amazing blessings that come from keeping the Word of Jesus. He says that the Father and the Son (and by extension, the Holy Spirit) will love those who love the Word of Jesus, and the Triune God will come and make a home with them. Amazing! God certainly doesn't need a home, since the entire universe was created by Him. And we certainly don't deserve to dwell with God because of our rebellious sins against Him; we deserve a home in no other place than hell! But God wants to dwell with those who show their love for Jesus by keeping His Word. The almighty and eternal God, creator of the heavens and the earth, whom we owe for life and every blessing—He wants to come to each of you individually and make a home with you. And in that home, He wants to be your dear Father, and you His dear child, since you have been purchased and won for the Father by the blood of Jesus Christ and you have been given new birth into the Kingdom of God by the Holy Spirit in Holy Baptism. St. John wrote, "See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are".

And so how could we not want to keep the Word of Jesus, who has brought us into the loving arms of the Father? How could we not love the One who has saved us from sin and everlasting death? The only answer is unbelief, and so we pray that the Holy Spirit would guard and keep us against such unbelief. When we pray the Lord's Prayer and say "lead us not into temptation," Dr. Luther explains in the Small Catechism, "We pray in this petition that God would guard and keep us so that the devil, the world, and our sinful nature may not deceive us or mislead us into false belief, despair, and other great shame and vice. Although we are attacked by these things, we pray that we may finally overcome them and win the victory." If we reject the Word of Jesus, then we throw ourselves into the devil's hands, the one who hates Jesus. But when the Holy Spirit moves us to trust the Word of Jesus and keep it, then we are showing our love for Jesus and are wrapped up in the Father's love, safe from Satan, death, and hell.

Love of Jesus happens when we love and keep His Word. But this cannot happen by our own power. Only when Jesus sends the Comforter, His Holy Spirit, to move our hearts, minds, and hands to love His Word, then can we actually love Jesus. We love Him by gladly and willingly receiving the Words of Jesus in the Gospels, learning them, treasuring them, and by putting them into practice.

But Jesus said so many things; which words are we to keep? Right before He ascended into heaven, Jesus told His apostles to teach everything He has commanded to His disciples in the Church. There is nothing left out of "everything." And so we desperately need the Holy Spirit to come and teach us the Word of Jesus, as Jesus said in the Gospel reading, "The Comforter, 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." Jesus also said that God the Father will give the Holy Spirit to anyone who asks for Him, and so our prayer each day should be that the Spirit come and teach us the Word of Jesus and then give us the strength to fear, love, and trust in Him above all things.

But if we take an honest look at ourselves, we will find that we have done a miserable job of keeping Christ's words. We have often ignored them; we have regularly doubted them; we have treated them as common human words rather than divine truth; and we have most certainly failed to consistently put them into practice. So should we then conclude that we do not love Jesus at all and have also lost the Father's love as well?

That is not where Jesus wants to leave us. He knows that those who believe in Him do love Him according to their new spirit given in Baptism, but according to their old sinful flesh they despise Him. So although we have failed miserably at loving Jesus by keeping His Word, He wants us to cling most of all to His Word of forgiveness in which He absolves us of the sins of our Old Adam and strengthens our new spirit to love and trust in Him.

So all of you who recognize how deeply you have failed at keeping the Word of Jesus, listen to the Gospel that Jesus speaks our Gospel reading. He says, "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". Keep those words in your hearts, and love what they teach you. Jesus says that He leaves you with not an earthly sort of peace, but with a heavenly peace: the peace that can only come from sins being forgiven. Jesus was able to leave this peace for you because He went to the cross to answer for your sins and accomplish peace between God and you, where there once had been only hostility. But in Christ, the Father loves you and forgives all of your sins, and in Christ, you love and trust in the Father.

So the Word that Christ wants you to keep closest to your heart is His Word of peace. That alone can untroubled your conscience; His peace alone can remove fear of condemnation from your hearts. And so that this peace could be delivered to His Church, Jesus sent His Holy Spirit and His apostles out to deliver it. On Easter Sunday Jesus had appeared to the apostles and His first words to them were, "Peace be with you." He showed them His hands and His side, the marks that demonstrated that He had accomplished peace with God for all of us through His death and resurrection. Then He breathed on the apostles and gave them the Holy Spirit and told them to go out and forgive and retain sins. He said, "If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld".

So if you want this heavenly peace, then learn to love the places where this forgiveness of sins is given to you. Come as often as you can to hear the Gospel preached to you. Return each day to your Baptism by calling it to remembrance with the sign of the cross and the Word of Christ, "In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." Confess your sins and hear them absolved through the mouth of your pastor. And come to the Holy Supper in which Jesus gives you forgiveness of sins, eternal life, and salvation, and says, "Do this in remembrance of Me." He wants you to remember the peace that He has won for you on the cross; He wants to place that peace into your mouths in His true body and blood.

Jesus said, "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". And so we can pray, "Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, according to Thy Word." Love that Word, and keep it in your hearts and minds, and be assured that you love Jesus, and God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit loves you. In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

And the peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.