Key Truth: Our obedience evidences our love for Jesus who provides the Holy Spirit to indwell us to teach and remind us of God’s adopting grace and Christ’s enduring peace.  

Introduction:

What do you most need help with in life? What circumstances do you feel like you need an advocate to help you understand the situation or to defend you?

Loving Obedience and the Indwelling Help of the Holy Spirit:

John 14:15-17

“That the Holy Spirit is here called “Advocate” indicates that in Christ we are more than simply accepted by God or even justified by God. The advocate continues to plead for us, to represent us to God in ways greater than our ways, and to speak on our behalf to God better than we could speak for ourselves. At the same time the advocate is God representing God to us, revealing God to us in ways that we could not have come up with on our own.’”

Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, The Holy Spirit

What are some of the ways that you express your love for Christ?
What are some ways that you have experienced and benefitted from the indwelling and advocacy of the Holy Spirit?

Adoption and the Fatherly Residence of God:

John 14:18-24

“Jesus does not intend to abandon his disciples by his departure through death on the Cross and then internment in the grave. He intends to represent them there and to take their place in these grim places, defeating death and decay, taking the punishment for all their sin, representing the whole human race before God, reconciling forever these simple disciples (and all those after them who join them in believing Jesus), and burying their guilt forever in his grave. And then he is ‘coming back’ to them, personally and even physically, almost immediately, in his glorious Resurrection from the dead, defeating death and decay, and bringing them back by his Spirit into good fellowship with the deeply loving Father who arranged all.”

Frederick Dale Bruner, The Gospel of John: A Commentary

What are some ways that you have experienced and benefitted from the adoption and indwelling of God the Father?

Remembrance and the Peace of Christ:

John 14:25-31

“The world’s way to achieve peace is to eliminate that which disturbs; God’s way is to restore the unruly. The world’s way to achieve peace is to say, ‘Shut up, I don’t want to hear it anymore’; the Lord’s way is to say, ‘Be still, and know that I am God’ (Ps. 46:10). The world’s peace is a precarious house of cards; God’s peace is a cosmic wholeness.”

Eugene H. Peterson, Forces Concealed in Quiet:
Meditations from the Writings of John the Apostle

What are some ways that you have experienced and benefitted from the peace of Christ?

Application:

John 14:15-31 teaches us that:
-our obedience evidences our love for Christ who provides the Holy Spirit to indwell us
-to teach us and remind us of God’s adopting grace
-and Christ’s enduring peace

Benediction:

Romans 15:13