Pastor Paul Bourman (Hope Lutheran, Tigard OR)
Sermon Text: John 15:9-17
Sunday April 25, 2021

Well good morning again to you all this morning! My name is Pastor Paul Bourman, I am the
pastor at Hope Lutheran Church, a church plant down in Tigard, OR. First off this morning, I do
want to shout out to Pastor Royce for allowing me to preach to you all on this text from John
15- friendship is something that has always been important to me, and it’s something that is
still important to me now even as I get to be your pastor’s friend only two hours away! God
knows how to take care of us!
There are some relationships that are just draining. The work relationships with the people who
never have anything positive to say. The relationships with the neighbor who insists on
oversharing or complaining about every aspect of their lives. The relationships with the people
you do care about, but who can never seem to stop talking about themselves. Then there are
the few relationships are just fulfilling. The spouse who sees you for who you really are and
loves you anyway and encourages you and builds you up. The parent who sacrifices everything
for you so that you can grow and be who God needs you to be. The friend who sits with you at
the low points and laughs with you at the high points, and who knows you inside and out.
The goal of our text for today from John 15 is that you should be filled up by the relationship
that you have with Jesus and with the Father, so filled up in fact that you pour out the love that
you have in your heart with others. This is a text that is about love. As I read the text, you’ll
hear it. God’s love for his Son Jesus, poured out for you, and now you get to pour it out for
others. Listen for it as I read our text from John 15:9-17.
Jesus had a lot to say to his disciples the night that he was handed over in the Garden of
Gethsemane. From John chapter 13-17, Jesus fills his disciples up with everything that they
were going to need to know before he died on the cross. He spoke clearly, even urgently to his
disciples, and he filled his words with love. You can see that in the first verse of our text. “As the
Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Now remain in my love.”
Now, this is another reason I gotta thank Pastor Royce for giving me this text to preach on,
because this is kinda unique. This is a sermon where I get to start with the Gospel, just like Jesus
did. Jesus makes a command to us to remain in his love, but he makes this command based on
Gospel love. “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.”
I want to reflect on that statement with you for a moment. In the same way that God the
Father in all eternity loves Jesus, his one and only Son, and in the same way that God honors his
Son, cares for his Son, this is the same way that Jesus loves you. Think, for a moment, about the
examples that we have in the Bible where God the Father speaks from heaven about his Son. At
Jesus’ baptism and at his transfiguration- what did the Father say about him? This is my Son,
whom I love, with him I am well pleased. This is the same love with which Jesus loves you. Soak
that in. Maybe you need to hear that today after a tough week, or month, or year. Maybe you
need to hear this, because you haven’t been feeling a lot of love from anyone around you. I
know that I need to hear this every week. Jesus loves you with a profound, cosmic, eternal love
that you cannot even begin to comprehend right now. You have been brought into that love by
grace alone, and not by anything you have done to deserve it. And here’s the coolest thing

about being loved in the same way that God loves his Son Jesus. What did God do for Jesus
after he died on the cross? He raised him from the dead. As the Father loves the Son, so the Son
loves you. Soak that in this morning. Let yourselves be filled up with that love! That’s what
Jesus’ intent was with this sentence! He intends for you to be filled up with that love and he
intends for you to stay filled up with that love and so he makes the command: “Now remain in
my love.”
And here’s how you remain in Jesus’ love- you keep his commands- just as he has kept the
commands of his Father. And when Jesus asks us to remain in his love by obeying his
commands, he asks us to do as he did: to participate in the love of God by obeying his
commands. He asks us revel in God’s cosmic, profound, eternal love for us to such a point that
we are willing to put aside ourselves and allow our passion for him and his love for us to be the
reason for our obedience to his command.
And his command is this: “Love one another.” I love this command. I love it because it’s almost
seems counterintuitive. Jesus wants us to remain in his love. To us, it would logically make
sense, then, for him to command us to love him to the exclusion of all else! But Jesus
commands us to love one another. This is the way that our God works. Love begins in the
Father. He loves his Son, has loved him in eternity and so he gave his son a command- to go
into the world, obey perfectly, to the point of dying on the cross. With the same love, Jesus
loves you- he has loved you in eternity, and in his love he gives you a command- to love one
another.
There are two applications that I’ll encourage you to make of this command in your lives today.
The first is this: Love one another- especially those who are already part of the church. Jesus
gave the command to love each other to his disciples right before he was going to be put on
trial, mocked, abused, crucified, and killed. He knew what he was about to go through in front
of their eyes. And he knew that even after his resurrection, his disciples weren’t going to have it
easy. He gave them the command to love each other because he knew they were going to need
each other’s support and love in a world that’s going to hate them. Verse 17 of this chapter
ends with the command: “Love one another,” and the very next verse goes on to say that the
world is going to hate you. People of Messiah Evangelical Lutheran Church: Love one another!
I’ll give you a note of praise here for this. I don’t know everything that goes on in your
congregation, but I know a little bit. I know that you take care of your pastors really well. You
encourage your pastor because you know that ministry is hard, and you know that pastors
often spend so much time pouring love into other people that they soon become burned out.
But your first pastor spent decades here, and your second pastor already considers this place to
be his home. You do a good job of loving each other already!
I’ll encourage you to do even one step better. I did some pastor math, and I thought about it
this way. If we were to make it our goal on a Sunday morning to go out of our way to love just
one person before leaving the church building, what would that look like? The first result is that

we would never be able to get out the door, but the second result is that each and every
Sunday we would have 100 people loving 100 people. At least mathematically, if we committed
to that goal, every Sunday, everybody would be cared for. And a really cool part of that would
be that you would be cared for. It wouldn’t just be that you are going out to love everybody
else, somebody is going to come to you and care for you, too.
And what if someone is really struggling with something? Struggling with their faith, struggling
with an illness, struggling with a hard decision, struggling just because they’re tired. Friends,
this is what the church is for. Remain in the love that Jesus has poured into your heart, and love
one another, just in the same way that Christ loved you. Care for your brother or sister and hold
on to God’s promises with them.
The second application I’ll ask you to take away from this text is this: love one another- even
those who are outside the church. This is another reason that the church exists. It exists first for
us to encourage each other as we walk the road to heaven together, and it also exists so that
we can reach outside of ourselves and share the good news with those who don’t know it yet.
My dear friends, this is HARD work. I’ve been working at this exact thing along with you down in
the Portland area, and I know that this is hard. Because it’s true that by nature people reject
God, and they very well might reject you. And it’s true that we live in a part of the world where
popular opinion is on the other side of God and your faith. But I’m going to let you know
something that you might think is interesting. I’ve kept track of the times that I’ve gotten to
share my faith since I arrived in Portland. I’ve shared Jesus with 137 people. How many of those
conversations do you think turned hostile? How many times do you think I’ve been belittled
and put down because of my faith and my Savior? It’s not as many times as you’d think. 4
times. Only 4 times has someone actually taken me down the worst case scenario path that I
take in my mind every time I start a conversation. Sure, many times, people listen, thank me for
my opinion, and let me go my own way, but only 4 people have hurt me. And I’ll encourage you
with one more thing. 1 of the 4 people who hurt me in my heart came to our Easter service a
couple weeks ago. Let me tell you, I had to scrape my jaw off the floor.
Love one another. Because when you love one another, you do just as Jesus says- you remain in
his love, you live in his love, and the results are just as verse 16 says- your love will bear fruit.
And it will be fruit that lasts. Not because of any part of what you do, but your love will bear
fruit because it’s God’s love that you’re sharing. It begins where we began this morning- with
God’s love shown to you through his Son Jesus. When you remain in his love, you show that
love to others. When you show that love to others, you grow in God’s love yourself, and you
also strengthen another. Love one another, just as Christ has loved you.
You might have noticed that for a sermon that was supposed to be about friendship, I haven’t
spoken much about friendship. That’s true, but I have spoken about love. And friendship is love.
However, friendship is a unique kind of love. During my final year of the seminary, I wrote my
master’s thesis paper on the topic of friendship. During the process of writing that paper, I
found that there were a few aspects of friendship that were unique to friendship. No other kind
of human relationship shares these characteristics. Jesus uses these friendship characteristics

to describe his love for us. I’d like to close our sermon this morning encouraging you with these
words- filling you up, so that you can also fill others with God’s love.
Friendship is unique in that it is constantly chosen. No other love is like that. You are born into a
parent’s love, you make a binding commitment in a marriage love, but in friendship, at every
moment, you choose to either remain in that friendship or cut it off. Friendship is unique in that
the other person chooses every time to be in a relationship with you. Verse 16 reminds us that
Jesus has chosen you. By name. He knows you for all your sin, and yet he chose you to be his.
And he has even appointed you for an awesome task- to love one another.
Friendship is also unique in the fact that Jesus has given us insight into his will through his word
in the Bible. And having filled us up with his love he gives us the privilege of being part of
carrying it out. Jesus talks about this being different than a relationship between a servant and
master because a servant does not know what the goals are of his master. We know exactly
what Jesus is doing. Through his love, through his word, we know his heart- that he wants all
people to share eternity with him, and he asks us to share that heart with others.
Finally, friendship with Jesus is unique because he has already made the greatest declaration of
love that can be made. He laid down his life for his friends. For people who hadn’t made any
commitment to him, for people who had never been able or willing to show him true love, for
people that were directly responsible for nailing him to the cross- for you and for me- Jesus laid
down his life. For you and for me- his friends.
Jesus’ love for you is that great. It’s worth abiding in. That means his commands are worth
obeying. Love one another, just as Christ has loved you. Amen.