We will come and make Our home

One of the disciples asks a reasonable question at the last supper: why do You intend to show Yourself to us and not to the world?

The answer does not address the mechanics at all.

If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word. That is the answer to a question about who gets to see Him.

Not a technique of perception. A relationship, evidenced by keeping something.

And then two promises, and the second is the one nobody would have written.

My Father will love him — which the disciples might have expected.

And We will come to him and make Our home with him — which they would not.

The word for home is the noun form of the abiding verb from Week Eleven. It is the same word used a few verses earlier in the promise about many rooms in the Father’s house.

So the shape of the sentence is this: He goes to prepare a place there, and in the meantime They make a place here.

Which is where eighteen weeks arrive, and it is a small door into a large room.

The volume has said everything it knows how to say about this Book. God-breathed, living, active, settled in heaven, refined like silver, worth more than gold, sweeter than honey, more than daily bread. Fire, hammer, lamp, sword, seed, milk, mirror, goad, nail, washing, dew, a stone men trip over, a plumb line, a trumpet, a polished arrow, an inheritance. Eighteen threads walked from Genesis to Revelation. Its writers have testified, left their failures on the record, and searched their own writing without understanding it.

And what is on offer at the end of all of it is not mastery of the text.

It is a house with someone in it.

Two verses later He says the Spirit will teach them all things and remind them of everything He has said — which means the keeping is not left to memory or willpower either.

Love Me, He says. Keep My word. And We will move in.

And the promise is stated in the singular. If anyone loves Me — not a congregation, not a movement, one person at a time. Whatever else is true of the church, this sentence is addressed to individuals, and the home is made with them.

That is the whole turn, and it has been the point since Week One.

The noun mone, dwelling or abode, occurs only twice in the New Testament, both in John 14 — in verse 2 for the rooms in the Father’s house, and here in verse 23 for what the Father and Son make with the believer. The verbal form is the abiding word of John 15.

The questioner is identified as Judas, not Iscariot — John is careful, and the aside tells us something about how the Gospel was heard. The question itself is the natural one for men expecting a public messianic display.

The plural We in the promise is unusual and is one of the passages Christian readers have drawn on in trinitarian discussion; the Spirit is promised in the same discourse a few verses earlier and again a few verses later.

Verse 24 supplies the negative counterpart and closes the loop on authority: whoever does not love Me will not keep My words. And the words you hear are not My own; they belong to the Father who sent Me. Even here, at the most intimate promise in the Gospel, He says the words are not His.

Revelation 3:20 gives the same picture at the other end of the canon and to a church in bad condition: I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in and dine with him. Hearing, opening, and a meal — the same three elements.

Look it upG3438 μονή mone, dwelling, abode · G5083 τηρέω tereo, to keep, guard, observe · G25 ἀγαπάω agapao, to love · G3875 παράκλητος parakletos, advocate, helper

Where this touchesJohn 14:15–27 · John 15:1–11 (Week Eleven, Day Seven) · Colossians 3:16 (Week Five, Day Seven) · 1 John 2:24 · Revelation 3:20. The earlier turns were James 1:22–25, Ezra 7:10, the two builders, the Bereans, Colossians 3:16, Psalm 119:11, Acts 20:32, 1 Thessalonians 2:13, 2 Timothy 2:15, Deuteronomy 6, John 8:31, Luke 11:28, 2 Timothy 4:2, Revelation 1:3, Hebrews 2:1, Psalm 1 and James 1:21.