John 15:12-27

New Testament for Everyone

¹² “This is my command: love one another, in the same way that I loved you. ¹³ No one has a love greater than this, to lay down your life for your friends. ¹⁴ You are my friends, if you do what I tell you. ¹⁵ I’m not calling you ‘servants’ any longer; servants don’t know what their master is doing. But I’ve called you ‘friends,’ because I’ve let you know everything I heard from my father.

¹⁶ “You didn’t choose me. I chose you, and I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last. Then the father will give you whatever you ask in my name. ¹⁷ This is my command to you: love one another.”

If the world hates you

¹⁸ “If the world hates you,” Jesus went on, “know that it hated me before it hated you. ¹⁹ If you were from the world, the world would be fond of its own. But the world hates you for this reason: that you’re not from the world. No: I chose you out of the world.

²⁰ “Remember the word that I said to you: servants are not greater than their masters. If they persecuted me, they will persecute you too. If they kept my word, they will keep yours too. ²¹ But they will do all these things to you because of my name, because they don’t know the one who sent me.

²² “If I hadn’t come and spoken to them, they wouldn’t be guilty of sin. But now they have no excuse for their sin. ²³ (Anyone who hates me, hates my father as well!) ²⁴ If I hadn’t done, there in the middle of them, the works which nobody else did, they wouldn’t be guilty of sin. But now they have seen me, and my father—and they’ve hated us both! ²⁵ All this has happened, however, so that the word written in their law might be fulfilled: ‘They hated me for no reason.’

²⁶ “When the helper comes—the one I shall send you from the father, the spirit of truth who comes from the father—he will give evidence about me. ²⁷ And you will give evidence as well, because you have been with me from the start.”