Jesus’ Glorious Promise: ‘I Am Coming for You’

Picture a child, standing on a curb at a school pickup line. You’ve seen this scene in dozens of movies. The bell has rung, the cars come and go, friends are climbing in and waving goodbye, and the line gets shorter and shorter.

“Are you sure your dad’s coming to pick you up?” asks the kind teacher, pointing to her watch. The child, a bit anxious, nods.

Finally, the parking lot is empty. In that moment of loneliness and vulnerability, that small child learns a feeling they don’t yet have words to express.

Promise Needed

That image is something we all learn, not necessarily because our parents left us, but because of the circumstances of life. We keep learning that, in one way or another, we have been left.

Maybe it’s the phone call that doesn’t come. The empty seat at the table. The funeral. The suddenly quiet house. Maybe it’s the marriage that ends, the friend who stops returning texts, the messes we created or the messes others have created for us. Maybe it’s the diagnosis no one warned us about.

There are hundreds of ways a person learns what that child learned that day: “I’m alone, and no one seems to be coming.” I’m grateful for a great relationship with my mom and my dad as well as my sister and her family, a wonderful wife and daughters, and the blessing of faithful friends, but I don’t take any of that for granted. And that feeling we sometimes have – I’ve been left, I’m alone, no one’s coming for me – is addressed by name in John 14. Jesus names it.

Allow me to set up this Gospel passage for you. The night before his arrest, Jesus is in the upper room with his disciples – the ones who have given up everything for him. They’ve followed him through three years of teaching and healing, controversy and hope. They’ve placed their entire lives in his hands, not knowing exactly where things are going but trusting in him. And now Jesus sets up his departure by saying, “I’m leaving, and I’m going to prepare a place for you, but it’s going to get better.” He’s trying to comfort them.

And then he says, “I am the way, I am the truth, and I am the life” (v. 6), but none of that is landing with them. They’re just too anxious, and we feel their panic. Thomas asks a question just before this: “Lord, we do not know where you are going, how can we know the way?” (v. 5).

He’s not arguing theology. What’s happening here is that the master to whom they have given their entire future just told them he’s about to leave. That all comes right before our gospel message – that’s the setup. And here it is: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (v. 15).

To our anxious ears, that can sound like a condition, as if the promise that follows is earned by our obedience: If I love him well enough, if I keep the commandments thoroughly enough, then maybe the Holy Spirit will be present.

Let’s notice exactly what Jesus says – and what he does not say. He says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” He does not say, “If you keep my commandments, then I will love you.”

Promise Made

Order matters. The gospel turns “If you keep my commandments, I will love you” inside out and upside down. Love is not the price of presence; love is the response to God’s presence.

In the same way, obedience is not the cause of God’s promises; it’s the fruit of having received God’s promises. He loved us. He gave himself for us. He sends his Spirit, and out of that, our love and obedience grow as the shape of a life of being adopted by God. It’s not “Obey to get loved,” it’s “You are loved, obey.” Keep that order in mind, because that’s what grounds the rest of the passage.

In the middle of the disciples’ unraveling, Jesus gives them a promise: “I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you” (v. 18). And the word he uses for “orphan” is a word for a child whose parents have died. In the ancient world, Plato used the same word Jesus uses to express the time when a teacher who has led their disciples has died, and the students are bereft. They’re exposed; they’re suddenly without the presence of the one person who ordered everything for them. This type of “orphan” is the exact word for the disciples when Jesus leaves.

Jesus sees it, and he names it, and then he answers it, and this is what’s so beautiful: “I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you.” I want us to feel the full weight of that promise this morning, because what Jesus does in this verse is what He does in the Gospel. He doesn’t pretend the dread is unreasonable. He does not tell his disciples to cheer up. He does not minimize what they’re about to lose. Instead, he looks them straight in that orphan feeling and gives them a word to counter it.

But how can he say that? Think about this: He’s about to leave them in less than 24 hours. How can he, the one who is leaving, promise his friends whom he loves, his disciples, that they will not be left? He’s telling them the exact opposite of what’s going to happen: “I’m going to leave you, but you won’t be left.”

That sounds like a contradiction. How can this be true?

Promise Anchored

It’s true because his promise that “I am leaving you, but I’m coming back, and you will not be orphaned” is anchored in three things. First, it’s anchored in what he is about to do on the cross. The reason Jesus can promise we will not be orphaned is because he was about to be orphaned. In less than 24 hours, he was going to hang on a cross and cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

John Calvin insists that what Christ experienced on the cross was horrible physical suffering, but he says the deeper torment was in the soul of Jesus, the experience of being forsaken by God, being cut off from sense of the Father’s presence and love, and bearing the curse, God’s curse, which belonged to us. So Calvin writes in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, “Surely no more terrible abyss can be conceived than to feel yourself forsaken and estranged from God.”

That is exactly what Jesus carried. He drank that cup of curse so we would drink the cup of blessing, which we still do every Sunday.

The reason Jesus can promise his disciples that they will not be orphaned is that he was willing to be orphaned in their place. He took the abandonment so we would never know it. He was forsaken so we would be blessed and brought in.

The second reason Jesus could make the “You will not be orphaned” promise is that this promise is anchored in his resurrection. Look at the next verse. It says, “Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you will live” (v. 9). And so when Jesus says, ‘I will come to you,’ he means it, first, in the most concrete way possible. That in three days, he’s going to walk out of the tomb and stand in front of them.

The orphan promise isn’t a metaphor. It’s not a sentiment. It’s a body that came out of the grave, because a dead Jesus can’t make a promise and keep a promise to anyone. But a risen Christ can keep his promise to everyone who belongs to him.

Because he lives, the orphan promise stands. Because he lives, “I am coming to you” is not a sentiment. It is a fact, and the empty tomb is the guarantee of his promise.

Finally, this promise is anchored in the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, who makes an absent Christ present. Jesus says it again right here: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever” (v.  17). And the word for “another” means “a duplicate, one of the same kind.”

Jesus is our first Helper, our advocate, and the Spirit is the second, of the same kind, of the same heart, doing in you and me what Jesus did right next to the disciples. The Holy Spirit, is how the risen Christ keeps coming to us, even now after he’s ascended to the right hand of the Father.

Promise Plus

You are not alone. The risen Christ has not left you to figure out life by yourself. He has put his Holy Spirit inside you. He is coming to you. He is with you, and he will be with you, as Jesus says, forever.

And so, here’s the depth of the promise. Jesus does not merely say, “I will not leave you orphaned.” He says also, “I will come to you” (v. 18).

He does not just remove the threat of abandonment; he brings you in. The opposite of being orphaned is being adopted. It’s not “not abandoned,” although that’s good enough. If I’m being abandoned, “not abandoned” sounds nice. But the opposite of orphaned is adopted, and this is what the gospel does: by the cross, by the Resurrection and the gift of the Spirit, you are not merely spared the orphan’s fate; you are brought into the family of God.

In his book Knowing God, the famous Anglican theologian and priest J.I Packer writes it better than I can summarize:

Adoption is the highest privilege the gospel offers, even higher than justification. A traitor is forgiven, brought in for supper, and given the family name. In adoption, God takes us into His family fellowship. He establishes us as children and heirs. Closeness, affection, and generosity are at the heart of the adoption relationship. To be right with God the Judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the Father is greater.

Adoption means that we’ve been adopted into Jesus’ family, and now – because we’re united to Christ – we have the same relationship Jesus has to God the Father, by adoption. We’re not strangers to God; we’re not tolerated outsiders. If you’re in Christ, you’re adopted in the family. You have the same Father, the same love and the same standing as Jesus. And this is where verse 20 lands like a hammer. It says, “In that day you will know that I am in the Father, and you in me, and I in you.”

There are three indwellings happening here in one verse: the Son is in the Father, you are in the Son, and the Son is in you. There’s no closer way to describe a relationship. Jesus is not just promising to be near you; he is promising that you will be in him, and he will be in you. You will become a room in which the Trinity takes up residence.

Orphans have no one to belong to, but adopted children belong by name and by a legal declaration to a family. One of my friends is a lawyer. He said, “The only time everyone’s happy in a courtroom is on Adoption Day, when a judge stands in front of a child who doesn’t have parents. As the child stands there with parents and perhaps siblings, the judge says, ‘I declare legally that you are this child’s mother, you are this child’s father, you are their daughter or son’ and hits that gavel and announces it, and everyone cheers.” My friend said it’s a time when lawyers will come out of their offices – when they ring the bell for Adoption Day, just to come watch the beauty over and over again. It never gets old.

The promise is not only that you will not be left. The promise is “You will be with me, and I will be with you – forever.”

The passage closes right where it began. “He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and will manifest myself to him” (v. 21). This whole passage is a circle of love that begins and ends with God. He loves first. He gives his Son. He sends the Holy Spirit. Then he brings us in the Son into the family of God, and so we love because we’ve been loved so well by God. And the love that always was – the love between the Father and the Son before the foundations of the world – turns out to be the love we’re standing inside of.

That’s why Paul, in Romans 8, says, “You have now received the spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” Not the distant deity, not the stern judge, but the Father.

Promise Fulfilled

The orphan promise in John 14 is fulfilled by the adoption cry in Romans 8. The Holy Spirit is freeing you and me from our orphan-like ways: living as if we’re not named, as if we don’t have an identity, as if we don’t have a family of God the Father and of the church.

If you are in Christ, you are adopted as a child of God. Here are these promises, as plainly as I can express them:

• To the one who has felt forgotten by God and a long season of silence: He has not left you orphaned. He is coming for you.
• To the one whose life emptied out in a way you didn’t imagine: He has not left you orphaned. He is coming for you.
• To the one who has been failed by people who were supposed to be there: He has not left you orphaned. He is coming for you.
• To the one for whom the room has gone quiet, the texts have stopped, the house feels still: He has not left you orphaned. He is coming for you.

The risen Christ doesn’t stand at a distance and wave. He comes for you. He comes by his Word. He comes to you in the promise God made to you in your baptism, that you are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.  He comes to you at the table, where you receive the body and blood of Jesus. He comes to you by the Spirit, uniting you to Christ and pouring God’s love into your heart (Romans 5:5).

Every time he does this, he is keeping his promise that he made in the upper room – that you, who were once orphaned, are now adopted. That you, who were once strangers, are now sons and daughters of God. That you, who feared that you would be left, have been brought home.

And so for all the ways that you have been or are standing at the curb, watching the cars drive by, hearing the haunting, “I’ve been left,” there is another word, spoken by the only one with the authority to speak it: “I will not leave you as an orphan. I am coming for you.”

Thanks be to God that in Jesus Christ, and by the sending of the Spirit, thanks to the Father’s giving, you have not been left. You will not be left. And he will always come for you.

Editor’s Note: This column was adapted from a sermon the bishop preached at St. James Episcopal Church, Ormond Beach, on May 10, 2026.