Whoever loves me will keep my Word in C major, BWV 74

The librettist for this work was Christiana Mariana von Ziegler. She collaborated with Bach on nine cantatas after Easter 1724, beginning with Ihr werdet weinen und heulen, BWV 103. In several of these works, she began with a quotation of Jesus from the Gospel. For this cantata, she quoted the Bible three times, taking a quotation from the Gospel as a starting point in movement 1 (verse 23), another one in movement 4 (verse 28), and a quotation from an epistle by Paul in movement 6 (Romans 8:1). She concluded the text with the second stanza from Paul Gerhardt's hymn "Gott Vater, sende deinen Geist". Much of her text was based on the "metaphysical" readings of the Gospel of John.