I AM the True Vine
Notes
Transcript
I AM: The True Vine
John 15:1-8
Series Slide
Good morning and welcome to worship everyone. What a week we have had. Some of you are aware that Renee was in a little fender bender… well a fender bender, wheel bender, strut tower bender, lower control arm bender, door bender, A-Pillar bender… well, you get the point. Oh, I left out the best part, the Wrist Bender. Renee’s wrist is getting better, we go see Dr. Roberts tomorrow to make sure it doesn’t need surgery. We really appreciate the meals and the prayers as Renee has been recovering. Renee’s wrist was the only known injury in the wreck and I am just glad it wasn’t worse.
But you didn’t come here to lament the driving habits of Brownwoodians, we are here to talk about Yahweh, Ego Eime, I Am. We have been looking at these passages where Jesus has told us that he is God in the Flesh, he is I Am, the eternal name of God. Along with that declaration, Jesus proclaimed the character of God as he said, I am the Good Shepherd, I am the Living Water, I Am the Door, I am the Bread of Life, I Am the Resurrection and the Life, and last week we saw that Jesus is the Way the Truth and the Life.
Sermon Slide
This week we are in our final week of the series as we look at the statement of Jesus, I Am the True Vine.
But, before we get there, some of you may wonder where we are going next. For the next 4 weeks we will be looking at the final words of the Book of Acts as a springboard for how our Faith can be set free, Unhindered! What Jesus did on the Cross,
By God’s grace and forgiveness offered through the sacrifice of Jesus,
through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit
God has done a new thing – we are unhindered, our faith has been set free! We will look at the Unhindered Kingdom of God, Unhindered Forgiveness, the Unhindered Power of the Holy Spirit, and the Unhindered Gospel that we are to proclaim across the world. That will lead us to Pentecost Sunday where we will gather together to affirm the faith of more than a dozen young people on Confirmation Sunday!
So, now that you know the lay of the land for the next 5 weeks, let’s wrap up the I Am series as we read from John’s Gospel.
Sermon Slide
Turn with me to John 15. If you remember, this is all part of the narrative of the Passover meal and Jesus’ teaching and preparing the disciples for his death, burial, and resurrection. Jesus has reminded them that that he is going away, but he will come back, that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, that he will send a comforter, the Holy Spirit, to them. Now he is going to tell them of the importance of abiding. So, let’s pick up in verse 1 of chapter 15
John 15:1-8
“I am the true grapevine, and my Father is the gardener.
He cuts off every branch of mine that doesn’t produce fruit, and he prunes the branches that do bear fruit so they will produce even more. You have already been pruned and purified by the message I have given you. Remain in me, and I will remain in you. For a branch cannot produce fruit if it is severed from the vine, and you cannot be fruitful unless you remain in me.
“Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing. Anyone who does not remain in me is thrown away like a useless branch and withers. Such branches are gathered into a pile to be burned. But if you remain in me and my words remain in you, you may ask for anything you want, and it will be granted! When you produce much fruit, you are my true disciples. This brings great glory to my Father.
<Prayer>
Unpruned Grape Vine
Grape vines have to be pruned to be healthy. They do survive in the wild. Here in Texas we have what they call Mustang Grapes and Muscadine Grapes. They are wild grapes native to this region. As they grow wild, they do produce grapes. However, when you begin to prune them, when you reduce the amount of branches coming off the vine and support the branches, you have grape vines that produce much more.
Pruned Vines
Now, I know the Thompson’s are probably looking at my pruned vines and cringing… I’m truly a novice… but, these vines in this picture are a year younger than the unpruned vines along my fence and yet they are producing three times the number of grape bunches!
As I think about this, I imagine Jesus looking at one of the cups of wine they are having at this meal, thinking about all the work from then vineyard to the press and on through the fermentation process to make that one cup of wine, and lifting it up to say, I am the True Vine. The various cups of Wine represented so much in the Pass Over Meal, and each one is the result of the work of the vineyard and the vine gardener.
Sermon Slide
But by claiming to be the True Vine, Jesus is calling their minds back to the Scriptures of Isaiah and other parts of what we call the Old Testament where Israel is called the Vinyard of God… but that God would produce a new vine for a new time. It was a familiar picture. But now Jesus is saying that the New Israel is the spiritual fulfillment of God’s promise. And one is connected to the true vine through Jesus, rather than through Abraham. In other words, Abraham and the people of Israel are one branch, but you and I, the gentiles, are another branch that is connected to, abiding in Jesus!
I want to focus this morning on what it means to “abide” in Jesus. One of the great challenges to spiritual life is the irony of time-conscious human beings trying to relate to a timeless God. We live under the tyranny of the clock; God inhabits eternity.
Psalm 46:10 says “they that wait upon the Lord…” But we’re terrible at waiting, mainly because it takes so much time! For most of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. Rather, it’s that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a watered-down, mediocre version of it.
To grow grapes takes time and patience. It takes connection. It takes abiding. Here, I have a branch from one of the vines. On it, you see these little baby grapes. Yes, they are attached to the branch, but the branch is no longer attached, it is no longer abiding in the vine. It can’t draw from the vine, it’s been cut off, it’s been pruned. These grapes will not grow. They will not produce. Because they are not abiding in the vine they will never be made into jelly, or wine, or juice. They are dead apart from the vine.
I doubt any of us would intentionally ever sever ourselves from God. But, we will become so busy, so hurried, that we don’t grow. So spread that we are like the unpruned vine growing in every direction without the fruit that we could have.
In John Ortberg’s book, he talks about our modern-day “Hurry Sickness”. Think about what we do… We buy 3 in one wash, so we don’t have to switch from soap to shampoo and then conditioner. Oooo we save a lot of time there don’t we.
We go eat at McDonalds… not because it’s good, but because it’s fast… and sitting down in the restaurant takes too much time, so they developed the drive-thru to help us with our hurried life.
One definition of this illness we are all living with by Meyer Friedman says: Hurry-Sickness is “a continuous struggle…to accomplish or achieve more and more things or participate in more and more events in less and less time, frequently in the face of opposition, real or imagined, from other persons.”
Any time we hear about a new disease, we want to know if we have it, so here are the Symptoms of the Disease:
1. Constantly speeding up daily activities:
- reading, talking, eating, etc. We skim an article instead of read it, we swallow our food whole… you get the point.
- Here’s another one, I did this a Brookshires just a couple of days ago… Counting the people in the grocery line—and then still keeping track of the place where you would have been in the other line. If you beat them, you won! If they beat you, you feel depressed for the rest of the day.
- I will set my GPS on my truck when I travel, not because I need to know where I am going, but to see if I can beat the Estimated Time of Arrival it tells me…
- You do realize that the modern computer is the result of his symptom of the illness… The computer was created to allow us to get more done, faster, so we could have more free time… but instead, we’ve filled up the extra time with more work… that we speed up
2. Multi-tasking.
- We used to call this “doing more than one thing at the same time,” but that takes too long to say.
- We do it best in the car. Hurry-sick people can drive, eat, shave, put on make-up, drink coffee, listen to the radio, talk on the phone, and make hand gestures—all at the same time!
3. Superficiality.
- Depth can only come slowly—in relationships, conversations, and thoughts.
- But we have traded wisdom for information; depth for breadth.
- We have created a culture that is a mile wide and an inch deep… and that has transferred over to our faith life as well. So many of us live our life of faith on the surface, never going deep into what God has for us.
4. An inability to love.
- Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible.
- Love always takes time, and time is the one thing hurried people don’t have.
- This is why hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life—it is impossible to be aware of the Father’s love when you are always in a hurry.
But, just like an illness, there is a treatment. Like with a poison that robs us of life, there is an antidote…
The cure for the disease: Abiding in Jesus.
John 15:5
“Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing.
There is a picture of this in Luke 10. It’s a familiar passage for some, it’s the story of Mary and Martha. You know the one. Jesus has come to visit his friends in Bethany, pre-dead and resurrected Lazarus is there, Martha’s in the kitchen preparing for their guest and Mary is sitting at Jesus’ feet listening to him teach.
Martha’s had enough, there she is slaving away in the kitchen preparing this meal for Jesus and the Disciples and Mary’s doing nothing. The nerve of her… doesn’t Mary know what it takes to prepare a meal and serve this many people? So Martha tells Jesus… you catch that, she tells Jesus what needs to be done.
That’s often what hurry-sick people do… We have a drive by prayer and tell Jesus what needs to be done.
But, what is Jesus’ reply to Martha?
Luke 10:42
But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”
We see, and we have two different ideas of fruitfulness in this story and in our life.
The fruitfulness that happens when we work and produce an outcome. This is the one we like to think we have control over. “Look, I did this and the outcome was that! Look at what I did!”
Then there is…
The fruitfulness of abiding in Christ and letting Him do the work through us. The result of that fruitfulness is “more than we could ever ask or imagine.”
Isn’t it interesting that Mary was sitting at Jesus feet like a child sitting around a teacher in class listening to a story… Wasn’t it Jesus that said, “Unless you become like little children you can not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Wasn’t it Jesus who said, “let the little children come to me.”
Mary was in the posture of abiding.
Martha was in the posture of producing. She was trying to do the work of pleasing Jesus and she thought others should be too, but Jesus was reminding them that he was the focus. He was the one that does the work.
So, I want to wrap this sermon up, And actually this series, with 4 steps to remain in Jesus.
And as we do, We need to commend Martha about something.
She wasn’t all bad.
She knew that there was work to be done, but she had lost the focus of why she was doing the work.
There are things we do, there is work we do, that helps us abide in Christ.
But the focus can’t be the work, it always has to be Jesus. Amen…
So, 4 steps to remain in Jesus.
And, I bet you already know them.
Scripture. Read some every day, perhaps use a One-year Bible. Learn the difference between reading for information and reading for formation.
Informational reading covers as much as possible
Formational reading covers what is needed, and focuses on depth, not quantity; perhaps only one word.
Informational reading has a goal of mastering the text (content and meaning)
Formational reading has a goal of being masteredby the text.
Informational reading treats the text as an object
Formational reading sees ourselves as the object of the text.
Informational reading reads analytically
Formational reading reads receptively.
Informational reading seeks to solve problems
Formational reading seeks to enter into the mystery of God.
So, there is Scripture, next is worship….
Worship. In Worship, The Focus is the Focus. We were made to worship and we will worship something… a sports team, an idol like our Cell Phone or Social Media, our children or grandchildren, some famous person… the list goes on… We will worship, and we need to develop a habit of gathering regularly for worship with God’s people.
Come prepared to encounter the living God, not just to evaluate and critique and compare. Remember, we’re here like a group of spiritual kindergartners, sitting at the feet of Jesus. He really is present with us by his spirit. Learn to “attend to him” like Mary did.
Fellowship. The importance of small groups. Wherever two or three are gathered in his name, he really is there with them. More importantly, he is present in the faces and lives of the people we gather with. We encounter Christ in each other. Because the church is the body of Christ, each gathering of believers offers a whisper of his presence and the lingering aroma of his fragrance.
You are an important part of the body and when you aren’t there you are missed. Like Renee’s Left Hand… she can’t use it, and it is greatly missed. We need all parts of the Body to function as we were designed. We can get by… we can learn to adapt and overcome… but we are our best self when our entire body works together.
Finally,
Prayer. Prayer at fixed times. (Morning or Evening, etc.) Also, prayer throughout the day. Paul wrote, “Pray without ceasing…” (1 Thess. 5:17)
Prayer centers us on God.
Prayer connects us to God.
Prayer reminds us to pause, to breathe, to know that Jesus is still on the Throne.
Over the past several years and even into this year we have all been through so much… and sometimes we need a reminder stop…
BREATHE DEEP and remember… Jesus is still Lord
…Wrist Bands…
We live in a busy time… but it’s always been that way. Yes, technology has changed how busy we are, but that’s been the case forever as well. Think about how the invention of metal in the Iron age changed society.
Think even before that about the invention of the wheel and how that impacted productivity.
As it says in Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun, we just like to think that we are special and different.
Sermon Slide
But, for all times the answer has been the same. Remain in God. Or as Jesus said, Abide in Me.
And so we come to an end of our journey, and I cannot imagine a better place to end then with the exhortation to ABIDE WELL IN CHRIST. For all we’ve learned about who He is, and how He lives with us… We are invited to ABIDE forever with the great I AM. The King of kings and Lord of lords, the Alpha and Omega, the Prince of peace, the Messiah… Immanuel.
God WITH us, forever… Just one long continuation of being with Jesus… over and over and over again… Let’s pray together.