According to the Scriptures

Guest (Male): Next on According to the Scriptures, we'll see the need to abide in Christ. But what is abiding? Pastor Damian touches on that as we begin.

Damian Kyle: Abiding is simply obeying. Abiding is simply obeying God's word. And so we begin with knowing God's word, but knowing his word isn't going to make any difference in my life until I obey it.

And there is nothing like it in terms of all that could be done. Obedience to God's word assures the health and the stability and the vitality of our relationship with Jesus.

Guest (Male): Welcome once again to According to the Scriptures. Pastor Damian Kyle is on the final leg of our study on the seven "I AM" statements of Jesus. And the seventh and final one is: "I am the true vine."

If we want to make it our aim in life to be a fruitful Christian, we'll need to abide in Christ. And abiding is really obeying. Obeying God's word. That's the focal emphasis of today's message, based in John 15. Let's lean in and listen to what Damian has to say about that.

Damian Kyle: This morning we continue our series that we're in the middle of just about on Sunday mornings and looking at the seven "I AM" statements of Jesus and the seven miracles that constitute the foundation and the core of the Gospel according to John. This morning we come to the final of Jesus' seven "I AM" statements where he declares in verse one, "I am the true vine."

And the context of this "I AM" statement of Jesus is he's speaking to his disciples. He's alone with them in an upper room somewhere in the city of Jerusalem. And he's with them on the night before his crucifixion. He's told them that he's leaving. That following his death, his burial, his resurrection, that he was going to ascend to the Father, return to the home that he had come from, the heaven that he had come from. And one day he would return and take them and us into that very heaven ourselves.

And Jesus' teaching here, as it's recorded in chapters 13 through 17 in John's Gospel, is known as the Upper Room Discourse. And in this discourse, he is preparing them for a dramatic change that is going to occur in his relationship with them. Because as he would be ascending shortly into heaven, their relationship with him would no longer be what it's been for three and a half years, and that is face to face.

But now it's going to be different. And now, in large part, by the person of the Holy Spirit, whom he's going to send to them and send to us, it would now become a relationship where the Holy Spirit is to us what he had been to them during his physical presence. And included in his instruction for this coming change in their personal relationship with him, and how to maintain the intimacy and the fullness of relationship that they had known for these three and a half years in his physical presence, how for all of that to continue in the same measure following his departure into heaven, and he makes that the focus of our passage here this morning where he declares himself to be the true vine and his Father, God the Father, to be the husbandman.

Now, in order for this instruction to be important to us at all as Christians, we have to ask ourselves two questions. Number one, is being spiritually fruitful really important to me as a Christian? And then second, do I possess, in my life, privacy of my own heart, do I possess a strong desire that God would be glorified through my life? And if neither of those things are true, then everything that's going to follow, certainly this sermon, is going to be very, very tedious. It assumes those motivations, Jesus does, in terms of our lives as we come to this passage.

And so these things are important to the Lord. And first we want to notice that Christianity is above all else, in verse five, it's a relationship. You notice again in verse five, "I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, bears much fruit, for without me you can do nothing." And so Christianity is above all a personal relationship with Jesus himself.

And this is a reminder that I think that even Christians need to hear. It certainly does me no harm to hear it. And I think it's important for us to be reminded of it and to hear, given the fact that Jesus makes it the focus of his final "I AM" statement in the Gospels. So there has to be a great tendency, he's speaking to disciples, not the great tendency in the world or among the pagans, and I use the term affectionately, but there must be a great tendency among Christians to somehow make Christianity supremely about something else.

About something other than supremely about a personal relationship with him. And all we have to do is think about Jesus' letter to the church of Ephesus there in the book of Revelation. A moving, a going, a doing, a very busy, physically vibrant church. But Jesus said they'd left their first love. They left this priority that Jesus is laying out here in John chapter 15. And because of it, Jesus threatened to remove the fullness of his active presence within the church and the fullness of his blessings upon them unless they got this turned around.

We think about in that same book of Revelation, Jesus' letter to the church in Laodicea where he actually portrays himself as being on the outside of the church, knocking on the door to try and gain admittance. And the church of Laodicea is filled with Christians who have no idea there is something wrong with that picture and wrong with that understanding of Christianity.

And Christianity's not supremely a relationship with a church, as important as church attendance is for a lot of reasons, including helping us nurture our relationship with the Lord. Christianity is not a relationship with some religious system or some great charismatic leader taking Jesus' place in our life, some mediator we make of someone else. It's about a relationship with Christ.

In verse five, Jesus declared himself to be a vine. And that is a grapevine. You can picture it in your mind coming up out of the ground. He likens us as Christians to be the branches that then branch off of that great vine, which we do as we abide in the great vine. And so what he's doing there is he is emphasizing our union with him. He's emphasizing here our relationship with him.

So you imagine we're out in a vineyard late in the summer and the vines and the branches are laden with fruit waiting to be harvested. And so many clusters of grapes. And somebody asked Jesus, "What's the key to this fruitfulness?" And he declares, "Well, come closer and I'll show you." And so we gather around him with bated breath to understand what it is that's the key to all of this fruitfulness.

And then he puts his finger and points at a great cluster of grapes and begins to trace back his finger from the cluster of grapes along the branch to where the branch is then connected to the vine. And then he points to that connection where the branch connects with the vine, and he says, "That is the key to this fruitfulness. Where that branch is joined to the vine. The relationship between the branch and the vine. Everything about fruit comes out of the health of that relationship."

And Jesus is telling us that the key to spiritual fruitfulness in our lives is the health of that union with Christ. That personal relationship with him. Just as everything depends upon the health of the relationship between the vine and the branch in viticulture, so too in the Christian life everything depends upon the health and the vitality of our relationship with the Lord.

Because so many other things can rise up, and I think even religious things, to compete with Jesus as being the supreme focus of our Christian life. The single greatest attention in our Christian life. Jesus declares himself in verse one, not only to be the vine, but to be the true vine. And so the vine is the source of life for the branches. It's the mediator between the branch and the ground.

You have all of these incredible resources that are found in the earth. And it is that vine then that delivers the fullness of those resources out of the ground then to the branches in order to produce those refreshing grapes for mankind. Originally, God intended that the nation of Israel would become that kind of a blessing to the whole world. He called them as a nation in order that they would be his people.

That he would be the means by which he would be able to express his heart to the world through them. To bless the nations of the world through them. To draw the entire world into the worship of him through them. And that people could come into contact with the children of Israel and as they would, in order to taste and see that he the Lord is good.

And so the grapevine is a very, very common piece of imagery, a description that is used of the nation of Israel in the Old Testament. I could quote many, but allow me just one. Psalm 80 verse 8: "You have brought," the psalmist declares to God, "you have brought a vine out of Egypt," speaking of Israel. "You have cast out the nations and planted it. You prepared room for it and caused it to take deep root, and it filled the land."

But what Judaism became under the Sadducees and under the Pharisees at the time of Jesus, Judaism became where people were largely in two extremes of legalistic under the oversight of the Pharisees, very, very liberal under the oversight, spiritual oversight of the Sadducees. And what Judaism had become at that time didn't represent the heart of God. And they had long ago ceased to point people to God.

Judaism under the Pharisees and under the Sadducees actually became an obstacle to people coming to know God rather than a help. And so all of their man-made traditions became more important to them and more authoritative in their thinking than the word of God. And thus, to come into contact with these religious systems were not to come into contact with God, not to encounter his word, but to encounter man-made traditions.

And so they were no longer being true to what God had called them to be, no longer being a true vine. In fact, while all the while the Pharisees and the Sadducees were claiming to represent God before the world, they were at this very moment that Jesus is declaring this, on the night before his crucifixion, planning the death and the crucifixion of their Messiah and of the Savior of the world. Talk about being disconnected.

And thus Jesus declared himself to be the true vine. To be the genuine vine. The real vine. Equal words. And so he's saying, just as the vine puts the branches into relationship with the earth, all of its resources for fruit physically, so too I will bring your lives into relationship with heaven, with God, all of those resources for spiritually fruitful life.

There are many religious systems in the world, and I think and know even today, that even call themselves Christian. And they do everything possible to keep a person from a simple, real, personal relationship with Jesus. And they set themselves up as mediators between men and God. Very easy for a church to do this. Where a church then begins to develop within a congregation that a relationship with the church, a loyalty to the church, an individual church, is more important, the most important thing about Christianity.

Sometimes they can even become an obstacle. How many people, don't shout out, but how many people have had to leave those systems to even hear the gospel? Confessing itself to be Christian, about God, and you have to leave the system to hear the gospel. To leave the system to be able to even hear that you need to be born again and to be saved and forgiven of our sins in order to enter into a relationship with God instead of being taught about all of the traditions of that denomination or non-denomination or Christian cult. And Jesus declaring himself to be the true vine, that declaration is as needed today as ever it was 2,000 years ago.

So if you're going to produce fruit, the first thing you have to have is you have to have good soil. The second thing you have to have is you have to have good stock. You have to have a good grapevine. And Jesus declares himself to be the right stock to put us into relationship with the Father and all of the riches of heaven. Now we have to take an especial note here of Jesus' continual reference to a particular thing in this passage, and that is the word "abiding." He uses the word "abiding" in one form or another ten times in these 11 verses.

So whatever this abiding is is very important to him. And whatever this abiding is is very important to fruitfulness in our lives as Christians. And so we'll just notice, for example, in verse four, Jesus said, "Abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine," verse five, "you are the branches. He who abides in me and I in him bears much fruit, for without me you can do nothing." The technical meaning of abiding, and not really a great definition of it, is to remain, to stay, to settle in.

The definition that I like for abiding is to settle down and make yourself at home. You settle down into that relationship. And so it refers to maintaining a living, healthy, unbroken relationship with Jesus. Well, since Jesus told us that apart from him we can do nothing, and since abiding is so important to Jesus, it raises the question in our minds of: how do I abide? So we could end the sermon here. And no wishful thinking.

We could end the sermon here and then send everybody out and say, "Now what you need to do is abide in order to be fruitful." Well, we'd make our way halfway to the car and we would think to ourselves, "I don't have the foggiest idea what abiding looks like." Certainly not the clarity that Jesus wants me to have. And so Jesus gives us two very practical keys here to abiding.

One of them he gives us in verse seven, the other in verse ten. So how to abide? He tells us in verse seven is his words must abide in us. "If you abide in me and my words abide in you." So this means that we are to make the word of God, as Christians, the single greatest and the most dominant influence in our lives. You say something like that and people think you're crazy.

But Jesus doesn't think it's crazy. Until we are familiar with the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, until we know the characters in the Bible and what those characters are intended to teach us better than we know any of the characters on a TV show or the athletes on a sports team, until we know Jesus' position on any particular subject in life better than we know the positions of our favorite talk radio personalities, or until we know our Bible better than we know anything else in life, and until we know God better than we know anyone else in life.

And it's a call for the word of God to absolutely dominate our lives. Our doing, our thinking, our speaking, our hearing. And how do we give it that kind of a place in our lives? By reading it on my own on a daily basis, what's called a devotional life, having a conversation with God through his word. Studying it. It's very good to have a devotional life in which I'm reading his word and reading it each day and learning it.

But it's also good to then move even further than that and to study the word of God. What does this mean and what does that mean? And do it on our own. That can happen by attending Bible studies at church. There are so many resources that you can access on the internet today. Excellent resources and so much instruction that you can receive online by simply downloading it.

I remember when I was a new Christian, we would fight over a new cassette tape. I mean, in the old days, you could read your Bible, but in terms of studying it and going deeper in it, you'd have to wait for the next church service and the teaching that would occur. Well, it could take you years to ever get to certain subjects on the Bible.

Now with the resources available to us to download, we can grow spiritually as and in our knowledge of the word as fast as we could ever want to do. And then the importance of giving the word of God a living place in my life. To really then know the word, but then make it the standard of my decision making. To make it the standard of my definitions of right and wrong in my life. Allow it to test my life and search my life and to ask myself circumstance by circumstance, "What does the Bible say about what I'm supposed to do in this situation?"

And all of that is encapsulated in as the apostle Paul put it in writing to the Colossians, chapter three verse 16. He said, "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly." And that's where it begins. The abiding is to know the word of God in this way. His word abiding in us. And then second, in verse ten, is just simply by obeying his commandments. If you want to look and say, "Okay, what's a simple definition of abiding on a practical level?" Abiding is simply obeying.

Abiding is simply obeying God's word. And so we begin with knowing God's word, but knowing his word isn't going to make any difference in my life until I obey it. And there is nothing like it in terms of all that could be done. Obedience to God's word assures the health and the stability and the vitality of our relationship with Jesus.

Guest (Male): Great way to look at it. Abiding is obeying. Obeying God's word. And that's one of the many reasons we love to study the word with you each day here on According to the Scriptures with Pastor Damian Kyle.

First, here's our phone number where you can order resource materials like today's message on CD: 209-545-5530. That's 209-545-5530. All of Damian's messages are archived for you at accordingtothescriptures.com as well as oneplace.com, as well as on most of the major podcast platforms.

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