According to the Scriptures

Damian Kyle: Get under the spout where the blessings flow out. Next.

Well, we all like a good shower, don't we? All like a good spout on a hot day, cold water poured down upon us. We love the image. So imagine this huge spout or this huge faucet out of which this massive flow of water is coming and you're standing right under it.

And that's what obedience does. All of His commands are intended to keep me smack-dab right underneath that spout. And a life of simple obedience allows me to experience the fullest expression of His love in my life.

Guest (Male): Great to have you along for According to the Scriptures, the ministry of Calvary Chapel Modesto. In chapter 15 of John, Jesus said if we would abide in Him, we would bear much fruit. And as we'll see today, there are tremendous blessings that come to those who abide.

But God also prunes us so we'll be fruitful as well. If you've got a green thumb, you know all about pruning and why it's necessary. It's needed at times in our lives as well. Here's Pastor Damian Kyle encouraging us to have the closest relationship we can possibly have with the Lord.

Damian Kyle: If you want to look and say, 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.

Now notice the result of abiding. He tells us in verse 2 that there'll be fruit. In verse 2, there'll be more fruit. In verse 5 and verse 8, there'll be much fruit. And then later, we didn't even get this far, in verse 16, fruit that will remain. So that raises the question, what in the world is this fruit He's talking about?

Paul listed some of it in Galatians chapter 5 where he describes the fruit of the Holy Spirit. What will be the fruit of my life as I abide in Christ in this way? And Paul said, "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law." These things will begin to be a significant part of our lives.

Another kind of fruit that God wants in our lives has to do with our Christian service and our place in the Great Commission of making the gospel known to people, making disciples of all nations, and the fruit that comes with entering our area of Christian service. Then there's the fruit of Christ-likeness, the fruit of just cooperating with the Holy Spirit and His work through the word to make our lives a little bit more like Christ every single day. That's the fruit that He's looking to accomplish in our lives.

Second, in verse 7, in terms of the result of abiding, is that the abiding life will result in a more effective, fruitful prayer life. When His words abide in me, then what happens in my prayer life is that His desires then become my desires in my prayer life, and my prayers then will be in accordance with His word and His promises and His will.

An abiding life also produces a boldness and a confidence in our prayer life, an authority to our prayer life that we would never otherwise know in our communication with God. See if you recognize anything like this ever having happened in your life. Maybe you've gotten as a dad or a parent, you've gotten in the flesh and yelled just before dinner. You haven't made it right yet with the family before you sit down to dinner, and now you have to pray and thank God for that meal.

How did that prayer go? It was like giving birth as much as I could understand it. What a painful, painful experience. When we're abiding in the Lord in this kind of a relationship with Him, then our prayers become very confident, they become very bold, they are very free just as a consequence of abiding.

Third, an abiding life in verse 8 is a life that glorifies God. The moral and the spiritual quality of life that results in us becomes so evident to other people. The relationship that we have with Jesus is so influential upon us that they recognize that this isn't something that we've done to ourselves, and so it glorifies God in the eyes of all who witness it in our lives.

Just as a vine branch exists to bear physical grapes for the pleasure, the blessing of people who will then eat those physical grapes, so too our lives become a blessing to others too, to the glory of our God. It becomes a blessing for people to come into contact with us.

Fourth, in this regard in verses 9 and 10, abiding allows us to experience the fullness of God's love for us. Jesus loves us very much. When you have someone who loves us as Jesus loves us, the one thing you don't want to do to Him is to do something or to become something that limits His ability to express His love for us in the fullness that He desires. To obey or to abide allows Jesus to express the fullness of His heart of love toward us.

Jude wrote in Jude verse 21, "Keep yourselves in the love of God." Keep yourself in that place where God can lavish us with His love with all of the expressions of His love. Abiding and obeying God's word keeps us right in that place. Apparently, there's an old hymn that declares, "Stand under the spout where the blessings flow out."

Well, we all like a good shower, don't we? All like a good spout on a hot day, cold water poured down upon us. We love the image. So imagine this huge spout or this huge faucet out of which this massive flow of water is coming and you're standing right under it. That's what obedience does. All of His commands are intended to keep me smack-dab right underneath that spout. A life of simple obedience allows me to experience the fullest expression of His love in my life.

Finally, in this regard in verse 11, abiding results in a life of joy. You look at this and Jesus wants us to realize that this abiding life, this obeying life with Him, this relationship with Him doesn't result in a life of drudgery and joylessness, but it's to enter into the very joy that Jesus experienced. There it is, available to us.

This isn't some punitive thing that He's talking about here. This is a source of great joy within our life. There's a quality of life that comes out of abiding and the joy of knowing that I'm right with God, I'm living a life that brings Him glory, I'm living a life that's best for my fellow man, and that is a priceless life.

Notice too, and it's a heads up in verse 2, that Jesus gives us a heads up here that this kind of fruitful Christianity and this kind of a fruitful relationship with Him will require pruning. Pruning in our lives as Christians is an absolutely necessary part of a fruitful vineyard and it's part of a fruitful Christian life as well. He tells us that God the Father is the vinedresser.

The vinedresser is simply to a vineyard what a gardener is to a garden. His responsibility is to tend the vines and the branches so that the branches would bear fruit. The first most important thing is to have good soil to be planted in. Then for it to be a good vine. The third most important thing for fruitfulness in a vineyard, and then also true related to our Christian lives, is to have an expert vinedresser, and we have the very best in God the Father.

You notice that word that He declares there? He declares that the Father prunes every one of us there in verse 2. He prunes every one of us as Christians. And what is pruning? It's simply cutting away. The vinedresser prunes branches so that in pruning those branches, it'll produce a greater fruitfulness. God, in a spiritual realm, is going to cut stuff out of our lives in order to produce new growth and to make us more fruitful spiritually.

We must never resist when God comes along and He puts His finger on something, even a liberty in our life, and He puts His finger on something and says, "That has to go." We can do it the easy way or we can do it the hard way, but that is going to go because it's going to be a hindrance to what I want to do with your life and the fruitfulness of your life that I have intended for you. Never resist that. It's only in order that our lives might become even more fruitful spiritually.

If you leave a vineyard unpruned—and sometimes you'll see them, for whatever reason they're not being tended—the branches will grow off in all kinds of different directions. Now all of the energy, all of these resources of the plants are going into producing wood rather than grapes. Pruning keeps the life and the vitality of the plant directed toward its higher purposes.

The same thing happens in our life spiritually. If the Lord didn't keep pruning in my life and in your life, I would take so many different interests in my life, so many things where I want to spend my time and my life, and they wouldn't necessarily be sinful. They could be liberties. But now all of my strength, all of my vitality, all of my time is going off in a hundred different directions.

Our life is then not producing the kind of spiritual fruit that God wants it to because our time and resources are going into all kinds of different places other than the place that He's called us for His glory. This pruning keeps our lives very well-directed in order that one day we'll be able to hear that "well done" from Jesus. The pruning's required in order for that to happen.

Or else we'll grow into all kinds of directions rather than into the one or the two or the three things that we're really good at in life, or the one or two or three things that God has gifted us to be fruitful in. We all recognize it in our lives if we walk with the Lord for a while, how important this pruning is to keep us focused in what His plan and His purpose is for our lives.

And then a warning, and we close with this in verses 2 and 6. Notice in verse 2, "Every branch in me that does not bear fruit, He takes away." Then in verse 6, "If anyone does not abide in me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered; and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they are burned."

I think it's very important not to press the imagery that Jesus is using here beyond what He intends and to make this a statement about salvation or eternal security or about eternal judgment. Those subjects are fully addressed and clearly addressed elsewhere in the Bible. He's not talking about those things here. He's talking about fruitfulness, and that's His focus.

Jesus is teaching His disciples here. Judas has departed from their presence in that upper room back in chapter 13. That's why He says in verse 3, "You're already clean" by Jesus's teaching. The subject here is not salvation but fruit-bearing and Christian service and growing in our relationship with God.

I believe what Jesus is doing here is He's using very strong imagery and language to let us know and the disciples know that such a Christian is displeasing to the vinedresser, displeasing to God the Father, and that a fruitless Christian is useless in terms of spiritual influence in the world. They're good for nothing in terms of bringing any glory to God in the world around them.

To communicate that their spiritual unfruitfulness will render them useless and that one day they will be rejected ultimately, not in an eternal sense. The Christian who ceases to make their relationship with Jesus the priority that He intends it to be, who ceases to abide in Him through prayer and through the word of God, will one day find themselves set aside. They'll be removed from having any kind of a dynamic place in Christian service.

God will do that to minimize that self-definition of Christianity, their bad influence and example, and that kind of person will find themselves actively avoided by other people, if not altogether removed by God from their area of Christian service altogether. That happens an awful lot where this relationship with Him and the importance of fruitfulness is no longer taken seriously, and yet somehow I want to serve Him in some capacity and be an influence for Him in some capacity within the body of Christ. But I'm advancing something that is completely contrary to what Christianity is.

So God the Father will remove us from that place of influence. Again, that's the very thing that Jesus threatened to do in His letter to the church at Ephesus. You're going great guns, you've got so much activity, every night of the week you've got something going on, you're doctrinally sound and all of that. It's just not about a relationship with me anymore. It's not good enough. I won't bless it. In what is supposed to be supremely about a relationship with me, now you've made that second tier, if not third tier, in terms of importance. I won't participate in it.

It's a strong word. Christianity is a personal relationship with Jesus. Everything about the Christian life is to flow out of the vitality of that relationship. I never cease to be amazed at the fact that He desires and He enjoys a relationship with us and with me. What an awesome thing.

Stop and think about the fact that Jesus dies on the cross for our sins, He's buried, and rises again on the third day in order that we might be saved and enter into a relationship with Him. That's what He wants with us, and then we make Christianity about something else. That would be a catastrophic thing to do with Christianity or an understanding of Christianity.

Here we have this wonderful instruction about how to have the closest relationship with Him that we can possibly have. He had gone off up into heaven, He's coming back again as we sang, and one day we will see Him as Christians face to face. But this is the means by which we are able to have the closest relationship with Him that we can possibly enjoy and that He wants us to have.

In a searching way related to this passage, just ask ourselves in the privacy of our own hearts, how much of our life is in any way connected to Jesus? How much of it is connected to Him in my thinking, in my doing? How much of my life flows out of my personal relationship with Jesus?

Hopefully, it's all of us at 100%, but I doubt it. If the church of Ephesus can get it wrong and if the church of Laodicea can get it wrong, then any of us can get it wrong too. What's the solution? Just to come back and say, "Lord, I get it. I see it. This is about a relationship with you and I've made it about everything else in life, or I have allowed so much deadwood in my life that the relationship has been crowded out."

Jesus, I'll take your instruction to the church at Ephesus there in the Revelation. I'll remember from where I've fallen and I will return to what I once had with you and return to the relationship being the priority of my Christian life. It sounds so obvious, doesn't it? But we miss it. But the opportunity to be able to make that change this morning.

If you're here this morning and you are not yet a Christian, Christianity is about a personal relationship with God, with Jesus Christ Himself. Imagine, I don't know how many friends you have, but imagine God the Son and the Son of God desiring a relationship with you. And then further, dying on the cross to provide you with the forgiveness of sins, being buried, rising again on the third day, and paying such enormous price for that relationship to be a possibility.

Realize you can enter into the very thing you've been created for, and that is a relationship with God through His Son. If you've never done that, there are going to be pastors and other men and women up in front immediately after the service and they'd love to pray with you to begin that relationship with Him this morning. If you need prayer for anything this morning, they'd love to pray with you and for you, whatever those needs might be as well.

Guest (Male): And with that, we've made it through each of the seven "I Am" statements of Christ. This last one being "I am the true vine." You're listening to According to the Scriptures with Pastor Damian Kyle. For resource requests like today's message on CD, give us a call at 209-545-5530. That's 209-545-5530.

Pastor Damian Kyle's studies can also be heard online at accordingtothescriptures.com or oneplace.com or wherever you get your podcasts. We also have a church app where you can listen to Damian. Simply search for Calvary Chapel Modesto in the App Store or Google Play.

If you'd like to partner with us through a financial gift, you can do that through our website at accordingtothescriptures.com. Thank you very much. Let me also give you our mailing address: According to the Scriptures, 4300 American Avenue, Modesto, California, 95356.

Next time on According to the Scriptures, we'll go on to talk about the seven miracles of Jesus, and we'll start off with Jesus turning water into wine. This program is listener-supported and brought to you by Calvary Chapel Modesto.