Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through John 15:1-17, emphasizing the importance of abiding in Christ as the true vine. He explains that spiritual life and fruitfulness come from a deep connection to Jesus, rather than self-effort. The sermon highlights that God actively prunes and removes branches to foster growth, urging believers to remain in His love and obey His commands. Practical applications include the necessity of daily dependence on Christ for strength and the call to sacrificially love others, reflecting the joy and purpose found in a relationship with Him.
Welcome and Housekeeping
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While you're turning there, I'm going to catch my breath for a minute. I have been singing that song all week because I knew the men were going to sing it. I just wasn't expecting to lead it with a microphone.
So I wanted to give some power to the men. Sing out with a little umption there.
All right, John 15, 1 through 17. You've been standing, so we're not going to have you stand. But I'm going to read these 17 verses as we get started today.
And what a powerful passage of scripture we're going to look at this morning. And I've got a couple extra minutes, so we're going to take our time as we walk through it. This morning, thankful for that.
Bible says in John 15, verses 1 through 17, this is where we get our abide passage from, is from this portion of scripture. Jesus says, I am the true vine, and my father is the gardener or vine dresser, your version may say. Every branch in me that does not produce fruit, he removes.
And he prunes every branch that produces fruit so that it will produce more fruit.
You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, and I in you, just as the branch is unable to produce fruit by itself, it remains on the vine. Neither can you unless you remain in me.
I am the vine, and you are the branches. The one who remains in me, and I am him, produce much fruit. Because you can do nothing without me.
If anyone does not remain in me, he is thrown aside like a branch, and he withers.
They gather them and throw them into the fire, and they're burned. If you remain in me, and my words remain in you, ask whatever you want, and it will be done for you. My father is glorified by this,
that you produce much fruit and prove to be my disciples. As the father has loved me, I have also loved you. Remain in my love.
If you love my commands, as you remain in my love, just as I have kept my father's commands, and you remain in his love. Verse 11, I have told you these things so that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be complete.
This is my command, love one another as I have loved you.
No one has greater love than this to lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends, and if you do not do what I command you, I do not call you to be servants anymore, because a servant does not know what his master is doing.
I have called you my friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my father. You did not choose me, but I chose you.
I appointed you to go and produce fruit, that your fruit should remain, so that whatever you ask of the father in my name, he will give you. This is what I command to you, love one another. Father, we love you. We thank you for what you've done. We thank you for your blessings.
Thank you for the opportunity for us to come into your house today. I pray, God, that you would continue to work in our hearts as we worship through you this morning.
We thank you for that triumphal entry 2,000 years ago, and I pray that your word be magnified this morning. In your name we pray, amen.
Today, we're going to look at this image, and we're going to take some gardener illustrations from this a little bit today, but as we walk through what Jesus is laying out here,
I tell our young people as I've been teaching through the book of Mark, and I've said it in here as well as I preach and teach, Jesus was a master teacher. He used everything that was around him.
I want you to put this in your picture. They've been in an upper room. They've been preaching. They've been teaching.
Jesus has been telling them and instructing them. The last statement we looked at before we left was Jesus said, let's get up from this place and go. So they've left the upper room, and they're walking toward the garden of Gethsemane.
Now, Jesus, as he's walking toward the garden, he finds all these other things. There's olive branches everywhere. There's palm branches everywhere. There's trees everywhere. And he just sort of stops, and he says, in this moment,
you see this branch laying on the ground? You see this branch laying on the ground?
It's not growing. I meant to bring an actual dead branch that I had in my house, and I forgot. The youth kept me up to like 1 a.m. last night, so I forgot some things. But he said, you see this branch laying on the ground? It's laying there. It's withering.
It's not doing anything. There's no fruit. There's no growth. There's nothing there. There's no future.
And he looks at the disciples and says, why do you think there's no future to this branch? And I'm sure Peter looks at him and goes, well, Jesus, that's easy. It's not connected to anything anymore.
There's no nutrients flowing to it. Jesus, why are you asking this question? And Jesus looks at him and says, you're correct. It's been disconnected from the actual source of life.
Jesus makes it plain. He makes this statement. He says, I am the vine, the true vine, the one that gives life.
And apart from me, you can do nothing. Now, the culture tells us this. The culture says, try harder. Do better.
And if you just continue to do better and you get stronger and you work out and you take care of this temple, if you take care of this body, if you do all the things that you're supposed to do, you're eventually going to succeed in life.
And Jesus looks at us and he takes this example and he says, I'm going to cut across the grain. I'm going to say, it's not do harder. It's not try harder. It's not these things. But Jesus looks at his disciples and he tells them exactly two things to do.
I want you to, if you don't get anything I've said out of this entire passage, out of this entire series, I want you to understand this. He looks at them and he says, these are the two things I want you to do in and of yourself.
You ready? Jack and squat. I want you to do jack squat on your own. Nothing, nothing you can do. Look at the passage. He says, because you can do nothing in verse five, nothing without me. Spiritual life is not self-produced. You can do nothing without Jesus.
And he's telling us, he's driving this home. He's saying the source of life that you need has to be connected to the true vine. He begins to walk through this passage, not about trying more.
He doesn't say just keep pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Keep trying to figure it out. Keep trying to do life. Keep trying to do things. He says, I want you to abide deeper in me.
Not deeper in yourself. Not deeper in some source of life that you think is going to be great, but deeper in myself, Jesus as the true vine. You want power.
Life From the Vine
You want strength. You want to be able to do these things. Begin to learn what it looks like to be connected to the vine. The very first thing we're going to look at in verses one through eight is life from the vine. Life from the vine.
Jesus begins in this passage with the final I am statement. We have seven I am statements in John.
John lays out some things that Jesus says about his divinity all throughout the book of John.
We looked at one of them a couple of weeks ago. He said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. That's quoted a lot. Some of the other ones are this in John chapter six, verse 35. I am the bread of life. Chrissy makes wonderful sourdough.
The other day she put these sourdough donuts on the Facebook page. And I was like, man, I wish I was closer because I wanted some of those hot, fresh sourdough donuts.
Right. Jesus is saying, I am the bread of life.
I am the sustainer of life that's going to nourish you as you go through life. He says in verse of John eight, verses 12, I am the light of the world. In darkness, when the world seems dark, you can come to me because you know I am going to give you light.
It illuminates things. Verses John chapter 10, verse nine, it says, I am the gate. He says, I am the one that protects you when all else seems helpless.
In John 10, verse 11, he says, I am the good shepherd. I'm not just a shepherd to take care of you, but I am the good shepherd that's going to always look after your most desperate needs in life. In John 11, verse 25, he says, I am the resurrection and the life.
In all of these cases,
Jesus doesn't say, I am a gate. I am a light. I am a truth. Jesus says, I am the way. I am the truth. I am the life. I am the light of the world. I am the truth of your life. I am the vine.
He gives this statement as a unique statement to say to us, it's not some abstract thought.
It is a specific way that if we're going to get to the father, we've got to go through the one that gives us that. And Jesus in this very first verse says, I am the vine, the only vine and the only true vine in life.
So let's look at that only true vine, the true vine that we see. Jesus begins this statement by saying, I am the true vine and the word true here matters. If he says true in the old Testament,
Israel was often called the vine in Psalms chapter 80. I'm not going to read it in Isaiah chapter five. It says that Israel was the vine of the bride of Christ, of the vine of God. He refers to Israel as that, but yet Israel continued to fail. Israel continued to not produce fruit.
Israel continued to not listen to the things that God wanted them to do. As we looked at Sunday school this morning in Deuteronomy, Moses had to continue to remind them. Hey, aren't you a chosen people? Hey, didn't God promise you these things? Hey, stop doing those things, you knucklehead.
Continue to do these things, right? Jesus is constantly having to do this. And Jesus steps into the picture and Jesus says,
I am the true vine. Where Israel failed, I'm going to fulfill it. Where Israel makes mistakes, I'm not going to make mistakes.
The True Source of Life
I am going to be the genuine source of life. Not religion, not some philosophy of the world, not a heritage,
not an effort that you can put forward, but I am the way of the true vine and I'm going to give you the source of life. Now, I think it's interesting and I want us to pay attention to this. He says this, he could have just said, I am the vine, right?
But he put this one little four letter word in here, not a bad four letter word, but a good four letter word. He said, I am the true vine.
Now, if he says I am the true vine, what does that infer that tells us this? There's a false vine out there.
There's a false way to try to figure out, you can figure out life. And he says, now listen, there's going to be people that come along and say, listen, if you can think harder, if you can believe different, if you can do these things,
then that's going to give you the source of life. And Jesus is coming in and he's saying, I'm not telling you those things. I'm going to tell you the true way of life.
I'm going to give you the true source of life. And we have to begin to put our minds and put our minds around who this true vine is and how he can work through us. I picked up this plant for a reason.
I'm thankful that Carrie put it in here because I want to use it as an illustration. Because I want you to think of an artificial plant. An artificial plant, from a distance, they look real.
Right? Not this one because you can see the metal up here. But oftentimes some of the plants that we have around, they look real. They look from a distance. They've got something going on. But as you get closer,
you see there's no life. You see there's no growth. You see there's no fruit. And I wanted us to show this because oftentimes our churches are built of a lot of plastic Christianity. From the outside, they look like they've got it going on. Man, that's really good.
Man, aren't they really good over there? Don't they dress right?
Don't they look right? Isn't their hair perfect? All these great things from the outside. But as people get closer to us, they begin to see, well, that's really just fake. You really aren't believing what you're saying.
Like I can just feel that you're fake. I can feel that you're not real. And Jesus is telling us in this passage, he's saying, listen,
let's move on from the plastic Christianity and let's move to a real, authentic Christianity that loves Jesus, that loves one another. As he ends this passage, I command you to love one another.
People know when you love them. People know when you care about them because they can see that. They feel that. They know that you love them.
The question this morning as we look at this specific portion is, am I connected to Christ or am I just close to Christ?
You know, the other day, me and the boys, we were cutting down some old trees and it's fallen and some branches.
And I took one of the branches and we filled up a couple of wheelbarrows and we took it to the back side of the house or by the woods. And we had put a pile there.
And as I was mowing, these branches were really close to a living tree. They were close.
I mean, they were, I mean, almost, you could almost see they're connected, but they weren't connected. They were close.
And now they have died and they've turned brown and they're beginning to simply corrode and go away.
Closeness to Jesus does not equate the power of what Jesus has given us. We have to be connected to the source.
If I were to go in and I were to cut that tree and graft that limb in, the life and the sustaining power of that tree would begin to give life to that branch. Because it was grafted in and it was connected to the source of power.
All of a sudden we have to ask ourselves, am I connected to Jesus or am I just close to the thing of Jesus hoping that a little bit of that power and glory from God was just going to somehow be connected to me?
He doesn't want us to be close to him. He wants to be connected to him. And are we in that way connected to Christ? He then continues on to the idea of the vine dresser.
He begins to continue on and say there is this idea of the father that is actively involved in our life. He's not an abandoned father.
He's not a father that's far away from us, but he's someone who is connected and intimately involved in our life. And we have to ask ourselves, are we responding to the father the way he wants us to respond to him? He gives us two actions here.
He says that he removes the fruitless and he prunes the fruitful. He removes the fruitless, but then he comes into those that are producing fruit.
And this is mind blowing to us when we think about it because he prunes those that are doing good things. This is not passive, but this is an intentional cultivating of what it looks like.
So this passage is a source of constant ideas and people can debate on this passage for generations and generations.
God's Pruning Process
I'm going to simplify it down into two ways, removes and prunes. Removes is this. It carries the idea of lifting away and restoring or taking away judgment that either God deals with the fruitless.
So God looks at the plant. He looks at the vine. He sees there's a branch here. It's not producing anything. It's no longer effective for his ministry. And so he removes that branch from the vine and puts it into the burn pile. Okay. Right.
I think if you've ever seen or went by Roy's got about about a month, maybe, maybe two months of firewood at his house to supply.
And so he's constantly having to go out and find more wood because he's, he's going to run out of wood in about two months is what Pat tells me. Maybe two, maybe three months is what he's got there. And so he's going out and he's finding new wood.
He's got to find branches that are dead and climb up in a tree. And Pat takes pictures of him as he's climbing at these massive trees. And he's finding tree limbs that are dead and decay. He cuts it off. And all right, that's going to be part of the burn pile. Right.
This is what the father's doing. The father looks at us and he says, this area of your life needs to be removed. And so I'm going to cut it completely away from the vine. This is where loss happens.
And it's sad when that happens in our life, but God does it in an idea, in a way that he is helping us.
This is the way that the second one that I want to look at is the idea of pruning. This literally means if you're a gardener, you know, this is to cleanse or to cut back
so that greater growth can happen. As we go through life, the father looks at us and says, it's time for us to cut this area out of your life. You're doing well, but this specific area, I'm going to have to cut away.
I'm going to have to prune it so that you can have more life and you can have more, more idea to go forward. And a good gardener would look at a plant that's healthy and say, I'm not going to harm the plant.
I'm not going to destroy the plant, but I'm going to take away something that is no longer effective in that plant so that it can produce more. Right.
You're tracking with me today. You're following along. So the gardener looks and the loss that happens in that idea in that moment is actually a preparation for us to grow closer to the Lord and to grow in a way that we never even saw possible.
So sometimes some things in our life are not bad. They're just unnecessary. There are times, right? Paul says this.
He says, as I was a child, I spoke as a child. I worked as a child. I did things as a child. But when I became a man, I put away the childish things.
I had to cut away the childish things in my life so that I could become a man, so that I could do things that men do. God, in the same way, looks at us and he says, I'm going to cut away sometimes what you think is good so that you can produce more.
One commentator said like this, I'm going to remove things to make room for something else.
Right. We, if you're like me, your schedule is crazy busy with three kids and sports programs and coaching right now in church and life.
And I'm a dad as well. Like I'm a father. I'm a husband. All these other things. Schedules are crazy and they're busy.
Sometimes sports end, things happen and we're like, man, I can't wait to have all this extra free time. Right. Basketball's over.
Like life is going to be easy now. It's going to be great. And then you cut that away and all of a sudden 17 more branches get attached to the vine. And you're like, hold on. Where did they come from? Why is this here? I just cut things away.
And God, in the same way, is saying, listen, I'm going to have to cut some things away because I need you to grow in this area. And you can't grow in this area while you're still connected to here.
And so there are things that you have to cut away in order for God to continue for your life to grow.
So what is it that God is cutting out of your life now that you can actively or physically see that God is physically removing this person or these things in my life because he's wanting me to grow somewhere else.
He's wanting me to be closer to him and be connected to the vine in a way that I never thought possible. Verse four, he gives this idea of the calling to abide. He uses this phrase, remain in me. This is the central command of this entire passage.
And he says this, if you're going to abide in me, this is not a one-time decision.
This is not something where you're seven years old and you're going to come to the Lord and you're going to say, Jesus, I want to abide in you. And then the next day, I'm never going to abide in you ever again.
That's not how the branch works. When the branch is connected to the vine, he is always connected and always remaining in him. It is a daily dependence.
The branch is over here and the branch is saying, vine, I need power. I need sap.
I need things that are in you to give me life through my life so that I can go and do the things you need me to do. To produce an apple, to produce a grape or whatever it may be.
I've got to need the, I need the power from the, from the vine in order to do that. It's not, I'm going to connect in for one day.
And when I get that one day supply, I'm going to not see it again for seven days. No, it's, I'm going to daily come back. I'm going to daily come back and say, I need more power.
I need more strength. I need more for you because I want to continue to work for you. And in order to work for him, you've got to walk with him. We're going to work for Jesus. We've got to walk with Jesus daily.
So when the time comes for us to step out and walk for Jesus, we are now living a life that God wants us to live.
Last night we were on our way home and we went to a hockey game, had a great time with our young people, 30 something people there with adults and parents. And it was a wonderful time. Got to see some fights and I'm cheering them on. I love fights. It's awesome.
And so we're cheering them on and we got to the car and Birdie needed something on mom. And he looked at her and she said, I need something on the phone.
And she looked at him and said, my phone's dead.
Right? We were in an auditorium that was a metal building and didn't have good service. And so our phones were dying. And so we had it plugged in. Now she could have looked at him and said, my phone's dead. It's no good. Let's throw it out the window. Right?
Is that, that's what the idea of it is, right? It's dead. So there's no use for it. So I'm going to throw it out the window. No, what it was, was it lost the source of power that it had and had to be reconnected to the power to be useful again.
Oftentimes we're like the dead phone. We lost the power. We're not connecting. We're trying to do it on our own. We're trying to do the world mentality and, and pull ourselves by our bootstraps. And all of a sudden we are all out of energy.
And we're like, what am I going to do now? God's not saying that you're no longer effective. I'm just going to throw you out the window. He's saying, reconnect to the vine, bring yourself back in and begin to ask yourselves, why are you disconnected?
Why are you not producing the fruit? Are you producing the fruit by your own effort? Are you producing fruit because you're attached to the vine?
The vine is what gives us in the life that we need. Are you abiding in Christ or are you just visiting Christ? It's one thing to visit someone you haven't seen in a while.
We have people that we go and we see in Tennessee and Texas and Arkansas and we visit with them and we sort of get a recharge of family and then we get disconnected from them for a couple of months and we've got to go and see them again.
Is that the relationship we have with Jesus? Are we just visiting him once a week and once a month and we're saying, Jesus, I need to be reconnected to you now and I'm going to go and do my own thing way over here. And I'm going to, when I need to be reconnected, I'll come back over to you.
And I'll say, fill me back up, Jesus, so that I can go over here and do my own thing. Or are we continuing to abide in him day in and day out and saying, God, I can do nothing.
I don't want to do jack and squat on my own. I want to come over here and I want to live in you and exist inside of you.
And then he begins to get to verses six through eight and he says, this is the result. The result is the fruitfulness that we have in our life.
Abiding in the Vine
When you don't abide in him, you're not going to produce fruit. When you begin to abide in the vine, you begin to get visible fruit. Most horticulturists, I think I used that word right.
It's always scary when I throw out big words that I didn't write down because you never know what I'm going to say.
So horticulturists will say that plant a new tree and sometimes an apple tree will take three or five years for it to grow and fully be able to be pruned in order for that tree to produce some type of fruit.
But at that moment, in that three or five year period, it's going to produce fruit that you're going to visibly be able to see because it has the nutrients and everything that it needs in life. And all of a sudden, the more the tree grows, the more apples it produces,
the more you collect, the more apple pies you get to make me, the more apple butter you get to make, all the good things that you get to make in life because of this wonderful sustaining tree is giving glory back to the person that planted it.
Look at what the Lord gave me. I've got 17 bushels of apples.
I've been blessed. I'm going to give you a bush of apples. I'm going to give you a bush of apples. I'm going to give the glory and you're going to say, thank you so much for doing this. This is so wonderful.
This is the idea of what Jesus does for us, right? He says, I want you to abide in me so that you can produce much fruit so that all the glory comes back to God.
All the glory comes back to him for you producing the fruit, for you doing the things that you're doing, for you loving other people, for you caring for other people, for you reaching other people, for you, as Caleb
said, having the heart for the lost and going out and sharing the gospel with them. And all of a sudden you get to produce fruit.
You get to produce what the Bible calls the character of the spirit, which is Galatians 5, the fruit of the spirit, love, joy, peace, goodness, happiness, faithfulness, all the great characters of scripture,
our conduct and our obedience of what we live and how we live our life and the converts that we get to share the gospel with. The greatest experience you'll ever have as a believer is getting to share the good news of Jesus,
the death, burial and resurrection with someone and saying, look, Jesus died for you.
He cared so much that he came and he died and was on a cross and he was put in a grave for your sins and my sins and he rose three days later.
And now he did that so that you can know him forever.
And when that person says, I want to accept Jesus, it's the greatest joy of your life as a believer to be able to reach someone else and share that gospel that you were once shared with for someone else
so that you can have an influence on other people for the sake of the gospel. This is what it means to abide in Jesus. We're sharing so that others can come to know him. And he's asking us, are we doing that?
Are we going out and sharing and telling others about what God has done?
I want to continue on verses nine through 17 and continue to talk about the spiritual fruit because when we're connected, Jesus gives us some things that the world gets to see because we're connected him.
So the spiritual fruit of connection is the thought that when we connected to Jesus, we are like the branch that's connected to the vine.
And he gives this illustration of prayer and the word,
right? Prayer is the nutrients that we're saying to the vine, I need these things from you. And then God's word is the response back to us, is the sap coming back from the vine to give us the life that we need. This is a natural flow of connection. The vine, as it's growing,
understands and knows somehow the way God programmed it to know this branch needs this much sap, this branch doesn't need as much right now. I'm going to give more nutrients over here and less over here. I don't know how it does it, but it does it.
I'm sure someone in here can tell me all the different scientific reasons by it.
I want to bring it into a spiritual application by saying this. The Father knows when we need more of his power.
The Father knows when we are connected to him, we're praying to him, we're saying, God, I don't know how I can survive tomorrow. God, I don't know how I'm going to go through work or school or whatever it is in my life. I need more of your power because I'm connected to you.
We pray to the Father and the Father says, I'm giving you the power right here, God's word. I'm going to flow my power through my life into your life.
And you open this word and you begin to read God's word. And all of a sudden, the power of the Holy Spirit, the power of God begins to flow through his word into us. And all of a sudden, we have this really beautiful picture of a union in Christ through a relationship.
As we want to grow closer to someone physically in this world, we communicate to them.
We call them on the phone. We text them. And we talk about how much we love them and how much we care about them and how awesome they are in our life. And God is saying the same way. He's communicating to us through his word.
And we're communicating back to him through prayer. And if we remain in him, if we remain in him, his word is going to remain in us. And we get to respond in power through the prayer of his Holy Spirit.
Number one underneath this, a result of this is an obedient love. Love is an emotion, but it's not used as an emotion form here. Love is used in a demonstrated way through obedience. Look at what he says here. If you love me, if you keep my commands, you will remain in my love.
Last week, I talked about a husband and wife loving each other.
I want to go and pivot the same idea into an idea of a father or a mother and a child.
Hudson, a couple of months ago, he couldn't do the I love you sign, right? He's young. He's five years old. And so he couldn't figure out how to put these two fingers down. Now he can. He'll just walk by and he'll go, love you, Dad. I'll drop him off. He'll go, hey, Dad.
It's like throwing up gang signs or something. I'm like, it's a five-year-old.
He's over here trying to figure out gang signs. But all of a sudden, he was down on the court last night, on the rink last night, doing some things. And he looked over and he goes, I love you, Dad. Right?
He couldn't say it. So he threw up the hands. So this is how it looks in our life.
He says, I love you. And I look at him. I say, Hudson, I love you as well. Hey, Hudson, I love you so much, but hey, will you go and clean your room real quick, Hudson? No, I don't love you that much, Dad.
I love you until you ask me to tell me to clean my room. I don't want to do that. And I don't love you no more. All right.
And all of a sudden, I've got a Hudson. I need you to go clean your room. You said you love me.
If you love me, you're going to listen to Dad, right? If not, I'm going to have to love you a different way. And so all of a sudden, in this whole father-son idea,
it's you love me, but are you listening to what the person that loves you is saying? And God and Jesus in this same idea is saying, I love you and I care about you.
And if you love me, if you care about the love that I'm going to give you, keep my commands.
And we go, I don't know if I want to do that, Jesus. That's a lot.
But the idea when I was studying through this was Jesus coming to Peter on the seashore. Peter had neglected Jesus. He had denied Jesus three times.
He said, I'm done with this. I'm going to go out. I'm going to go fishing. I'm done with this Christianity. I'm done with this following Jesus. I'm just going to go back to my own life. And all of a sudden, Jesus comes to the seashore. And Peter knows this Jesus.
And Peter runs to him. And he's going out to meet Jesus. And Jesus looks at him and lovingly looks at him and pulls him to the side and says, Peter, do you love me?
And Peter says, Jesus, you know I love you. Go feed my sheep.
I don't know if I can do that, Jesus. You remember I denied you? I wasn't faithful to you. Peter, do you love me? Jesus, you know I love you. Go feed my sheep.
Jesus, I just, I've made too many mistakes. Look at how many times I messed up. Look at all the things I've done that you would not agree with. Peter, but do you love me? A third time now, he's getting back to this love. It's not love as an emotion.
It's love as a motivation for us to continue to go forward. And he says,
do I not love you so much that I gave my life for you? And would you not love me enough to listen to what I've called you to do? And all of a sudden, this love of, that we think is an emotion, gets defined biblically a completely different way.
And Jesus says, because you love me and the love that I have for you is going to remain if you continue to keep and obey the commands that I've given you.
When you do that, you ready? This is the next thing that gives us an unexplainable joy. And I'm going to hurry now. I spent way too much time. Unexplainable joy.
But you're going to eat, right? I'm feeding you in a little bit. So we're going to eat so I can go just a little bit longer. Unexplainable joy.
Joy that's not based on circumstances. But joy that flows because of the connection that I have with Jesus, with Yeshua, with our Savior that's there with us. Look at what the verse says. So that your joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.
This is Christ's joy. The joy that he has in us, not just the joy that we have for him.
Joy Rooted in Christ
Three things that I wrote down real quickly last night as I was looking over this. Joy that is rooted in Christ.
Our joy that is so connected to Christ, is so rooted in who he is, that it is just overflowing from us.
Joy that is resilient as we go through trials and we go through things that we don't understand how it's going to happen. And then joy that is radiant and that is seen by others.
As I was studying through that and the Lord began to give some of those things to me, the one name and picture kept coming to my mind of Anita Tharp. Most of us know Anita in here.
She was a track teacher and works at the middle school or high school or something. And she posted a picture.
She's going through some really hard chemotherapy. And she had her head wrapped and was just in pain.
And she had put a picture out on Facebook. And she said something to the effect of, you know, I'm praying for others or something along those lines.
And my heart began to just break because this is someone who's going through trials, who's going through pain, who's going through difficulties. And yet she's caring for others.
She's showing this in the trials, in the things that she's going through. And she's making a difference as she is showing to others that my joy is not defined by where I'm at or the situation or the circumstance that I'm in life. My joy is defined by who I'm connected to.
Is our joy connected to our circumstances? Or is our joy connected to Christ? And no matter what comes, no matter what may happen in our life, I am so connected to Jesus that I don't understand why it's happening.
I'm not saying you can never be sad or sorrowful or lament. The Bible clearly lays out ways to do that. But even in those moments, we're still joyful. It doesn't take our joy away because our joy is complete in Christ. Number three, this fruit of being connected to Jesus is a sacrificial living.
A sacrificial living. Look at what Jesus says. No one has greater love than this to lay down his life for his friends.
Jesus, in his omniscience, it's almost like he knew what was about to happen. He knew the cross was about to happen. It wasn't going to take him by surprise, but he's saying, listen, a true friend, someone who loves you,
is going to lay down his life for you. I'm about to go to the cross. I'm about to lay my life down. And he makes a statement later that no one is going to take the life of the son, but the life is going to freely be given down for his friends.
And we get to see this picture of the cross as we go into next week, as we think through this sacrifice that Jesus gives us. As he's coming in on this Palm Sunday, he's saying, I'm not just dying for someone or anyone, but I am daily dying for others.
And I'm daily dying to self. And I'm showing you the deep connection that I have. When you sacrifice for someone,
you're saying to that someone, I love you so much that I'm sacrificing for you. I give this fun,
silly illustration every once in a while. But when 15 years ago now, I went and I proposed to my wife.
The only way I could propose to her was I had to sell some things that I had. Now, if you were around me 15 years ago,
every vehicle I had up until this last vehicle that I had when I was about to propose to my wife, had a wonderful, beautiful set of subwoofers in the back of them.
And they were powered with really good amps, and I was thumping to Southern Gospel music. That's all it was.
No one understood why I was listening to Southern Gospel music with subs, but I'm a bass guy. I love bass singers. And so I'd put on Tim Riley or J.D.
Sumner and all these wonderful bass singers, and they would shake my car, and it was awesome. But I had to buy this ring, and I couldn't afford any other ring any other way, and so I went on Craigslist at the time.
It wasn't a Facebook marketplace, and the hardest thing I ever had to do was put these two 15-inch subs with a 600-watt amp that was mounted to the back of it in an encased, encapsulated, soundproof box that could shake any vehicle out there.
I put it on Craigslist for some money because I wanted to buy my wife a ring,
right? I did all this. I sacrificed. It was the biggest sacrifice of my life. If you knew who I was at that time, I was in love with it. My nephew even asked me the other day, James, when are you going to put subs in your car? I'm just not going to do that. I'm a man now.
I've got to put away childish things. I've got to be a man. All these things there. I've got to give all the right answers, right? And so I sold it. I sacrificed.
I went to the ring store. I bought the ring because I had the money now. And I went and I got down on one knee and I sacrificed something that I had in order to show my love for my bride.
Now, that's a silly illustration, but it is what looking like sacrifice looks like.
It is you giving up what you have, not to say how great I am, but to say this is how much I love you, that I've given up something in order to grow closer to you.
Jesus' Sacrifice and Love
Now, Jesus in this moment, he's saying, I'm giving up my life because I love you so much. I'm going to give up the life that I have, the perfect life that I've lived to give you this salvation
that is going to guarantee your way into the Father through me. And now I am going to give this gift to you. And all of a sudden, we begin to say, how much am I loving Christ? Am I sacrificing the same way?
Am I doing the same thing as Christ is doing? Am I being the same example to others?
And number four underneath this, I put on the screen, it's backwards from your notes, but it's the same word, chosen or called and commissioned.
The Bible says in verses 16 through 17, you did not choose me, but I chose you. Now, there's a lot of theological debate here,
Calvinism, Arminianism. We're not going to go through any of that today. Okay.
If you want to have that discussion, I'm here every day of the week. You can come hang out with me. We can talk about it.
I can share my thoughts or my feelings with you. But what I want you to understand is this. We were chosen or we were called by God and he has now commissioned us. What this produces is this, right? This whole passage is talking about producing something because Christ chose us.
It produces humility in us. It should not produce pride in us. We should not stand up and say, look at how great I am. I was chosen.
This should look at us and say, look at how unworthy I am. Look at all the wrong I've done. Look at all the bad things I've done. And yet God in his foreknowledge looked down from heaven and said, I want that one.
I want the redhead, the freckle face, the four-eyed, the stinky boy that loves Jesus. I want him to be mine, right?
He looks down from heaven and he says, I want that one that no one else would have chosen. That's the one I want.
And now all of a sudden he's looking down from heaven and he's saying, I want to choose you. I want you to be called and commissioned for me.
I want you to be chosen for a purpose to bear fruit that remains. But are we willing to look back and say, I accept that calling. I want you to choose me.
I want to come and I want to start this relationship with you. I want to have a life that has purpose.
I want to have a life that has meaning. If I would just continue to look and say, I want to be answering that call as he looks down from heaven and he's calling us to be one of his children.
Living with Purpose
Are we living our life with that kind of purpose or are we just drifting through life? As Terry comes and we begin to close up the message today, I want to bring this back to full circle. I started the message with verse five. A branch disconnected from the vine is useless.
There's nothing that it can be done in and of itself because it is not connected to the source of life. It gets thrown over to the side of the brush pile.
You come back to it a couple of days later, sometimes a couple of hours later, and it's already been discolored because it's no longer connected to the vine. But the opposite of this is, you ready? A branch that's connected to the vine is unstoppable. How many of you have kudzu in your yard?
Right? Kudzu is unstoppable. It's connected to the vine. It's getting the source of life.
It begins to spread. There's nothing that you can do to get rid of the stupid plant that we put out in our yard for some reason that we think it's going to take care of all these things. And yet, that is a picture of what our life is. We're connected to Christ.
And because we're connected to Christ, we begin to spread and we begin to grow. And it is unstoppable.
And nothing that we can do can put it away because it's not the kudzu itself. It's the vine that it's connected to that is continuing to give it life, that's continuing to let it spread. Are we spreading the way God wants us to spread?
Are you connected to the vine the way God is telling us to be connected? Are you abiding in Christ the way we need to be abiding in Christ? And truly, we have to ask ourselves,
if those two things are there, we're connected and we're abiding, what are we producing? What is coming out of us? What is being given to other people for them to say, yeah, I know you're an apple tree because you're producing apples. Yeah, I know you're a Christian because you're producing Christians.
Yes, I know that you're a believer because you're giving your life for other people as Christ gave his life for other people. What are we doing with our life to say that we are abiding in Christ?
Because at the end of the day, the Christian life is not about what you produce, but how you are connected to the one that produces it all. The branch can't say, look at how great I am.
The branch says I'm connected to the source of life and therefore I get to produce things because this is the person that's giving me the strength and the power to do everything.
Don't give me the glory. Give the vine the glory. I'm nothing.
You cut me off and you throw me down. I turn into a withered up piece of trash that gets burned in a burn pile. But the vine is the one that gives the power and the source and all the glory goes back to him. Is that us this morning?
Are we giving the glory back to God for what he has done in our lives? Father, we love you. We thank you for what you've done. Thank you for Jesus this morning that gives us life.
The reason we come, the reason we sacrifice, the reason we worship you this morning and we devote time away from our family that schedules that we could do other things with, Lord, but we know that this time is valuable and Lord, we want to give you that praise, give you that glory.
Closing Prayer and Invitation
Lord, if there's someone here that doesn't know you, Lord, today pray that it would be the day they come to know you.
Maybe not in this service at this time, but maybe later when we go to eat, they'll pull me aside or one of our men aside or one of our ladies aside and say, I want to know that Jesus. I'm not producing the fruit like I should.
I'm not, I'm not giving the, the produce, the Christian and maybe I don't know Jesus.
Father, help us this morning as we serve you. Help us in this time of invitation that we would glorify you. In your name we pray. Amen. Let's. Thank you again for taking your time to listen to the sermon audio of Pleasant Grove. Please subscribe to get our latest sermons each week.
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