The Invitation

Introduction

Illustration: I am not really a ‘design’ guy. I tend to be a form over function kind of guy. I recognize the value of the design people in my life however in moments like putting together an invitation. Not something we do for many events, but I am a married man and that was a pretty important invitation to send out. Sure, I could have just made a bullet point word document and hit print and folded it up in an envelope, but the effect wouldn’t be the same, right? You want the person you’re inviting to feel that your invitation comes with care and expended effort and attention to detail is one way to show that you care. Still an invitation is also ultimately about function, it needs to convey to the invitee what you are asking them to do and what they can expect if they agree.

In many ways our passage this morning reads to me like an invitation. An invitation to the life that Jesus has called His disciples to, first these eleven with Him at the Last Supper, but also to all of us who claim to be His disciples today. So what is Jesus inviting us to? Let us read our passage this morning as we continue in our series, Believe and Live: The Gospel According to John.

John 15:1–16:11 CSB

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. 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 a branch is unable to produce fruit by itself unless it remains on the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in me and I in him produces 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, throw them into the fire, and they are 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 keep my commands you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. “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 if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants anymore, because a servant doesn’t know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me, but I chose you. I appointed you to go and produce fruit and that your fruit should remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he will give you. “This is what I command you: Love one another. “If the world hates you, understand that it hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own. However, because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of it, the world hates you. Remember the word I spoke to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours. But they will do all these things to you on account of my name, because they don’t know the one who sent me. If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin. Now they have no excuse for their sin. The one who hates me also hates my Father. If I had not done the works among them that no one else has done, they would not be guilty of sin. Now they have seen and hated both me and my Father. But this happened so that the statement written in their law might be fulfilled: They hated me for no reason. “When the Counselor comes, the one I will send to you from the Father—the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father—he will testify about me. You also will testify, because you have been with me from the beginning. “I have told you these things to keep you from stumbling. They will ban you from the synagogues. In fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering service to God. They will do these things because they haven’t known the Father or me. But I have told you these things so that when their time comes you will remember I told them to you. I didn’t tell you these things from the beginning, because I was with you. But now I am going away to him who sent me, and not one of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ Yet, because I have spoken these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart. Nevertheless, I am telling you the truth. It is for your benefit that I go away, because if I don’t go away the Counselor will not come to you. If I go, I will send him to you. When he comes, he will convict the world about sin, righteousness, and judgment: About sin, because they do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will no longer see me; and about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been judged.

This is an invitation like no other. First of all, Jesus is calling us to a life of deep love and belonging between us and God, which produces love through us for the whole world. Second, though the call is to love it comes with a side of hate from the world. We shouldn’t be surprised when faithfully following Jesus means facing rejection from those who do not follow Him. Finally we see that Jesus’ invitation to follow Him is also an invitation to receive the Holy Spirit as our advocate, our defender and the one who will vindicate us against the persecution of the world.

Invitation to Abiding

Illustration: As a bit of a hobbyist gardener, I have some experience pruning vines and bushes. The process of pruning increases the yield of fruit after all, which is the whole point of growing things like blueberry bushes or grape vines, both of which I have in my back yard. What happens to a branch that’s cut off from the blueberry bush? For a little while it might seem fine. The leaves are still green, you could mistake it for a perfectly healthy branch. Yet with time it withers and fades away. The fascinating thing about plants though is that not only can you prune them, you can also graft them. This is when you take a branch or a root from one plant and put it together with another until they grow together and become one plant. How do you graft a branch onto a vine? You have to attach it somehow until being next to the vine long enough the two become one.

Isn’t that a fascinating picture. Being close enough for long enough to the vine makes the branch a part of it, and it will go on to bear fruit if everything was done properly. Using this technique people have made super plants that grow multiple varieties of fruit on one plant, it’s really interesting.

Now in our passage this morning Jesus doesn’t get into the whole grafting thing. He is after all speaking to His Jewish disciples, already a part of Israel which was called by Isaiah God’s vine, and who were at least until this moment remaining faithful to Him. His concern was with teaching them the importance of remaining with Him. The importance of not losing that vital connection. My concern is to point out that both things are true, that you can begin a vital connection with Jesus or maintain one and the requirement is the same for both, abiding in Him. Let’s take a look at what Jesus says about what it means to abide in the vine, abiding meaning remaining closely with.

John 15:1–17 CSB

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. 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 a branch is unable to produce fruit by itself unless it remains on the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in me and I in him produces 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, throw them into the fire, and they are 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 keep my commands you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. “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 if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants anymore, because a servant doesn’t know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me, but I chose you. I appointed you to go and produce fruit and that your fruit should remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he will give you. “This is what I command you: Love one another.

When Jesus talks first about His being the true vine and the call to abide in Him and then about love, it’s not as if He has moved on to another subject. Love is the key to understanding what Jesus means when He talks about being the vine and our being the branches, and even what He means about bearing fruit.

The natural question when Jesus asks us to abide in Him is to ask what it means to abide, which is one of John’s favorite words in his gospel. This means to be close with, to remain beside, in other words it basically means to love. So why doesn’t Jesus just say love Him? Because I think the idea that comes with abiding that might be less clear in a command to love is the idea of reciprocation. The idea that it’s not just a command to receive love and it’s not just a command to give love, it’s a command to be in love. To experience it in both directions.

Yet love is not only what is meant by abiding, but what is also meant by producing fruit in this context. A close look will show that every time Jesus talks about us producing fruit He follows it up with a command to love one another. So think about this for a second, it’s like Jesus is inviting us to a love feedback loop. Do you know what a feedback loop is? You know when someone speaks into a microphone too close to a speaker and it makes that awful screeching sound? That’s because a sound is put into the microphone and sent out the speaker louder than it was before and then it’s picked up by the microphone again and made even louder and if you don’t do something to interrupt it, it could build until either the microphone or the speaker can no longer handle the signal.

That’s what Jesus wants to happen with our love, except this feedback loop is as beautiful as the noise is awful. Jesus is the one who kicks off the feedback loop by loving us while we were sinners as Paul says in Romans 5:8 “But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Then He asks us to receive and send out that love to one another, the result of which is more love produced as fruit of our remaining in Him. This should be the Christian experience, love abounding beyond what we can measure and amplified by us every day in our remaining in Jesus.

So how do we live up to this call? Maybe the better question is why do disciples of Jesus struggle so much to live up to this call? I think perhaps our struggle is with truly abiding in Jesus and depending on Him to work through us. Anyone who has young children has experienced moments when they have this sudden need for independance, which over-all in their case is good, but sometimes leads to them insisting on trying to do something themselves that you know they cannot do. Jesus tells us in verses 4 and 5 that we can’t do anything apart from Him, meaning that this fruit He’s asking us to produce cannot be produced if we try to do it on our own. We will be like that branch cut off from the vine that slowly withers away fruitlessly. That’s not the future I want for myself, and I don’t think it’s the future we want for our church. Instead we need to be radically dependent on Jesus to do the work of love that He has called us to do.

If abiding means staying close to Jesus, what does that look like? Maybe it’s spending time daily in prayer, reading His words, or depending on Him moment-by-moment as you make decisions. Think of a vine constantly nourishing the branch—it’s not a one-time thing, it’s all the time.

Yet doing this work is not without its obstacles and difficulties. Jesus is not surprised though when we face trials and hard times, in fact they are part of the plan. So much so that when Jesus invites us to abide, in one sense He is also inviting us to be persecuted for His names sake.

Invitation to Persecution

Illustration: Now I’m not exactly an adrenaline junkie or anything, but I have on occasion gone on a few outings with an element of danger. Like TreeGo for example. There’s a lot of safety equipment and it’s unlikely that anything will go wrong if you listen to the instructions, but you’re still climbing around high off the ground in trees. So because someone is selling you that experience they make you sign a little waiver at the start acknowledging that you know the danger. This is true of any activity where there’s a reasonable possibility you might get hurt, like even kayaking they have liability waivers. This way if something does happen they have proof that you were aware of the danger when you agreed to do the activity.

Sometimes I wonder if our invitations to new believers should include a liability waiver. Not that we are saying we are in some way giving up responsibility in the case that something goes wrong like many of these companies do, but just as a sort of heads up acknowledgement that following Jesus brings with it challenges and trials. The Bible is very clear about this. Some of those who have preached the gospel in recent church history have been… less clear.

I think that sometimes in our zeal to help people see the beauty of the gospel, in our desire to convince people of the benefits of following Jesus, we sometimes gloss over the danger and the suffering that the Bible describes waiting for those who follow Him. I doubt there’s many who do this as an intentional deception, just a desire to put our best foot forward so to speak.

Jesus however never avoided explaining this part of what it means to follow Him. Consider these verses from our passage this morning:

John 15:18–25 CSB

“If the world hates you, understand that it hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own. However, because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of it, the world hates you. Remember the word I spoke to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours. But they will do all these things to you on account of my name, because they don’t know the one who sent me. If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin. Now they have no excuse for their sin. The one who hates me also hates my Father. If I had not done the works among them that no one else has done, they would not be guilty of sin. Now they have seen and hated both me and my Father. But this happened so that the statement written in their law might be fulfilled: They hated me for no reason.

So why was Jesus telling them all this? Why does Jesus multiple times in Scripture warn the disciples that following Him means following Him in His suffering? This isn’t some one off thing said to His eleven disciples before the crucifixion. Just to list a few places, Jesus warns about this in Matthew 10:38

Matthew 10:38 CSB

And whoever doesn’t take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.

A statement reported in Luke and Mark’s gospels as well, and which is repeated in a different way in Matthew 16:24

Matthew 16:24 CSB

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.

Jesus also warns in Matthew about the coming persecution causing people to fall away if they aren’t deeply rooted in Matthew 13:21

Matthew 13:21 CSB

But he has no root and is short-lived. When distress or persecution comes because of the word, immediately he falls away.

In Matthew 24:9 He warns,

Matthew 24:9 CSB

“Then they will hand you over to be persecuted, and they will kill you. You will be hated by all nations because of my name.

And speaking about Paul to Ananias Jesus says in Acts 9:16

Acts 9:16 CSB

I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.”

I show you all these to emphasize how often it comes up as something Jesus told us explicitly to expect. It’s also all over the rest of the New Testament as a perpectual warning from the disciples that we as believers should expect and endure suffering because we follow Jesus. So why, why all this emphasis on suffering to come? I think there is two reasons, the most obvious being the one Jesus Himself explains in 16:1, to keep us from stumbling. If we were led to believe that the Christian life would be all smooth sailing and free from any kind of bad experience how would we react when those bad times came? It would make us question our faith. Jesus obviously doesn’t want that.

The second more profound and perhaps harder to accept reason is this: suffering for Jesus is not a bug, it’s a feature. We are supposed to endure hardship for the sake of the gospel. This is one of the ways that Jesus does the work of pruning the branches that remain on the vine. Pruning hurts, it’s cutting away parts of the branch. Yet that is what we need God to do in us. Why? For this very good reason described in Romans 5:3-5

Romans 5:3–5 CSB

And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, because we know that affliction produces endurance, endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope. This hope will not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

This means that those of us who follow after Jesus should not be surprised when we go through hard times. In fact it almost makes me wonder if I’m doing something wrong when no one is rejecting me because of the gospel. What should our reaction be? Our reaction should be twofold. Remembering that when people reject us and mistreat us that we can be assured they are doing so wrongly, and that God is in fact on our side and will have the final victory. Secondly, rejoicing not in the suffering itself but in what God will do in us through the suffering that we endure in love.

Yet we are not on our own to endure mistreatment and rejection. As Jesus has already said and here repeats, we are given the Holy Spirit to strengthen and guide us through what the world will put us through.

Invitation to Receive the Spirit

Illustration: In many ways being persecuted as a Christian is like being accused of a crime that you didn’t commit. Well, that’s exactly what happened to Jesus, and to a lot of Christians who were blamed for the burning of Rome a few hundred years later. In any case, if you are falsely accused, what kind of person do you need? You need a good defense attorney. Someone who knows the law and can speak in your defense. You could also use a witness to come and speak on your behalf telling of why you are innocent.

The Holy Spirit in the case of the world’s rejection is both our defense attorney and our key witness. In fact the word we talked about last week that means counselor as well as helper and one who is called beside is actually used in the Greek world to describe a defense attorney. So together with the word for testify I think John wants us to picture this like a courtroom drama, and the Holy Spirit in this case is our heroic defense attorney and witness as I’ve said. Let’s look at how Jesus describes this situation in the last section of our verse for this morning.

John 15:26–16:11 CSB

“When the Counselor comes, the one I will send to you from the Father—the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father—he will testify about me. You also will testify, because you have been with me from the beginning. “I have told you these things to keep you from stumbling. They will ban you from the synagogues. In fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering service to God. They will do these things because they haven’t known the Father or me. But I have told you these things so that when their time comes you will remember I told them to you. I didn’t tell you these things from the beginning, because I was with you. But now I am going away to him who sent me, and not one of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ Yet, because I have spoken these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart. Nevertheless, I am telling you the truth. It is for your benefit that I go away, because if I don’t go away the Counselor will not come to you. If I go, I will send him to you. When he comes, he will convict the world about sin, righteousness, and judgment: About sin, because they do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will no longer see me; and about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been judged.

So remember as we were just talking about that Jesus has promised us that we will face rejection and suffering for His name. This is His ultimate reassurance in the face of what is to come, the sending of our advocate, the Holy Spirit. He bursts on the scene ready not only to stand up and defend us, but to turn the tables on our accusers.

This isn’t really standard practice in courtrooms today, but in the ancient world it was a common rhetorical practice for people in court to try and turn the charges around on their accusers who brought them to court. To pull the ol’ Uno Reverse routine on the guy who falsely accused you. Well in this passage, that’s exactly the kind of thing Jesus describes the Holy Spirit doing for us.

“The world is going to accuse you and take you to court,” He says, “but the Holy Spirit is going to be the one who convicts them.” Notice that ‘convicts’ is also a legal term. The metaphor is hard to miss. The Holy Spirit comes not just to defend us—testifying that Jesus truly is who we claim—but also to prosecute the world: convicting them of sin for rejecting Christ, teaching them the truth about righteousness in His absence, and passing judgment just as Satan, the ruler of this world, has already been judged.

Jesus says that He’s warning His disciples about all this so that when the time comes they will remember what He said. He said them for reassurance when the difficult moments come. I think we should use these words in the same way. Remember: the Holy Spirit is standing beside you in those moments. Remember: He is your defender. Remember: when you are rejected, you stand with Christ. And remember: when the final verdict is delivered, you will be vindicated if you remain in Him.

Conclusion

So then my brothers and sisters in Christ, let us soberly reflect on the life that Jesus has invited us to. Many of us accepted that invitation long ago, maybe some of us are still mulling it over. I think whatever your situation it’s good to reflect on what exactly we should be expecting of the Christian life. In this passage we see clearly that Jesus is inviting us to abide in His love so that we can produce an overflowing cascade of love for one another and for God as we grow in our discipleship to Him. We see also that this invitation includes the call to bravely face rejection and persecution for the sake of Jesus’ name and for the sake of making us more like Him. Finally we see that even when we are rejected we can be assured that the Holy Spirit is standing beside us as our advocate and as the one who convicts the world on our behalf.

My call for all of us this morning is to know so well the life that Jesus called us to that we will not doubt when the fruit of that life comes. Jesus didn’t leave our relationship with Him a mystery. He told us exactly what to expect. So if we call ourselves disciples of Jesus this morning let us do so in full knowledge of exactly what that call entails.