Cultivate John 15

Intro:

Psalm 63:1–4 “You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water. I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory. Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you. I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands.”

Setup: some think He may have spoken these words to His disciples in the garden of Gethsemane or on the way there the day He was betrayed.. These are some of His last words before His crucifixion.

++John 15:1–5 ““I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.”

Prayer:

Story:

— Sheri does a lot of work to make sure her vegetable garden gives her a good yield.. She does something called “hardening”. Which seems kind of mean.. She will take plants that have been coddled inside and put out in the prison yard.. So the can get tough. Those cucumbers can get like hardened criminals doing push ups and bench pressing in the yard..

— She also does a lot of removing of different shoots.. Little starts of budding or what have you, she snips em right off!!

— I try to imagine if these things could talk or think. Maybe they think Sheri is a monster! But the truth is, we pay a lot for all of this (right out of the grocery budget!!) So she wants RESULTS

Transition

God expects results from us too. He paid a lot for us! He wants/ expects results…

We need to think about the fact that we have a King! Our King has made clear that He has expectations from His subjects..

But He resources us so we can obey Him! For you and I to bear fruit..

The Godhead is cooperating

What or who is ultimate

— I AM (Jesus) the true vine.. I am is an indicator of Jesus claiming His deity

— Jesus is making a contrast to what the Jews saw everyday, an engraving of a grape vine on the temple to symbolize Israel as the vine..

— Think about all the God had promised to the Jews in terms of land. The “promised land”!

— That’s where God promised flourishing!! This is a land flowing with abundance. So it makes sense that the Jewish people would use a symbol like a vine to represent their nation.

— But Jesus is saying HE is the vine that will bring abundance and flourishing.

— A real quick note to this is that the land of Israel is important. There are still prophecies yet to be fulfilled. The land itself was given as a promise to Abraham and his descendents.

— I think it’s super important to note a difference between things that are important and that which is ultimately important!

— As we go along here I want to say it’s the Godhead that we need to be connected into for vitality.. What do we treat as ultimate that should be secondary?

Roles

— The Father is the vinedresser, He is doing what is necessary for fruit it is His vineyard..

++Pic of vine

— So Jesus is the Vine.. When you look at a grape vine, there is a “trunk” that goes up and splits off into these two cordons.. it’s the foundation of the plant. It carries the sap to the whole.. Then you have the “canes” which are the little branches where the buds grow which give way to grapes..

— Our role is minimal as Jesus describes it.. What’s interesting is that Jesus said we can do NOTHING apart from Him! Yep there’s no way the cane or the little branches can do anything without the structure and the sap from the trunk and the cordons..

— And the interesting thing here that doesn’t get much discussion is the role of the Holy Spirit in all of this.

— We have to recognize that Jesus is going to be physically leaving them.. So ch 15 is right between this whole explanation Jesus is giving on the role of the Holy Spirit.

— Jesus is telling His disciples that He isn’t going to abandon them.. He is telling them to be continued to be connected to Him.. How is that possible?

— Jesus is saying that the church age (after His ministry) is going to be defined by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the believers life..

++John 16:7 “But very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.”

— So He’s encouraging His followers to not check out because He is not physically there.. He is telling them to continue their connection.. And they did!! The whole known world was turned upside down by the Gospel..

— If we remain we will have fruit..

What is fruit?

a. Fruit of the Spirit

++Galatians 5:22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

b. Walking in your God given gifts Romans 12:

prophetic. Prophetic doesn’t always mean foretelling. It’s usually a person that can hear God and speak His truth to the present moment.

Service.. People who love to work behind the scenes.

Administrative. Great place to honor people..

Teaching. Take concepts and help people understand them. Not just operative in church. Encouraging or Exhorting.. They come alongside. They are those annoying pesky worship leaders..

Giving. People who naturally want to give.

Leading. Rise up on behalf of others.

Mercy. They believe in the best for others. When others tend to judge they believe in you. They move towards people in pain, not away from them..

c. Multiplication - healthy things multiply

— righteous living that will lead to people getting saved

— Gen 1. God has from the beginning desired that His living things would multiply. A sign of health is multiplication. — For the Christ follower, that results from both intentional evangelism (gift) or reproducing because people are watching your life.

Matthew 5:16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

2. What does He do?

— God is “lifting us up”

— In vs 2 that word translated as God is “cutting” in the original language can also mean “lifting”

— The vinedresser would clean up the vines to let more sun and water in.. He would take away the dead weight.. But also the idea is that the worker would lift up branches that were bogged down and in the dirt.. He would lift them up and attach them to some kind of structure like a trellis..

— Do you know that God lifts up the weary. He pins us up in the right spots!!

++If you watched the last Toy Story there was a character named “forky” and he thought he was garbage.. So he kept trying to jump into the trash! It was Woody that kept pulling Him out of the trash so he could be part of the gang.

— He has placed you where you are. He pulls you out of the waste pile. He placed you in this church. He puts us in spots I believe where we are going to get the most sun the most water, the best chance to flourish.

— God is getting scissor hands for my own good every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.

— what good thing needs to go to make way for a God thing?

-- YOUR NO is just as powerful as your yes!

-- Story of taking 3 months off of being a worship leader..

— Just a few years ago, we had three buildings on this property. We listened, and we sold one, and it made this building more fruitful.

— Another way God allows growth is through challenging experiences

++Hebrews 12:10–11 “They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.”

Spurgeon on God’s cutting through suffering:

“What then does affliction do?” say you. Well, if I may say so, affliction is the handle of the knife; affliction is the grindstone that sharpens up the word; affliction is the dresser which removes our soft garments, and lays bare the diseased flesh, so that the surgeon’s lancet may get at it; affliction makes us ready to feel the word, but the true pruner is the word in the hand of the Great Husbandman. Sometimes when you lay stretched upon the bed of sickness, you think more upon the word than you did before, that is one great thing. In the next place, you see more the applicability of that word to yourself. In the third place, the Holy Spirit makes you feel more, while you are thus laid aside, the force of the word than you did before.

time permitting:

— It seems like God has had me in challenging ministry transitions

— These were at times tumultuous, sometimes demonic

— But God was drawing me close

— What challenges have you gone through? now I want to clarify God doesn’t cause calamity.. He does allow things in our fallen world..

— Can you look back on those moments of cutting and see that you drew closer? Can you see the growth?

3. what do we do?

— The obvious takeaway from this passage is that your connection to Jesus is vital to bearing any kind of fruit

— How? abide in the WORD doesn’t just mean intellectually, but there’s this idea of intimacy and closeness

— Can we REMAIN connected to Him. Not just try and do more for Him, but be more near Him

-- You are clean, He has done a complete work on the cross. Your past, present your future. You have been FORGIVEN a great debt because of the blood of Jesus.

-- Colossians 2:6 Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, 7 rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.— — Word, Worship, Prayer, obedience, let your room, your home, your car, your walk, let it become a sanctuary..

— We remain in Him by being LED by the Spirit. Being obedient to His convictions in our lives and being led by Him

Galatians 5:16 “So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.”

Galatians 5:25 “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.”

— Here is another thought. When we look at the activity of the Father, He is lifting us, He is pruning.. But we also see this idea conveyed that He is clearing the dead branches.

— This raises the salvation issue.. Here is what this verse is saying People that were part of the vine who don’t abide will wither and are cleared to make space for the ones that do abide.

— We have some Christians who just think they prayed a prayer one time and they have salvation.. They have the gift!!

— But salvation shouldn’t be thought of in terms of a transaction as much as it is a relationship!

— The point of this passage I believe, is to lead us to say “I don’t want to be of the group that is cutoff and thrown into the fire, wether that means losing my salvation or that I wasn’t even saved to begin with it matters not, because the result is the same. I want to be the branch that remains.”

— It’s not praying a prayer that makes you saved! Are you IN HIM? The concept in Him was used in the NT 174 times in the NT!!

— The word Christian was given to us early on by gentiles in Antioch.. The word means “little Christs”. It was actually meant as an insult!

— But looking like Christ, or being like Him is a result of being IN HIM.

— GARDEN

It all started in a garden. It all started with deep connection with our Father. We walked with Him in a place that was flourishing. God called it GOOD.

— Then there was disconnection. The Fall. We were cutoff from the good life.

Genesis 3:24 “After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.”

— Death was the result in all sorts of ways!!

— But Jesus gives us an opportunity to come back to flourishing. Jesus, the 2nd Adam came and obeyed the Father, and gives us through the cross through believing on what He did a way to reconnect.

— I encourage you today to ask the Holy Spirit to see if there is fruit..

Galatians 5:22 “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,”

— Are these true about you? Because of the fall we are like forky. We keep jumping into the trash. But God wants to seat you at His table! Are you IN HIM?