Finding our purpose

ANZAC Day

In this last week, our nation paused to reflect on ANZAC Day. I had the privilege of leading a number of the prayers at the local service that was held at the Tilligerry RSL, including the dawn service at 5:45am.

You probably remember that here on this peninsula there was quite a bit of rain on this day. So the service that would normally be held outside had been moved inside.

Now this day over recent years has become increasingly popular, however, I thought that a wet morning would be enough to keep people away from a 5:45am dawn service. But I was wrong.

I have no idea of exactly how many people were there, it can be hard to estimate, particularly in rooms you are not familiar with, but I can say that the room was full.

The attraction

What is becoming apparent is that this day is setting itself up as the most sacred day on the secular calendar in our country.

It’s a very solemn day. People become offended when shops open on this day. When politicians or activists politicise the day, they are condemned. When businesses start using the day for commercial purposes, they face a backlash.

Now I think that quite rightly the day should be kept special. Many young men and women have sacrificed their life in order to defend our freedom.

The reason that it has become so special is that within this day, many people begin to find something that brings us together. It’s something we can get behind because it builds us up, makes us stronger, and essentially makes us better people.

Easter and ANZAC

Now the question that goes on in my head, is why can people see it in this day, but on the day we remember a sacrifice that has eternal implications they can’t.

You see, while attendance at ANZAC ceremonies is increasing, when it comes to Easter services, we aren’t seeing the spikes in attendance like once happened.

Now on one level I get it. We can essentially get our head around ANZAC Day. Even though it’s hard to imagine what those ANZAC must have felt as they landed on the shores of Gallipoli, with thousands loosing their life around them, we can at least appreciate that an threat was being made on the world and our general effort helped to nullify this threat.

The sacrifice at Easter, however, can be a little harder to get our head around. I know that for many people the idea that someone dying on a cross 2000 years ago could make a difference to us today just seems absurd. Interestingly, Paul, in his letter to the church at Corinth said that the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but he also said to us who are being save it is the power of God.

Our challenge

But while I acknowledge this big difference, I can’t help but wonder whether as a Christian society we’ve becoming so focused on doing church that we’ve lost sight of what it means to be a church in Christ.

Doing church

Now you may wonder what I mean by being a church “in Christ”, and I’m going to unpack that shortly, but essentially what I’m trying to get at, is that our default position of just doing church means: choosing the right songs, preaching better sermons, having good coffee for morning tea, having the right programs throughout the week.

These are all good things to think about, but our tendency can be to think that when attendance declines, we’ve just got to think how to do those things better.

Part of the problem with this thinking is that we’re making “doing church well” the main aim. It presumes that people will naturally be attracted to church if done well, but more and more, people are not finding church an attraction no matter how well it is done.

Finding our meaning and relevance

That sort of thinking is sort of akin to thinking that people attend the ANZAC Day ceremonies because they are attracted to the pomp and ceremony of the whole thing. I actually don’t think that is the case at all, rather they are attracted to it because of the meaning and relevance of it all.

In the same way, the attraction of church should not be in how well our product looks (although that’s not to say we shouldn’t aim for excellence), but in looking at the meaning and relevance of why we meet. At the end of the day, this is because of who we have become in Christ and the hope he gives us. Therefore our number one focus should be on being in Christ.

Link to the passage

Last week I was on holidays and I know that Steve spoke here on the idea of change. He introduced us to the idea that the leaders of this church have been looking at our vision and what we’ve come up with can fit under the banner of “Love, Share, Serve”. We’re going to unpack this over the next few weeks, but this morning I want to take you to a part of the Bible where the Apostles were learning about what it will mean to be the church. So let’s dive into the passage I have before us and look at the context.

I’ve chosen a passage this morning in , which has Jesus giving further explanation to the analogy he has just given on him being the vine.

Now I will look at that analogy shortly, but I want to look at how this fits in with the bigger picture in which this discussion takes place.

You see, to get the full context you need to go back to Chapter 13 where John describes for us the event we call the last supper.

If you follow the events, it starts with Jesus washing the disciples feet, something we looked at a few weeks back now, and then following Jesus acknowledging the betrayal that will take place very shortly, Judas then leaves the scene, allowing Jesus to give special instructions to his disciples.

So becomes a very special part of the book as Jesus addresses his closest disciples in this way.

I’m just going to explore this larger section really briefly, because I think it can add some helpful insight to the passage that we’re going to spend more time on.

We can break up this larger discourse of Jesus into two main parts. In chapter 14, it would seem that Jesus is inside the upper room and his focus seems to be on calming the fears of the disciples as evidenced by the opening words of - “Do not let your hearts be troubled”.

But in the last verse of chapter 14, Jesus says “come now, let us leave” which probably indicates that they move outside, and so he begins his analogy of the vine.

And so you get this movement of inside where everything is safe, Jesus is reassuring them, and then they move out into the world, where Jesus instructs them essentially of their mission.

Now, in addition to this outward movement, we also see a question at the start of chapter 14 which directs the conversation.

It starts with Jesus talking somewhat cryptically about going to a place that Jesus is preparing and that they should know the way.

One of the disciples, namely Thomas who often pipes up with the useful questions, isn’t quite getting Jesus’ cryptic remarks and so asks outright, how can we know way when we don’t know where you are going?”

Jesus of course answers with the very emphatic: “I am the way and the truth and the life”. And while in one sense, this is all we need to know, thankfully Jesus unpacks this for us, and so in a sense, this whole larger discourse that we see can be seen as a way in which Jesus is instructing his disciples and where to from here.

Now, I wanted to give you all this context because as we now look more closely at we see that Jesus is trying to show the disciples what is important for them.

He didn’t start telling them about how they should structure church or anything like that, rather he showed them something much deeper, and I believe that this is what becomes the attraction.

So when we as a church start to think about what our vision is, I believe this passage becomes very relevant for helping us to think about it.

The Vine analogy

As I’ve mentioned before, chapter 15 starts with the vine analogy. If you have your bibles open at , you’ll see the opening words are: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener”.

What I love about this analogy is the organic nature of it. If you watch a vine grow it has this freedom to adapt to what is around it. A vine brings beauty to an ugly fence. It clings and adapts to it’s surrounding but it never loses sight of it source. It’s life does not come from the surrounding, but from the trunk.

In verse 5, Jesus expands the analogy “I am the vine; you are the branches”.

He is talking about the church here. And the clear message is that if we stay close to Christ we will flourish. That doesn’t mean we will be free from pain - in fact this very analogy directly addresses that. It talks about the branches being pruned.

Now there is more that can be gained by examining this analogy in the opening eight verses of this chapter, but I want to spend more time looking at what Jesus says next starting in verse 9.

Being in Christ

Now what we see with the vine analogy is a call to remain in Christ. But to this point this remains a fairly abstract concept. After all, what does it mean to remain in Christ.

Well, thankfully verse 9 helps us with this, and in part, it is this answer here that directly feeds into our new vision. He says:

He

John 15:9 NIV (Anglicised, 2011)

‘As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.

It’s about love

In other words, it’s all about love. For those familiar with the Greek words for love, this is the word ‘agape’. The type of love that puts the interest of the other person first.

Love is what holds all of this together.

There’s that classic passage in . In the opening few verses of that chapter, Paul says we can do all manner of wonderful things, but if we have not love, than we are just a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

He is essentially saying, you can do church to the best of your ability. You can have the best worship music, you can have the greatest public speaker giving the address, you can have the best coffee and the fanciest building, but if you don’t have love, then it’s all for nothing.

You see without that essentially ingredient of love, then we fall from the vine.

My Dad tells the story of this beautiful passionfruit vine that he used to own, but one day, some helpful person trying to remove the weeds from the garden, somehow managed to cut the base of the vine. Without knowing this, they all watched this once flourishing vine just start to droop and then eventually completely die.

This is what happens when we lose the very thing that holds us together.

It’s commanded

Now back in , Jesus continues in verse 10, but he brings a new element in - keeping the commands. Now we have to tread carefully here because it’s easy to take this out of context.

One way of doing this is to see this as an encouragement to become legalistic. In other words, it is only through our obedience that we can be close to Jesus. But Jesus isn’t encouraging us to become legalistic here.

Actually I think it’s unfortunate what we’ve made of the commands. You see, as Jesus reminds us at a different time, all the commands can be summarised by loving God and loving others. It is when we begin to understand what the commands are, that we know that it’s not at all about being legalistic, but about loving like God loves.

However, there can also be a danger in going too far the other way and thinking that the commands mean nothing because of some airy abstract notion of love. Love is not an abstract notion - God made that clear by sending Jesus and showing us that love means action.

So when we see the word ‘command’ in verse 10, don’t get scared, but also don’t just dismiss it, rather as Jesus encourages us in this verse, see it in light of the way Jesus demonstrated it in his life.

Lot’s of love

Now, as we go through this passage, we see how important love really is. Verse 9 and 10 specifically tell us it’s about love. Verses 12 and 13 again repeat that it’s about love. And just in case you start to forget, Jesus rounds of this section by repeating for us: “this is my command: love each other”.

Finding joy

Now one thing I really love about all of this is that this is not intended to just be all dry theory. And this is really important, particularly as we begin to think about our own vision statement. You see we’re not just about shifting from “let’s make church better”, to “let’s try and do love better”, and end up with just more heart ache in trying to figure out how we do this.

Rather verse 11 is our corrective in this regard. It says:

John 15:11 NIV (Anglicised, 2011)

I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.

It’s about joy. I’m not talking here about cheap thrills and the various highs we get from being in the world. I’m talking about the deep seated feeling of true joy.

I believe its a type of joy that can only be experienced when true love is involved.

You see it sometimes in children. Now I know that all children from time to time will become super excited about something, but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about what you see in a child who comes from a stable family, where there can be a time of relative unimportance, and yet they will have this feeling of happiness knowing that they are loved.

This is the type of joy that I am talking about.

And I honestly believe that it is this type of joy that the community so desperately want to find. Unfortunately, when they look at the church, their impression is too often a bunch of people trying to do church, and in that they can’t find joy.

Where they will find joy, is in people loving like Jesus did.

Friends with Jesus

The other great thing that we learn from this passage, is that as we when we connect ourselves to Jesus through love, our relationship fundamentally changes. He is still the one in control, but it changes from a master/servant relationship to one of being friends.

Now sometimes we so overplay this that we lose the beauty of it. Unfortunately, sometimes when we talk about Jesus as our friend, it’s almost as if we bring Jesus down to our level. But this isn’t the beauty of it. You see, Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, and yet he is willing to be our friends.

Bearing Fruit

I now just want to move to verse 16 before I wrap things up.

Verse 16 starts with the statement from Jesus that “you did not choose me, but I chose you”. Now we can get hung up on the issue of predestination, an issue that I’m not going to get into now but would be happy to discuss with you after.

Instead I want to draw your attention to what you have been appointed to do, and that is, to “go and bear fruit - fruit that will last”.

This brings us back to the analogy of a vine. The vine has a purpose and it is to bear fruit.

The big question for us to answer is, what does it mean by fruit in our situation.

Now I’m going to caution against being too restrictive in our understanding of this, because I think our fruit can be a whole range of things.

The fruit we produce includes bringing people to a saving faith. But it also includes the ongoing discipleship of drawing people closer to Christ.

But the fruit is more than that. In , Paul lists nine different attributes that he calls fruit, namely, love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control. I believe we are also producing fruit when we live like that.

More broadly, I believe that we are producing fruit whenever we allow God to be active in this world.

This is why in our vision statement, not only do we talk about love, but we also say that flowing from this we will share and serve others.

This is the fruit that we are to produce as a church.

Conclusion

In the month of May, we are going to delve further into all of this.

Next week we’re going to examine further the love that the Father has shown us, and then we will explore our response, or the fruit that will flow from that.

Coming up with this vision statement is not to say that we haven’t already been operating in this way. Rather it is help us to move from what is so easy to do, and that is focus on just doing church for the sake of church.

Instead we want to be a church that is firmly linked into the vine that gives us life, the vine that is Christ.

We can do this when we love, share and serve.

I believe that as we do, we will be in a much better position to show the world that we have something on offer that the world really needs.

Let’ pray...