Untitled Sermon

The Mission

At the Bridge we are Bold for Christ. We do life together and create REAL relationships. We act with INTEGRITY always. We are completely DEVOTED to God. We give in many ways through GENEROUS living. We are ENTHUSIASTIC to connect to you!

Bold

Real

Integrity

Devoted

Generous

Enthusiastic

What does your day look like?

This is intended to be an interactive activity. So please grab a piece of paper or a note card. If you don’t have those but have a smart phone or tablet use the note section. If your just really anti participation do it in your head. I am going to ask you some questions that I want you to write out the answers to.

What does your day look like?

What is the first thing you do each day when you wake up?

Write out a rough schedule for your typical day?

Include Work, Entertainment, Typical sleeping times, Eating. etc.

Remember there are only 24 hours in a day.

Do you have a specific time for your relationships with God?

Is Devotion only about our time?

I once had a professor share with me the importance of time. If people are willing to invest their time into something than they will be willing to invest other resources into the same thing. Think about that for a moment.

Think about your favorite Hobby? How much do you invest the other resources you have at your disposal into them. Think about your best relationships? Friends, Spouses, Boyfriends, Girlfriends, Children, and so on. Do you devote multiple forms of the resources at your disposal to those relationships? I am willing to bet the answer to all those questions is yes.

Devotion is not limited to only time but it does include our resources. However, If we start to think about devotion to God only within the context of time and resources there is a hidden danger that can happen. We can slip into an attitude that

Devotion to God=Just Doing good works.

We know that our faith is not built upon good works but our faith.

Romans 5:1 NIV

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,

We must never forget that it isn’t our works that bring us to salvation it is our faith. Yet, we also must remember

James 2:17 NIV

In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

It is the balance and the natural by product of our faith that deeds and actions follow. James highlights in the subsequent verses when he talks about Abraham and how his faith was shown by his action and that they worked in tandem together.

This is the challenge that we face when we start talking about ideas like Devotion to God. We realize that it is about both faith and our actions.

There is a passage of scripture that i think helps pull this all together for us that provides for us also some beautiful imagery to help us see the value of our connection to Christ and our faith.

John 15:1–8 NIV

“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. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.

When I read a passage like this i love the imagery provided to us. Though it is one of an agricultural background many of us can understand or draw the connections. There are a couple key questions that we must address when we look at this passage though.

What does it mean for the disciples to ‘Remain’ in Jesus?

When we think about a plant and the relationship the branch has with the vine or the body of the plant it is a symbiotic relationship that is formed of all the parts. The plant can’t expand its influence or produce more fruit without the vine. Yet, the branch needs the vine to process and feed the branch the necessary nutrients to allow the fruit to grow. The reality though is that the branch is far more dependent of the vine then the reverse. The branch when removed from the vine will wither and die. It will lose all its value. The vine will continue to grow and produce new branches. THis helps remind us that the vine is not dependent on any one branch.

So to the question of what does it mean for the disciples to remain in Jesus. For them in their context it is absolutely necessary to remember that they were seeing this as the continuation of fellowship and loyalty to Jesus. This loyalty and fellowship demands obedience to the commands of Jesus. This can be seen in

John 15:10 NIV

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.

This makes it absolutely essential to match or words and our deeds to remain in the love of the father. Yet, this passage has more for us.

What does it mean for Jesus to remain in the disciples?

We talked briefly how that some can view this passage and see that the vine needs the branches. Yet, this is not the message that is being shared in this passage. The reality is that Jesus does not need the fellowship with us to be whole. He does not require it. Yet, he maintains the fellowship and the imagery that we can draw from him remaining in us is that promis of the Holy Spirit.

John 14:15–18 NIV

“If you love me, keep my commands. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.

Jesus sends us the Holy spirit to build and maintain the relationship that we have with the vine. Jesus will be at the right hand of God and becomes our biggest advocate. He is sticking up for us.

Romans 8:34 NIV

Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.

He takes on this role and remains faithful to the relationship he formed with humanity when he entered into this world. This is the beauty of the relationship we share with the vine and in turn the gardener. Imagine the vine being able to speak and tell the Gardner wait just a bit more this branch is about to bear some amazing fruit. This is the promise and the hope that we have in Jesus.

Devotion requires us to bear fruit

We talked earlier about our days and what they look like. For many of us we are busy people. We have one task to the next to maintain our normal lives. I think this became even clearer when the realities of the shutdown hit us a couple months ago. What we experience as normal is long gone and honestly who knows if it will ever come back. We have reshaped and shifted and in many ways for some of us. Work looks different, home looks different, school looks different. We go through our days and we live life. Yet, this is the issue i want to tackle. The very way we live life is essential to understanding our need for devotion to God.

We need to not see devotion simply as a set aside time for God but as setting all our time apart for God.

Now that is a complicated prospect at best, but i think i have an idea on how we can achieve that. We strive to engage God in all aspects of our lives.

We treat our our work at our jobs as an opportunity to Honor God

We treat our relationships as an opportunity to Honor God

We work to care for ourselves in a way that is an opportunity to Honor God.

When we shift our focus to working to live every aspect of our lives for God this is how we can show true devotion to him. It now becomes and intricate part of our lives that is woven together. It becomes more difficult to see where the branch is separate form the whole plant. We then produce more fruit because we have allowed the Gardner and the vine to take care of us. This allows us to be transformed and in turn help transform the world around us.

We may not be perfect in always achieving this and we will fall short sometimes. However, we need to be pushing for this shaping our lives in such a way that we are honoring God with our lives.

Eucharist