"Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing."
Faith Baptist Church
Cause and Effect
This music stand is being a little bit tricky to me here now I don't usually have something in front of me like this, but I usually have more than 24 hours to prepare So I do I do ask you to bear with me and have grace and maybe pray silently for me as we go along So welcome again. I Am pastor Dustin. I'm filling in for pastor Rob today. He is home ill So be in prayer for him and his family going through that and pray a rapid recovery So what you have in your bulletin for Psalm 139 is absolutely not right Rob will be bringing that back to us next week, I'm pretty sure And I don't have any slides for you. So I'm gonna have you I'll take out your Bible and Turn to John chapter 15 And while you're doing that I'll give you a little bit of background on why this is our passage today and the reason is a couple of weeks ago We had a youth event. We call it Jesus at mains or jam And this was the this was the section of scripture that we focused on for that evening So we had our students there. We had them broken out into small groups We had two small group sessions. We had two worship and teaching sessions and the entire evening of about six hours was focused on this passage of scripture and So it's very very fresh in my mind and I think God has kind of set that up to be what we hear today So I'm going to read out of the NLT version and I am going to change one of the words in the NLT because in other translations it uses the word abide where NLT uses the word remain and I'm gonna do that because I just like the word abide better. It has a deeper meaning To live within as opposed to just being with so follow along as I read one through 17 I Am the true grapevine Jesus says and my father is the gardener He cuts off every branch of mine that doesn't produce fruit and he prunes the branches that do not or that do bear fruit So they will produce even more You have already been pruned and purified by the message. I have given you Remain in me abide in me and I will abide in you For a branch cannot produce fruit if it is severed from the vine and you cannot be fruitful unless you abide in me Yes, I am the vine and you are the branches those who abide in me and I and them will produce much fruit For apart from me you can do nothing Anyone who does not abide in me is thrown away like a useless branch and withers Such branches are gathered into a pile to be burned But if you abide in me and my words abide in you you may ask for anything you want and it will be granted When you produce much fruit you are my true disciples and that brings great glory to my father I have loved you even as the father has loved me remain in my love When you obey my commands as you remain in my love just as I obey the father's commands and remain in his I Have told you these things so that you will be filled with my joy Yes, your joy will overflow. This is my commandment love each other in the same way. I have loved you There is no greater love than to lay down one's life for one's friends You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you slaves, but a master doesn't confide in his slaves Now you are my friends since I have told you everything the father has told me you didn't choose me I chose you I appointed you to go and produce lasting fruit so that the father will give you whatever you ask using my name This is my command that you will love each other Now I already kind of said that That the word abide is a pretty strong word. It means to live within something We used to refer to a house our home as an abode And abode is where you abide And so we need to live within Christ. Well, how do we do that? What is Let's make this a little practical. I'm going to try and be a little practical today Well, we used to have a wanna here And some of you might remember the awanna pledge to the bible which is a collection of verses out of the psalms essentially It says I pledge allegiance to the bible god's holy word I will make it a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path I will hide its words in my heart that I might not sin against god And we won't go into where that falls short But it is It's a great way to think of it Right. I want to make god's word The light that guides me. I want it to light my path. I want to hide its words in my heart I don't want to sin against god One of the biggest falling shorts that I will mention is there's nothing in that about prayer Because prayer has to be a part of it. That is how we conversate with god. That's how we converse with him That's how we talk to him. He talks to us. We get our our Direct orders from god our direct marching orders through prayer And so that absolutely has to be part of it. So spending time in scripture and taking that time in prayer Is what we have to do to abide and to remain and live in christ Now i'm going to highlight some verses as we go through here And i'm going to start with verse five It says yes, I am the vine and you are the branches those who abide in me and I and them will produce much fruit for apart from me You can do nothing And that's pretty much the premise of what i'm going off today If we abide in jesus the fruit comes If we don't abide in jesus, there is no fruit That's The short and sweet of it we could cut it off right now, but I think there's more that we can get out of this And this is uh Oh, where was I going? All right If we if we are in christ We bear fruit if we're not we don't And paul actually gets into this in the second part of Galatians chapter five He talks about what fruit is produced by the flesh And the answer is a whole list a really not good sin But if we abide in jesus, the fruit of the spirit is a whole laundry list of good wonderful things Love joy peace patience kindness goodness faithfulness gentleness and self control and yes, I know all of those because of a Because of a children's ministry song um But that's what the fruit of the spirit gives us it gives us these wonderful things love joy peace Are the first three And love is the first one and we're going to talk about that a little bit later uh verse seven I'm going to go off on a bit of a related tangent with verse seven. Okay. This is actually repeated later, but Jesus says if you remain in me and my words are man in you You may ask for anything you want and it will be granted I have a confession to make I have understood this wrongly. Okay. I I think all of us have at some point in time understood this wrongly because We think That means or I have thought that that means that whatever I want And That's not quite right And I'm going to go to uh Psalm 37 verse 4 and it's a it's something that Many of us have heard before many of you are going to recognize and understand why I went to it Because that verse says delight in the lord and he will give you the desires of your heart And again, it's easy to understand that poorly And I went so I have spending time and prayer over over this verse in john and this psalm Started to understand it a little bit differently And I went looking into some commentaries to see what other scholars have written about it and I found surprisingly few That talk about verse four when they're Making they're writing their commentary on this psalm The one that did that I did find that did stick out is st augustine of hippo And he writes about psalm 37 verse four. He says Don't misunderstand this and this is not a direct quote. This is a paraphrase. He says don't misunderstand this God is going to give you the desires of a righteous heart not of the flesh This is not necessarily about health and wealth and happiness This is about what a righteous heart desires And i'll give you my take on it my take on it is God doesn't look into your heart and see what you desire and then give that to you God opens your heart and puts into your heart what he desires for you So that when you ask for it, it's his will and he can give it to you And so when we look at verse seven like that It says if you remain in me and my words remain in you You may ask for anything you want and that anything is the will of God for your life And it will be granted Now That is That's our prayer When you ask God when you're talking to god and we are asking him for things that's our prayer His will for our life And i'm going to jump to verse 12 Which says this is my commandment love each other the same way i have loved you And how did jesus love us well one of the primary ways that we see jesus loving us is prayer He goes off regularly to pray And i'm Absolutely positive that he prayed for the disciples even though it's not necessarily written directly We do have his prayer in the upper room, which comes just a little bit after this in the scripture But we know that he prays for his disciples And i would expect now this is just my interpretation of things, but i would expect that his prayer for peter Was not necessarily About peter and what i mean by that is I'm guessing That part of his prayer for peter is god. What can i do to help peter grow What can i do to help him love and understand you better what can i do lord? What can i do father? to lead and guide peter And jesus and philip and andrew and all the rest Because it says That love has no There is no love greater than this than to lay down one's life for your friends And that's what i think of i think of How can i lay down my life jesus did it in? the only way That he could have and in a way that none of l none of us could Should say in a way only he could Because he lived a perfect sinless life And he was the sacrifice for us he took the punishment for our sins On the cross and he died But then on the third day he rose again amen He conquered death so that we could have eternal life and we could have that right relationship with our father So that when we die we pass from this life into the next into eternal glory with god And only jesus can lay down his life in that way So when he tells us to lay down our life for our friends We know that most of the people that are hearing this in the upper room with the exception of john were martyred for their faith And that is one way to do that but not everybody Is called to be a martyr Sometimes laying down your life for for your friends means praying god How can I be a better? husband What do I need to do today lord? What do I need to give up today? What selfish desires do I have that I need to get rid of so that I can be a better husband or father or sibling Or friend Have we spent time we spend time a lot of time praying for people in their needs and their health needs Do we spend time praying god and asking god? How can I do better for this person? God, how can I love People better I'm looking at all of you out here and I just want to start praying god, how can I love dian better? How can I love less and brad and paul And dennis and dan and how can I love all of you better? How can I lay down my life for you in that way? How can I sacrifice what I have Whether it's time telling or treasure. What can I sacrifice? What can I give? How can I love people better? And I think that's What jesus is getting it here? We need to lay our lives down for each other and we do that By loving them And we do that through prayer And now in verse 16 and 17 we have the culmination of this section It says you didn't choose me I chose you I appointed you to produce lasting fruit So the father will give whatever you ask using my name. There's that Idea again And he says this is my command love each other And another translation it says this is my command so that you will love each other And I kind of like that better Because that highlights this cause and effect relationship Because if I am not in christ then I can't love you the way that i'm supposed to I can love you the way the world says I should love you But I can't love you the way christ and wants me to love you If I don't abide in him This is a cause and effect if I spend time abiding If I know what the bible says And I spend time praying god, how can I love? Glenda better what can I do for her? God is going to give me direction And his love will then flow from me that is the effect the cause Is what we have control over I have control over how I abide and how I pray for you The holy spirit Controls the effect which is the love that pours out from that abiding And isn't that Isn't that a nice wrap up of what jesus says in the greatest commandment and matthew 22 Starting in verse 34. He is asked by the Pharisees the religious elite they say What's the greatest commandment jesus says love god and love people And it's two sides of the same coin if you love god, you will love people And how you love people will show how you love god It's kind of a dual action thing there. It's two sides of the same coin. So here is my challenge For you as we go into our week. Here is my challenge Abide If you don't have a habit of spending time in your bible Today is the perfect time to start Tomorrow is a little less perfect, but it'll still work Start spending time in your bible start spending time in prayer And yes, we should absolutely pray for the health and well-being of those around us But we should also be praying how can I love them better? How can I lay down my life for someone today? Ask god to give you a name if you can't come up with one And then ask him how to love them better And then Let jesus love those people through you be the hands and feet Like I said, we control that cause we can abide We can spend time in our scripture. We can know the bible. We can know god. We can know jesus But the fruit comes from him And only from him And the outcome is love Would you pray with me? You Heavenly father, I want to thank you and I want to praise you this morning For everything that you are Father your son jesus christ was sent down to us to live that perfect sinless life To love us perfectly and to be that example of how we should love each other He laid down his life for us in a very real and very powerful way And it brings us into a right relationship with you I ask lord that you teach us today Show us in our hearts how to love other people better How we can lay out down our lives for those around us Especially those who don't know you So that they may come to know you as well Father all of this we lift up and we glorify your name in jesus name Amen.