Following Jesus #7 - In the Way of Abiding

Message Description

Dr. Kurt Bjorklund looks at the passage of "The Vine and the Branches" from John 15 and what it means to be fruitful in different ways in our world and how abiding or remaining in the ways of God can help us encounter him.

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Message Transcript

Well, this fall we are working our way through John 14 through 17, which is known as the upper room discourse. It's Jesus' last words to his disciples before the crucifixion. Last week here in Wexford, Terry Thomas spoke. Brady Randall spoke in Butler. I had a chance to speak at our Strip District campus and be there, and it was such a joy just to see the group that's gathering, the passion, the energy, the enthusiasm to serve a location in our city.

Today, just before we jump into John 15, I want to highlight a couple of things for us. First of all, I received packages at my house all the time that I don't order that somebody else orders. They show up from Amazon. If you're like me, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You just get these boxes.

It's soon to be shopping season, and it just reminded me that Amazon has a program called Amazon Smile where you can go online and designate a charity that would receive a fraction of a percent of every dollar you spend. I actually saw what has come to the church recently, and it was not small for just people saying simply we're going to sign up for Amazon Smile. So if you shop on Amazon, I just want to encourage you to go to Amazon Smile and mark that the church could be your beneficiary, Orchard Hill Church. That's a great way just to gain something from that. If this isn't your church home, go online and designate some charity to be your charity, because what that'll do is it means the charity will get the money instead of Jeff Bezos, which is probably a good thing.

Also, I just want to say this, and that is we have an event every fall toward the end of November that we call year end giving or this year Vision 2020, and here's what we do. We get together and we celebrate what God has done in the last year and then we look at what God's going to do and we talk about just how we can participate. If this is your church home, we'd really love for you to be a part of that. In Butler County, it's happening on November 6th, in the Strip District November 21st, and then here in Wexford it'll happen on November 14th, 15th, and 17, three different events. There'll be some fun to be had, some celebration, and then a look ahead to where we're going as a church. If this is your church home, if you could just make one of those dates a priority, that would be appreciated and just a good way to be a part of church life.

Just before I pray, I also want to say for those of you here at the 11:15, thank you for braving the Soergel's mayhem out there to get here. We're one of the few churches that our 11:15 service drops in attendance in October because of the Soergel's thing. Leave a little early, and it ends after next week and we'll be good. I mean leave early to get here, not at the end by the way.

Let me pray. Father, thanks for just each person who's gathered. God, I pray that you would speak to us through your Word, that my words would reflect your Word in content and in tone and emphasis. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen.

Several years ago, I read something that captured how I felt in a moment, and then I put it aside, as most of us do with things that we read, and I saw it again recently. It's in a book that I had bought. I realized that I feel much the same way as I felt when I read this years ago. In other words, this describes some of how I feel about my own life. To be honest, I was a little disappointed that I had not made greater progress. You'll understand as I read.

Here's what one author writes. He says, "I'm disappointed with myself. I'm disappointed not so much with particular things I have done as with aspects of who I have become. I have a nagging sense that all is not as it should be."

"Some of this disappointment is trivial. I wouldn't have minded getting a more muscular physique. I can't do basic home repairs, and so far I haven't shown much financial wizardry."

"Some of this disappointment is neurotic. Sometimes I'm too concerned about what others think of me, even people I don't know. Some of this disappointment I know is worse than trivial. It's simply the sour fruit of self absorption. I attend a high school reunion and I can't choke back the desire to stand out by looking more attractive or having achieved more impressive accomplishments than my classmates. I speak with someone with whom I want to be charming, and my words come out awkward and pedestrian, and I'm disappointed with my ordinariness. I want to be in the words of Garrison Keillor named Sun-God, King of America, Idol of Millions, Bringer of Fire, the Great Haji, Thun-Dar the Boy Giant."

"But some of this disappointment runs deeper. When I look in on my children as they sleep at night, I think of the kind of father I want to be. I want to create moments of magic. I want them to remember laughing until the tears flow. I want to read to them and make the books come alive so that they want to read. I want to have slow and sweet talks with them as they're getting ready to close their eyes. I want to sing them awake in the morning. I want to chase fireflies with them, and teach them to play tennis, and have food fights,, and hold them and pray for them in a way that makes them feel cherished."

"I look in on them as they sleep at night and I remember how the day really went. I remember how when they were trapped in a fight over checkers, I walked out of the room because I didn't want to spend the energy needed to help them resolve the conflict. I remember how my daughter spilled cherry punch at dinner and I yelled at her about being careful as if she had revealed some deep character flaw. I yelled at her to tell the truth simply because I'm big and she's little, and I can get away with it. And then I saw the look of hurt and confusion in her eyes, and I knew that that tiny wound on her heart that now existed I had put there, and I wished I could have taken those 60 seconds back, and I'm disappointed."

"And it's not just my life as a father. I'm disappointed also for my life as a husband, a friend, a neighbor, and a human being in general. I think of the day I was born when I carried the gift of promise, the gift given to all babies. I think of a little baby and what might have been, the ways that I might've developed my mind, body, and spirit, the thoughts that I might've had, the joy that I might've created, and I'm disappointed that I still love God so little and sin so much."

"I always had the idea as a child that adults were pretty much the people that they wanted to be, yet the truth is I am embarrassingly sinful. I'm capable of dismaying amounts of jealousy. If someone succeeds more visibly than I do, I'm disappointed at my capacity to be small and petty. I cannot pray very long without my mind drifting into fantasy of angry revenge over some past slight I thought I had long since forgiven or some grandiose fantasy of achievement. I can convince people I'm busy and productive and yet waste large amounts of time watching television."

"These are just some of the disappointments. I have other ones, darker ones that I'm not ready to commit to paper. The truth is, even as I write these words, it's a little misleading because it makes me sound more sensitive to my fallenness than I really am. Sometimes, although I'm aware of how far I fall short, it doesn't even bother me that much, and I'm disappointed at my lack of disappointment."

"Where does this disappointment come from? A common answer in our day is a lack of self esteem, failure to accept one's self. That may be part of the answer, but it's not the whole of it, not by a long shot. The older and wiser answer is that the feeling of disappointment is not the problem, but a reflection of a deeper problem, my failure to be the person God had in mind when he created me. It is the pearly ache in my heart to be at home with the Father."

Now, I mentioned that I read that years ago and it captured how I felt in many ways about just myself, my life. Then finding it again and reading it again, I'd love to stand here and tell you now I have figured out how to live without ongoing disappointment in my own life and with myself, but the truth is that that still captures many aspects of how I feel.

Here's what I think happens. Whether you're a person of faith or you aren't really sure where faith fits into your life, there are these expectations, these thoughts of what you want your life to be, and so you say, "This is what it should be," and wherever it falls short, there's a gap. It's in that gap that we live with a little bit of a disappointment, and we can have one of two general reactions to that disappointment.

One is we can decide that it isn't worth the effort and decide that we're going to stop trying, that whatever it is that we said, "This is what my life should be," isn't really going to be. So we just say, "I'm not going to get more fit. I'm not going to be a better dad, or mom, or husband, or wife. I'm not going to achieve as much as I thought I could at work, or with my company, or my employees, or as an employee. I'm not going to be the kind of friend that I thought I would be, because it's just too much."

Now, the challenge of this is that in John 15 that Jesus addresses to his followers, he says that you're to produce fruit. Fruit, if you go all the way back to the beginning of the Bible, is used to connote a life that thrives and helps other people to thrive. In fact, one of the very first commands in the Bible is to be fruitful and fill the earth, to multiply. It isn't just an analogy to talk about reproduction, but it's saying, I want you to help the world thrive. So even if you say, "I'm not rooted in the faith tradition," there's probably some part of you that says, "Here's what it would look like for me to really use all that God has given me to maximize who I am so that my life is really what I envision and dream that it could be." So even if we try to stop, there's a little piece of us that keeps coming back to it's saying, "Well, maybe, maybe I could do this."

The other reaction is to try harder, to redouble our efforts, to decide that since we want to have a life that's more productive or a life that counts more greatly, that all we need to do is organize our time. All we need to do is work harder, smarter, so that we can achieve all the results that we want. I don't know if you've ever done this, but if you've ever become dissatisfied and so you sit and you make a plan, and you make a plan for all the ways that you're going to change the way that you do things so that you can be as efficient and as effective as possible moving forward. What happens is we run ourselves ragged with simply trying to achieve more.

Years ago, Tim Kreider wrote an article called The Busy Trap. I'm going to read from this, and this is more than I typically read on a weekend, but I think he says it much better than I ever could. He says this. "If you live in America in the 21st century, you've probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It's become a default response when you ask someone how they're doing. 'I'm busy, so busy, crazy busy.' It is pretty obviously a boast disguised as a complaint, and the stock response is a kind of congratulation. This is a good problem to have. It's better than the opposite."

"But notice that it isn't generally people pulling back to back shifts in the ICU or commuting by bus to three minimum wage jobs who tell you how busy they are. What those people are is not busy, but tired, exhausted, dead on their feet. It's almost always the people whose lamented busy-ness is purely self-imposed, work obligations that they've taken on voluntarily, classes and activities that they've encouraged their kids to participate in. They're busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they're addicted to busy-ness and dread what they might have to face in its absence."

A little later, he continues. "Busy-ness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness. Obviously your life cannot possibly be silly, or trivial, or meaningless if you are busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day."

Then he adds this still again later in the article. He said, "Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence, or a vice. It is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as Ricketts. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration. It is paradoxically necessary to get work done." What Tim Kreider argues is that what we all need is more idleness, that we're so addicted to being busy, to appearing busy that it's our way of feeling as if we're significant, and what we actually need is to plant idleness.

Now, I think idleness can be one helpful approach, but this isn't Jesus' solution. In John 15, what Jesus does is he says, "I'm the true vine and my Father is the gardener." Now here he's alluding to an Old Testament reference. In Isaiah 5 and Psalm 80, we see the imagery of Israel and God with the vine and the vine dresser, and Israel we're told produced wild grapes. In other words, they were in the vine, but they went crazy and now what he's doing is he's saying, "I want to be the vine dresser. I want you to abide in me."

He says this. He says, "If you abide in me, then you'll produce much fruit, but apart from me, you can do nothing." So without me, you will not produce all the things that you want to produce. Instead, what you'll do is you'll run from one thing to another thing, to another thing, trying to always get a verdict saying you've done enough, you are enough, you've achieved enough, and you won't actually produce all the things that you want to produce. That's what Jesus is driving at here.

I like how Dallas Willard ... or not Dallas Willard, Richard Foster once put this. He said, "Superficiality is the curse of our age. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people or gifted people, but for deep people." Here's what he's talking about. He's saying that when we come to abide in Jesus, it produces a depth that actually gives us the connection beyond ourselves that we so desperately want.

Now, here's how usually I've heard this section of the Bible taught, maybe how you've experienced that, and that is people will read this and they'll say, "If you want to produce a lot of fruit, you need to abide in Jesus," and to abide in Jesus, what you need to do, and there are some hints of this in this passage, you need to pray more, you need to read your Bible more, you need to worship more, and you need to repent more. That's not altogether an off reading, but here's the problem with it. I don't think this is actually what this text is saying. It's not saying in order to abide, you need to do more, because you'll always live in tension between the desire to produce and the desire to abide, because in some ways they feel in tension with one another.

Ultimately, it is my responsibility for myself, just like it's your responsibility for you. It's not your spouse's responsibility, not your boss's responsibility, not your sibling's responsibility to make sure that you abide. It is my responsibility for me. It is your responsibility for you.

What will happen is sometimes what we'll do is we'll Christianize another list of to dos. We already have this gap of saying, "Here are all the things that I want to do or be. I want to be a certain kind of friend, or daughter, or son. I want to be a certain kind of brother, or sister, or mom, or dad. I want to achieve," and then we'll add a list of things that are actually Christian. Pray more, repent more, worship more, try harder, do better. We just transfer one sense of busy-ness for another sense of busy-ness.

But here's what I think we see in this passage, and that is that abiding isn't doing more, but it's using the things such as prayer, worship, repentance, even Bible intake to help us encounter the love of God at the core of our being so that as we encounter that, we're able to push some of the voices that tell us that we need to keep performing away.

Here's where we see this, verse 2 and 3. It says, "He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it'll be even more fruitful." He takes some branches and says, "You're not fruitful. I'm going to eliminate you," but even the branches that bear fruit, he says he prunes, and we'll come back to this in just a few moments.

Then he says this, verse 3. "You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you." Now notice the tense there. He doesn't say you're clean if you take my word to heart and you act on it. He says you're clean because of the word I've already spoken to you. In other words, this is past tense. He's saying, "I've already spoken the word to you. If you've believed the word, now you are already clean."

Here's why this matters. Because what he's not saying here is do more, try harder. He's saying the word. Now, what is the word that's already been spoken? Gospel of John, the message throughout the gospel of John is Jesus has made a way for us to be right with God where there was no way. He has done for us what we can't do through our own effort. In fact, if you just take the most famous verse of John, the gospel of John, it's, "God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him would not perish but would have everlasting life."

Notice what he doesn't say. He doesn't say, "God so loved the world, that if you do a better job obeying him, you can have everlasting life. God so loved the world that if you pray more, if you worship more, if you repent more, if you read your Bible more, then you can have eternal ..." No. If you believe.

The Word of God is tied to belief, and what this is pointing to is this idea that you're already clean, meaning if you've come to a point of trusting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, that this is the abiding that all of the other activities point to. In abiding in Jesus, you start to say, "Now I hear that voice," that voice that says you are accepted, you are enough. Because everything else in our world tells us you're not enough, you aren't accepted, you need to perform, you need to try harder, you need to do better, and that's where our disappointment comes from.

See, Christian faith in many ways for many people has become just another list of shoulds, but Christian faith isn't a list of shoulds. It's a statement of what Jesus Christ has done on behalf of those of us who can't keep the shoulds.

Now, certainly if you understand Christianity correctly, it means that your sins will never be held against you. Romans 8:1, "There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." At the same time, there's a sense in which God will discipline those he loves. That's Hebrews chapter 4. This is part of what pruning is. You see, when he talks about pruning, sometimes God takes something that feels to us essential, that feels to us as if it is helping us have comfort and success, and he will prune it. Sometimes it might be tied to our sinful choices where God loves us so much that he won't let us stay in our sin because he knows that it takes us away from him, and sometimes it may have nothing to do with sin. It may just be something that he's saying, "If I cut this back, I know that you will ultimately be more fruitful."

But here's the challenge. If you're like me, I don't always want to be pruned. In fact, I want God to help me have more comfort and more success more than I want to be more fruitful if I'm honest, and I'm disappointed that I have to admit that. But here's the point. When you and I see that God is really for you, for me, then what happens is we begin to say, "God, I'll accept your pruning. I'll embrace your pruning, because your work in my life will actually help me come to a better place."

Fruit is sweet. One of the things that happens as you abide in the vine over time is that you will become sweeter. In other words, the older you are, the longer you've abided or remained ... Remained is the word in the NIV, abide in some of the older translations. The idea is that the longer we walk with Jesus, the sweeter we'll become.

But that isn't always how it works. You see, to abide, in many ways what we need to do is we need to be able to shut off all of the other voices that are telling us what we need to do, what we need to become, what we need to achieve, and we need to hear the voice of God alone that says, "I have done for you through Jesus Christ what you can never do. You as you sit today are enough." Or we'll always be disappointed and frantic trying to get a verdict from other things in our lives.

I was thinking about this the other day, and I was thinking about the reality of how things have changed since I grew up. I know anytime you talk like this, you sound like a really old guy, but here's one of the things I've noticed, and that is my kids have, as they've grown, have had smartphones. I'm not anti-smartphones, because my kids have them and we need them to function by and large in our portion of society.

But here's what was really different when I was a kid. When I was a kid, I'd go to school and there would be drama. There would be people who would be mad at each other. There would be all kinds of things. What would happen is you would then go home, and when you went home, whatever time you got home that stayed there, and the only way somebody could interact with you is they'd call your house. You actually had to go over to the wall, pick up a phone. It had a long cord that you would take and you could go into maybe the other room, maybe around the corner a little bit, but everybody else could hear you talk, meaning you didn't ever really have a moment in the house that was fully school and not part of the house.

What it provided was it provided an opportunity to kind of regain perspective, to regain a way of thinking. Then in the morning you'd go back to school and you'd have to deal with whatever was still there. But it kind of went away for a little while.

Now, here's what's happened was with smartphones is today, what happens for kids in school is they leave school and as soon as they leave school between Twitter, and Instagram, and Snapchat, and whatever other apps they're using ... By the way, they're not using Facebook. You have to be like old to use Facebook at this point in time. But whatever else they're using, it's constant. There's a voice and an interaction from school that's always saying, "Well, here's a problem. Here's what's going on. Did you see this? Did you know what's going on?" It churns, and there's no break other than when they're physically asleep unless you somehow restrict the phone.

Now, this isn't really about phones. This is just saying there's a huge difference, and here's what we need to do spiritually. At some point, we need to shut down the voices, and I'm not talking about literal voices, or maybe they are that they consistently bombard us, telling us the only way that you'll be enough, the only way that you will feel good about yourself is if you're more fit, if you're more successful, if you're more in tune with your family, if, if, if, if, if. It pounds on us all the time, and what we need to do is be able to put that voice aside and be able to hear the voice of God. That's what it means to abide.

Now, lest you think I'm making too much of verses 2 and 3, here's where we see this, verse 9 and 10. "As the Father has loved me, so I've loved you. Now remain in my love, or abide 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."

See what he's pointing to? He's saying that abiding isn't about more of something, but it's about experiencing the love of God. Meaning that your prayer, your worship, your repentance, your Bible reading are all about coming to the point where you say, "I am loved by the God of the universe, not because of what I do or don't do, but because of what Jesus Christ has done on my behalf." When that becomes the place that you and I live, what Jesus says is now you're going to become more fruitful. You're going to bring about human flourishing. You're going to produce good things in your life. It doesn't mean that we'll never be disappointed, but it means that we're free in a sense from the neurosis and the demands of the voices that are constantly telling us you need to do more, produce more, and be more. It's a radical difference.

Maybe you're here and you say, "I've been a person of faith for a long time, but I still find myself churning to those voices." Well, come back and abide in Jesus and be free from them. Maybe you're here today and you say, "I've never really believed, but this sounds really good. It sounds almost too good to be true." Well, the truth is Jesus' death is the thing that gives you freedom to say now I can live and move in this world without having to load too much into this world.

When my wife and I were first married, we lived in Chicago. We lived in a little house in a neighborhood, and we both went to grad school and worked during those years. What I would do if I wanted to exercise often is I would go out for a run, but in the city it's hard to run because you're always crossing busy streets. So I would run from my house up maybe a half mile, mile away to a cemetery, and then I would run laps in the cemetery because there was no cross traffic. I didn't think much of it, because to me it was a place where there were roads that I could run on without anything.

Until one day when there was a funeral that I went to in that cemetery. After I had gone to the funeral, I had experienced the whole Chicago ethos of funerals. Every region does funerals just a little differently. There what would happen is after the funeral home or the church, wherever the funeral proper was, they would go on a precession and you would drive by the person's house who had just died, and then you'd proceed to the cemetery where you would have the committal.

I knew the person who had died because they were part of the church that we were part of, and they had lived on a house that was right on my route where I would run to go to this cemetery. So all of a sudden, every time that I would run, I would run by this house where this person had lived and then up and through the cemetery and past the plot where their body had been committed.

Here's what I came to just understand and appreciate. Every time I'd run by that house in the next few months, it went for sale and then soon somebody moved in who didn't know this person. They gutted the house because the way that they had put all their time and energy into the house hadn't been the way that the new people wanted the house to be. Then I would run into the cemetery, and I'd run by, and here was the plot, and their whole earthly existence had come to an end.

See, when Jesus says, "Apart from me, you can do nothing," he doesn't mean you can't refinish your house and have a nice house, you can't have good things and nice things said about you at your grave side apart from me. What he's saying is if you don't abide in me, then you won't produce anything that lasts beyond this life in reality. You see, disappointment might be part of my experience, but a lot of it is because instead of abiding in Jesus and saying he said the best word over me that can ever be spoken, because I still want to hear these other voices and I want to load too much into this life, instead of seeing this life for what it is and trusting what Jesus has said that matters the most.

My hope is that as a church family that we can be a church that are people who abide in Jesus, remain in Jesus, not by trying harder, but by resting in what Jesus Christ has done, because that's the message that the world that we live in desperately needs. Not that Jesus is another thing to add to an already exhausting list of things you should do better and try harder at, but that Jesus has done for you and for me what we can never do.

If you're here today and you say, "Boy, that sounds good. I'd like it," you can enter into that life, as John 3:16 says, by believing that God sent his son, that you have not been enough even by your own standards, and therefore Jesus is for you the one who has made it possible. If you're here and you say, "I've believed that for a long time, but I keep regressing into trying to get a verdict in my own life from the way that I behave, the things that I do, the things that I achieve or don't do," maybe today is just your day to say, "Once again, God, I'm going to rest in what Jesus has done instead of demanding from myself perfection."

Father, I pray that you would let our disappointment with ourselves turn us to the goodness of what you offer to us. God, I pray that you would help me and each person who's a part of Orchard Hill this weekend to really know what it is to live in the reality of your love instead of chasing the fickle verdict of all the things that our world gives us. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen. Thanks for being here. Have a great week.