©2003 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

08/17/03

Abiding Pt. 2

John 15:1-10

8/17/03 Abide Pt. 2

Those of you who were here last week

know that I didn’t make it as far last Sunday as I’d planned.

In fact, I stopped in the middle of my notes

because we were running out of time

and I didn’t want to rush through the passage we were moving into.

For the past three weeks

we have been involved in a study

of the connection between our performance and our relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

Though I haven’t stated it exactly this way before in this study,

there are two completely separate questions we need answers for in this whole area.

First, as Christians, how does our performance affect our relationship with our Lord?

Second, how does our relationship with our Lord affect our performance?

And, even though both questions are extremely important,

and even though any truly healthy forward movement in our Christian lives

rests upon our understanding the answers to both of those questions,

yet, they are not exactly equal in their importance.

There is a definite order in which we must ask and correctly understand the answers to those two questions,

and if we get them backwards,

it will severely hinder our ability to correctly answer either one of them.

The question that must be asked and correctly answered first

is the one we began with four weeks ago in this study,

“As Christians, how does our performance affect our relationship with our Lord?”.

If you’ve been involved in this study with us during the past few weeks,

you’ll remember we’ve been using a little chart

that shows our relationship with God remaining at a perfect 10

in the face of our fluctuating and imperfect performance.

Only when we have wrestled our way through at the heart level

to a correct understanding of that truth

will we then have a foundation upon which to correctly understand

how our relationship with our Lord

can and will have a powerful impact on our performance.

This order of learning - first relationship, then performance

is deeply ingrained in framework of God’s whole communication of Himself to us in Scripture.

There are three New Testament Epistles written by Paul

in which he carefully structures and organizes what he says

into beautifully formulated statements of Christian doctrine.

We have, of course, a number of other New Testament letters

that are far more casual in their organization,

letters written by Paul to specific churches

as he addresses specific issues or needs,

letters like Philippians,

written to bring reassurance about his own circumstances

to his close friends in Philippi who were deeply worried about him,

and letters like Galatians,

written by Paul to a group of Christians who were in danger of throwing out their faith foundation with Christ

and replacing it with a works-based religion,

and letters like the two he wrote to the Thessalonians

who were confused about certain critical truths surrounding Christ’s return,

and letters like those he wrote to the Corinthians

in response to questions they had asked him.

And with each of those letters

the basic structures were informal in nature,

driven by the specific needs and questions he was seeking to answer.

But there are three letters in Paul’s writings

in which he clearly, carefully formulated his structure in advance,

letters in which he gives his readers the content he wants them to have

in precisely the order he knows they need to receive it.

Those Epistles are Romans, Ephesians, and Colossians.

And in all three of theses letters,

do you know what we find?

We find Paul using the first half of the letter

to talk with us about the true nature of our relationship with God

that has come to us as a result of our faith in Jesus Christ,

and then, in the second half of the letter,

he goes on to talk with us

about how we can expect this knowledge to affect our practical daily living

assuming we have correctly understood what he has just said.

First relationship,

and then performance.

Our natural, flesh-based religious natures

frequently attempt to read and then live those letters backwards.

We begin with the second half,

point out to ourselves and to one another

what our lives should look like

if we are “really good Christians”,

and then we wonder why we seem to have so much trouble

making any real progress in bring about the changes that need to be made.

And what we so easily forget

is that until we have correctly understood at the heart level

the first half of those letters,

the second half will be absolutely unattainable to us.

When I wrote The Grace Exchange

I borrowed exactly this same learning structure

that we see in Paul’s letters.

The second half of that book

talks a great deal about the protective moral framework

given to us by our Lord,

and what it means for us to live within that framework.

But that whole discussion is preceded by 107 pages

that talk about the true nature of God’s relationship with us

as a result of our faith in Christ.

Now, I’m probably making this whole thing

sound more complicated than it is.

Simply put,

until we have correctly understood the true nature of God’s love for us

and how His love has caused Him

to create for us a relationship with Him that is not dependant upon our performance,

until that understanding

is deeply imbedded in our hearts and minds,

we have no basis for effectively addressing performance problems in our lives.

Let me try again.

Only the personal discovery of the true nature of God’s love for us

can provide us with an adequate basis

for bringing about practical performance changes in our lives.

Religious duty cannot cause us to face the real issues in our lives.

It simply drives us to create a rigid religious facade to hind behind.

Fear of judgment and the wrath of God will not bring about true inner transformation.

It will only crush our spirits under a weight of fear

or cause us to run from our God in terror.

Only our personal discovery of the true nature of God’s individual love for each of us

can ever provide us with the motivation we need

for the changes God wants to accomplish in our lives.

Some of you were with us several years ago

when we were studying the book of Romans.

In that study we reached a point in the first 11 verses of Romans 5

where Paul lists for us

the first seven birthday gifts given to each of us

when we enter His family through faith in Christ.

You are probably familiar with at least the first two gifts on that list

because I refer to them so often in my teaching.

The first is “peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ”,

and the second is “this GRACE in which we stand”.

But it is the 5^th gift in that list

that I want to mention this morning

because of the way in which Paul presents it.

If I were to ask you this morning

what you would expect to find

on a list of gifts given to us by our Lord

at the time we come to Him in faith,

I’m sure that one of the first ones to come to mind to many of you

would be the gift of the Holy Spirit.

The life and work of the Holy Spirit within us as Christians

is absolutely central to every aspect of our walk with God.

In fact,

the gift of the Holy Spirit to us

was the very first gift promised to His disciples by Christ Himself

in the hours just preceding His crucifixion.

JOH 14:16 "And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever;

JOH 14:17 that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not behold Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you, and will be in you.

And, of course, the Holy Spirit is included in Paul’s list of birthday presents

given to us in Romans 5.

But what I find so fascinating here in this list

is the way in which Paul includes the gift of the Holy Spirit in his list.

He doesn’t just tell us that God has given us the Holy Spirit,

he tells us why the Spirit is given.

He reveals to us the one central purpose

underlying everything the Spirit does in our lives.

In Romans 5:5 Paul says,

“...the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”

The Holy Spirit is given to us

to fill our hearts with a constant, growing awareness of the love of our God for us.

Only that awareness

can provide us with the inner motivation we need

for a healthy, growing walk with God.

And how does He do that?

How does the Holy Spirit spread abroad within our hearts

the knowledge of the love of God for us?

Well, in the overall course of our lives with God

the Spirit does it in countless ways

as He works within us to meet our needs

and to reveal to us God’s deep, intimate involvement in our lives.

But in the beginning

the Spirit brings our first introduction of the love of God to us

in a way we would never anticipate.

He does it by bringing us to the point

where we recognize our own utter moral failure before God.

In other words,

He brings into our lives the personal conviction of our own sinfulness.

And He does it

because only against the backdrop of our own guilt before God

can we ever begin to understand the true nature of God’s love for us.

Only when we see God’s response to us

in the face of our guilt before Him and rebellion against Him

can we begin to grasp the true nature of the love of God for us.

ROM 5:8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

And our personal discovery of the love of God for us

begins at that point where we discover

the absolute separation between our performance

and God’s acceptance of us and love for us in Christ.

From there

God can then begin to work with us

to bring about ongoing changes in our lives

as we continue to hear and respond to His love.

Now, that’s where we’ve been for most of the past three weeks,

and in our remaining time this morning

I want to conclude this study

by taking us to that passage in John I told you about

in which Christ talks with us

about this connection between our relationship with Him

and the changes He then wants to bring about in our lives.

And with that

let me read the passage and show you what I mean.

It’s found in John 15:1-10, a passage that records words spoken by Christ Himself to His disciples.

It begins with Christ creating for us an analogy

designed to help us to better understand

the kind of relationship He has established between Himself and His people.

He says, JOH 15:1 "I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser.

He describes Himself as a grape vine,

with God the Father being the One who cares for the vine

and keeps it fruitful and productive.

Then, having established the analogy, He goes on.

JOH 15:2 "Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it, that it may bear more fruit.

Now, He comes back to that first statement a few verses later,

so we’ll leave it alone until we get to verse 6,

but the second half of the verse contains a critical principle in God’s dealings with us as His children.

He tells us that every truly productive child of God will be pruned.

And this is where the vine illustration becomes so helpful to us

in our understanding of the basics of our relationship with our Lord.

You see, the pruning process in a vine

is the process in which the gardener removes healthy, growing, productive parts of the plant

so that the energy of the plant

can then be poured into the production of a few great fruits

rather than a bunch of mediocre ones.

We have developed a religious world

in which we have convinced ourselves that more is better

and busy is good.

I have no idea how God will apply this principle in your own life,

but I can tell you with certainty that He will.

If you honestly hunger for a productive walk with the King,

He will prune you.

There will be times when He will take what is good away from you

so that what is best can grow.

And at the time it will hurt.

At the time it will seem like a great loss to you.

At the time it may even cause you to turn to your God and say,

“I don’t understand! You have taken from me

that which was so obviously good,

that which proclaimed Your life and your truth.”

It is a process that every truly productive believer will undergo at times,

a process that is absolutely essential

for a truly productive walk with the King.

Then, before He says any more about this productivity thing

the Lord makes a critical distinction,

the same distinction we have been talking about for three weeks now,

the distinction between acceptance and productivity.

He says, JOH 15:3 "You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you.

And with that statement

He wants to be sure we understand

that He is not talking here

about our earning our way into God’s acceptance.

We are already clean, pure, holy in spirit because of our faith in the word spoken to us by our God.

But then He goes on to explain the critical principle He’s trying to communicate.

JOH 15:4 "Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you, unless you abide in Me.

JOH 15:5 "I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me, and I in him, he bears much fruit; for apart from Me you can do nothing.

And I’ll tell you right now

that there is a critical word used by Christ in this passage,

in fact it is used nine times by Him in these few verses.

It is the word “abide”.

It is a word carefully designed

to describe for us that one special, unique aspect of the God/man relationship

that has the ability to result in a truly productive life.

He doesn’t say “obey”,

He doesn’t say “submit”

He doesn’t even say “trust” or “believe”.

He says “abide”.

And this is why I spent so much time

talking about the necessity of us coming into an awareness of the love of God for us.

You see, we simply will not abide in a God we do not love,

Or a God whose love for us we doubt.

Do you know what it means for us to abide in Christ?

It means we allow our spirits to rest in Him.

It means we utterly relax in Him,

and in His oversight in our lives,

and in His ability to do in us and through us whatever needs to be done.

It means we reach the point where we are at peace with the knowledge

that anything of value that comes out of our lives

will exist because He has produced it in us.

Then, from there, the Lord continues His vine analogy by saying,

JOH 15:6 "If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch, and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.

 Now let me tell you what He is not saying there.

He is not saying that those who do not abide will be ripped out of the body Christ and condemned.

We know that because He has just assured us

that our acceptability to Him is not and never will be dependant upon our productivity...

JOH 15:3 "You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you.

 But what He is saying

is that frantic religious activity is not fruit,

it is not true productivity.

And the only way for true fruit to develop in our lives

is through our first hand discovery of the personal love of our Lord for us

in a way that draws us into a relationship with Him

in which we abide in His love.

And then He makes us a promise.

JOH 15:7 "If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it shall be done for you.

Then, in verse nine,

He states clearly what He’s talking about with this whole business of abiding.

JOH 15:9 "Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love.

He then concludes his vine illustration

with one final statement.

JOH 15:10 "If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father's commandments, and abide in His love.

And here again, let me state first of all what He is not saying.

He is not saying that keeping the commandments

is in itself an absolute external proof of an inner spirit that is abiding in Christ.

The religious world around us

is filled with people who keep the commandments out of fear of the wrath of God.

Remember those words of the elder brother when the prodigal son returned?

LUK 15:29 "But he answered and said to his father, 'Look! For so many years I have been serving you, and I have never neglected a command of yours; and yet you have never given me a kid, that I might be merry with my friends;

He lived in the same house as his father,

but he certainly didn’t abide in His love.

In truth, he knew nothing of his father’s heart.

What the Lord is saying

is that it is impossible to abide in His love

and not trust what He has said to us about morality.

John said it so well in his first letter.

1JO 2:4-6 The one who says, "I have come to know Him," and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him; but whoever keeps His word, in him the love of God has truly been perfected. By this we know that we are in Him: the one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked.

So, there we are -

there is an absolute separation between our performance and our acceptance by God.

We are accepted by Him absolutely

because the death of Christ has removed all sin from us forever.

And yet,

as we discover more and more of the true heart of our God,

and the true nature of His love for us,

as we abide in Him in response to that love,

we will find a transformation taking place within us

that will result in our lives being truly productive by His standards.