Vine and the Branches 5/22/11

Have you ever gone to a Doctor’s office and meet up with a really grumpy receptionist. Sometimes you will visit a business and the very first person you meet at the front desk has the personality of a frog.
The following story illustrates this point. A man had to go to the Doctor for sore chin and ran into a very grumpy receptionist.
As he walked in, he was met by the receptionist. He told her that he had a sore on his chin that he wanted the doctor to examine.
She said to him, "Down the hall, first door to the right, & take off your clothes."
"But ma’am," he said, "it’s just a sore on my chin. I don’t think all that is necessary."
She repeated, "Down the hall, first door to the right, & take off your clothes."
"But ma’am," he said. "Down the hall, first door to the right, & take off your clothes."
So he went down the hall, took the first door to the right, walked in & saw another man already sitting there in his boxer shorts, shivering.
He said to him, "Boy, that receptionist is really something, isn’t she?
I just have a little sore on my chin & she told me to come down here, go through this door & take off my clothes."
The man in the boxer shorts said, "You think that’s bad? I’m the UPS delivery man."
Why do people act this way?
They don’t have the joy of being IN Christ – they don’t have the joy of being friends with God.
In today’s reading from John we are going to see the remedy to this type of behavior.
Today we are back in John’s Gospel.
The scope and sweep of this gospel is breathtaking in may ways.
As one early Christian scholar said that John’s gospel is shallow enough for a child to wade in and deep enough to drown and adult.
We see that each week, there are nuggets from John that are easy and simple to grasp and then there are grand and majestic theological teachings that we marvel at.
We notice each week a word or phrase is prominent in John’s Gospel and this week it is not different.
This week the word that sticks out is Abide. Christ wants us to Abide in Him.
How many of us this last week used the word Abide in our conversations. We many times will say – Hurry Up, we got to get out of here. We have somewhere to go.
What Jesus is saying today is totally foreign to the world we live in.
Webster’s defines the word Abide as to REMAIN. Jesus is calling us to come to Him and to Remain With Him. If anything else changes in your life the one constant that Christ is calling us to is to anchor our life with Him.
To abide with him and be with Him.
This morning let us slow down and listen to what Christ has to say to us.
Realize as we read this that Jesus is signaling the fulfillment of a prophecy and expectation that was laid out by Hosea the prophet that the empty vine of Israel will no longer be empty.

John 15: 1-11
1 "I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. 2 "Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away ; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit. 3 "You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. 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. 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 . 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. 7 "If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. 8 "My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples. 9 "Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love. 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. 11 "These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full.

FASTENED TO CHRIST
One of the themes of John’s gospel is ABIDING IN CHRIST - Paul would use the idea of being IN Christ a good bit in his letters.
True Joy and purpose in life is found in this very simple theme of being connected to Christ.
Once a Christian is baptized into Christ and connected to Jesus we are grafted into an organic body.
The book of Ephesians calls the Church the Body of Christ - The Church is an organic body that is brought to life by the Spirit and connected by the blood of Christ.
This might seem like a crude example of how this works but this is very Biblical – Think about it this way.
When we are baptized we are added to the Body of Christ – the Church – we learn this in Acts 2. It is the blood of Christ that runs through this body that we must have applied to us to be saved.
This body that has the blood of Christ running through it so to speak and it is God’s Spirit that is the Spirit of this body. This Spirit as we learned last week guides the Church into all truth and it is this Spirit that brings life.
Not only does the Church corporately have the blood of Christ and His Spirit but it also works individually for each person – we have the blood applied to our life and it is this same Holy Spirit that sets us apart and will have a role in our resurrection from the dead.
Jesus uses the metaphor of the flock and a shepherd in John 10 which shows His close relationship with His body the Church but this metaphor continues for the Church- Continues with Peter and the shepherding of the flock of John 21: 15-17
This idea of the flock needing shepherds is carried out in the early Church with elders that shepherd the flock of believers.
This work of Christ is to continue in the Church and the work of the Church.
The same is true of the metaphor that Jesus uses as the vine and the branches.
John 15:8, 16 We are to bear fruit because of the work of Christ.
This being in Christ and being fastened to Christ is carried out in John’s Chain of action of his gospel.
John’s Chain of Action:
1) The Father Loves Jesus and loves his disciples (John 15:9)
2) Just as Jesus obeyed the Father, we are to obey the Father (John 15:10)
FRUIT BEARING
Everyday 10 churches go under in the United States
Everyday 7 new churches are started that’s a loss of 3 churches everyday.
In the last 10 years the church attendance has remained, on average, the same in churches across America.
It is reported that in churches today 90% of the work is performed by 10% of the members.
A secular study projected by the year 2050 that Christianity will be so obscure that it will have absolutely no effect on the moral and ethical condition of our country.
Christians have come to the conclusion that bearing fruit is not important as a Christian. This is a totally foreign concept to the Bible.
This is not a new thing. Fruitlessness and not abiding in the vine was something that happened to Israel.
Jesus use of the metaphor of a vine is not a new concept but comes from the OT. Israel was considered to be God’s vine and vineyard but they had not produced Fruit.
Jesus has become the true Israel, the true son of God, the true son that had been called from Egypt and now was embodying the call of Israel and was doing so perfectly.
Jesus being the vine now has called us to stay Fastened to Him and to bear fruit. We are to grow in Him and continue in this grown.
If we don’t bad things will happen to us spiritually. Look at the example of Israel in Isaiah 5
Isaiah 5: 1-7
1 Let me sing now for my well-beloved A song of my beloved concerning His vineyard. My well-beloved had a vineyard on a fertile hill. 2 He dug it all around, removed its stones, And planted it with the choicest vine. And He built a tower in the middle of it And also hewed out a wine vat in it; Then He expected it to produce good grapes, But it produced only worthless ones. 3 "And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, Judge between Me and My vineyard. 4 "What more was there to do for My vineyard that I have not done in it? Why, when I expected it to produce good grapes did it produce worthless ones ? 5 "So now let Me tell you what I am going to do to My vineyard : I will remove its hedge and it will be consumed ; I will break down its wall and it will become trampled ground. 6 "I will lay it waste ; It will not be pruned or hoed, But briars and thorns will come up. I will also charge the clouds to rain no rain on it." 7 For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel And the men of Judah His delightful plant. Thus He looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed ; For righteousness, but behold, a cry of distress.
God planted Israel as His vine as His vineyard and they didn’t produce good grapes.
Israel had not produced the fruit that they were called to do.
Now God is calling us as grafted into Christ to produce good fruit, to grow and multiply.
Part of producing fruit is two fold:
1) We grow personally in holiness and obedience to God. Spiritual growth of the Christian that exhibits the fruits of the Spirit as discussed in Ephesians 5 is the axiom.
2) We produce others in Christ – we bring people to Jesus – we produce new fruit in bringing new Christians into the Kingdom.

FRIENDSHIP
It is hard for us to discuss the kingdom of God many times and think of it as relational.
Difference in English and Hebrew of kingship—In English, a kingdom is a political territory, run by the king.
In Hebrew, a kingdom is where the king's will is obeyed—at its core it is a relational thing, not political.
God wants a relationship with us. He wants to be our friend.
In Mr. Alter’s fifth-grade class. it’s impossible to tell which boy is undergoing chemotherapy. Nearly all the boys are bald. Thirteen of them shaved their heads so a sick buddy wouldn’t feel out of place.
"If everybody has their head shaved, sometimes people don’t know who’s who. They don’t know who has cancer, and who just shaved their head" said 11-yeat-old Scott Sebelius, one of the baldies at Lake Elementary School. For the record, Ian O’Gorman is the sick one.
Doctors recently removed a malignant tumor from his small intestine, and a week ago he started chemotherapy to treat the disease, called lymphoma.
"Besides surgery, I had tubes up my nose. I had butterflies in my stomach" said Ian, who’ll have eight more weeks of chemotherapy in an effort to keep the cancer from returning.
Ian decided to get his head shaved before all his hair fell out in clumps. To his surprise, his friends wanted to join him - in a move reminiscent of the 1992 U.S. Olympic volleyball players, who shaved their heads in a show of solidarity with a bald teammate.
"The last thing he would want is to not fit in, to be made fun of, so we just wanted to make him feel better and not left out" said 10-year-old Kyle Hanslik.
idea, and then one of their parents started a list. Last week, they all went to the barber shop together.
"It’s hard to put words to," said Ian’s father, Shawn, choking back tears as he talked about the boys. "It’s very emotional to think about kids like that who would come together, to have them do such a thing to support Ian." The boys’ teacher, Jim Alter, was so inspired that be, too, shaved his head.
God has chose us and loves us.
How do we know that God loves us?
1 John 4: 9-10
9 By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
The TV news program 20/20 once had a segment on baby chicks that were packaged and marketed.
These tiny chicks traveled on conveyer belts past workers who selected them to fit into a box to be shipped out and sold.
The chicks were chosen by sex, size, general appearance. But some were not chosen.
The cameras followed these baby chicks as they slipped by the workers and fell off the end of the conveyer belt… to die.
That’s the way of this world. If you don’t fit into the box, you’re rejected and left to die.
John 15:16
16 "You did not choose Me but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit, and that your fruit would remain, so that whatever you ask of the Father in My name He may give to you.
God chooses to have a relationship with us. God has chosen us and everyone has infinite worth to God.
Because of the Cross – God now chooses us to be saved in His Son – no one is not important to God.
We live in a world where life doesn’t mean much. The world tells you that you are worthless but God looks at you and says you’re worth everything.
We matter to God and Jesus actually tells us that we matter so much that God wants to be friends with us. Not just our savior, not just our redeemer but our friend.
Christ has disclosed the teachings of the Father and the inner truth of God. This is a sign of true friendship.

Christ has showed His desire for friendship in that he did the following for us:
1) Died for us – laid down His life.
John 15:13
13 "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.
2) Christ shows His desire to be friends with us in that He discloses the truth from the Father.
John 15:15
15 "No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing ; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.
So this desire for friendship from God is manifested in two ways – the Cross and revelation of truth.
The cross draws us to God and the Truth shows us the path we are to walk – the life we are to live.
What is the ultimate sign of our friendship with God?
How do we respond?
1) Obey the Father and Son
John 15: 10
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.
2) Love one another
John 15:12 and 17
12 "This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you
17 "This I command you, that you love one another.
Our response if we want to be God’s friends includes that we LOVE one another.
I think of my own children. As parents we love one another as husband and wife and we share that love with our children.
We manifest our love for our children by working hard, sacrificing and providing for them.
But we also provide rules and parameters and we raise them the right way.
In return the children are to respect their parents and obey. They manifest their love and respect by obedience.
They also reflect their love for us by loving each other as siblings. Nothing grieves a parent like brothers and sisters in the same family that don’t get along.
The same is true for God’s family – God has sacrificed Christ for us, lays down family rules, in response we obey our Father in Heaven but also we are to love our siblings one another.
This is exactly what Jesus is talking about.

Conclusion:
In 1969, Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black celebrated his 83rd birthday
His colleague, frequent opponent and good friend, John Marshall Harlan, sent him a birthday letter. This is a simple gesture for most men, but Justice Harlan was almost totally blind.
To sign an opinion, he found it necessary to turn on a massive set of lights that had been installed above his desk and use a large, single lens magnifying glass.
With the glass on his eye actually touching the paper, ...he would struggle painfully to complete his signature.
IT WAS THE ONLY WRITING HE EVER DID.
The birthday note to Justice Black covered a page. When he had read it, Black folded it and put it carefully in his pocket, then turned his back on his clerk for a few minutes. When he turned around, his eyes were full of tears. "He wrote it himself," he said.
Today we have witnessed that God wants to be our friend. He wants us back in His family. He desires this so much he sent his own hand written letter in the life of His Son.
He sent it so vividly that His Son showed us exactly how we should live even to sacrifice to the cross.
That type of sacrifice and love gets one’s attention.