Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the last day of 2023. Yeah, some mixed emotions on that. Some of you are cheering and others are like, man, it was quite the year. And at this time of year, we naturally reflect on what the year had in store. And I just have to say that God is a very good God. Regardless of the trials and the struggles that this congregation went through, God is a good God.
Speaker: Some of the members of this congregation experience loss, job loss, loss of a family member, close family members, loss of children. We've seen marriages reconciled and we've seen marriages end. And it doesn't change who God is. He's still a good God.
Speaker: This morning, as we look at the new year, we set goals. They come in the form of New Year's resolutions. A lot of those, 60 % of those actually, I looked up the stat. 60 % has to do with physical health. And so it probably has something to do with the two major celebrations we just had with Thanksgiving and Christmas and family and food and eggnog, which I looked up and has 400 calories per eight -ounce class.
Speaker: And I don't, and I don't just, so I don't just drink an eight ounce glass and so it makes me reconsider where I'm at in my life. But a lot of New Year's resolutions has to do with physical fitness or working out. Some have to do with financial goals. Maybe you're looking for retirement or adjusting your retirement or looking for a job change. But there is a section where we focus on our spiritual goals. A lot of times that looks like a read the Bible through a year plan.
Speaker: I remember my first time committing to the Lord that I was going to do a devotional every single day. I was in fifth grade and I got this devotional for Christmas and it was a 365 -day devotional. They were half -page devotionals and I said, this is totally doable. January 1, I came in strong.
Speaker: January 2 I completed it, January 3 I completed it, and then I missed 362 consecutive days after that. And my spiritual goal, I felt like a spiritual failure. I felt like I had promised something to the Lord, and then I felt like a failure.
Speaker: And so as we look at the new year, we want to do things well. We want to be good husbands. We want to be good fathers. We want to perform well in our workplaces. We want to have financial goals. We want to be physically fit. And all these expectations, especially the spiritual expectations of who we are in Christ, start to bear on our shoulders.
Speaker: And we start to become overwhelmed for all the decisions we have to make. As parents, we decide, am I going to put my kid in public school or am I going to homeschool him? Am I going to put him in private school? Am I doing enough as a parent spiritually for my child? And we start bearing this burden, these spiritual burdens. And the passage we're going to look at this morning, Jesus eliminates that burden off of our shoulders with one word. That word is not a secret. It's at the top of your outline.
Speaker: And that word is abide. With that word abide, just by that silence of the 10 seconds that I just did makes some of you uncomfortable. And that must mean there's some reservations with that word abide. Because to abide means we have to sit quiet
Speaker: It means we have to focus and we have so many things going on in life. When we sit down and sit quiet, our brain is filled with other things that aren't what God wants for us. John 15, you could turn there in your Bibles if you have your Bibles. If you don't have your Bibles, bring your Bibles. If you don't have a Bible, come to me afterwards. I'll give you a Bible. This is the key. This is the key to abide. This is the key to abiding.
Speaker: We're gonna do 17 verses, it's a lot of verses. So we're not gonna do an in -depth study. If we were to do an in -depth study, we'd probably have to break this up into three or four sermons. And so this is gonna be an overview of this section of verses to just grasp a little bit of what Jesus is talking about when he's saying, abide.
Speaker: Where we're at in John 15 is considered the upper room discourse. It's where we see the Last Supper. It's where we see Jesus wash the disciples' feet. It's where we see Jesus identify Judas as the betrayer.
Speaker: And so they're in the upper room and at the end of chapter 14, Jesus says, let's go, get up and let's go. And so now it's Jesus and his 11 disciples, his core group of disciples, Judas has gone his own way and will later betray Jesus. And in chapter 15, 16 and 17, it doesn't exactly say where they were, but they end up at the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus was betrayed and goes to the cross.
Speaker: So we don't know where they were, but it was likely that they were by a vineyard, because this is the vine and the branches. And Jesus was a very practical teacher. They could have been by a vineyard in the Kedron Valley. They could have been at the temple gate where there was a vine inscribed in gold on the temple gate. It was Passover, so the gates would have been open. But the Bible doesn't say. But Jesus is talking about the vine and the branches. Jesus has a timeline on his life at this point, because he knows he's going to the cross the next day.
Speaker: He's been with his disciples for years in this ministry and he has words to share with them before he goes to the cross and these are those words. These are all in red letter means this is Jesus speaking this whole time in John 15.
Speaker: 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 bear even more fruit. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me and I 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.
Speaker: I am the vine, you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit apart from me, you can do nothing. If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away, it withers, such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire, and burned.
Speaker: If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be given you. This is to my Father's glory that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. As the Father has loved me, I have loved you, now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's commands and remained in his love.
Speaker: I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this, love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this that he lay his life down for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends for everything that I have learned from my father I have made known to you.
Speaker: "'You did not choose me, but I chose you, "'and appointed you to go bear fruit, "'fruit that will last. "'Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. "'This is my command, love each other.'" This is a very common Bible story or Bible verse. If you've been in church any period of time, you've heard this before, and it's pretty simple. There's a vine, there's a branch, that branch can do nothing unless it's in the vine.
Speaker: This may be your first time here, and you can understand that concept that there's a vine and a branch, and that branch is nothing unless it's abiding in the vine. For the disciples, this was a revolutionary message. It meant more to them when he said this because of those first five words that Jesus spoke. He said, I am the true vine.
Speaker: If there's a true vine, that means there must have been another vine. And so to find out what that other vine is, we're gonna go into the Old Testament, into Isaiah, Isaiah five, one through seven. I will sing for the one I love a song about his vineyard.
Speaker: My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside. He dug it up and cleared it of stones, and he planted it with the choicest vines. He built a watchtower in it and cut out the winepress as well. Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit. Now you dwellers in Jerusalem and the men of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard what more could I have done for my vineyard that I have done for it?
Speaker: When I looked for good grapes, why did it only yield bad? Now I will tell you, what am I going to do to my vineyard? I will take away its hedge and it will be destroyed. I will break down its wall and it will be trampled. I will make it a wasteland, neither pruned or cultivated.
Speaker: and briars and thrones will grow up there. I will command the clouds not to rain on it. The vineyard of the Lord Almighty is the house of Israel. And the men of Judah are the garden of its delight. He looked for justice, but saw bloodshed, for righteousness, but heard cries of distress. The first part of verse seven, the vineyard of the Lord Almighty is the house of Israel.
Speaker: Skip ahead to Jeremiah 2, 21. It says, I had planted you like a choice vine of sound and reliable stock. How then did you turn against me into a corrupt, wild vine? Jeremiah 6, 9 and 10. This is what the Lord says, the Lord Almighty says, let them glean and remnant of the Israel as thoroughly as a vine. Pass your hand over the branches again like one gathering grapes.
Speaker: To whom can I speak and give warning to? Who will listen to me? Their ears are closed and they cannot hear. The word of the Lord is offensive to them and they find no pleasure in it.
Speaker: So to the disciples, this was a revolutionary message because Jesus is saying, I'm the true vine. Up until this point, the disciples put all of their identity in their Jewish culture. They put all their identity and their upbringing in the house of Israel because what they knew was that was the vine. And Jesus is saying, your identity is no longer in your heritage or what your father believed or what your father fathers believed. Your identity is now solely in me.
Speaker: No salvation can come but through me. No hope can come through me. No life can come but through me. This was a powerful statement. The disciples had heard powerful statements from Jesus before. In fact, this is the seventh I Am statement that Jesus made in John. He said, I am the bread of life. I am the light of the world. I am the door. I am the good shepherd.
Speaker: I am the resurrection in the life. I am the way, the truth in the life. And this was the nail in the coffin taking away any other opportunity of anything being a source of life. He said, I am the true vine. In order to have any type of life or any type of properly following Jesus, we must abide in Jesus.
Speaker: Abide, remain, stay connected. I think of my wife and I, like when we go on a date and we sit at a restaurant and we look across the table and there's a family of four sitting there and you've seen it too and they're all buried in their phones. You know they're a family, you know it's a father, a mother and a son and a daughter, but they're buried in their phones. They are not present with each other. You know they're connected as a family.
Speaker: But they have no clue, they're nowhere of what's going on around them. And I love to cast judgment on those people. I love to say, man, I would never do that, right? But then I wake up on a Monday morning and I say, babe, let's go have some coffee on the couch. And we go sit next to each other on the couch drinking our coffee and I whip out my phone and I check text messages and I check emails.
Speaker: I share something with her on Facebook. I know the memes she likes. But am I connecting with her? Do I know what current insecurities she has? Do I know what hurts she's currently going through? Or am I staring at my phone and invested in my phone? And then later on the week, we get in a fight. Man, I wish I would have known she was hurting. I wish I would have known she was going through this. And I could have if I was just present or abiding in that situation with my wife.
Speaker: Abide isn't a word we use commonly, but you might know it from like my humble abode, right? A house, a place where we dwell, our dwelling place. And this resonates with me because when I go on vacation and I go away for two days or I visit family or I go anywhere, we had a couple of days away, after day like one and a half to two, my mind kind of goes back to home.
Speaker: My mind wants to be in my house, my mind wants to be in the comfort of my home where I get my resources, where I get my rest, and home is a very important place to me. And we can play that same thing with Jesus if we abide in him. And if we disconnect from him, we should have a desire to abide, to be back home.
Speaker: Psalm 62 .1, my soul finds rest in God alone. My salvation comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation. He is my fortress. I will never be shaken. Romans 6 .23, for the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Acts 4 .12, salvation is found in no one else, for there is no one under the name of heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.
Speaker: Romans 10, nine and 10, if we confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
Speaker: All of these are verses of salvation. All of these are verses of falling into that, abiding with Christ, and in all of them, we bring nothing to the table. We have nothing to offer when we come to Him. Everything in our salvation relies on Him. We are grafted into the family of God as children. We have the right to be called sons and daughters of God, and it's all by Him, not by us.
Speaker: I took a college class, it was called a plant science class, and the first thing we did was we grafted plants together. And I don't know if you have any experience or have ever done that, but it's pretty incredible. There's different variations and different varieties of, we'll say, vines or vineyards, and some have very temperamental root systems where they're affected by soil temperature and moisture, and they will rot. And then others have very hardy root systems, but they may not have very good fruit.
Speaker: And so they'll take a hardy root system vine with a breed of grape that produces good fruit and they'll splice them together and graft them into it. And so my teacher comes and I have my plant and it's got the little leaves on it and he comes and he sets this, he called it a branch, he sets it on my desk and I was like, sir, this is a stick, this is dead. And he's like, yeah, it doesn't get its life until it's grafted into the vine.
Speaker: And so we put a wedge in the vine and put a V in the stick, my dead stick, and we put it in there and then wrapped it with some clean wrap and put it in the greenhouse. Two weeks later, we came back and you could immediately see that that stick had revived. There was life now in that stick. And in fact, there was a bud to produce a leaf. We've been grafted into the family of God and we are children of the Father.
Speaker: Once we are grafted and once we are biting, we produce fruit, but not by our own means. That stick was dead. That stick was sitting there dead. And it reminds me of Ephesians 2, and I'm sorry it's not on the slides. Ephesians 2.
Speaker: Verse one, it says, as for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sin in which you used to live and where you followed the ways of the world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air. And if we skip down to verse four, it says, but because of his great love for us, God who is in his rich mercy made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in our transgressions. It is by grace that you have been saved through faith.
Speaker: So once we abide in him, we then produce fruit. We are now that conduit. We don't have anything to offer, but if we abide in him, we are now that conduit between the vine and producing fruit. We hear that and we say, I need to produce fruit to prove that I'm a Christian.
Speaker: I need to produce fruit. I need to do something. I need to serve the homeless. I need to do this." And we put this burden on ourselves of producing fruit. When he doesn't ask us to produce fruit first, he asks us to abide. A good example of this is I have a good buddy, and his prior church was part of a very big church, a mega church. They had too many members to count.
Speaker: But they had no community involvement. And so someone's like, we need to get involved in our community. We need to do something. And so they started a Do Something campaign. And they were going to do something for the community. They took eight months to plan this Do Something in the community. They had hourly or weekly meetings for an hour to talk about what they were going to do. They had a budget, so they bought t -shirts that said, do something. They said, oh, if we're going to do something, we're going to get hungry, so we need to feed our people.
Speaker: and so they put part of the budget towards feeding the people and after eight months when it came down to it they went into this neighborhood about 45 people and raked up three yards and then went back to the church completed and patted themselves on the back with a meal he said what we did that day could have been done by four guys waking up on a saturday morning go hey you want to go rake some leaves
Speaker: But they talked about doing something because they wanted to produce fruit for the kingdom and they never regarded what God wanted for that fruit to be produced. That's not even the worst part. They do something shirts. It was fall time. And so they wanted them to be seen, but most of them were wearing flannels or zip -up jackets and they had it open. Well, if you chop off the first few letters of something and the last few letters of something, their shirts in all the pictures said, do meth.
Speaker: He said, we did more damage to the kingdom of God that day than anything. And this is what happened when we put ourselves in charge of producing fruit. Jesus says, you're not in charge of producing the fruit. He says, abide in me, abide in me. And naturally fruit is going to be produced.
Speaker: Galatians 5, 22, but the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self -control. There's a process that takes place before we produce fruit when we abide. When we abide, we experience pruning.
Speaker: When we abide, we experience pruning. John 15, 2 -3. Sorry, I got to flip back there.
Speaker: John 15, that's Luke. John 15, two and three says, he cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes. And so what does that look like? What does that pruning look like? Sometimes it's sin. Sometimes he's cutting sin directly out of our life. Sometimes it's people moving away out of our life. Most of the time it's just correction or discipline. And then sometimes it's where our priorities are.
Speaker: Very familiar verse, James 1, 2 through 4 says, consider pure joy my brothers and sisters when you face trials of many kinds. Because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work in you so that you may be mature, complete, lacking nothing.
Speaker: Kelly's parents, they moved into a house, I don't know, five years ago, and there was an established garden, and on the backside of this trellis, this fence line, was this beautiful grapevine. It was huge. It came from one stalk or one vine, and it spread the whole length of the fence, and we were incredibly excited to receive the produce off of that grapevine. Well, it hadn't been tended to in years, and so it was way bigger than it should have been.
Speaker: So when the season came for that start to do producing fruit, all these hundreds of little fruits started popping up and we got excited because there were so many. Harvest season came and went and those fruit never developed because that vine was so spread out it sent all its resources to the leaves and it didn't produce any good fruit.
Speaker: And so with part of my plant science class, they taught me how to prune a plant. So I asked my father -in -law, may I prune this plant? He said yes. And I went out there and I did what I remember and what I was taught to do, and I was to prune.
Speaker: But there was so much on this thing, this pruning turned into a very aggressive, it was more like whacking. And I cleared this thing out, and my father -in -law came out, and he was taking it back, and he was like, uh, my vine, right? And I was like, yeah, I know, it looks pretty bad. I was starting to doubt the process of pruning this plant back. The next season, it didn't produce as many grapes, but the grapes that it produced were profitable. They were good. They could be used. They were useful.
Speaker: Hebrews 12, 11 says, no discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and a peace for those who have been trained by it.
Speaker: Jay Vernon McGee, he tells this story of him and his friend getting in trouble and they go to his mom's house and they were looking for a whooping and his friend leaned over to him before they went in and he said, hey, I figured something out when it comes to spankings. He said, when they spank you the first time, constantly move towards their hand and they lose power to the spank and it doesn't hurt as bad.
Speaker: I wish I would have read that commentary about 25 years ago, because that's some good information. But his point was when we are being disciplined by the Lord or when we be corrected by the Lord, if we move closer to Him and abide in Him, we experience less pain through that discipline.
Speaker: But if something's going on in our life and we see it as this all punishing power from the Lord and we start to disconnect ourselves from the Lord, we're only putting ourselves in more separation from Him and in more pain. And so if you're experiencing that in your life, to draw near to Him limits that amount of discipline that you receive from the Lord, the amount of correction that you receive from the Lord.
Speaker: The word prune in Greek literally translates to cleanse, to be cleansed. And if we look at verse, yep, I didn't write it down, now I'm looking for it. Verse three, it says, you are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you.
Speaker: remain in me and I remain in you, no branch can bear fruit by itself. You are already clean." This reminds me of when Jesus is washing the disciples' feet and Peter says, no, you're not washing my feet, I'm going to wash your feet. And he says, if you don't allow me to wash your feet, then you have no part with me. And then Peter's like, well, then wash my hands and wash my head. And Jesus said, you're missing the point. You are already clean. Why would someone who'd take a bath get another bath? He says, you're already clean. I just need to wash the dirt from the world that's on your feet.
Speaker: And so he's saying this, by my word, you're already clean, but now there's some business to take care of of the things of the world that have an attachment in your life. The song, Holy Spirit, I love that song. Holy Spirit, you are welcome here. Flood this place and fill the atmosphere. Your glory, God, is what our hearts long for to be overcome by your presence, Lord. I love that song.
Speaker: About a year ago, I started being extremely convicted about what I was worshipping the words and actually singing. Was I loving that song because it has a nice melody or a nice harmony or nice words to it? Or was I loving that song because it was the truth of God's word? And so I started focusing on this song because I loved it so much and I said, what does it mean to welcome the Holy Spirit into our life?
Speaker: and I was praying about it and working through it, and then I walked into someone's house, maybe a month ago, and directly in their living room, above their couch, probably a hobby lobby sign, it says, Holy Spirit, you are welcome here. And I thought, if I welcomed you into my house, and I brought you into the entryway, and I'm like, all right, stay here because the rest of my house is a mess.
Speaker: Definitely don't go in the bedroom. Here, I'll pull up a chair for you. I'll bring your food to you here. Would you feel welcome in my house? No, and we do that to the Holy Spirit. We say, Holy Spirit, you are welcome here. Just don't touch this area of my life. In nowhere in this passage, nowhere in this passage does it say that we are the gardener and we get to prune things out of our life.
Speaker: That's absolutely the Holy Spirit's job through Scripture. Jesus said, by my words, you are clean. And this process of pruning is a cleansing process. And we're not in charge of what goes and what stays.
Speaker: We are, we are asked to abide and he will prune us because if we decide what goes and stays in our life, we now created a consumer version of Jesus and that's not Jesus. That's not true Jesus.
Speaker: So what it looks like is you're walking through Walmart and you come to the Jesus aisle and you ask your wife, babe, do we have enough Jesus to last us till next Sunday? You know, I could use some generosity because I need something to post on Facebook. Here, Lord, you can have my anger, but keep it close. I might need it back. And we start deciding what comes in and out of our life. And that doesn't make Jesus Lord of our life. That makes us the Lord of our life.
Speaker: Jesus doesn't want to be a supplement to our life. He's not an addition to our life. He's not even a crucial part of our life. He is the absolute source of our life. Everything that is in us, that is good, comes from him. When we abide, we experience effective prayer.
Speaker: When we abide, we experience effective prayer. John 15, seven says, if you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be given to you.
Speaker: This is to my father's glory that you bear much fruit. Ask whatever you wish and it will be given to you. If you jump down to 15, 16, it says, you did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go bear fruit, fruit that will last, then the father will give you whatever you ask in my name. My kids love to holler at me from across the house. Dad!
Speaker: And for some reason I entertain it and I holler back. And then they say, I didn't hear what you said. I said, because you weren't close to me. And so we get all up in arms when God's not answering our prayers and he's going, I can't, you're not close to me. You've chose to walk away. You chose to disconnect from me. You chose to not daily be in my word. You chose to not daily speak to me. You chose to disconnect from the church.
Speaker: And now you're expecting to hear your prayers. Proverbs 15. Catch up on my slides here for a second. Proverbs 15 29 says the Lord is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayers of the righteous, draw near to him, abide in him. When we abide, we receive irreplaceable joy, irreplaceable joy.
Speaker: John 15, 11 says, I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. Some of us have been Christians for 25, 30 years and we say we have the joy of the Lord in us, but our face doesn't say the same story. You've been a Christian for 30, 40 years and you look like you've been sipping on sour milk.
Speaker: Your face is not eluding the joy of the Lord. You're negative. You're cynical. Gossip. And we tear down the body of believers all because we are not abiding in Christ. If we abide in Christ and realize what he's done for us, salvation alone is the joy that we need. The fact that we aren't going to hell
Speaker: The fact that we aren't condemned for our own sins should be joy enough. We should be walking to the grocery store no matter what we have going on in our life, and the cashier should say, why are you so happy? And it's common, it's super common for us to say, hey, my daughter just had a grand baby, check it out. Or I just had a kid, this is what it looks like. And we're so, so ready to brag about other things in our life
Speaker: But it's hard for us to brag about Jesus because ourselves, we're not experiencing that joy. And it's not because He's not there to provide it. It's because we're not abiding in Him. If we truly abide in Him, the joy of the Lord naturally flows through us. We are radiant with His light. And people ask the question, why are you so happy? But we get distracted.
Speaker: Hey, I lost my job, right? My family's in shambles. When we abide in Christ, we can look at those situations and say, don't you see who I'm abiding in? This is why I have joy. You can't take that from me. Until I focus on other things is when I lose that joy is because I'm not abiding in the resource of joy that he has to offer me.
Speaker: When we abide, it brings glory to God. John 15 .8 says, this is my father's glory. This is to my father's glory that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. I often don't feel worthy. I don't feel good enough. I question why God would use me.
Speaker: I didn't have a wild past or anything where I'm like, man, I did this and this and this, why would God use me now? And some of you might be sitting there going, I've done a lot of things and you don't know what I've done, so there's no way God can use me. On the contrary, he's the one, you're the one he wants to use. Because through your testimony, glory is brought to him that God would choose an imperfect person who's made imperfect choices
Speaker: and still be able to use that person as that conduit branch to produce fruit for his kingdom. It's way more impactful for God used to pull you out of where you were and use you for his glory than it is for him to come for the righteous. He came for the sinner. He came for you. He died on the cross for you.
Speaker: It says he died for the sins of all time. Meaning when he was on the cross, he was thinking about you and saying, I don't care where he's been, I don't care what he's done, I don't care what situation he thinks I can't pull him out of, this is why I'm dying for you.
Speaker: Galatians 5, 22, and 26 will read it again. But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self -control. Against such things, there is no law. And those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we lived by the spirit, let us also walk by the spirit.
Speaker: By abiding in Christ, it gives us every resource that we need to perform the duties that we talked about in the beginning of this sermon. I wanna be a good dad. I wanna be a good husband. I wanna be a good follower of Christ. And when we focus on those things, we take our eyes off abiding in him. He says, first, you must abide.
Speaker: Once you abide, that is the key. Everything else flows from there. I want you to just entertain me for a second and imagine, and if it helps to close your eyes, go ahead and close your eyes. I'm going to, so you can either stare at me closing my eyes or you can close your eyes.
Speaker: But just imagine if we put all the expectations of the world, all the expectations of the church, all the expectations of our family members, all the expectations we put on ourselves, and just lay them aside right now. And if every single person in this church decided that they were truly going to abide in Christ, abide in the person of Jesus Christ, and realize that apart from him we can do nothing,
Speaker: and we daily study His word, and we have open communication with Him, and we pray without ceasing, and we stay connected to the church. And then each one of us walked into the world, glowing as the light of Jesus because He's radiating from us, the impact we could have on the world.
Speaker: It's not by us. It's simply by putting all those expectations away and focusing on him, abiding in him. Father, thank you for simplifying this message. Thank you for simplifying your word.
Speaker: There's so much in your word to digest, and here you are the night before you're gonna die, and you're giving the disciples truth on how to proceed in life when you're gone, and your message to them is to abide. Father, thank you.
Speaker: As the band comes forward, I just want to give you guys the opportunity. The altar's open. If you've been just worn down, bore down by the weight of the shoulders of expectations that have been put on you. If you feel like a failure in your spiritual walk, which I do all the time.
Speaker: If you're in an area where you're like, you know what? I can't sit quiet because the past decisions that I've made have come back on me. There's guilt, there's shame, there's so much that I would have to deal with. Jesus is saying yes. Jesus is saying abide.
