Last December, a gathering at my home set the stage for a spiritual exploration that has since blossomed into a transformative journey, deeply rooted in the practice of abiding in Christ. With the new year well underway, I'm eager to share the insights and experiences that have shaped this path, particularly through the lens of prayer as we navigate the early months of 2024. Our latest discussion unpacks the profound metaphor of the vine and branches from John 15, revealing our essential need for a continuous, lived faith deeply intertwined with Jesus.
As we venture into the intimate terrains of our relationship with Jesus, we uncover the parallels with His bond to the Father, offering us a blueprint of trust and devotion. The episode brings to light the nurturing role of God as the gardener of our souls, where the act of divine pruning emerges not as a harsh correction but as a loving transformation toward our truest selves. With personal anecdotes and collective insights, we chart the path of spiritual resilience—a journey marked by the embrace of vulnerability and a commitment to growth, even when it leads us through the valleys of discomfort and change.
Concluding our heartfelt conversation, we extend an invitation to join us in practices that foster a deeper communion with Christ. From worship filled with expectation to the shared joy found within our communities, we explore how these collective experiences help us abide in the vine. Reflecting on Jesus' promise of fruitfulness, we’re inspired to persevere in our spiritual walk, trusting that our patient endeavors will ultimately blossom into a life that glorifies God in every season. Join me in this episode as we affirm our dedication to a faith that goes beyond the surface, seeking to bear lasting fruit in all that we do.
Last December, a gathering at my home set the stage for a spiritual exploration that has since blossomed into a transformative journey, deeply rooted in the practice of abiding in Christ. With the new year well underway, I'm eager to share the insights and experiences that have shaped this path, particularly through the lens of prayer as we navigate the early months of 2024. Our latest discussion unpacks the profound metaphor of the vine and branches from John 15, revealing our essential need for a continuous, lived faith deeply intertwined with Jesus.
As we venture into the intimate terrains of our relationship with Jesus, we uncover the parallels with His bond to the Father, offering us a blueprint of trust and devotion. The episode brings to light the nurturing role of God as the gardener of our souls, where the act of divine pruning emerges not as a harsh correction but as a loving transformation toward our truest selves. With personal anecdotes and collective insights, we chart the path of spiritual resilience—a journey marked by the embrace of vulnerability and a commitment to growth, even when it leads us through the valleys of discomfort and change.
Concluding our heartfelt conversation, we extend an invitation to join us in practices that foster a deeper communion with Christ. From worship filled with expectation to the shared joy found within our communities, we explore how these collective experiences help us abide in the vine. Reflecting on Jesus' promise of fruitfulness, we’re inspired to persevere in our spiritual walk, trusting that our patient endeavors will ultimately blossom into a life that glorifies God in every season. Join me in this episode as we affirm our dedication to a faith that goes beyond the surface, seeking to bear lasting fruit in all that we do.
Good morning, east Side Church. How are you? Sounds just a little hot in the house. It's a little warm in the room in general, so I won't add to the energy coming out, valerie, well, I want you to take out your bulletins for a moment and just flip a little bit past where you're at right now with the passage, and you'll see the kind of daily practice for this week. It's a little bit different than normal. I just want to highlight, just kind of remind you, what this is, remind you how it's designed to function in our life together.
Speaker 1:At the end of last calendar year, in December, we gathered at my house and as we walked through kind of where we wanted to go in the coming months and years together, one of the things we felt called to do as an eldership is to deepen, kind of, our spiritual disciplines, our practices, and what we mean by that is just looking at Jesus' life, the things that he spent time doing. We also want to spend time doing those things. We think that there's a correction that's needed to oftentimes what our churches can be, which is very heavy on the words of Jesus and light on the ways of Jesus, and so we want to to bring those into balance. And so this first few months, this first third of 2024, we're focusing on prayer. Next is going to be solitude. Introverts for joists, extroverts lay hands on you and pray. I'll need it myself, but this daily practice is kind of kind of the vehicle. It might change a little bit in how it goes, but this is what we're going to do. So this coming week we just designed a way through kind of praying through Holy Week.
Speaker 1:We don't come from a high church tradition, most of us, but in the high church there are gatherings almost every day marking Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem. Typically there would be some kind of celebration on this day, palm Sunday, and then walking through kind of each of the days leading up to Easter Sunday, and so we don't do that. But you have a chance through the daily practice to kind of walk a little bit through that yourself, and so wanted to highlight that for you as we get started this morning. Well, last week Houston kind of guided us through John 14, the first seven verses of that or Jesus presents himself as the way, the truth and the life. It was the sixth of Jesus' I Am statements that we've gone through in the Gospel of John, our series Come and See, and Houston helped us to see that this is not just a comfort in troubling times, but this is a profound and foundational claim about our relationship with God.
Speaker 1:Jesus is positioned as the unique and kind of only pathway to God. Remember the illustration that he used of coming face to face with a sheer cliff. And it's not just that Jesus enables us to climb the cliff on our own we can't, but he actually lifts us and carries us up the sheer cliff. And so we're coming to John 15 this morning, one through 17,. I told the guys this week this feels like I've been handed a family heirloom Right. It's like grandma's, great-grandma's, great-grandma's, great-grandma's China Bowl and everyone loves it and everyone needs it, and I've been in charge of keeping it for us. And this is such a sweet passage because it helps us to see, and deep in the understanding that we came to last week Of what it really means to live in Christ.
Speaker 1:Jesus introduces a metaphor of vine and branches, not just as a beautiful image but as a profound exploration of our dependence on him. And John 14, jesus focused on belief in him as the way to the Father, the initial step of faith, of trust. But now this morning we're going to take it further. We're going to illustrate the ongoing trust in him. What that looks like in our lives on a regular basis. Jesus presents himself as the true vine, the source of spiritual life and nourishment, with his father playing the role of the attentive master vine dresser, nurturing our growth and our faithfulness. Jesus' invitation to abide in him this morning, family broadens the earlier statement of him being the way, the truth and the life. This is about keeping us connected to him, tethered to him, as he makes the ascent up the sheer cliff. Our initial faith in Jesus is the path to the Father and it extends in this continuous lived reality the entire time that we're alive. But our spiritual vitality, our capacity to bear fruit, is directly connected with our abiding in Christ. So what this is going to offer us this morning is the clear reminder of our complete reliance on Christ, a reassurance of God's nurturing presence in our lives and the challenge to bear fruit, fruit that reflects the life and the love that we have received from Jesus.
Speaker 1:So, as we engage with this passage this morning, I just want to encourage you to open your hearts. I just encourage you, where you're sitting right now, put your feet flat on the floor If there's something buzzing around in your head. I just want to give you a minute to just, or a moment to just ask God to help you. Lay that to the side, just to be present here in this moment. I love this time that we have together each week. This is unique in our life as a church. It's a really precious time that we can have with God. So, before we go any further, would you pray with me? Let's ask the Spirit's guidance. God, we do come before you this morning together. I'm grateful for this kind of unique expression of our gathering, of your people, uniquely sitting under this word together today, uniquely worshiping you through song and prayer and scripture, later coming to the table, being sent back out as your body to live, to breathe, and we want to deeply connect that with who you are this morning, jesus, and the way that you want us to see our relationship with you and the way it's designed to function. I'm praying you to help us Spirit open our eyes to see Christ. This morning together, my brothers and sisters said with me Amen.
Speaker 1:Well, many of you met my friend Mike Ely this past August. He knows why Dominica came over from Detroit. Mike is pastor of Soma, detroit, and Mike spent some time living in Romania. He loves to travel. If you do Enneagram, mike is the poster boy for the seven personality bouncing around high energy. But during his time in Romania he discovered that Romanians have this rich cultural heritage of home winemaking. It's just a part of the culture and so every house has kind of small vineyards in it.
Speaker 1:And so Mike moved into a house and you notice this kind of pile of stick looking branches on top of the carport where they would park their cars. And he started asking around, reaching out to folks in the neighborhood, and finally was kind of pointed in the direction of this older gentleman who is known for his skill working with vines, because Mike wanted to revive the vines. He's like, hey, I see some grapes on there but I'm not sure what to do. So he reached out to this guy and this guy comes and helps Mike assess the vine and begin not the three week process, not the three month process, but the three year long process of cultivating these vines so that they would be ready to bear the kind of grapes to make wine Typical of an Enneagram seven. This was not the news Mike wanted to hear. He's like there's grapes, why can't we just make wine? You see, even though there were some grapes on the vine, the vine itself was misshapen and had been grown unevenly for some time. It hadn't been pruned, no one had been taking care of it, it was unattended. So if the desire was getting some grapes fast, the results could be fairly immediate. But if the desire was to get a lot of healthy grapes, not just once but year after year, then it was going to take this three years, maybe longer, maybe a little shorter of regular tending, pruning, feeding, watching.
Speaker 1:The opening verses of John 15, one through 17 were invited into this moment that's already in progress, where Jesus is imparting a really crucial metaphor to his disciples. He begins with this statement I am the true vine. A statement that's far more than just analogy. This is a declaration of the essential role that Jesus plays in our spiritual lives. See, here Jesus isn't just positioning himself as a guide or a teacher, he's presenting himself as the very source of spiritual vitality and growth. You see, throughout Israel's history, oftentimes Israel was related to the vine, an image of a vine.
Speaker 1:But if you kind of pick up the Bible story in about Genesis 3 and follow it all the way through the end of the New Testament or Old Testament, you'll notice that the vine was not very productive in the ways that it was supposed to be, and it wasn't for tending. The vine did not produce the fruit that it was supposed to, over and over and over again resisting God turning from him. And so when Jesus presents this to the people that he is teaching in front of instantly, this image would be in their minds. Because when it comes to a vine and its branches, the vine just doesn't just support, it infuses life, channels, necessary nutrients and sustenance. And this is precisely the role that Jesus has come to play in the people of God and the one he plays in our lives. He's not some remote, detached figure, he's intimately connected, supplying everything that we need to grow and to flourish spiritually.
Speaker 1:This theme of dependency is powerfully echoed in verse 5. Jesus says I'm the vine, you're the branches. So not only is Jesus the true vine, but he labels us as the branches, and he's not just doing some metaphorical kind of flourish here. It's a clear illustration of our absolute reliance on him for everything spiritual. And he kind of puts an exclamation point on that by the end of verse 5, saying apart from me, you can do nothing. This isn't about hammering us for our weaknesses, family. It's about recognizing that Jesus is the true source of strength and of life.
Speaker 1:In Jesus' invitation to abide in him. Look at verse 7, he says if you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you. And here we see this clear distinction between this religious observance and what a true abiding in Christ is. It's not a carte blanche for our desires. Rather, it's about the realignment of our will with his. In this abiding, our deepest desires begin to mirror his, reflect a life in tune with his purposes. I want you to just reflect for a moment on how the vitality of the vine directly impacts the health of its branches. Everything comes from the ground through the vine to the branches. There's no other way to get it in. In a similar way, the character of Jesus, marked by his love, his obedience, his sacrifice, is meant to flow through us as we are connected to him. Becomes about picking up his behaviors and the transformation that happens over time as we abide in him, where his words and his ways deepen in us, we begin to reflect his attributes, not just through effort, but through our vital connection to him.
Speaker 1:I was recently talking with a friend and he was highlighting just a practical aspect of this when he was talking about struggling with expressing genuine love to his wife. He'd gone to her and he'd said, hey, I just want to know how would you feel loved by me, guys, you could try that. It's eye-opening. She told him some things that would just make her life easier. They're raising young kids. Instantly, he felt this weight of tasks. He knew that she wanted him to do these things out of a pure heart. He felt his actions were just obligatory rather than heartfelt.
Speaker 1:What this unpacks, or what this illustrates for us, is an important aspect of our relationship with Christ. It can't become just about a religious checklist. See, what my friend realized was off is what we have to realize is off when we approach Christ. It's not about just reading the Word or hearing it preached and kind of coming up with some to-do lists to do in order to stay connected to Christ. It's about the transformation of the heart that comes from a deep and living connection with Jesus and abiding. The word that's underneath, abiding in this passage, is the Greek word meno. It means to dwell, to come home. There's a sense of permanency. It's not a fleeting connection. This isn't like just kind of tying up on the boats in the summertime which is coming right, the flotilla. It's not just kind of floating up, tying up for a little while hey, thanks, it was fun to be together. I'm going to go on my way. No, this is a homecoming, this is a deep rooting.
Speaker 1:Robert Ferrara-Cappan says this about the relationship between Christianity and religion. He says Christianity is not a religion. It's the announcement of the end of religion. Religion consists of all things believing, behaving, worshiping, sacrificing that the human race has ever thought it had to do to get right with God, to be connected with God I would insert, to meno with God. But about these things, christianity has only two comments to make. The first is that none of them ever had the least chance of doing the trick. The blood of bulls and goats can never take away sins and no effort of ours to keep the law of God can ever succeed. The second is that everything religion tried and failed to do has been perfectly done once and for all by Jesus in his death and resurrection. For Christians, therefore, the entire religion shop has been closed, boarded up and forgotten In the context of Jesus' divine family, there's a vital distinction to be made between empty religious activity and a vibrant relationship with God.
Speaker 1:Jesus called in verse four a Bide in me and I in you speak to this need for a sustained, life-giving connection with Him. He emphasizes the necessity of abiding as the only way to bear fruit, highlighting the futility of trying to do it on our own. I've heard one illustration over and over again that asks the question you know, as we're trying to bear fruit in our lives, are we, you know, what are we doing to try? Are we just stapling fruit onto the branches of our life, hoping that nobody notices? Right, you just think of like come fall, you drive past the apple orchards around Madison and you look out and there are just these pieces of paper with apples drawn on them, just stapled to the trees. It is not fooling anybody, least of all the tree. The tree is fully aware this did not come from me and our culture.
Speaker 1:In a culture that tends to equate spiritual maturity with that kind of visible activity, the pressure on us to produce can be almost overwhelming, can't it? More prayer, more service, more study. Every week they publish this thing in the bulletin called the daily practice, and I gotta do it. Jesus is calling us back to the heart of what really matters here, the essence of our faith. Not activity, not a dynamic, growing relationship with Jesus, no, but a dynamic, growing relationship with Jesus. Not activity, dynamic and growing relationship. This relationship is characterized by mutual love, trust and obedience.
Speaker 1:Look at verse nine. This is where Jesus gets this idea from. As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. Something about the relationship between Jesus and the Father that comes out in the way that we abide with Jesus, that the love that the Father has for Jesus is available to us, and so our response to His love is not about striving to earn it, it's about living within it, responding with trust and obedience In such a relationship as we remain connected to Jesus. We don't just act in Christ like ways, we begin to embody Christ Himself. It's about becoming extensions of Jesus in this world, reflecting His nature in our lives, family. Jesus is not just offering us a lesson, he's showing us a way of being. It's a pathway to a life deeply rooted in Him, bearing the fruit that comes from an abiding relationship with the true vine, the true source of our life. Well, as we're working through this passage, we've seen Jesus is our vine, the essential source of life, of sustenance. But it's now we need to turn our attention to another figure mentioned here the Father. God is the vine dresser, and this is where this passage can get a little dicey. So I want you just to stay with me, okay.
Speaker 1:This role that is described of God transcends just caretaking. It encompasses a deeply loving, though often misunderstood, act of pruning. In verse 2, jesus articulates this clearly when he says Every branch in me that does not bear fruit, he, god, the Father, the vine dresser, takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes that it may bear more fruit. And at first glance, this is hard. It's hard to think about this, the notion of being pruned, lots of us being trimmed away. I mean it's cutting right, I don't know about you, but it makes me uncomfortable. You know that feeling you get in your knees when someone describes like a breaking a bone or something like that, or like cutting their hand with a bread knife because they forgot you aren't supposed to cut bagels like this in 2024?.
Speaker 1:But we have to look this in the face. This is why we preach through books. We have to look this squarely in the eyes and consider the true nature of this pruning, because pruning, when it's done by our Father, is an act of discerning and intentional love. This is not haphazard, this is not punitive. God is not arbitrarily cutting away at our lives. He is carefully and lovingly shaping us. We everything dies in the winter here, right, but we're coming to a season where everything's going to come back to life and some of the bushes and the hedges around houses are just going to take the water, the air, the warmth and just grow right. And at some point in time maybe one of your neighbors is going to get out there pruning shears and they're going to bring shape to it. This is the image. This is the image of what God is doing. It's Mike Ely's carport vineyard being trimmed back lovingly over time so that the yield of fruit can increase. And this shaping, although it might be uncomfortable, is God's way of preparing us for a life of greater fruitfulness, far beyond what we might currently imagine.
Speaker 1:If you've been around here a while, you've heard me say a bunch of times that there's this realization that we have to come to as Christians, that God is just as pleased with a future more fully fruit-bearing version of ourselves, as he is right now. I want to add to that this morning that he loves the journey between those two points Doing his work in our lives, cultivating a deeper sense of who we were made to be, recovering true humanity, taking the shape of Jesus. And Jesus clues us in a little bit to how this happens. If you look at verse three, he says already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. Notice the parallel here. This is connecting the pruning acts of God, our vine dresser, with the cleansing power of his words. It suggests that God's truth, spoken into our lives, acts as a pruning tool, cutting away deceit, doubt, misplaced priorities and all the things that hamper our growth. And actually Jesus is doing a little bit of a play on words here, because the word that he uses for prune means cut clean. So what he's saying is disciples, because of the work that we've been doing together over these years, because of the words that I have been speaking to you from the Father enlightened by me given to you, you are being pruned.
Speaker 1:But just take a moment, how do you typically react to a trial in your life, to those periods of loss, of hardship or uncertainty. Man, I so often catch myself responding honestly to someone when they ask me how I'm doing and then at the last minute, just throwing in this kind of like yeah, but it's going to be okay, it's going to be all right. But internally, like it's really hard, like the seasons of trials, the seasons of pain, displacement, often self-inflicted, sometimes the result of other sin. It's hard, leaves a mark and I think too often we can view these things as setbacks, just not going my way or worse. But actually I think for those of us raised in the church this is more likely. We see them as signs of God's displeasure. But what if we view these experiences through the lens of pruning? What if we understood them as God's way of clearing space in our lives for growth, for fruitfulness? I think that this perspective reframes our understanding of God's discipline. Hebrews 12, 11 says no discipline seems pleasant at the time but painful Later on. However, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. This discipline, this pruning, is not about just punitive payback, but it's about training Training us in righteousness, training us in the ways of Jesus, stripping away all the non-essential things that we are so willing to just kind of crowd up.
Speaker 1:There's this great children's book that we have in our house called Adam the Raccoon. Anyone familiar with Adam the Raccoon? Thank you, daniel Val's Reddit. But Adam the Raccoon, he's a friend of King Aaron, and King Aaron comes to him one day and he says Adam, I want you to come with me. We're going to travel through the forest. Adam's never been on any kind of trip like this before and so he's like this is great, let me get some stuff. Give me a couple minutes to pack. King Aaron's waiting outside and he comes out with every single thing that he owns and he's like I'm ready, let's go. And King Aaron says I don't think that that's going to work. He's like no, no, no, I know what I'm doing, I need all this stuff. And as they walk, you can only imagine Adam is not enjoying himself. Things start to fall by the wayside. He ends up alone and lost in the woods because he was not keeping in step with King Aaron.
Speaker 1:I think sometimes I wonder if we kind of keep the trials that we go through in our lives around us similar to Adam's possessions and we want to walk with Christ, but we want to hang on to these things too. We let him color the way that we see what we're being called to and so we end up with this view of God that's tainted. My friend, chuck Gishwind, leads a ministry that helps Christian leaders kind of tap back into who God is, who they are, through relationship. It's beautiful. Some of us went on a retreat with Chuck this last fall. It was great.
Speaker 1:Sometimes we're self, but he says the research that they did is they began the Eden Project. They came to find that 77% of people who attend church believe that God is somehow negatively looking at them all the time. If we just take this room family, that's a high percentage of us that see the things that God brings into our lives as punitive and not as pruning opportunities that we might bear more fruit, not as our God training us in his righteousness, stripping away all the things that we want to carry with us so that we are dependent only on Christ. When Adam has dropped all of his things and he's alone in the woods, wolves start to come and at the very last moment, king Aaron comes and drives away the wolves and in that moment Adam realizes that all he needs is to be with the King that all he needs is the presence of the King to be satisfied and cared for in his life, and that King Aaron calling him away from those things was not any kind of punishment but was good.
Speaker 1:You see, understanding the nature of our hardships is really crucial here Understanding whether the things that we're going through are trials designed to refine us. There might be consequences of our own actions. They might be disciplines in the vein of Hebrews 12 to realign us with the character of Christ. But discerning this is what helps us to respond appropriately in those moments, to recognize the Father's loving hand in every situation of our lives, because pruning prepares us to bear the fruit of Jesus, primarily the fruit of love. We're going to get into this in part three, as we go there. But we have to realize this is not just the theology, it's lived experience. See, when we're pruned, we shed all of these self-centered desires, these biases, these fears, this making room for the compassion, the understanding and the patience of Jesus.
Speaker 1:The journey towards bearing the fruit of love requires trust in the Father's wisdom, submission to His pruning, a steadfast connection to Jesus, the vine. And so as we undergo pruning, we don't merely lose parts of ourselves. We can't view it that way. When I walk couples through premarial counseling, there's a key moment where I remind them that what you're working towards is something new. This is not loss. You're going to be giving up different things, ways of being that you used to be, but it's for a purpose. It's to come together into something new, and so the pruning that God does in our lives is not losing of any part of ourselves. That is necessary for us to become more like Jesus, and we need to trust Him in that, because we gain immeasurably more than what we lose. We acquire the character of Christ, the fruit of the Spirit, a life that genuinely reflects God's glory. That's what we were made for.
Speaker 1:As we contemplate moving into this idea of loving as Jesus loves us, remember that pruning may seem painful, but it's a profound expression of God's love for us. It's His method of equipping us to bear more vibrant and richer fruit all the time, and so let's learn to embrace these pruning exercises not just as not at all as periods of divine displeasure, but as moments of divine preparation. We're being ready to bear lasting fruit, fruit that glorifies the Father, truly exemplifies what it means to be His disciples, and so, as we get closer to our conclusion. This morning, we need to shift our focus now to the implications of what it means to be connected to Christ, what it means to be in relationship with God as our Father, as the master vine dresser pruning us out of His love. And this connection leads to a significant outcome the bearing of fruit. This is where this image of the vine really hits home, and the fruit that really sings through in John 15 is the fruit of love.
Speaker 1:Look at verse 12. Jesus lays this out plainly. He says my command is this love each other as I have loved you, family. This is not a mere suggestion, it's not an idealistic goal. It's not one of these things of like hey, if you have time, love one another, right. It's the concrete expression of the life that we get from Him. Love, in this light, is more than simple emotion or feeling. It's an active, deliberate choice that clearly demonstrates that we're connected to Jesus, because it doesn't make sense any other way. And Jesus further emphasizes that this love is the mark of a disciple. Just a couple chapters back, he says this everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another.
Speaker 1:This love is not just verbal, it's not just doctrinal, it's tangible, it's visible. It's in our actions, it's in our attitudes, reflecting the very love that Christ has for us. The manifestations of this love are just as diverse as the types of grapes in a vineyard. We're not all the same. It can come out of us in kindness. It can come out of us in encouragement. Maybe it's acts of service. It comes out by way of forgiveness, patience, generosity, hospitality.
Speaker 1:Each expression of love is uniquely suited to our specific circumstances, to the people that God has given to us to interact with, but all of it comes from a deep relationship with Christ. I mean, just think of the people in your life, just think of the people in your initial community. Apart from God fueling the love for them, we're hard to love it sometimes If it hasn't felt that way yet. You all need to get real with one another. The remaining in this love is challenging, especially in a world often marred by division and pain, and we know that pain. But Jesus gives us powerful assurance in verses seven and eight. Would you look there with me, he says. If you remain in me and my pruning, cleaning words remain in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you Use it to my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. This abiding love is sustained not just in isolation, but through prayer, through being near to the words of Jesus in Scripture, through the support of our faith community. Importantly, we must remember that this fruit of love is not a result of our own efforts. It's the work of the Holy Spirit within us.
Speaker 1:Paul has a short list of some of the fruits of the Spirit Galatians five, 22 through 23. He writes but the fruit of the Spirit is love, is joy, is peace, is patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. None of these things are self-produced. They stem from the Spirit's activity in our lives as we stay connected to Jesus. The true vine I don't know if vines have sap. I probably should have looked it up. They probably do. I think everything has sap that moves nutrients through the grapes have to get juice from somewhere, I don't know. Anyway, but the way that the nutrients coming through the vine that keep us connected and flourishing in the vine, this is the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Not only does he bring the fruit into our lives, but he is so ready and willing to constantly help us see how it is impossible.
Speaker 1:Besides our connection to Jesus, he's inspiring us to practice the love of Christ, not as an obligation but out of a joy that comes from understanding what Jesus says in verse 11, I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. See, jesus is assuring us that loving others reflects God's heart and fulfills our deepest longings for purpose and connection. I mean, how many of us are chasing joy? How many people do we know in this world who are chasing joy, coming up empty? And Jesus says right here, it's in me. I want to give it to you as you abide in me. So, as we move forward in our spiritual journey, we can't shy away from the challenges of pruning family. We have to understand they prepare us to live a life of love that resonates Christ, that reflects His character, and this is both in joy and in hardship. But we can be confident that His pruning is shaping us for greater service, deeper love, more profound reflection of Christ in our lives as we stay connected to this true vine.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, as we draw this to a close, I just want to take a moment and just speak a little bit candidly about kind of the practical implications of this. One of the things that we as elders have just sensed in our church life of late is just a tiredness a hope, but a tiredness. And I think that particularly during times when it feels most difficult to abide in Christ, it's easy to just kind of discuss this in the abstract and then just kind of limp out of here, go home, take a nap, just kind of do what you need to do, and then the week just starts over again. Is it just me? Do you know what I mean? And then I think what can happen is that we idealize this abiding as some kind of spiritual state that's out of our grasp and we give into despair, hopelessness, survival mode.
Speaker 1:But the truth is that abiding in Jesus, especially in the times of trial and of stress, the truth is it's really challenging. It requires us to release control, to allow ourselves to be completely and 100% cared for, to trust the one whom we are tethered to, who is climbing the sheer rock face and holding us. We're just dangling out in the open. It's uncomfortable and as I was preparing this, the spirit was just kind of pressing into me of, like Ben, you can't take these people somewhere, that you're not willing to go. It's always the case. It felt especially true this week.
Speaker 1:So I want to confess that I have had a hard time abiding in Christ. Abiding Eastside has been one of the hardest things in my entire life and the season has been long. I've often struggled to feel connected to Jesus. Trust in Him is the true by to take Him at His word. The deep personal losses, challenges in ministry, just the weariness of life as a husband to Mickey, dad to Quinn, nora, graham and Avery and Reed. It's just some mornings, you guys, where it feels like my prayers are not even escaping the gravitational pull of my body. You know what I mean and in these moments I have too often chose to rely on my own efforts, my knowledge, my skills, past experiences with God. But every single one of those are false vines. They offer no real sustenance, they offer no real life and I've tasted it and I pray that I've tasted it for you so you can stay tapped into Christ and not be tempted to go to other places that claim to offer the same things. The guy with a bunch of Rolexes inside his jacket it's like some form molded piece of plastic. What I want to testify to is that God, in His kindness, has allowed all of these false vines to just wither out from under me. Every time I would try to graft myself onto one of them to sustain me. Just pruned, it hurts, it's embarrassing, and yet I know that this is His loving work.
Speaker 1:As we're in this season here of seeking to rekindle East Side, there's something that's beginning to happen in my heart. When I hear the flash of the shears opening, there's a joy that starts to come. There's never been a food that you just really didn't like. I remember when I first started eating tomatoes on sandwiches. I was trying to be healthy and I was like I just put tomatoes on sandwiches because it's like nutrition, it's less calories. I was like the pet project of some grad student that semester and so it's like just keep Steph happy, right. So I started putting tomatoes on my sandwiches and within a certain amount of time I didn't want to eat a sandwich and never have a tomato on it. I was like let's try banana peppers, let's try black olives.
Speaker 1:I think that, with the help of the Holy Spirit, we can learn to like the sound of the shears opening, the feeling that the pruning is coming to release the control that we have on these false vines and watch our father lovingly do his work and just knowing and this has been the most transformative thing for me in this whole season. You guys, if you hear nothing else that I'm saying about this confession, just hear this what I have come to believe and to feel is that in those moments of deep pruning, there is no less love from the father toward me. In fact, I feel it more as he exposes these places where I'm trying to go outside of his good care for me to get what I need. He's not angry. He's so overjoyed that I'm in his presence and experiencing the goodness that he has designed me to experience that the loving work of my father, the master vine dresser, is being done and I get to resemble Jesus a little bit more every day, find new ways of not looking like Jesus more and more every day. You just want to keep God in business, right? Sorry, that was a throwaway line.
Speaker 1:I'm being uncomfortable with all this vulnerability, but that's kind of the point actually is that when we're this vulnerable with God, there's no way that I could stand up here and say the things that I'm saying to you. I wouldn't have done this three years ago, in fact, I had opportunities to and didn't. I hadn't experienced it yet like I've experienced it these last three years. But as I have become more and more comfortable with this pruning process, more and more honest with God and had experiences of feeling his love just poured over me guess what? It gets more and more easy to do this with you, and so just think of the kind of community that we want to build here at Eastside Church. It has to have that kind of vulnerability in it. The people in our lives that are hurting because they've never even heard of the vine, they don't even remotely in the vineyard, just trying, thing after thing after thing after thing in the world, to satisfy them, to feel some kind of love. It's this level of vulnerability that we bring to them that is going to be a game changer.
Speaker 1:I've got a bunch of things here that I was going to say. I'm not going to say them, just some practical things. And I'll just say this we, as your elders, have tried to design Eastside Church to be about funneling you towards the practices that will help you abide in Christ. So here's the application Abide. Come expectant to worship on Sunday morning. Bring all the dead branches flopping around on you, and let God do some work. Come to missional community. Let God do some work. Come to DNA. Let God do some work. Share meals together, and let God do some work.
Speaker 1:This is a long haul process. Family, let's not just settle for grabbing a couple of grapes and making some wine. Let's wait. Let's keep waiting on the Lord, trusting that in his timing, this vineyard is just going to burst and it's going to be sweet, and we're going to feast together. And I'll leave you this one thing Look at verse 16. This is Jesus promise over us together, as we get ready to break from this place in a few minutes. He says this you did not choose me, but I chose you and I appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit, fruit that will last. So let's desire that together. May that not just be a statement. Let's pray.