MS | "The Vine" | Josiah Brondyke

Date: February 25, 2026
Series: The Sayings of Jesus
Passage: John 15
Preacher: Pastor Josiah Brondyke

Transcript

Hey, welcome back guys, I am so excited to be back with you, hopefully you’re finding your way to your seat. You’re grabbing your linear and scriber, your Bible, and your notes, and you are ready to dive in with us. I’m excited for what we have tonight, so I don’t want you to miss it. So look at the person next to you and say ‘Hey, don’t miss it.’

I got a question: If I were to tell you I have the secret to full joy, and I have the secret to make sure that you don’t waste your life, I wonder, would you listen? Today in our passage we’re going to see where Jesus tells us just that: the secret to how we can have full joy and a meaningful, fruitful life. It’s going to be really important and I want you not to miss it. We are getting close to the end of our series, actually next week is going to be our final installment, everyone say ‘Awww’ [crowd goes awww]. I know, but it is also some of my favorite passages of scripture. If you’ve been reading along with us, you’re finishing up our reading in John this week. If you haven’t even started yet, the Book of John is not too long for you to get through one week, but if you’ve been following, just three chapters left: 19, 20, and 21, as we see how the story of Jesus in the Book of John concludes.

This passage today, it’s so rich and it’s so meaningful, it’s so simple, but it’ll change everything if you can get it right. So to try to make it simple for you, I want to make it easy tonight, we’re going to see it’s as easy as one, two, three. In John 15, Jesus gives us one final ‘I am’ statement about himself. He gives us two commands to follow because of it, and we’re going to look at three results that will happen when you do it. That’s our whole goal for tonight, I think God’s going to bless it, but would you come with me into his presence and pray that God would meet with us in a special way and speak to us. This is the word of God, when we open it and hear from it, we have the opportunity to hear from the living God and I pray that you wouldn’t be a distraction to anyone else but instead that you would hear what he has to say to you tonight.

So let’s pray and ask for his help in these moments and we’ll go to him. God, please come, meet with us Lord, I love this chapter. These verses, this truth has gripped, transformed, and helped my life so much, so much lighter, so much freer, so much more fruitful, so much more joyful, and God I pray that for these students. I pray freedom for them, I pray life for them, I pray everything that you died to give them for them, and I pray that in these moments no one would be distracted, but the enemy would be bound and driven out of this place, but instead your spirit would have reign here. That you would speak and that you would glorify your name, for your name is worthy and we want to lift it up high and honor it for the beautiful name that it is. So God please bless this time, please glorify yourself through the preaching of your word and we pray it all in the name of Jesus, Amen.

John 15: 1-11 Reading

The final statement we’re going to be looking at tonight is simply ‘I am the vine’ and everything that comes with that. So tonight, I want you to open your Bibles to John 15. [crowd cheers] Amen, so go ahead and head there. We’re going to look at verses 1 through 11 as you get there. Why don’t you go ahead and stand with me in honor of the reading of the word of God, in our first pass through our text, we like to go ahead and stand and remember that these are the words of the King of Kings. I’m going to ask the guys in the back to click for me as we read starting in John 15 verse 1.

Thus saith the word of the Lord:

‘I am the true vine and my father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes that it may bear more fruit. Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me and I in you, as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches, whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me, he is thrown away like a branch and withers and the branches are gathered and thrown into the fire and burned. If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you. By this my father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. As the father has loved me so have I loved you, abide in my love. 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. These things I have spoken to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full.’

May God bless the reading of his word, you may be seated.

Biblical Context

So here is our text, it’s so rich, it’s so huge and I don’t want us to miss any of it, so let’s dive right in. First we’re going to look at this one statement. We’ve been looking at these ‘I am’ statements of Jesus and here we rejoin Jesus and his friends as they are getting ready for the final moments of Jesus’s life. This is right after the last supper that we looked at last week, and they just finished all of these powerful teachings and powerful sayings, Jesus washed their feet and he’s making clear that he’s going to die and he’s giving them one final word of instruction. Even as they lead and are on the way to the Garden of Gethsemane, the place where Jesus prayed before he went to the cross, this is where we hear these words.

And he offers this one final ‘I am’ statement. All throughout this series we’ve been saying ‘Hey John’s doing something super clever because he knows you’re clever and you’re going to catch it.’ Every single time that Jesus is making a statement about himself that points to his divinity, his nature of being God, he uses the phrase to say ‘I am’, ego eimi, which is saying ‘I am, I am’ in the Greek language, pointing to himself as being the God of the Old Testament because that’s exactly the way God introduced himself in the Book of Exodus. So he says ego eimi, ‘I am the true vine and my father is the vinedresser.’ He goes on to say ‘I am the vine and you are the branches, whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing’, again pointing to himself as something greater than anyone realized.

The whole purpose of the Book of John is so that you and I can understand through his words and through his actions that Jesus is so much more than we expected, that Jesus is the god-man in flesh. John wrote this book so that you and I could know that he is the Messiah, the Christ, the one that we need and that by believing this we get have life in his name. If we’re going to combine these two verses to kind of see our statement, he’s saying ‘I’m the true vine, my father is the vinedresser, and you are the branches.’ We learn in these statements, the statement tonight, that we are intended to abide in the vine.

We’re going to learn a little bit more of what this needs and maybe what the disciples would have heard. Because you see, for you and I as modern audience when we hear ‘Okay I’m the vine’, we might not have a lot of context for that, you might be from a concrete jungle, you might have never seen an orchard in your life, never a vineyard in all your days, and so this doesn’t conjure the same images. These people were in an agrarian society, they were farmers, they knew a thing or two about growing olives and wine. They also knew about the Old Testament scriptures. He was talking to his disciples who were a bunch of Jewish people. And when he said this illustration that ‘I am the true vine’, there’s something interesting there.

By saying ‘I am the true vine’, what does it imply but that there’s also a false vine? You see in, or a corrupt vine. See throughout the Old Testament, this term of the vine is used a whole lot. It’s often used to describe the people of Israel. In Psalm 80 verse 8 it talks about this phrase, it says ‘You transplanted a vine from Egypt and you drove out the nations and planted it.’ So what nation do we know that was taken out of Egypt and was planted some place where other nations were? Remember that whole Book of Joshua that we talked about, how God was giving a land to his people? It’s talking about Israel. So there was this idea in this Psalm where he talks about how these people were planted in Israel, but things weren’t going well because the people had turned from God. It says their walls were knocked down and everyone was taking the fruit from this vine and the question of Psalm 80 was ‘When are you going to come and establish your vine again because we, your people, have been harmed and are hurting?’

In Isaiah 5 again it talks about the vineyard, the vine as being the House of Israel. And it talks again about well things have gone wrong here, when are you going to come and when are you going to fix it? And part of the promises of the Old Testament looking forward to the one who would be the Christ would be the one who is this branch of Jesse who will be able to establish the true vine in Israel again and Jesus says ‘I am the true vine.’

The Vine and the Branches

In this passage, however, the old vine had a problem. God planted a vineyard for himself and he wanted a people for himself that were going to produce good fruit, but the problem that the Old Testament says is these people produced wild grapes. Raise your hand in here if you like grapes [crowd raises hands]. They’re fantastic, they’re delicious and we love them a lot in my house, I grew up around them, I love it. But if you’ve never experienced wild grapes, they are not like the stuff on your dinner table. They’re little, they’re sour, they’re kind of bitter and nasty and they have only gotten into what we are familiar with by a lot of times of people working very hard to get their kind of genetic makeup through selective breeding generation after generation to become these sweet, wonderful things. He’s saying ‘Hey Israel, I planted you as my people and I expected you to produce good fruit, but the fruit that you gave me was nasty, it wasn’t good and it wasn’t helpful and it wasn’t right and I’m concerned that this is your problem.’ And Jesus said ‘Hey, I’m the new Israel, I’m a new way of living and I’m going to produce the right kind of fruit and show you how to do it too.’

He says ‘See, I’m the vine and my father, he’s the vinedresser.’ Now, how many of you are good with plants? Okay, raise your hands. Any green thumbs in the room? All right, my grandpa was the ultimate green thumb. He could just turn anything into life-giving gardens that were beautiful. Towards the end of my Grandpa and Grandma Brondyke’s lives, they came to live to one of, in our cottage, that my dad had fixed up and they, it was a very small plot of land and there wasn’t that good of dirt, but grandpa worked with it and worked for it and he planted corn and peppers and tomatoes and salsa would come out of this garden. It was wonderful every year and one of the favorite things that he grew is he grew Concord grapes on the side of the cottage. It was beautiful, they would come out every season, they had little seeds in them but they had this bold flavor and it was fantastic and it was up against this trellis that he had built on the house and it was all perfect and as it should be.

But as grandpa passed away and we still had the cottage, the stuff that he had planted it just kept growing and kept growing and kept growing. Actually when Rachel and I first got married we moved into the cottage that my grandparents used to live in and that old vine was still on the side of the house. But what had once produced beautiful fruit, because it hadn’t been tended, that fruit had gotten overgrown and gotten rotten, it had kind of spilled off of the trellis and it was just this big heap of weed-looking thing on the side of our house and the grapes that were once wonderful were now kind of nasty because no one had been taking care of them.

The Process of Pruning

Because if you want a fruit product to continue to be really, really good, you’ve got to do something called pruning. You’ve got to go along and and you intentionally cut at certain times, certain parts of the plant so that it yields a better crop and it takes tender care. Jesus says ‘I’m the vine and my father’s the vinedresser.’ He’s interested in making a people for himself and he’s interested in those people becoming really fruitful to give a good gift to the world and he’s the one that goes through and does something called pruning.

Now, so an overgrown plant is no good at all. Now we’re going to walk through this analogy. It’s going to say ‘Hey Jesus says hey I’m the vine, I want my people to be connected to me and I want them to produce good fruit.’ He says something’s going to happen, if you’re growing a vineyard and you have a section of the plant that is not growing anything good, what you’ll do is you’ll prune it, you’ll cut it off and you’ll take it away and that part’s just not alive anymore, it’s not doing any good and you’ll get rid of it. Another part that’s going good produce, you’ll kind of cut off the unimportant parts of the plant so that it can have the maximum yield the next season. God, Jesus says, ‘Hey my father God is kind of like that.’ People that are attached to me and that are producing good fruit, God is going to do a pruning work in their life. Look in verse 4, it says:

‘Abide in me and I in you, as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.’

We’re going to talk about this in just a minute. The way that we can have a fruitful life is through our connection with Jesus. He says in verse 5:

‘I am the vine and you are the branches, whoever abides in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit, apart from me you can do nothing.’

Verse 6:

‘If you don’t abide in me he’s thrown away like a branch and it withers, the branches are gathered and thrown into the fire. If you abide in me and my words abide in you, you’ll produce this fruit’

and it talks about how God goes along and prunes us. Now I just want you to for a moment think about this: if you are a grapevine and someone comes along and they have to prune you. There’s parts of your life that aren’t that helpful, parts of your plant that aren’t that useful, and so someone comes along with shears and cuts off little bits of you. Do you imagine that would be a little bit painful? Yeah, I think it would be. But it’s also really necessary. God is saying ‘Hey for you to be my children, I’ve got a really big vision for you and there’s something that I’m very interested in: you producing good fruit with your life and I’m so interested in that that I’m willing to come in and even sometimes painfully work on you and with you to see you become the kind of person that I want you to be.’

Jesus is saying ‘I’m the vine and my father’s the vinedresser, he comes along his people, my people, and he works with them to help them produce the right kind of fruit.’ This is important to remember: pruning hurts, but pruning has a point. Sometimes in life when God is interested in doing something in your life, there’s part of your life that’s holding you back and tripping you up and God says ‘Hey that actually has no place in your life’ and he comes through lovingly to kind of cut it out and sometimes it’s happened to me that that can be very painful. But if you are God’s child, we can know even when he’s pruning us it comes from a good God who loves us a lot.

Well there’s just one more character in this little story that Jesus gives. Jesus says ‘Hey I’m the vine, my father’s the vinedresser, and you,’ talking to his disciples, he says, ‘you are the branches.’ So I just want to break this down for you, you guys have had grapes before, so they come in these clusters. So when you’ve gone through and you’ve eaten up all the grapes and you have that little weird-looking stick, you know what I’m talking about? Okay, that is, okay, so that little stem is left over. That’s what Jesus says you are: you’re the stem. So my question to you is what can that stem do on its own? Once you cut it from the plant and all the grapes are gone, what is it good for? Nothing, it’s just a stick, it’s just a branch, it can’t really do anything on its own.

So what are they good for? Kind of nothing, maybe just fire kindling. That if this thing is used up, if it’s gone, it’s no good. And sometimes we don’t realize God says ‘Hey you think you can do so much on your own without me, you don’t realize you can’t do anything without me.’ How many of us would have so, such a happier Christian life if we could just believe God when he says ‘Hey you can’t do anything without me’? Gavin and I were just talking before service about an interesting verse in the Book of Hebrews that says even when we praise God, we can only do that through Jesus. Even to worship Jesus rightly you need Jesus’s help, isn’t that interesting? He says ‘Hey apart from me if you want to try to do this Christian life thing apart from me you can’t do anything on your own.’

Abiding in Jesus

But sometimes wonderful things come out of those little sticks and they’re called grapes and they’re delicious. So where I’m from we mostly corn, but we also had vineyards and they were beautiful vineyards. My dad actually was cooler than me, no one thought he was, you know, he had a Harley Davidson motorcycle, it was a Road King, it was big, it was beautiful and he loved to go and drive through the country on the rolling hills amongst the vineyards and at certain times of year you could just smell the grapes in the air and it was a beautiful time. And as if you were to go out into those field I want you imagine yourself there. You’re in the middle of the fields, you know what you would never hear? You might smell the grapes in the air, you might even feel or hear some rustling of the leaves, but you never hear the grape branches going ‘Rrrrrrrrrrr’ trying to pop out a grape. That’s just not what they do.

If you’re a grape branch and you’re attached to the grape vine, you’re just going to grow fruit. But so many Christians I see they’re living the ‘Rrrrrrr’ kind of Christianity. They basically say ‘Hey Jesus, I love you thank you so much for doing that, will you stand over there, I’m going to go over here and I’m going to do something really impressive for you, just wait Jesus, I’m going to be nicer today, just wait Jesus, I don’t really need your help, I’m going to stop lying, don’t wait Jesus, I’m going to get over this on my own’ and we try to do things on our own and you know what we get? Nothing, just stressed out trying to do work on our own. So much of our Christian life is ‘Well I’m trying to do this thing’ and Jesus says ‘Hey hey hey, stop it. Just come and abide in me. If you come and if you’re connected to me...’ Now what happens?

Okay, so we agreed that a little branch, the little weird stick thing, apart from the grapevine it can’t do anything. But what’s going to happen to that same little stick if it’s still attached to the vine? What’s going to happen? It’s going to produce this beautiful things called grapes that are fantastic. And it’s going to keep doing that. So often we make our lives about the stuff that we’re doing, ‘God am I doing better, am I behaving better, what job do you want me to have, and where do you want me go, and what do you want me to do’ and Jesus is saying ‘Hey don’t you... I want you! I want you to have a relationship with me, I want you to be connected with me, and I want you to stop trying to do this on your own. I want you to believe me that you can’t do anything on your own. I want you to believe me that if you would just stay focused on staying connected to me, that you’ll bring forth much, much fruit.’

This one thing: being connected to God means everything. So to produce fruit do you need to try real hard? No, if you’re a grape branch all you need to do is be connected to the vine. It’s just what you do, you pass on the life that’s in the vine to the world around you. So this is the idea, this one statement that we are intended to abide in the vine, is what we learn. We see it in these two commands that he gives us. Look in your Bible in verse 4 it says this:

‘Abide in me and I in you, as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.’

This word abide means to make your home in, to live in, to stay connected to. He’s saying ‘Hey I want you to abide in me, I want you to be connected to me, I want you to have real relationship with me.’ Why? He says ‘Because it’s necessary to produce fruit.’ So many people want their lives to count and they want it to be meaningful and they’re trying to find meaning and purpose in life without God and it’s never going to work. It’s like that little stick trying to pop out a grape from a lot of effort, it’s never going to happen. You don’t have the source, you don’t have the stuff, you don’t have the ability to make life fruitful on your own. But if you’re attached to the source of all life, you can do it.

So what does it mean to abide in him? To make our homes in him, to stay close to him, to be connected to him, to say ‘Hey God is life, so I’m going to make my life about being connected to the source of all life. That I’m going to treat my relationship with God as really important to me as the main thing in my life to focus on, well will that help my relationship with God or hurt my relationship with God? My main thing is to have relationship with God, so I’m going to focus on that to abide in him, make your home in him, stay close to him, be connected to him as your source.’

Life in God’s Love

The cool thing about this, sometimes we think of our lives as a moment by moment thing. It’s like ‘Okay I am doing the church thing now, cool cool, later I will do the homework thing, and then I’ll get a break and I’ll do the entertainment thing, and then I’ll do the sleep thing, and then I’ll do the school thing, and then the work thing’ and we just switch modes, modes, modes, modes and we’re like ‘Some of the slices in our life are Jesus slices and he can have all the Jesus slices.’ But he says ‘Hey, actually I purchased all of you and I want all of you, and no matter where you are and no matter what you’re doing, you can do that while abiding in him.’

At school, in your studies, at work, in sports, no matter what you’re doing you go about doing it saying ‘Hey I’m a child of God, I have a relationship with God and as I stay connected to him I can produce fruit in those things through him. Not by trying to do it, but by focusing on staying connected to the God who gives life.’ He gives us two commands in verse 4:

‘Abide in me.’

So that’s a command, so stay connected to me, focus on a relationship with me. Don’t focus on trying to produce fruit, focus on trying to have a relationship with me, on staying connected to me, on our connection. He also says:

‘Abide in my love.’

And when you hear abide in my love, if you’re like my son, there was a long time and still kind of there, he doesn’t super like love, he thinks love’s gross and whenever mom and dad kiss he’s always like ‘Eww’ from the other room and he’s gets very uncomfortable and you’re like ‘I don’t want to talk about love, it’s weird, it’s weird.’ And so when you hear abide in my love, you’re like ‘That’s weird, I don’t want to do it, I don’t want to talk about it.’ You might be thinking about love songs or like ‘All right I’m going to abide in God’s love...’ Ready? I’m going to feel it.

And we think like a liver quiver and waiting for something to happen in worship and I don’t know about you, I’m not a super feely person, and so sometimes if I’m like supposed to have a feeling I’m like ‘I’m not sure how to do that.’ But he’s not talking about that. Look in your Bible in verse 9, he’s saying:

‘As the father has loved me so have I loved you, abide in my love.’

Verse 10, he gives you a little hint, he says:

‘If you keep my commandments, you’ll abide in my love.’

He says ‘Hey if you want to abide in my love, do what I ask of you.’ I love my wife a lot, you know how I show that love? Doing what she likes and doing what she wants because I like her, not because I have to but because I have a relationship with her. He’s saying ‘Hey, how do you do this? How do you abide in my love? Keep my commandments.’ He basically says ‘Hey if you love me, act like it.’ That’s what it means to abide in his love.

Again in verse 10 he says:

‘If you keep my commandments you’ll abide in my love, just as I have kept my father’s commandments and abide in his love.’

So if you want to have a fruitful life, if you want your life to count, if you want it to be full of joy as he’s saying, what do you do? You obey him. God has given you some things to do and you know what? He didn’t do it just because he’s grumpy. He’s actually not grumpy at all. God is the supremely happy, most joyful being in the universe. He’s getting his way all the time so how could he not be full of joy? He’s perfectly full of love all the time so how could he not be happy? This God is saying ‘I know how to have life, and you my kids, I want you to have life. I want you to have my kind of life. I want it to be abundant. Can I tell you how to do it? Would you just listen to me?’

I know you don’t understand it right now, I know that you’re young and you think you know better than me, but would you just would you just do what I say? Would you just trust that I as God know more than you and I’ve given you some instructions in my word and through your people and maybe your parents, ‘Hey I have a way to live that’s going bring life and blessing and goodness, would you walk in that?’ He’s saying ‘Hey if you want to experience life and fruitfulness and blessing, do that. Walk in his ways, walk in his commandments.’

Who does he say to do this to? The actual Christians. The invitation of this passage is for Christians to stay connected to God so that they can produce life. The invitation of this passage isn’t ‘fake it til you make it.’ It isn’t ‘go ahead and if you try hard enough and if you can obey hard enough maybe someday you’ll finally turn into a grape.’ No, I’ve made you something, I’ve connected you to me. If you have a relationship with me, I’m going to give you the power and the life to live in this way, I just want you I just want you to do it.

I’ll do all the hard stuff, I’ll give you the power, I’ll give you the will, I’ll give you the way, you rely on me, I’ll make it happen, but you just choose it. It’s not about trying to become something, it’s just allowing God’s life to live and flow through you. Well when is this supposed to happen? All the time. You don’t have days that you’re a Christian and days that you’re not a Christian, and I’ve had times in my life that I’ve felt more fruitful than others. There’s some days that I wake up and I feel a little bit more Christian. I’m just a little bit happier and a little bit bouncier and I’m ‘Hey Mr. Jeff, good to see you, God good!’ and some days that’s great. And other days I wake up on the other half of the universe.

And if it was up to the way I felt, some days I wouldn’t say I wake up feeling very saved. And other days I’m ‘Hey Lord...’ and I’m just not feeling it. In those moments when my life isn’t producing the fruit of Christianity, what do I do? Try to squeeze out a grape? No, you can’t squeeze out grapes. You get grapes by staying attached to the vine. So in those moments I don’t just try to be what I think I’m supposed to be and try to fake it and try to put on something, I say ‘Okay God, I don’t feel it right now but you’re my you’re my God. I remember the gospel, I remember the cross, I remember how much you love me’ and I stay connected to him and I focus on my relationship with him. Suddenly he starts to meet me and change me again and suddenly in time there’s more fruit.

How do I do this? Through the power of God, because the Lord is my helper, because he’ll never leave me. So why is this so important, why is this such a big deal? Why will it change everything about your life?

Results of Abiding

But here’s three results that happen when we abide in him. First, before we do our three, I’ve got to give you a bonus one and he says ‘Hey this is what happens when people don’t. If people aren’t attached to me as the source of life, they die.’ And if there’s something that doesn’t produce any fruit, it’s gathered and it’s taken away and burned, as using this analogy. He says ‘Hey if this branch if it never produces fruit it’s cut and it’s thrown into the fire.’ What happens when we don’t stay connected to God? If we don’t stay connected to God we die. To those who reject him, they’ll eventually get that rejection, they’ll be thrown away from him. Much like the branches that get rejected from the vine end in fire, so does the person that rejects God as the source of life: their life ends in fire, separated from God.

But to the one who listens, to the one who comes, to the one who says ‘Yes God I want to connect with you, I want to have real life in you, I want you to change me,’ what happens? Well he says something amazing: he says ‘Hey your prayers will be answered.’ In verse 7 it says:

‘If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you.’

This is like ‘Okay cool, I wish I had a Ferrari.’ That’s not what it’s talking about. He’s saying ‘Hey as you get to know me and our hearts get connected and I start making you like me, you’re going to want what I want and you’re going to ask for exactly the kind of things that I want to give you and I will be delighted to say yes to you. I will be so interested in doing and blessing you also.’ I love my kids all the time, but sometimes it’s easier to just bless them when they’re just doing what they’re supposed to be doing and ‘Sam I would love to give you an ice cream sandwich but you’ve just been a little creep right now.’ At some point it’s... he’s saying that as well, like ‘Hey walk with me, stay connected to me, I’d be happy to bless you.’ If we abide in him we’ll be asking for things in accordance with his will.

Next he says: ‘Why do I want you to abide in me? Because I want I want your life to be fruitful and I want your life to bring me glory.’ Man when people see a group of Christians, when a group of Christians walk into a store they should be like ‘Wow, we get Christians up in here!’ because Christians as they get to know God and represent his life, they should show good fruit. These people are loving, these people are patient, these people are kind, these people are generous, these people know the solution to the problems of the universe and they know how to share the hope that they have in a way that can bring healing to others. Man, Christians should be the most wonderful thing in the world. That’s what God wants.

He wants to be like ‘Oh man I’ve seen something happened to Jeremy. Man he was such a creep and then man something hit Jeremy and Jeremy’s just something, I love being around him, and I love his... how kind he is and I love how generous he is and I love how he puts other people first all the time.’ And as they start to see your life change they’re going to be like ‘I don’t know what’s in Jeremy, there must be something else afoot.’ And as you start to change and you produce good fruit, God gets credit, glory, and fame. That’s the idea. So often times all we care about is well do I have my ticket to heaven, but God’s saying ‘Hey are you wanting to max out bringing me glory? Are you bringing forth good fruit? Are you making my name famous through how you live?’ God wants to be glorified in us as we abide in him because we’ll be fruitful.

And last he says this:

‘I’m going to tell you how life works: if you want fullness of joy it’s found in this, it’s found in the connection to me.’

In verse 11 it says this:

‘These things I have spoken to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full.’

He’s saying ‘Hey you were made for something, you were made for purpose, you were made for a point, you weren’t made for just endless pleasure and scrolling, you weren’t made to just get yours, you weren’t made to just make yourself happy, you were made for more than that. I made you for a purpose, I have a calling on your life, there’s something that I made you, I designed you to do. I’m going to make myself famous through your life, you have no idea the things that I have in store for you. And man, when you lock in and you start to do the stuff that I made you for, you don’t know the kind of joy that will come from walking with your creator doing the things that you’re created to do.’

Recently we did a podcast on the Ordinary Legends podcast about the man named Eric Liddell, and there’s a quote attributed to him, probably pseudo-historically, but he said this: he was an Olympian, he was a runner, he said: ‘God made me fast so I can run, and when I run I feel his pleasure.’ Man when you do what God has made you to do, it’s just really cool. And and God’s saying ‘Hey I want you to do that, you’re you’re made for a connection with me, you’re made for to be useful to me as you start to do that man it’s going to bring you more blessings and more joy than any video game console or phone and popularity or whatever. Man when you start to do what you were made to do, it’s going to give you so much joy as you do it with a relationship with me.’

Final Encouragement and Prayer

So Jesus simply says this: he says ‘I am the vine and you are the branches. Stay connected to me and it’ll determine everything about you.’ As we disconnect from him, the source of life, what can we find but death? The Bible makes very clear that we all enter into this life separated from him through our sin. This message of John 15 goes out to a group of Christians who had come to be connected to God again through this incredible man Jesus that we’ve been talking about all series. And the question of are you connected to God through Jesus determines everything about your life and it determines everything about your future.

The question is right now: are you? Are you really connected to God? If you are, do what he says. Stop trying to produce fruit by your own effort and focus instead on staying close to God in a relationship with him. Don’t try to be something, be someone in a relationship with the living God. If you’re not, the New Testament says again and again God delights to take things that are far from God and bring them into his family. There’s another vine that he talks about, this passage God’s describing himself as an olive branch. He says ‘Hey I’m happy to take wild olive branches and graft them in.’

Right now you could be very far from the things of God and God is very willing to make you part of what he is doing. He did this and he made a way to do this through what he did on the cross. When he as we’ll look at next week when he died on the cross for our sins, when he was buried and he rose again, he made the one way for a broken people like you and me to finally be made whole. Not so we could fake it til we make it, so that he could make us new and reconnect us to life. And if tonight you’re like ‘I don’t have that, but I want that,’ you can have it tonight, it’s free. Jesus says ‘Whosoever will can come.’ In other words you don’t have to stay that way. You don’t have to be burned up, you don’t have to be separated from him forever, God is inviting you to have a relationship with him even now.

Can I pray for you? God, for many of these, I see myself. So many of my years I have been a Christian technically, saved maybe, pretty darn disconnected to Jesus, but trying really hard to produce something kind of Christian in my own strength. I know you said in your word, apart from you I can do nothing, but yet so many times I tried to do it in my own strength and I was miserable and I failed and I failed and I failed and I failed. To every Christian in this room I pray that we would stop trying to do it on our own and instead learn to live this Christian life through the strength that you supply. That we would focus our energy not on trying to do and be the right things but staying connected to the living God. That we would focus on abiding in you and in your love, staying close to you and connected to you and focus our energies on that, not just our performance.

And God I know in a room this size some of these they could never produce life because they’re not connected to you, the source of all life. But tonight you brought them here even now so that they could have their sins forgiven. You went to the ends of the earth, you went to the cross so that you could have them, so that you could save them, so that you could bring them in, so that you could connect them to life again. And even though their life feels dry and empty and just condemned in their sins, you say ‘I paid the price for that, you can have life in me, I can make you fruitful again, I can make you whole again, I can connect you back to the source of all life: me.’ If you just come and repent and believe, say sorry for your sins and believe in what I’ve done that you can have life, and God some here tonight they need to do that, they need to trust in you.

And God if they do I pray they would, that they wouldn’t leave today disconnected from you, but instead would talk to someone and learn how to have a relationship with the living God through putting our trust in Jesus Christ. God would you speak to us now, connect with us now, Lord, if we’ve been doing it in our own strength help us to stop. If we need to be connected with you, Lord, would you even save some even now? We pray this in the name of Jesus, Amen.