Cultivate

Sermon by Lead Pastor, Nate Levering

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hello and thank you for joining us on the Sierra Bible Church Sermon of the Week. We hope you enjoy this message by Pastor Nate Leverett.

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Amen. Nice shirt, Emily. We dropped some merch out there if you're interested in grabbing a shirt. This is my first time teaching in a t-shirt, so we'll see how that goes. First was great. And I have a tissue in case I cry. Anyone else get emotional watching the kids? Like I don't know. Two minute kids thing. Our kids, kids that my wife gets to teach all year, and they show up here and they just get like bombarded with this incredible, just over-the-top love and the message of Jesus just in a thousand ways. So yeah, I did need a tissue. I get I'm a crybaby, but it is what it is. Uh I'm excited about what God has for us this morning. Uh, yesterday, uh, just as a part of getting a break, we took our kids up to the mountains. And uh one of the things we love to do is ride mountain bikes. And so as we're getting ready to kind of head down the trail, uh, I said to my son, as he's gonna be actually a pretty good mountain bike. It won't be long before he I'm trying to keep up with him, but I still have him for now. And uh I said, Hey, the first couple of drops will be a lot easier if you just lift up your front end and jump about six or eight feet down and just avoid all that rocky, choppy stuff. And in one of the rare moments that my 14-year-old son actually took my advice, uh, he did that. And I remember he got down there a little ways and he's just cooking down this trail, and he like looks back up at me, and I was like, Yeah, like that's that's my boy. He's like jamming, right? And I was stoked. And the text we read that is Jesus speaking to his disciples has a verse in it. It's verse eight. If you have your Bible open, I would encourage you to look at that. Many people think this is in these 15 verses in which Jesus circles and spins and goes all over the place a bit, which we'll try and create some order out of. He focuses us in church in verse eight with these words. All of this, all of this that we've been talking about, this you know, burning and cutting and fruit bearing and remaining in vine, all of this is to my father's glory. And then he kind of sums it up. He says, That you bear much fruit, showing yourselves or demonstrating or proving or being in yourselves my what? My disciples. All of this, Jesus says, is for my Father's glory that you would bear fruit, you would show yourself in this kind of 17-verse process that Jesus is going to walk us through as my disciples. This summer, we've been uh talking about and we'll continue to talk about uh this idea of discipleship or being a disciple. If you have on your seat, I think there was one, uh, what we are calling our discipleship journey around here at Sierra Bible Church, is we're trying to put some language around what does it look like to be a disciple? If you were to look at Jesus' words for the church, he says you have a core calling. Your core calling is to be a disciple. Your core mission that you're being invited into is to make disciples. We said last week a church has two questions to make, to ask of itself. What's your plan for making disciples, and is it actually working? Because this is what we are called and commissioned to do. And so uh one of the things we invited you to do if you were here last week, as we talked about uh being a disciple and what that looks like. So we're trying to create some categories uh for what Jesus is inviting us into is to kind of flip a bit, and we hope this is somewhat creative. The SBC that oftentimes around here stands for Sierra Bible Church, to mean three very different but distinct things. Do you remember what they were? S stood for steward, right? So S no longer stands for Sierra around here, S stands for steward. We are meant to steward our lives with purpose. This is what it means to be a disciple, to to just consider all that God has given us, from our breath to these amazing gifts and abilities that God has given you all as that which is from him and for him. We are stewards before the king. The be then no longer means Bible, although it very much means that. Um, it stands for belong. We are meant to belong in community. That if you find a disciple thriving as Jesus invited disciples to thrive, they will belong in community. They'll be growing in community, they will be loving what? One another. They will be living that out in all kinds of different ways. And then lastly, the C stands for cultivate. A disciple will be cultivating their life with Christ. They will be growing, they will be leaning in. God will be transforming them from the inside out. And so um we created these and we hope they are helpful for what discipleship looks like around here. Uh, we've printed out a bunch of these little stickers. We said, hey, grab one, they're free, just snag one. Remember, ask yourself the question if this is my core calling, am I doing that? If I've been commissioned to make disciples, am I doing that? Am I helping my kids, those in my small group, those that I'm walking with, learn to steward, belong, and cultivate a life with Christ? John 15, Jesus is preparing his disciples for this next season as he's going to give his life for them and go be with the Father. So he begins to teach them about the Holy Spirit, and then he says, All right, let's get moving, right? As we pointed to, and then he says, Wait, wait, wait a second. Hold on. Before let's consider together. I, Jesus says, am the true vine. This is a what we call a meta shift in a narrative. Up until this time, Israel had been promised to be the one through which God would heal and bless the nations. They were the vine. In no less than eight or ten places, Jesus lays that out, or probably Jesus, but God lays that out. You are the vine, Israel. Jesus now says, I am the true vine. Access to God is shifting. It's no longer through your kind of national identity or your ability to observe the old covenant. It's through me, Jesus says. I am the true vine. This is a massive shift in the story of God's revelation. And he's inviting them, us by extension, to consider what he means and to be grafted in, no pun intended, to the story. Jesus says, This is no longer about your bloodline. This is now about the blood that will be spilt as the forgiveness of sins for all people. This is the invitation to know him. Jesus, in these 15 verses, I said, I mean, does anybody else like you listen to those 15 of your verses? You're like, oh, that's a great verse. That's a great verse. Whoa, that was powerful. Wow, that's a big deal. But you're like, how in the world do all 15 of those verses go together? Like, I'm with you. Okay. So we're going to try and create a little bit of symmetry. We're going to do a couple of lists at the end because, yeah, it's hard. It's not like a Paul statement, you know, in the epistles where he's like, boom, boom, boom, boom. Jesus is like, don't miss this. I'm the true vine. Plug in. It's going to make a difference. By the way, God might cut you off or cut you back. Like, all right, good news. Let's go, team. So we're going to try and make sense of this. But he does give us a bit of a journey of discipleship. What it looks like to apprentice, that's what the word disciple means. As we talked about last week, it means to know Jesus, then to begin to act like him in our space. And so Jesus says, hey, here's what discipleship looks like. And if we just look through these verses, he says it starts by being attached to the vine. He says, I'm the true vine. Disciples are those what? Plugged in. They're connected into the true vine. Just play out the metaphor. Jesus is the full, the faithful fulfillment. What it looks like to be a disciple is to be connected to the vine, the true vine, Jesus. It also looks like someone that would abide, that has a vital kind of relationship with Jesus, who, because of that relationship, becomes the source of the fruit in our lives. Jesus will talk about this idea of pruning, being cut back so that more can be produced, that we will, in our journey of discipleship, experience that. And then lastly, the journey of discipleship is about fruit. It's about developing friendship with Jesus. It's about learning how to love one another. It's about experiencing his joy right in the middle of my story. Let's start with a couple questions. Let's just ask a couple questions of the text. The first question is this: How in the world do I get attached to the vine? If that's the beginning of discipleship, like how do I get grafted in? How do I start a relationship with him? Does this happen magically? Do I have to say something? Is there a particular prayer I need to say kind of in order? How do I get in? Later we're going to look at what Jesus becomes a source, these beautiful things. And maybe some of us, even for the first time, will feel like God's like saying, Hey, I want you grafted into me. You stayed at a distance, you kind of watched, but come. So the question is, how do we get attached to the vine? Paul walks this out real simply to a church in Ephesus. He says, This, for it's by grace that you've been saved. It's this word grace is a gift. It's something that God does for you, that the gospel is that it's been done for you, not that you need to go do something to achieve. It's grace that you've been saved through faith, putting your faith in him. And this is not from yourselves, it's a gift of God. And so we get grafted in by receiving this gift of salvation that God has for us. Now that can look a lot of different ways. For some of us, it was responding to Billy Graham and an invitation to say, I want to know forgiveness. I want to come, right? And we walk the sawdust trail to the front and it's like, I'm going to lay it down, and God just meets us in that place. For others of us, it's on our own. Maybe we're on a walk. Maybe we're wrestling, trying to get to sleep, and God's working on us. And we simply pray a simple prayer that says something like, God, I want to know you. Thank you for providing a way that my sin before you can be forgiven, for paying the penalty that my sin deserves. God, help me learn to follow you. And probably as many of us as there are in this room, there are different ways we get grafted in. But Paul would say when we give our heart, when we say yes, when we seek forgiveness, God grafts us into his true vine. I love how Sinclair Ferguson says it when he's speaking about this. He says this. He says, When we get Christ by faith, when we get it, when we see the cross, like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's what he says: we get everything that is in him to pardon, liberate, and transform our lives. Here's how I might add a bit of context. When we get Christ by faith, we get everything to pardon our lives. We will experience in that moment some liberation as we realize we've been forgiven. And we will be wildly untransformed, but invited into a life of discipleship, where we follow, we abide, we're at home in the life of Christ as He is at home in us, where His love is in us. This is what this transformation looks like. And this is why we we have a C on our list that we are to cultivate a life with Christ. While we get plugged in in an instant by the salvation, the gift that Jesus gives us, this life of transformation looks a lot more like cultivation. It's why Jesus uses this kind of language. And I love what he has to say here, Sinclair. Because the goal, the goal of abiding, the goal of remaining or being at home in is to take what's already, track with me here, what's already in your eternal account. It's yours, signed, sealed, delivered because of what Jesus has done, his death and his resurrection. So the goal is to take what's in your eternal account right now and to draw upon it in your daily account, to allow what's true because of what Jesus has done to be true in you. And one day, friends, whether it's the day this earth fades or we fade from it, we will experience the full reality of what's in our account. Until then, Jesus gives us this metaphor. He says it's like a vine. Lean in, draw out what's already in your eternal account so that you can live in it, so that you can experience and then so what? You can share it with people that desperately need it. So make your home in me. Abide in me. Man, there's a lot of things you can draw life from. Some version. Jesus invites us to make our home with him. Second question: What does it mean to abide? If you look just at even in verse four, uh, it's this powerful phrase. And I think there are so many times I was studying this week, and I just kind of got lost in these phrases. So I would encourage you this week to go back through and just if you know Lectia Divina, man, just read and pray and read and pray. Let God just blow something off the page. Verse four was one of those sections. Jesus says, This remain in me. I'm like, okay, that's the command. As I also remain in you. He says, make your home in me as what? As I'm making my home in you. What it what does this look like if you have a different translation than the NIV we wrote the one we read this morning? Your translation might say that. It might say, Make your home in me as I make my home in you. And this is picking up on what Jesus is inviting us into. So what does it mean to abide? It means to be at home with. I love listening to people tell stories. I really, really love listening to Pastor Ralph tell stories. So he came back from this wild trip in Germany and he was all over the place. And I, you know, we were talking about this, that, and the other. And I said, Ralph, any like good, sort of that, you know, coming out of uh all this time zone craziness, like stories, you know, anything crazy happened to you in the midst of this? Like, did you wake up? Did you like some weird thing? And he said, Nate, he got all bright and excited as Ralph does when he starts telling a story and he's like just cracking himself up, you know, which causes me to laugh. So I'm kind of leaning in, and Ralph's like, yeah, it was the first night. And he said, Now, I slept in about 12 different beds in 15 different nights. And we flew in at about 4:30 in the afternoon to LAX. We drove to our granddaughter's house to see her. I mean, it was also our kids' house, but mostly our granddaughter's because she's a baby and we wouldn't have wanted to see her. We got up at midnight, Ralph says, because we were on a different time zone. We were on Germany time zone. So from midnight to six, we drove to Sonora. At eight o'clock, he logs in into the office. I mean, the guy is like two sheets to the wind, as they say. Um, he's telling me this story. He says, Yeah, the next night I strut, struggled to stay awake as long as I could. Went to bed around seven, two o'clock. He's like, I wake up in like a full tear. He's like, I have no idea where I am. Like I could have been in one of 12 beds. I'm like, which hotel am I in? Where am I? How do I? And there were two things super clear to him. He had no idea where he was, and he really needed to use the bathroom. So he's like most men, he's like, I'm gonna ask Jenny. And he looks over, and Ginny's like, doing, you know, all this too. And so she had already left the bed a couple hours ago to try and you know sleep on the floor somewhere, as you do. And so, no wife, no idea where he is, and a massive emergency. And Ralph's just cracking himself up. He's like, I have no idea what to do. He's like, I'm not gonna make it. You know, he's having this whole existential moment, you know, and finally it hits him.

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Oh.

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Oh, wait. I'm actually at home. I know where the bathroom is. I know where the kitchen is. I'm safe. No one's gonna check my passport. I'm home. This is a place I can rest. This is a place I can be. Maybe I'm challenged to be the best version of myself, but friends, home is where you're accepted right as you are. And Jesus' invitation is to be at home in him, to find our safety and our rest and our nourishment, and the place we leave our junk in him. And so if we're going to abide, we're going to be at home with Jesus. The second piece of this, if we kind of look through even just John chapter 15, the first 17 verses, is the invitation not only to be at home with, but to be in love with, to find ourselves affectionately loved by Jesus. Like to tap in. I mean, do you do you remember? And you might not remember it now, it may have been a while, but the last time you were in love. And what Jesus' invitation here is that our our hearts would be oriented around him. Didn't you ever like have to long distance date? I mean, I could remember as a kid, now again, I'm an old guy, but I I can still remember the payphone on campus when Kathy moved to Seattle, and I would just stack quarters. Crazy. Used to put these things in the machine, and it would like, you know, be like, hey, you're running out of time. I don't know who that person was. It was probably precursor to AI, but they would tell you you got to add some change if you want to keep talking to your wife in Seattle. And if you have these long-distance relationships, you know that you don't even have to be physically present, but you're constantly thinking of them. Your heart is oriented around them. Maybe for some of you, it's like it's your truck and you're just in love with your. You don't even need to be driving your truck, but you're like, I just love my truck. This one guy in first service, he's like, it's my motorcycle. I don't even have to be. I'm like, okay, great. Thank you for your confession. You're set free, you know. But this is what Jesus is inviting us at make your home and allow the affection of your heart, be in love with me. As I, Jesus says, This is a shocking truth. I'm in love with you. Know yourself as the beloved. This is what it looks like to abide, to make our home with, to reside or remain in him. And Jesus' invitation is that we all would be at home as he's at home in us, that we would be in love as he is crazy in love with us. Okay, this next bit, as we're gonna wrap this piece up. Uh, it I just kind of called it the law of abiding. Uh, abiding is the word that many passages use for this word uh uh remain or home. So the law of abiding. This law is one of those laws that causes many, many parents sleepless nights and turns parents into great prayer warriors, because we know this one. The law of abiding is what? I become what I what? Say what. Me, I become what I abide in, I become what I abide in, and so as a parent, we know where my kid abides, they will soon become. So let's play this out together. A couple fillings just to make sure we're on the same page here. Uh, and I just wanted to help you to try and answer these. My life will bear the fruit of where my blank resides. Okay, help me out. My life will bear the fruit of where my what? Heart. Where my heart. What has the affection of my heart? I will begin to abide there. I mean, I will abide there, and fruit, that fruit will be born in me. Now, this happens all over the place, right? One of the places that I always laugh, um, because whatever, I don't care that much about swearing. And sometimes I'll show up at somebody's shop and we're kind of hanging out, and they go to church here, and they've never talked to me with like shop talk before, but they're abiding at the shop, and so at the shop you shop talk. And so they just start swearing at me, and I'm confessing for them the whole time, you know. But it's like they live at the shop, that's how they talk at the shop, amen. Like that's just where if you abide at the shop, you're gonna talk like the shop people eventually, probably, most likely. I think you will, and it happens. You were laughing with some doctors, like you ever had a doctor talk to you, and you're like, I think you spend too much time with doctors. I'm not sure what you're saying, I'm sure it's helpful, but you maybe need to abide with some like real people that speak English. Where you abide, fruit will be born. You will become. Okay, next fill-in. If I want to be a person of love, then I must abide in next step. What love? Okay, that works for our study this morning because Jesus is love. If I want to become a person of love, then I must abide in Jesus. I must draw upon him. This is Jesus' invitation. Now, with this invitation also comes potentially an invitation to become a very angry person, right? Because the same's true. If you want to become an angry person, anybody wake up that way this morning, you're like, man, I'm just way too joy filled this morning. Anger would be nice. What Jesus is saying here is if you want to become an angry person, you must what? Abide with angry people. You want to become bitter? Watch political rhetoric all your life. You want to become insecure? Click on social media. It works. You become what you abide in. It's why we as parents pray like crazy for our kids. And we like hypernavigate them because it's it makes sense. But oftentimes we think, well, I think I'm I'm immune to all that. And Jesus says, you know, it's so true about you. Pay attention to where you abide. And then he gives us this unbelievable, every one of us in this room, invitation to abide, to draw from him as the true vine. Okay, a couple ways I think the church just gets this wrong. And then we'll jump into the promises of Jesus. A couple ways that people like me get this wrong. And we do it, I think, oftentimes honestly, but sometimes we hear a word like abiding, and it sounds like do more. Sounds like if I just do more for God, I'll get more from Him. It sounds like, and sometimes it's just the filter we live our lives with, and I have one. It sounds like perform more so that God will pay attention. And maybe I can get his attention if I just do more. But the gospel written into this text, the invitation is to just find ourselves, to abide, to make ourselves our home with him. And so we've got to be careful here because strengthening any relationship will require you to what? To what? To do some stuff, right? If you're gonna grow your relationship with anybody, you're gonna have to do some stuff. And you're gonna have to do it religiously. You don't want to be a religious person, I understand that, but you're gonna have to do it religiously because that's how relationships work. So we are going to have to do things, but those aren't so that they are becussed because of all that God has already done. It's in your eternal account. Abiding is drawing on that account for today. I love how Andrew Murray puts it when he's thinking, when he helps us understand this. He says, abiding in him, abiding in Jesus is not, it's not a work we have to do as a condition in order to enjoy his salvation. We're not getting God to give us salvation. Rather, it's our consent to let him do everything for us. It's crazy. What an invitation. And in us and through us. It's a consent to love. It's not getting up and forcing something, hoping fruit will show up. It's like, oh my goodness, look how much I've been loved. Imagine the God of the universe makes his home in me. Second thing I think we get wrong isn't just turning abiding into kind of doing to perform, but that we would become a people who chase experience over cultivating connection. And I think many of us are guilty of this. I get guilty of this partially because I love a good experience. And I hope some of you are with me. Like I love it. I want to feel what God has for me. I think those people are like, you should get rid of your emotions and think your life to happiness, or they're not happy, okay? Like we God meant for us to tap into our emotions. He gave them to us. He meant to be right in the middle of them, fueling them, making them happy, making them sad, drawing them out of us. But when we chase a kind of you know, experience over what Jesus is inviting us into, cultivating a life of intimacy, a life of knowing Him, we miss what He's inviting us to experience. In some ways, you might put it this way uh we can, especially in our world, we can go buy someone else's fruit, right? I mean, ChatGPT, I would never have to write another sermon in my life. And it writes great sermons. If you ever think that sermon was lame, just go on chat GPT, put the text in we studied, it'll give you a great sermon. No work, no cultivating. Just go. That's the world we live in. I mean, I I've talked to you about my farming. You know, I have a little salsa garden, and I can't start with a seed because that seems ridiculous to me. Takes like seven years for the seed to actually grow into a leaf. This year, and and for every year it's like the spiritual thing for me because of these texts, because I want to cultivate a life with Christ that bears much fruit. And so this year I went down there and I was like, the four-dollar tomato plants, they're like this tall, or I could buy the $20 tomato plant, buy Sonora Lumber's fruit. And I looked around literally, like no one was watching, and I'm like, I'm buying this one. It's already got fruit on it. I bought it and I felt like the Lord saying, You're you're shortcutting me. You can't shortcut cultivation. And I planted it, and I felt like this thing in the back of me saying, You better put the fence up next morning. I walk out there, my tomato plant is smunched by the deer. One night, God sent the deer to say, Hey, you can't shortcut it. You might be afraid of what intimacy with me looks like. You might be wildly impatient because of the way your culture is grafting you. You may not know how to get through the initial steps of kind of just even boredom to a vital, fruit-bearing relationship with me, but it's worth it. Make yourself a disciple. Don't chase at someone else's fruit. Cultivate your own. God desires to do that in you, and then ultimately through you. The last one we're gonna look at next week. I invite you back, love you to bring somebody, and it's this that you know. I think sometimes in the church we can we can kind of equate, I know some facts about Jesus with actually having a relationship with Jesus. And Jesus is going to kind of give us a bit of a smelling salt in our sort of narrowway passage we're gonna look at next week to say, hey, you you may be riding on the facts. I want you to know me. And so we're gonna uh jump into that next week. Okay, uh, I love this next section because this was just so helpful for for me as I think about uh am I gonna abide, am I gonna take the time, am I gonna cultivate? Jesus gives us in this text a number of things, fruit, if you will, that come into our lives as a result of abiding in Him. He says, if you abide in me, I will be your source for all these things. I will fill your life with these things. These are the promises that come when we decide I will abide. These are the things when we find ourselves void of them in our lives that are shouting to us, go back to your Savior, go home, return. Okay, so here's the first one. Jesus says, This when I abide in him, he will become my source of care. Jesus starts this section and he says, Hey, my father, he's gonna cut off those that don't produce fruit. He's going to cut back those that do produce fruit. You will, if you abide in me, become a recipient of the Father in heaven's good, divinely loving care in your life. And here's what I want to say. I think it's so helpful that Jesus says this. Especially if you're a newer believer in here. I get to walk with so many of you, and you know, we're doing rooted class, we're doing a class, we're doing something, and I get to hear your story. And it's a little bit like this, right? You you come to faith, you experience this full pardon, this forgiveness, like woo, I'm going. God begins to work in your life. You know, it's a little bit like this, like like little Johnny, like he finally turned his heart over to God, and little Johnny just starts growing. And what happens in little Johnny? He begins because the love of Christ is flowing through him to begin to like produce fruit, right? And it's like whoop whoop whoop boop. Like there's a grape. Oh Johnny's first grape. Isn't it awesome? What does Jesus promise that the Father's gonna do? Whack it off. Any of you ever had that experience? Like, man, I was all in. I was growing, I was growing fruit. God, it was for you. I was all in, and then I went through this season, it was tough. Things went sideways. What happened? What is God doing? He's loving you. Friends, I I don't just do you know salsa gardens, I have four beautiful fruit trees in my yard. This is wildly counterintuitive. Every spring, even winter, my friends that actually grow fruit, I have fruit trees. My friends that actually grow fruit are like, Nate, you need to prune that thing. Like, it just doesn't make sense to me. Why would I cut it all down? Like, I want it fluffy and I want it to give, I want it to give shade. And they look at me like, dude, if you wanted shade, plant an oak tree. This is a fruit tree. It's not meant to produce shade, it's meant to produce, help me out, fruit. Not one fruit, little Johnny, lots of fruit. Jesus says, I mean, this is wild, right? He says, not just one piece of fruit. Father's hacking that off. Why? Because he said, You have more fruit in you. Way more fruit. Ten times, hundred times, thousand times I can produce fruit if you will what? Remain in me. I think Jesus starts with this teaching because sometimes we feel that and we're like, man, I must not be good enough. I must not have the skill. I must have done something wrong. I must have, and he's saying, No, it's because the father loves you. It's because he's got a vision that's far bigger than you have for yourself. Yes, it hurts. Lean in. This is the time to abide. When you feel like, man, what happened? This seems like a ripoff. Remember when Jesus gives this teaching? Imagine if he thought, I'm the God of the, I'm the king. Ain't nobody gonna cut me back. Your father desires to produce much fruit when we abide. He says this. He says, you know, I also will become the source of of all love. He over and over in this text. This is just verse 9, but there's so many places where he says, so have I loved you, not so that I will love you, so have I loved you. Some of us grew up in a home where it was so that. And we got approval, we got acceptance when we did whatever was required or didn't do whatever was required. Some of us grew up with a sibling that did all that stuff real naturally, and we thought, Who am I? God comes to us and says, I've already loved you more on that. He says that you're gonna receive my joy. I mean, Jesus says this, right? He says it in verse 11. If you, again, this is just be a verse to think on this week, to study on, to let it take root in you, so that my joy, Jesus says, will be in you. Remember what the author of Hebrews says about Jesus' joy? He says, it's for his joy that he did what? Went to the cross. Like that's some pretty deep joy. He says, I want to put my joy where? In you. The only way I can get it in you is if you choose to what? Abide, make your home remain. If I can't get it in there. Any of you guys like me, you have times in your life, seasons in your life, people in your life. And when you spend time in that season, in that place with those people, you hear like a vacuum sucking sound. It's like and what they're doing is they're sucking the joy out of your life. They're wonderful people, right? We are them to others. So, amen. Okay, we come by it honestly, but we all have those things. And what Jesus invites us to know is that we can live the life of abiding, where our joy is not dependent on our success at our job, whether we make the shot, get on the team, whether our kids are perfect. Our joy is dependent on him as the source of our joy. He says, he goes on, he says, not only is will I be your source of care, your source of love, your source of joy, but I will be your source of friendship. Jesus says, I no longer call you servants, I call you friends. The word Jesus uses here, this translated into the English friends, it has a beautiful description. If we look at the Greek word he chooses to use, and Jesus had a lot of Greek words that mean friend. He says, This, that you're a friend. You're someone that's dearly loved or prized in a personal, intimate way, a trusted confidant. You are as a friend, this is what Jesus is saying about you. You are held dear in a close bond of personal affection. You are a friend. And then lastly, he says that you will, I will become for you a source of value. He says, I chose you, I appointed you to abide and to bear fruit. You have been picked with a purpose. Let me ask you this question. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have like a black belt and abiding? Like to be really good at abiding. Anybody ever said that, man? That person knows they abide. Look at them. They got it. They got it figured out, they got it dialed, they abide. As I was thinking about this this week, I just I would love that to be true of me. You know, he couldn't sing, couldn't carry a tune, couldn't grow hair to save his life, couldn't even see colors. The idiot was colorblind. But that dude, he could abide. He could walk with his savior. He knew what it was like to make his home with Jesus. Jesus gives us four things. I'm gonna just walk through them real quickly in this text that are his response to what abiding looks like. The first thing he says is this abiding, being at home with, in love with, is continually trusting in Jesus. Some of us live lives that are kind of controlled at times by fear, by worry. Sometimes they're controlled by control or need to fix it, cover it up. Jesus says, abiding is continually trusting in me. His narrow way phrase around this idea of trusting in him is this you can do nothing without me. The hard part of that is none of us believe it. I won't say none of us, maybe you do. All too often I don't. I do some great stuff. I do some neat things. Jesus says, Nate, Nate, Nate, Nate, Nate, Nate. You can do nothing without me. And so I start my day in a posture of trust. Because I want to do something. I think the breath he's given me to steward, the gifts he's given me to steward, are meant to mean something, as they do in you. And so we start by trusting in him. Second thing Jesus invites us to do is to remain in him, and his words remain in us. And so we start with his words. We listen. What is it that he has to say? How is it that he's guiding, directing, speaking? So we go to God's word. We we we start there. This is what it looks like to remain, to allow his words to be in, to be in us. Listen to what is said by uh uh the author Dallas Willard. He says this certainly, this abiding in the faithful heart involves conscience, communication, or conversation. The spirit, he says, is not mute. He's speaking, he's not restricting himself to an occasional nudge, a hot flash, a brilliant image, or a case of the goosebumps. He desires to talk, casual conversation, just learning throughout the day to listen and to speak and to grow an abiding kind of relationship with him. The third thing Jesus invites us into is to obey Jesus, to obey him. If if you and I are gonna get any closer to a kind of whatever a black belt and abiding look like, you and I are gonna be hungry to allow the words of Jesus to be made true in our lives, to align our lives to his truth, to come before him regularly and say, God, are there ways I'm out of alignment? Are the ways I'm treating people that you don't want them to be treated, or the ways I'm thinking that you don't want me to think, or the ways I'm I'm being selfish or greedy with the stuff you've asked me to steward. And you need me to respond, to obey. Jesus says, if you keep my commands, my love's gonna be in you, you will abide. And then lastly, he says this, and being loved by Jesus, just simply figuring out what it looks like for you to on the regular receive, to live in, to make a home in the love that he has for you. That's gonna look different for all of us. Central to our stories of being loved by him, Jesus hints at in this text, verse 12 and verse 13. Jesus says these words He says, Love one another, what? As I have loved you. And then he goes on. He says, Greater love has no one than this. Greater love has no one ever. Like if you ever found a person that this was true of, they would be the greatest recipient of love. Hang out with them, they're bound to get their love all over you because they've received great love. Where do they get it? Jesus says, they've had a friend lay down their life for them. Now we can read this as an invitation for us to love those around us, and I think it's that. But I think what Jesus is saying, on the eve of the night he would lay down his life for his friends, for people like you and me, is receive. Receive this love, let it fill your veins, let it be what you think about, let it rewrite your story in a way that begins to reflect to others the love you have received, because greater love has no one than one who's had somebody lay down their life for them. And that, friends, is what God has done for us. God, we come before you. Maybe this morning we need to get tapped into the vine for the first time. Maybe we need to say in the simplicity of this moment, God, thank you. God, thank you for sending your son to die for me. God, thank you for inviting me into life. God, I lay down my life before you. I give you my heart. I desire to follow you. Maybe for some of us, we we just haven't been leaning in. Maybe we've gone through a season of pruning, a season of trial, a tough thing, and we need this moment to say, God, I want to lean in. I need to come back to trust you and your goodness and all that you have for me. Maybe, God, for all of us, it would be a moment as we together stand and worship where we receive the crazy, bold, over-the-top, sacrificial, unconditional love that you have for us. God, thank you for loving us that way. We love you. Pray these things in your name. Amen.

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