Before I start, why don't we pray real quick?
If you'll bow your heads.
Heavenly Father, I'm so thankful for this church, thankful for the worship Sam coordinates every week, just love it and honors you.
I pray that this would be a time of rest and peace amidst a busy season of life, that we could just come and hear more about you, the speaker most of all.
I pray that you would speak through me.
That is my only hope.
In Jesus' name I pray.
Amen.
So as Bo said, this is my last day as an elder.
We're kind of hanging on to that last 13 hours, and then January 1st we'll be done.
But I have been an elder for five years.
This church started about five years ago.
And a few families in Marietta, Mandy and I and Brad and Megan Respus felt like God was calling us to help start a church that preached every week that you are more flawed than you know, but you are more loved than you could ever dare to dream by Jesus.
And we didn't hear, we knew that we needed that message every week.
And we had not found a church in Marietta that preached that every week.
And for five years, it's really been a joy in my life to serve as an elder and just to come here and hear that message that Russ preaches every week because I need it every week.
I will go beyond that into earning my way in.
And if you had told me six or seven years ago that this all would have happened, I would have said, you have the wrong Brian Robinson.
That's not something I'm interested in.
That's not something I would choose to do, which means to me even more so that it's God and it's Jesus working through people, uh flawed people like myself.
So I'm going to focus on the verses today, I'm the vine, and you are the branches, verse five, which says, I'm 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.
So what does Jesus mean when he says, Apart from me, you can do nothing?
What does that really mean?
Because I've seen things in the world that people are doing that don't appear to be nothing.
They appear to be something, constructive.
Um, but Jesus is saying those things apart from him are nothing.
Um I heard a sermon series entitled Jesus plus nothing equals everything.
And that was kind of my first taste of this.
Um in 2011, when I heard those words, I thought that I believed that.
Um, but it turns out it sounded good to me, but functionally, that's not really how I was living.
I was living much more Jesus plus Brian Robinson and my gifts equal success, not Jesus plus nothing.
Um I think that's because I'm a goal-driven person.
I'm a firstborn, I'm the elder brother in many ways.
Um, and I like control and I like to earn things.
Um, but thankfully, God um eventually shows us that we are not in control.
And this often happens through difficult times in our lives.
Uh, and I'm no different from that.
Um, leading up to that, there's I had this um period of time in my life um where I experienced some brokenness, and we each have a unique story in our lives.
And mine was that um in the past, like growing up, I grew in a loving home, um, went to a good high school.
Um again, I'm pretty goal-driven, so I wanted to go to this school, and I got into that college, and I was dating this beautiful girl who's now my wife, and she married me, and I wanted to go to graduate school.
So all of this was kind of this upward trajectory in my life, and it felt like I was in control of that.
Um, but as most of you that are old enough to know, eventually you hit a period in your life where you realize you're not in control.
And for me, that happened a few years ago, like I said, in 2011, through some difficult circumstances, and I was literally kind of at the end of my rope, where I was literally on my knees and my hands were up.
And I was saying, Jesus, help me, because I don't know what to do.
I I'm out of, I'm out of options, which is why I was saying I don't know what to do.
I tried all the options that I knew.
And that's very fertile ground for Jesus to work.
Um, and I need to make it clear that he brought me to that point.
It wasn't anything that I had done, he brought me there.
And maybe you're there right now, um, and you can't imagine a way out of your situation that you're in.
And if you are, I know a few things.
I know that you're not alone.
I know that he loves you.
Um, and his heart breaks for you.
And I know that um because he says that in scripture.
Isaiah 53 3 says about Jesus, he was despised and rejected by man, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
And as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Psalm 147 3 says, He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.
So he knows, and you're not alone.
Um another quote that's in your bulletin, the uh the theologian and um church elder Davis Lee says, ultimately, I love this quote, ultimately, underneath everything that I do, I'm seeking to return to the garden, to be with him, whether I recognize it or not.
Think about it.
My efforts to be secure, loved, happy, complete, successful, admired, respected, fulfilled are all based on my ultimate inborn desire to be with Jesus.
What I do apart from him has only the illusion of success leading me away from the garden, away from him.
That is my rebellion, my failure.
Apart from him, I can do nothing, nothing that is meaningful.
Quoting Mr.
Brad Respus, Jesus is the answer.
The fact that I can cling to that in spite of my flaws makes me eternally grateful.
So, how do we get to a place where abiding in Jesus can free us?
I think first we have to understand that who Jesus is and how he feels about us.
I saw a movie recently and it dealt with shame, and this woman was saying, I knew that God was a loving God, but I also knew that he was going to judge me.
And that always scared me, and I kind of had a fence up there.
And I think that's true for a lot of us, depending on our background or what we were taught growing up.
Um, but I think we have to look to Scripture to see what God says about us through his son Jesus.
Um, we have to know his face is a loving face.
Paul says in Romans 8, 38 and 39, for I'm sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord.
So only because I know of his great love for me, can I view his being in control as relief.
And when I fully understand my capacity to sin, and I fully understand that he knows all that about me and he still loves me, I can begin to trust and surrender and open my hands.
But I think it has to start with his love for us.
Romans 2.4 says, God's kindness leads to repentance.
It doesn't say God's law or God's instruction leads to repentance.
It says his kindness leads us to turn, leads us to change.
So back to apart from me, you can do nothing.
I don't desire to do nothing with my life.
I desire to do something.
So what does this look like on a practical level?
On Wednesday afternoon, when you're at work or at home taking care of the kids or going to school, what does this actually look like?
Part of our struggle in the day-to-day is that we forget who we are in Christ or we resist that.
We just choose to be selfish.
And I think the key is to remember what is true of us in Christ.
Colossians 3 points us this way.
Paul says in Colossians 3, 2 and 3, set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.
For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
So why do we do what we know is not good for us that's going to make us feel bad?
I'm going to tell a little story.
This Halloween, the story involves this young man sitting in the red checkered shirt up front here, James, my son.
He's seven years old, have three other kids.
So this Halloween, we went trick-or-treating.
Mamie and I got to take James and Allie, our first and second graders.
And Sydney and Meg stayed home.
They're 14 and 15.
They manned the Ford at home.
Although when we got home after trick-or-treating, we noticed they were playing loud music, and Meg was dressed up as a giant T-Rex.
And it was a very popular house to come to because of that.
But anyway, so Manny and I were taking James and Allie trick-or-treating, and I noticed in between houses that James is chewing.
And I don't remember giving him any gum.
And his pace after we had been to five or six houses was increasing.
He was speeding up a little bit.
And so we got home, and Allie and James had their little orange jack-o'-lanterns, and they dumped their candy out, and Allie dumps her candy out, and she's got probably 60 pieces of candy in there.
We have a pretty good treat uh street to trick-or-treat on.
And then James dumps out his jack-o'-lantern, and he's got about 30 wrapped pieces of candy, and about 30 wrappers.
So you can imagine in about five minutes there was a lot of moaning coming from the bathroom.
Fortunately, my wife is sympathetic and was with him in the bathroom.
I was outside laughing a lot.
So the next day, I went to work the next day, and I came home, and being the instructive father that I am, I sat down with James and I said, No, James, let's talk about this.
What happened yesterday?
What happened when you were trick-or-treating?
Why did you eat that candy?
And he looked at me and he said, Well, I knew that you and mom were only going to let me eat like three or four pieces.
So, you know, I had at it while I could, and I was like, Well, you know, I'm proud of you for telling me the truth.
That was good that you told me the truth.
So, still in instructive father mode, because I don't feel like my point was quite yet made.
Um I said, So how do you feel about that decision, James?
And he looked at me uh and he said, Well, I knew I was gonna be full, and then he kind of paused and smiled with a twinkle in his eye, and he said, But I knew it was gonna taste good.
And that's funny because we do the same thing.
Uh in fact, that morning at work, I had two brownies in the break room, and I knew that it was gonna make me full, but I knew that it was gonna taste good in the moment.
And maybe your thing that makes you full is food.
Or maybe it's alcohol, or maybe it's tobacco, or maybe it's porn, or maybe it's gossip.
But when our worth and our values are found in these things, they make us sick.
They make us feel full or uh just not good.
Uh, an example of this, like with gossip, um, we have this bit of information that we know and we want to share it with someone else because it makes us feel a little better to have this knowledge.
I know this because I do it, uh, to have this knowledge to tear someone else down, and they're not all that, and all of that, when after we get this little hit of dopamine or adrenaline, and it makes us feel good in the moment.
But long term, after we do it, it makes us feel sick, it makes us feel full.
And I think in that moment, we're failing to realize what has been done for us, who lives inside of us.
We're looking for our acceptance and our worth from another person and not from our creator.
Um, a few quotes that are also in your bulletin that help me remember who I am in Christ, and these come from Andrew Murray's book called Abide in Christ.
He was a South African pastor and author.
Um, he says, live your daily life in the full consciousness of being righteous in God's sight, an object of delight and pleasure in Christ.
And the second quote, he says, A soul filled with large thoughts of the vine will be a strong branch and will abide confidently in him.
Be much occupied with Jesus and believe much in him, the true vine.
So in conclusion, um Bo shared a little bit of this story, but the past three or four months of being an elder have been great.
Um we've had really good discussions, but one thing that's been new is we've been bumping into this.
We we've some of you know this, we've been bumping into a negative cash flow, which means we're running at a deficit.
We're taking in less than we're spending.
And that in our meetings as elders has been has added some stress, um, not so much in the moment, but more for 2018 and what we're planning to do in the years ahead.
And um and yeah, so those those decision making has been hard.
It's been hard to see my friend Russ stress out about those things because um what's in the church's bank account means a lot more to the pastor than it does for someone that just goes to this church.
Um, so it's been hard.
Um and some of you also know a few weeks ago um we had an anonymous donor call and give our church a million dollars to pay off our mortgage.
Um and when Russ told us, we're in that room right over there in that room, Russ told the elders, someone has done this.
And um, there were, it was emotional.
There were tears, we cried.
Um I remember Bo just started spontaneously praying, which was powerful.
Uh and I remember David Russ quoted uh Ephesians 3.20, which says, more than we could have asked or imagined.
And Bo alluded to that a little bit in his intro, but I have seen in this church over and over and over again, a church that started in a dental office reception area, um, he does more than we could have asked for or imagined.
Um I went back and looked and read the rest of that verse in context, and it's in your bulletin as well, Ephesians 3, 20 through 21 says, now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus and throughout all generations, forever and ever.
Amen.
I thought it was interesting that right after it says, To him who is able to do far more abundantly than all we asked or think, it says, according to the power at work within us.
As believers in Christ, we have that power inside of us.
Um, we don't need to look to something else to give us that worth or that fulfillment.
And as Brad said, uh, Jesus is ultimately the answer.
Let's pray.
Um, Heavenly Father, again, I'm I'm so grateful for what you're doing in this church.
I pray that you would continue to make the next step clear for us.
Um we know that um these blessings we don't deserve, that they're just gifts from you.
And um I pray for Russ and his family that they have a restful time away.
And I pray for our New Year's that we would continue to keep our eyes on you and off of ourselves.
In Christ's name I pray.
Amen.