Branches In The Vine

Hey, happy Sunday, everybody. Welcome to June. The summer carries on and really glad to be with you. Honestly, just the sight of you today brings such joy to me because it really is a gift to be able to gather together as God's people. And even for us as this small expression of God's greater global body of Christ, this is a gift to us. And I'm so glad to be with you, excited to talk through a bit of scripture with you today as we dive into God's word. My name is Dylan. If we've not met before, I'm one of our pastors here on staff and continuing with a handful of messages today. Last week, Pastor Josh gave a message talking about being close enough to Jesus to feel his heart beat. And it was such an incredible message, such a beautiful invitation. I don't know about you, but I so greatly desire to be near to Jesus, to be close to him. And my prayer, my hope is that even the message today would help us in that pursuit to give us handlebars and practical ways to draw near to Jesus. And that message last week was really anchored in John 13. And if you look at John's gospel, chapters 13 to 17 holds what is known

as Jesus' farewell discourse. And so Pastor Josh kind of began there last week. And these are really Jesus' final words, his teachings and insights leading up to the time where he's going to be arrested and he knows that he's going to be going to the cross, whew, excuse me, going to the cross to give his life. And it's a pinnacle moment in the gospel narrative. And these are really intimate moments where he's with his disciples. He knows that the time is now short. He doesn't have long before this is going to happen. And he's saying, here's really what I want to leave you with. Here's what you need to know before everything else happens. And we're continuing through a handful of messages drawn from Jesus' farewell discourse. And today I want to give you a message titled Branches in the Vine. Branches in the Vine, and we're gonna begin in John chapter 15 and read through verses one to five where Jesus is speaking and he says, I am the true vine and my father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit. While every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself. It must remain in the vine.

Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing. Now this is one of, I gotta let you know, one of my favorite passages of scripture, one that I regularly come back to and meditate on, these words of Jesus speaking of himself as the true vine and us as the branches. And even through scripture, if you look at the beginning and the end, garden imagery bookends the Bible as space where God dwells with his people from the Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis with Adam and Eve to this future picture of the garden city of the new Jerusalem in Revelation. And I love this kind of imagery. We actually, in our own backyard, my wife Kendra and I, our family, we have a small kind of modest garden in our backyard that I love, I love that space. And we're getting to the point in the season now where it is, if maybe you have a garden, it's kind of gardening season. And we've been getting into a new rhythm that's been really welcome for us, which is kind of, we'll put the kids down for bed, and then most nights we'll go out together and we'll walk out and we'll check on the garden and see how things are looking

and take some time to water the plants. And we've gotten into this routine. And actually last night, we got back from a couple of days out of town. And so we got the kids to bed, tucked in, and we went back to the garden to check it out. And we had our first real kind of harvest of strawberry plants. And I want to show you a picture of some of our produce. This was, yeah, I mean, wow. That's pretty red. That makes me feel so good. That's mostly a credit to my wife Kendra and not me. most of the work in the garden, but this was just one handful of the strawberries that we picked last night. I did put the biggest one in the middle. There were some smaller ones as well. But there's something that just feels magical about going back and seeing what's been growing and to be able to pull things from the branches, this fruit, and for us, our garden, mostly it's like half of it is a kind of strawberry patch that we planted strawberries a few years ago. They continue to kind of grow and propagate and spread. It's about half the strawberries, and then the other half we do mostly tomatoes. We love garden-fresh tomatoes, and we did stop planting zucchini. And if you've ever planted zucchini in a garden,

you know that you witnessed something just short of like a multiplication miracle because they just keep coming, and they're always, for us, we had them, and there was always this point in the season where we just couldn't keep up anymore, and you try, you look for all the different recipes, and there just comes a point where you realize, man does not live on zucchini bread alone. We gotta do something else. And so some of you who do have zucchini in your garden, you're gonna be like ding-dong ditching neighbors leaving zucchini on their doorsteps at some point this summer because you just won't be able to keep up. But we love what we have, and not too long ago as we were kind of entering into the summer became one of my favorite moments of the year, one that I consistently enjoy, and it's very specific, but I always have the task of tilling the garden, particularly tilling the half where we do all of our tomatoes and things. And because there's dirt everywhere and stuff, I always just kind of slip off my shoes and go in barefoot, and you begin tilling what looks like this sort of hard, cracked surface on the top that's a little bit dried out, and slowly but surely it churns up, and you see the soil darken, and you can begin to smell the earth, and it feels just like walking on these kind of dirt pillows. It's all soft and pillowy, and I love that experience.

I think just there's something about, for me being someone who most often is kind of walking an inch above the earth with the soles of my shoes between as a buffer, and so much of the air I breathe is air-conditioned in this life. There's just something about coming back to a place where I'm reminded that I'm dust, touching dust, so to speak, to be in that space of the garden. There's something special there for me, and as I think of the smell of the dark and damp soil, and the quiet life that pours out of it in the form of strawberries and tomatoes that we gather, as I think of the joy of eating a small harvest from it, transported not by an unknown truck from some far-off unknown place, but transported by the hands of my children from a place that we call home, there's something really special about that. And so as I hear Jesus' invitation enveloped in this garden imagery to remain and abide and dwell with him, with me as well, as vine and branches, it's so deeply resonant. And just as I've seen the great beauty in our little garden, I also know that the good things growing there didn't get there by accident, right? And I also know that gardening, I have found out, is a lot of work. I mean, when we began making our garden,

we had to do fencing and stuff to keep the rabbits out. We had to bring in soil because the dirt in our backyard wasn't good enough for gardening, apparently. And you realize quickly and still to this day, know that dirt cheap means absolutely nothing because dirt, if you buy dirt, it's not cheap at all. We get soil for our planters every year, and I've spent way more money on dirt than I would have ever hoped to as a kid. I thought, this stuff is free, they just give it away. Not the case. You've got to bring in the dirt. There's weeds that need to be pulled. You do planting and watering. You go out and you spend time harvesting. I even remember earlier this year, our strawberries were starting to come back nice and strong from the winter, and we were thinking, man, there's going to be this great harvest. And then we got this thing called a frost warning. And so Kendra informed me, we have to go out and cover the strawberries with sheets. I thought, I've heard of flower beds. I didn't know there were strawberry sheets. There's like more to this than I, and we had to go out and I had to like tuck in the strawberries after I tucked in my kids. I felt, and we had like a flashlight in the dark. The neighbors probably thought we had committed some crime.

There's all this work that goes into gardening. I found out, and the crazy thing is, and for me, this is really kind of the rub is that gardening is a lot of work and it's really this peripheral part of my life. very small, to-the-side thing. There are a lot of other things in my life that require a lot more work. And there's rub for the fruit-bearing branches in my garden. It's not really hard for them to remain. It's not like the strawberries are going to up and run away. We're not worried about that, right? They just kind of hang out. And so I look and I say, Jesus, I want this remaining, abiding, dwelling life. But I'm a person, not a plant. There seems to be a few differences there. Unlike the strawberries, I have a job to work. I've got bills to pay, kids to raise. I've got events that I need to attend. There are meals that I have to prepare because I cannot photosynthesize, like the plants in my garden. It doesn't seem quite like one-for-one in the analogy. Yes, I want to remain, but I'm a person, not a plant. And amidst the busyness and demands of life, perhaps even for you, if you were to self-reflect, you've found yourself at times feeling like it's a fight just to return to Jesus in the gaps of your days or of your weeks. And so how can we not only return occasionally or even frequently, but to remain continually in Christ, in Christ, in us, that we may bear much fruit? In verse 3, Jesus says, you are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. In other words, because you've received the gospel, you've already been grafted in. You've already been planted in Christ, in the courts of God, where you may flourish. So the question, therefore, from there is now, how do you grow? How can the vitality of the vine flow through your life, quietly pouring out into produce, into fruitfulness? And what is clear is that it does not happen by accident. We don't accidentally stumble into Christ-likeness. We must intentionally orient our lives toward that end. And the question is not, how do I squeeze out fruit? It is, how do I remain rooted? How do I remain rooted in Christ? How can we architect our lives in such a way that fosters our vital connection to Christ, from which fruitfulness then flows? And there are endless things that you could talk about with that, endless things that could be said. But for today, we'll focus on just a few that I believe are really indispensable. And the first is to create structure. Create structure. Jesus uses this imagery of vine and branches. And the vining plant that's most commonly conceived

of in this passage is that of a grapevine, as is directly asserted in some translations. And we don't have grapes in our garden. Strawberries, they seem kind of viney in the way that they spread out across the ground, though I found out they technically put out these things called runners, and then they kind of repropagate and they grow. It's this whole thing. But this year, actually, for the first time, we're growing a true vining plant in our garden. We've got a new crop on the rise, and that is sugar snap peas. And because of that, for the first time, we've also had to install a trellis in our garden. And so when Kendra told me we're going to plant these sugar snap peas, and she said, we also need to put in a trellis. I thought, oh, I didn't know that. I didn't realize that we would have to do that. And as it turns out, a trellis is incredibly important for cultivating the growth of vining plants. And you can probably picture a wine vineyard with its many rows of grapevines hanging across trellises. You might be able to envision that. And a trellis is important because it allows more exposure to sunlight. It increases airflow to prevent funguses and plant rot. It elevates the plant above the pests on the ground that would otherwise harm it. And ultimately, the point is this, that vining plants are exponentially healthier and more fruitful when their life is assisted by a trellis. And the same is true for us, I would say, spiritually as branches connected to the true vine. We grow more, we are healthier, we are more fruitful when our connection to Christ is supported by an intentional structure. Throughout the history of Christianity, tracing all the way back to the life and the example of Jesus, what a trellis is to vining branches, the spiritual disciplines have been to life with God. And when I say spiritual disciplines, I mean the rhythms. habits and routines that support sustained healthy connection to God. And if you look historically, these are practices like reading and meditating on Scripture, listening and speaking to God in prayer, fasting, giving and receiving love in community, serving others, sharing the good news of the kingdom, practicing generosity, resting and delighting in God's presence in Sabbath. All of these different ways of encountering the presence of God are opening ourselves up and making ourselves available to Him. And now in verse 5 Jesus utters these words, apart from me you can do what? Nothing. I don't know if Jesus is being encouraging or if that feels discouraging to hear at times, like hey, by the way, you can do nothing apart from me. And I actually think that's one

of the most encouraging lines in Scripture because it reminds us that the weight does not fall solely upon us, but the weight is carried well in union with Christ. Apart from me you can do nothing, he says. And we may be tempted to reduce this down to God does it all, we just kind of accept Jesus and sit back, or we accept Jesus and we just go on living our lives. But what Jesus is saying is that without Him, everything else is a non-starter. We need Jesus who is the way and the truth and the life. And Him being the true vine implies that there are many false vines that beckon us to connect ourselves to them as well, but if we were to do so we would find there is no life actually in them, that only in the true vine of Jesus is real abundant life actually found. He alone is the true vine. So apart from Him we can do nothing, but when we're not apart from Him, when we are with Christ, when we are in Christ, we do have a part to play and it's worth saying that. And our role is not to change ourselves, but to make ourselves available to God who changes us, to actually receive the pervasive grace of God into our lives. And this is what the spiritual disciplines or the practices of Jesus actually help us to do. It is not that they change us directly by their own power, it is simply that they make us available to the power and presence of God with us, that He is the one who does the transforming and the changing in our lives. And we may be perhaps put off by the language of discipline or structure or practice for fear of legalism, and if we allow they can become those things, but if we keep a right perspective, they are not. We might be put off by that, but this is not works-based righteousness, to be clear. It is not working for God's grace. In all of these things, we are working with God's grace. Not for it, but with it. I love this quote from Dallas Willard in his book, The Great Omission, where he writes, The true saint burns grace like a 747 burns fuel on takeoff. Become the kind of person who routinely does what Jesus did and said. You will consume much more grace by leading a holy life than you will by sinning, because every act you do will have to be upheld by the grace of God. See, in a busy life fraught with responsibilities and commitments, all of these things that we carry, we will not

be regularly available if we do not plan. And so the practical question is, what are the daily or weekly or monthly even annual rhythms in which I open myself up to the transforming presence of God? And just to share a bit from my own experience in taking the time to articulate and write down, like I said, very practically to say, what are the rhythms of my life? To evaluate them and to say, how do I want to be connected to Christ in the rhythms of my life? And not simply how I want to as I desire, but how do I send God's invitation. How do I sense that God desires for me to encounter him? And I look to the past and I look at the saints through history and say, how have people connected with God and how may God want to connect with me? How can I encounter him? And when I have taken time to write out, this is the rhythm that I want prayer to look like in my life. This is the rhythm of Bible reading and study of scripture and meditating on God's Word. This is what I want that rhythm to look like in my life and I go through these different areas and when I've taken the time to articulate those, here's what I've noticed. Is that even if I'm not hitting the mark 100% of the time, even if I was to hit it quite low, say like something like 70%, I'm probably still hitting that target that's been about five times more often than if I never took the time to create it at all. Does that make sense? That there's a higher frequency of engaging in these ways when I actually take the time to say intentionally, thoughtfully, how might I encounter God in my life? And the point of that is that it it's not a harsh legalism. It is not saying, okay, I'm gonna write out these things and now I have to be perfect in it. How many of us have felt guilty, have felt like ashamed because we haven't prayed as much as we think we should be or because we we haven't read the Bible as much as maybe we know we should and this guilt starts to creep in and and for me I'm such a classic perfectionist. Like I want to do everything perfect and that's just not the reality for us and I want to encourage you in this that in practice it is not the case that practice makes perfect. The reality is that practice makes progress, that we grow through practice, that we come more like Jesus through practice and encounter with his

presence. I think of this beautiful line from the book East of Eden. It's a novel by John Steinbeck and there's this line from a character where he says, And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good. And there's something so liberating about that, that it's not about being perfect, but when we practice, when we devote ourselves to following Jesus, there's this newfound freedom to, okay, I can encounter the goodness of God in my life. It's not about my performance and me being perfect, but it's about consistently pursuing the person of Jesus, consistently pursuing the heart of God, and there's a newfound goodness in that. It's not a rigid structure that restricts, but it's one that gives the freedom to flourish. It's a way of cultivating good growth, is what a trellis is really for. This quote from GK Chesterton is worth sharing and I also have to say, I know I share this at the risk of sounding like I only read one person in one book because I've quoted GK Chesterton a few times in past messages, but this one's too good not to, where he writes, And I love that picture because God is not this kind of authoritarian person up in the sky wishing to dictate all the details of our lives. He is a good God and a good Father who desires to cultivate lives in which we can flourish, where we can have room for the goodness of God to run wild, so to speak, that he can fill our lives in that way. And we often desire this, to grow in our walk and experience of life in Christ, but to do so, to practice what we plan, we must also make room. In verse 2, Jesus says, so that it'll be even more fruitful. For the good fruit of our lives to increase, there will often be other things that need to decrease. The more that God has for us is often multiplication through subtraction. The obvious things are cutting away what is dead or diseased, but oftentimes as well, there's a time to cut away what is healthy maybe, but that is not the priority at the moment. I've found this, I learned with strawberries, that they put out these runners and sometimes what you'll do is you'll cut off the runners, not because they're unhealthy, they're growing well, but it's to say, hey, the priority right

now is not to spread wide, the priority is to invest all of our energy into the fruit that's being produced. And so sometimes you'll cut off good or healthy growth because it's simply not the priority of the season. Sometimes there are those things in our lives where we say, God, I know this is not sin, this is not a quote unquote bad thing, but perhaps you're inviting me to take a step back from it or to cut back on some things. And I've often had to ask God, what do you want to prune in my life? And there are times where we clearly recognize it's a major pruning kind of season. I think of moving into parenthood. And that was the time when there was a major pruning because all of a sudden I don't have the time for all of the things that I used to. And so there are many things which I had to cut back on that I had to reprioritize where my energy was going toward. And maybe you find yourself in seasons like that of entering marriage or parenthood or retirement or a new job, whatever it might be, where there's a massive reprioritization that takes place. And at other times there's regular kind of minor pruning. Moments where the Holy Spirit will whisper, Dylan, let's cut back your screen time. It's going up. If I've realized if I want to grow as a morning person, I don't wake up earlier by cutting back sleep. When that happens, I become a worse morning person

and a worse afternoon person and a worse evening person because I become a crabby person. It's, oh no, if you want to grow in that way, you need to maybe cut back on watching TV late at night. You need to create room. And because the kingdom of God is agricultural, because it is sowing and reaping, it's pruning and growing, the results often take time. And so with that, we must trust the process. You've got to trust the process. There are some plants that we cut back and I think, oh, surely we've killed it. You know, fall comes and we cut back the lilac in front of our house. Or if you have perennial plants, some of them you will literally cut down almost to the dirt. And it looks like you've committed some kind of plant homicide. Because like you just look and you think, there's no way anything is coming back from that. And you've almost cut it completely away. Sometimes we put seeds in the ground and think nothing's happening. Is anything even going to grow? And I want to say that we can trust the process because the gardener is trustworthy. God knows what he is doing. I don't always even know what I'm doing, let alone everything that God is doing, but I can trust God knows what he is doing.

He is a good gardener. And so when you're tempted to run, remain. When you want to seize back control and make it happen on your own, remember he can do what you cannot. I have a part to play, but apart from him, I can do nothing. And so don't get discouraged or disheartened as you wait in the steady rhythms of his grace. Do not grow weary in doing good because at the proper time, you will reap a harvest of righteousness if you do not give up. If you remain, if you continue on, if you stay rooted in Christ, trust the process and the person of Christ, trust the faithfulness of God. I can more easily remain when I'm reminded that he has been faithful, he is faithful, and he will be faithful. He will continue to be so. And so remain, stay rooted, dwell deeply in him. And my invitation to you today with this is a couple of things. One is that if you're not already in Christ, if you've not connected your life to the true vine, who is Jesus, today you can be grafted in. You can become planted in Christ. The Bible tells us, confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead and you will be saved.

Receive him as Lord and Savior. Be planted in the courts of God, in the person of Christ. That's the decision that you can make today. And also for those who are in Christ, the invitation is simply this, and it's a very practical one. I wanna ask you, what is one new practice? One new discipline? One new habit of holiness that you could build in your life this week? And I know we all wanna grow in 20 things, I do. And you can make the list of the things that you want to add to your trellis over time, but the question right now is for this week, what is one thing that you maybe sense the invitation of the Spirit of God saying come be with me in this way? Connect yourself to Jesus in a way you haven't, whether that's a new practice or a different way of doing an existing one that you have. And in all of this, the reminder is always to begin with where you're at and not with where you think you should be. And so if you're a person who doesn't really pray and you want to be someone who has a habit and a discipline of praying, the solution isn't to say, man, I should be, I should really be praying. I'm going to commit to one hour every morning, every day of the week. There's a good chance you're going to burn yourself out in that or you're not going to know what to even do to like fill an hour. And so don't start with where you think you should be. Begin with where you're at, which may be saying I'm going to commit to praying daily and I'm going to start with five minutes. The way to become a person who prays a lot is to begin as a person who prays a little and to not give up at it, to keep continuing on. Same with reading scripture, a key core discipline of the Christian faith. If you want that habit in your life, but it doesn't currently exist there, begin with five minutes in John 1, 1 and read through the gospel of John and become a person who, man, meditates on scripture a little that you would one day be a person who is rooted and deep, has a deep well of scripture within you. But begin with where you're at, but begin somewhere. Because if you don't begin, if you don't develop the habit,

the discipline, the consistency in making yourself available, we miss it and we miss out on what the Lord wants to do in us and through us. And secondly, just maybe what is one thing to prune? This will help in that pursuit of, if you want to add, it's easiest to do it when we also subtract elsewhere. So what might be one thing to prune? What might the Spirit invite you to cut back to give room for growth? Would you pray with me right now? Lord, we thank you. Jesus, thank you for your promise that as we remain in you, that you will remain in us, that you desire to abide and dwell with us as your people. And Lord, our prayer today is that we would be rooted more deeply. Lord, that you would invite us and that we would respond in ways to encounter you and connect with you, that you would shape us into your likeness, that you would transform our lives by your slow and steady grace at work within us and through us. We thank you. We praise you. We know that apart from you, we can do nothing. So would we dwell with you? Would you be dwelling with us? Make us your dwelling place, Lord. In Jesus name. Amen. Amen. I wanted to give just a little bit more time, maybe than normal at the close of service to just respond and reflect. And we're going to have a song that will play. And if you can help it, don't rush out of the room. Don't let that convict you if you've been waiting to go to the bathroom and the Lord sees your heart and your bladder and you're, you know. So it's not a have to, but it's an invitation to say there is some room to simply dwell in the presence of God, to remain with him just a few moments longer. And you may sit as the song begins. And maybe as you feel led, you stand and worship or you move to your knees or whatever it is. But let this be a moment where you can dwell with the Lord, which would be the beginning of continuing that through your days, perhaps in a new way. So let's fix our eyes on Jesus together right now.