2 Spending Time with the Master / Abiding in Christ John 15:4-5

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1 1 2 Spending Time with the Master / Abiding in Christ John 15:4-5 Life is a journey of faith, and as we do life together here at FBC we are likewise on a journey of faith. This is a journey we share as the family of God. Part of that journey is our emphasis to bring all our members to Christ-like maturity in Jesus. Another word for that is discipleship. We are in the process of building our disciple-making base to accommodate the great response you have made to this need. In the meantime, I have felt Holy Spirit lead me to set aside the direction I had planned to go next and instead share with you what I call Discipleship 101. This is a series of sermons that will help all of our church family understand what discipleship looks like. It is a broad-brush stroke, not an exhaustive study. It is taking a look at the process of discipleship from 5,000 feet up traveling at 600 miles per hour. Allow me again to share a couple of disclaimers. First of all, you will NOT become a disciple of Jesus Christ just by listening to these sermons! Let me explain something very important to you. Discipleship does not happen on Sunday morning through worship. It is utterly impossible to disciple people in mass. Jesus didn t attempt to do that and neither should we. What I can and will do is help you understand what discipleship is. I can teach and preach about discipleship but I know that I cannot make disciples through my preaching and teaching. It doesn t happen that way. So, disclaimer #1, this series of messages is designed to inspire you toward discipleship, but it cannot accomplish discipleship. I hope you understand that. Disclaimer #2 is simply this: what I am about to share with you is not original to me. I owe a great deal of where I am as a disciple of Christ to Avery Willis, former missionary and author of Master Life. Avery passed away in 2010, but not before he made a lasting impression on millions of people, helping them understand what being a disciple was all about. The essence of the material I share came from him and has been fleshed out through 35+ years of practice in my life. Last week we began to grasp what Jesus meant about discipleship from what Luke recorded (9:23). And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. We learned the essentials of denying self, cross-bearing, and loving obedience. With that backdrop, let s go on to see what discipleship entails. The first discipline that a Christ-follower must comprehend is the absolute need to spend time with the Master. There are many ways that is expressed: prayer, Bible study, meditation, journaling, scripture memorization, devotionals, etc. But the heart of this discipline has to do with what Jesus taught in John 15. Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing. (John 15:4-5) READ with me verses 4-5. PRAY Now we need to talk a bit about that word abide. The Greek word is meno and it means abide! Nothing really strange there! But it is how we use the word that is important to understanding how Jesus used it. What does it mean, to abide? (1) Where you live. Where you abide. Where you are at home. That is a good definition but it lacks something. (2) What you can live with. When my grandmother heard something she absolutely disagreed with, she would say, I can t abide that. What did she mean? She could not live with that kind of situation. These are both correct, but still a bit short of what Jesus intended with His choice of meno. The word He chose means, to live in life-giving union with to draw life from a source. To use a similar analogy to the one Jesus used, what would happen if my arm were suddenly cut off. It has been severed from my body. What will happen to it? Very soon the tissue and nerves will die. It has ceased to live in life-giving union with my body.

2 What needs to happen? It needs to be restored to my body. It needs surgery to reattach the blood vessels, muscles, and nerves. If that surgery is successful, then it will be once again living in life-giving union with my body. Jesus says we must derive our life s essence from our love relationship with Him. Our relationship with Him must be such that we live in life-giving union with Him. We draw our life from Him. We receive our purpose from Him. Then He supernaturally lives His life through us. As we yield to Him and He lives in us, He lives through us. His power, His love, His wisdom and guidance, His grace and mercy all flow through us. The illustration continues with what happens if we are not living in that kind of relationship with Him we shrivel up and die. So Jesus calls us to fellowship with Himself. We are to so live in Him and He live in us that our very life flows from Him to us. This is an amazing concept. What makes it so amazing is that far too many folks think discipleship is dogmatically adhering to a set of rules and expectations. It is NOT! It is living in a relationship with Jesus that can only be described as life giving. So how do we do that? How do we learn to abide in Christ and allow Him to live in and through us? Let s talk fundamentals here. Let s talk about the basics: we have to spend quality time with Him. We need to get to know Him. Much more pointedly, we need to fall in love with Jesus. That may be a strange concept to some of you. For you, salvation may have meant escaping from hell, or keeping a set of rules, or being baptized. If so, someone sold you a cheap imitation of the Gospel. Salvation is all about falling in love with the One who loved you so much He took your place of torment and death! It s all about falling in love with the One who first loved you! Why is grasping this so imperative? Because you and I will never leave our comfortable, present lifestyle to follow Jesus unless we love Him enough to do so! Love is the only thing that will motivate us to do what Jesus calls us to do. Obligation will not do it! Sheer determination won t do it! Wanting to look good to others won t do it! Pleasing your spouse or parents won t do it! Simply put: if you don t love Jesus you are NOT going to follow Him! You are NOT going to learn and practice these disciplines! You are NOT going to obey Him out of love and do what He calls you to do! This is really where discipleship begins. It begins with falling in love with Jesus. He must be the number one priority of our lives. Why else would we deny ourselves and put Christ on the throne of our lives? Only out of love for Who He is and what He has done in our lives. When I was a young Christian, I was in a small but dynamic church, filled with youth and young adults. Sometimes on Sunday night our pastor would simply say, I love the Lord tonight! He has been so good to me. Do you love Him tonight? That would get it started. For the rest of the worship time, person after person would stand and begin the same way: I love the Lord tonight and then give Him praise and thanksgiving. I would sit in awe for a while at their love for Jesus. I would be amazed at how close they were to Him how He worked daily, even hour-by-hour in their lives. I wanted that! I hungered for that. And so I pursued that. How? By spending time with Him and falling more and more in love with Him moment by moment. By being aware of how very present He was with me throughout my day. By seeing Him in what happened throughout my week. The more aware I was of walking with Him, the more precious our relationship became. The next time the pastor opened the door for testimony of our love for Jesus, I was on my feet. I had my own testimony of His presence and grace in my life. Only loving Him will motivate us over the long haul to stay with the disciplines that lead to real discipleship. Only love could motivate those who have been martyred for the faith to give their lives, their families, and their reputation for the Lord. Our love for Him has to be dynamic and central to our lives, or else there will be no change, no transformation, and no willingness on our part. He calls for first place in His disciples lives. 2

3 3 This helps us understand some of what has often been called the harsh sayings of Jesus. Like Luke 14:26: If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple. To put this in context, one day Jesus turned to the multitude and preached a sermon that deliberately thinned out the ranks. He made it clear that, when it comes to personal discipleship, He is more interested in quality than quantity. In the matter of saving lost souls, He wants His house to be filled (Luke 14:23); but in the matter of personal discipleship, He wants only those who are willing to pay the price. Jesus seems to make a distinction between salvation and discipleship. Salvation is open to all who will come by faith, while discipleship is for believers willing to pay a price. Salvation means coming to the cross and trusting Jesus Christ, while discipleship means taking up the cross and following Jesus Christ. Jesus wants as many sinners saved as possible ("that My house may be filled"), but He cautions us not to take discipleship lightly. None of us will be willing to pay that kind of price unless we must love Christ supremely, even more than we love our own lives and our own flesh and blood (Luke 14:26-27). The word hate does not suggest antagonism but rather by contrast to love less. (see Gen. 29:30-31; Mal. 1:2-3; and Matt. 10:37) Our love for Christ must be so strong that all other love is like hatred in comparison. In fact, we must hate our own lives and be willing to bear the cross after Him. When our love for the Lord is contrasted with our love for anyone else, it must seem that we hate others and love only Jesus. Don t think that is poor idea. Recently one of you told me that when he proposed to his sweetheart, he confessed You need to know that there is another person in my life who will always be first in my heart the Lord Jesus Christ. Her response was, that was a relationship she would be pleased to live with! Jesus was not suggesting out and out hatred toward our family, but He was emphasizing that following Him would very possibly put us as odds with our family. In such a situation, He must be first! Otherwise, He is not Lord and we will not follow. In Luke 14:26-33 Jesus gave two parables to explain why He makes such costly demands on His followers: the man building a tower, and the king fighting a war. The interpretation is simply that believers are represented by the man building the tower and the king fighting the war, and we had better "count the cost" before we start, lest we start and not be able to finish. Jesus cannot get the job done with halfhearted followers who will not pay the price. Once again in Matthew 10:34-39, Jesus states, Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law ; and a man s enemies will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it. What all this means is that only love for Jesus will motivate us to make the really difficult decisions that a disciple will have to make in order to follow Him. Far too often we have to make those kind of decisions in our families. Many of us have been ostracized from our families because of our commitment to Jesus. As we move to this time of year when most families gather, Christ followers know that those gatherings can turn uncomfortable but we must be faithful to the One we love most. Only love will motivate us to pay the price, even the price of our own family and even our own life (Luke 14:26), in order to follow Him. So if the secret to being a Christ follower is falling in love with Jesus, how do we do that? How do we fall deeper in love with Jesus? Well, let me tell you how I first fell in love with Valeria and how our

4 love deepens. It s not hard to say, but it s hard to do! TIME! You spend time together. You never stop getting to know the person you are in love with. The more time you spend together, sharing the things that really matter to you both, the more in love you grow. The same is true with Jesus. That is why one of the very first disciplines you must learn has to do with spending time, quality time, with the Master. You have to give time and opportunity for that love to grow. If the secret of spending time with Jesus is our ever-growing love for Him, then the secret of discipleship is recognizing Him as the sovereign, unchallenged, unopposed Lord of your life. What does lordship look like in every day life? Let me give it to you in one word: Obedience! Obedience is hardly ever a problem if it flows out of love and devotion to a person. Jesus said as much as recorded in John 14: If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him. Did you get that? Love for Jesus results in obedience to His Word. Obedience then is the arena in which the Father and the Son find themselves at home in your life. Wow! How simple, yet profound! If you or I have a problem obeying the Lord, the reason for the problem is not in the act of obedience but in our love relationship with Him. Jesus made it simple in verse 15. If you love Me, keep My commandments. To illustrate this truth, Jesus gave the symbol of the vine, the branches and the fruit. (John 15:1-4) Now we are back where we began this sermon today. When we live in life-giving, vital union with Jesus (abiding) then our love for Him grows. As our love grows our obedience follows. And the result of obedience is fruit. What is fruit? It is change, transformation of our life and character to reflect the One we love. Verse 5 puts this truth in contrast. When our love for Jesus does not result in abiding in Him, if our relationship with Him is formal or guilt motivated or just doing what is expected of us, we wither. We shrivel up spiritually. We dry out. Love is not the motivator: obligation is. We fall into the same legal bondage that the Pharisees did in the New Testament. So how do we abide in Jesus while we magnify Jesus abiding in us? How do we fall more and more in love with Jesus? One of the best ways I know is to spend some quality time with Him every day. You stay attached to Jesus by spending time with Him, sharing your heart with Him as He shares His heart with you. Let me give you a few practical tips: - Get ready the night before - Select the time that is best for you to spend minutes uninterrupted time with Him. - Select a place where are not likely to be disturbed. Let family know how important this is to you so they will help you guard it. - Gather all you will need: Bible, notebook, pen or pencil. - Set the alarm. Do what you have to do in order to wake up. Shower, get a cup of coffee, etc. - Shut out all distractions and turn that portion of time over to Him and Him alone. - Focus on meeting a person (Jesus) not on fulfilling an obligation. - Ask Him to reveal Himself to you through your quiet time with Him. - I will give you more instructions as we move forward in learning what discipleship is all about. Today I am led by Holy Spirit to call our church family to spend time with Jesus every day. In so doing we will learn what it means to abide in Him and for Him to abide in us. We will fall more and more in love with Him as we do so. Some of us need to come to Jesus and confess that we once did this regularly but have allowed too many things to separate us from Him. We need to confess that our love has waned and we need for Him to restore to us the joy of our relationship with Him. You may come to the altar or you may remain where you are, but in Jesus name I am calling on you today to deal with Holy Spirit on this matter. 4

5 I am asking Holy Spirit to put a hunger, a yearning in your life to have a love relationship with Jesus Christ. Do you love Him today? Would you use the word love to describe your relationship with Jesus? If not then why not? Do you want that kind of relationship with Him? Holy Spirit, create that longing, that gnawing need in our heart. Will you determine today to do this? Will you decide today that you will begin tomorrow to spend some dedicated time with Him and Him alone? Will you seek to have your love restored and your passion for Christ re-ignited? Will you do that today? This morning some may want to publically declare your faith in Jesus as your Savior. Some may want to join our church family. But the primary point of my sermon today is a call to establish a quiet time with Jesus in which your love for Him can grow. Will you do that? 5