Well, what's up Hope Community Church, how we doing? Okay,
well I am excited to spend this time with you. My name's Dwayne.
I'm one of the pastors here at Hope and I'm excited to continue this series, uh,
that we've been in for the fa past few weeks.
We've been talking about the foundations of our faith,
the things that are essential to us living out a long life, lived with Jesus.
Now last week we got a chance to hear from Ben Foot, my good friend,
y'all give some love for Ben. Great message last week, great time together.
And Ben challenged us to do one thing as we move through our week.
And I gotta tell you like it really was a challenge and it was something simple
to do.
He asked us to simply take a 20 minute walk
undistracted with the Lord. And I gotta tell you,
like everything in my life this week fought against that walk, right?
Like I was busy, I had a whole bunch of stuff to do, but I decided to do it.
And so by show of hands, how many of you also decided to take a, a walk,
a 20 minute walk with the Lord? Okay, I can see quite a few of you.
I see you two at Get Hope tv. You guys did a great job.
You should be proud of the fact that you walk.
And so I took a 20 minute walk with the Lord. I took my headphones off,
I decided to just do it. I just went out and I did it.
And can I just say like it was one of the most beautiful moments that I've ever
had in my walk with the Lord. It was just 20 minutes.
It wasn't a particularly long walk. I am 46 years old,
but it was a good walk. I just spent time talking to the Lord,
listening to what he had to say to me.
And it was like this close relationship was rekindled.
It was something that I felt familiar in.
It was something that I remembered and I just had an opportunity to spend time
with God and it was like this beautiful thing.
And I was so glad that Ben challenged us to do it because it made a
huge difference. And I had this feeling in my heart, like,
and it's a feeling that I get oftentimes, uh, when I,
when I take long separations away from the gym and I go back for one day and I
have that feeling like, man, why do I ever stop doing this?
Why do I choose to not actually work out every day?
Well that's the way I felt after I took this long walk with the Lord.
Why do I ever stop walking with God?
Why do I choose
to walk away from the Lord rather than choosing to walk
with him? And the answer's pretty simple.
It is probably the same answer for all of us. Uh,
it's because we get caught up in the spin cycle of life, right?
You just start doing things and you start going places and everything seems like
it's more important than the relationship that you have with God.
And so you get caught up in this spin cycle and when you're in the spin cycle,
one of the first things that gets dropped is your relationships.
And usually the second thing is your discipline.
And so for me,
there are these times where I just get outside
of proximity to the Lord. You know,
I reaffirmed during that walk something that I found to be very true.
And it's a song that we sing. It says that God is a good, good father.
I reaffirmed that in that moment because I realized that he desperately wanted
to spend time with me the same way I wanted to spend time with him.
Like it was almost as if he missed me in that moment, right?
And I know what this feels like mostly because we have children
and I know what it feels like to just spend time with your kids and to have them
want to be with you and you to want to be with them.
And now we are at a special part of our lives.
Me and my wife are loving this season of our lives. It's called Empty Nest.
Anybody at Empty Nest, listen, it is a beautiful place to be.
I wish we could have gotten there faster.
You know, the kids are outta the house,
they are off the payroll mostly
they're kind of flourishing on their own.
But can I tell you a secret about Empty Nest? Now don't tell my kids.
It's not as if they're gonna watch the sermon . I miss him.
I miss like being close to them. I miss like hanging out with them.
It is all the little stuff that I miss, right? It's none of the the big stuff.
Like I miss the simple things that come with close proximity to your children.
I, I miss the McDonald's toys on the floor, all the pointy toys.
I must have threw away 175,000 of those toys over the years. But I miss it.
I miss the little shoes that would get put on the stairs because apparently
that's where shoes go. And I would trip over 'em on my way up the stairs.
I miss yelling up to our children or just random things like stop pinching your
brother. Turn off your light. We're gonna be late. No,
you don't need a bandaid again, I miss it.
I miss being in close proximity to our children.
You know,
one of the things I miss the most is when they would get a little nervous and
they would want to get close to me, right?
We would go someplace as a family and I could always tell that they were
nervous, uh,
especially my daughter because she had this way of just kind of wrapping herself
around my leg and letting dad know that there was something going on that she
wasn't completely sure And she didn't know exactly what was gonna happen.
So she found that if she'd just gotten close proximity to dad that everything
would be okay. Now my son was much cooler than that,
so he wouldn't wrap himself around my leg.
He would just kind of hold on to my shirt.
But it was a way of letting me know that they wanted and desired a relationship
with their father. You see,
those were like the best moments. And if I'm honest,
I miss it. You see,
there were three things that our children knew that if they got close to dad and
if they got in close proximity that they could expect, uh,
they could expect protection, they knew that dad was on the job. And listen,
if you want to get my attention mess with my kids because that Papa Bear comes
out, I will take you out and preach at your funeral. ,
they knew that they could get protection from their father.
They knew they could also get provision and they had no problem with spending
that provision.
But they also knew that something they could expect in close proximity to their
father was this sense of peace.
And it was a special kind of peace. And here's the thing,
that kind of peace that I shared with my children that didn't come naturally to
me, that wasn't something that I naturally knew about.
The only way that I learned how to share that kind of peace with my children was
because I had learned it from sharing that kind of peace with my father in
heaven. It was the same thing that I had experienced from that walk. You see,
here's what I've learned about proximity to the Lord,
is proximity with the Lord leads us to peace with the Lord.
We get to this place of peace when we spend time
with our father. You know,
it was a beautiful thing that I experienced on that walk.
The Bible has a word for that kind of experience.
And that is gonna be the focus of effort as we spend our time together today.
The Bible calls that kind of proximity to the Lord,
that kind of walking daily with Jesus, the Bible calls that abiding.
And so that's exactly what we're gonna focus on.
And abiding is a big part of this series that we've been in.
We've been talking about the foundations of faith and we've examined four
different things that are essential to understand if we're going to have a
relationship with Jesus. The first one that we are created,
we were made by God with purpose and intent in mind. Second,
that we are broken people, that we have a sense of brokenness.
But here's the good news about our brokenness,
that through a relationship with Jesus Christ we can be fixed. And that lastly,
and this is what we're gonna focus on today.
We are on our way to something better
and that better begins with this word abiding.
Now the quintessential passage on the concept of abiding is found in
John chapter 15. So if you have your Bibles, here's what I want you to do.
I want you to go ahead and open up to John chapter 15 or go ahead and turn on
your devices and I'm gonna meet you over there and we're gonna spend some time
just kind of reading through the text.
And then after we read from verse one to 11,
we're gonna take some time and just kind of chop it up a little bit. All right?
So while you're turning there,
let me just give you some context of what's happening here.
When you get to the end of chapter 14,
Jesus has been spending time with his disciples.
And this is something called the upper room discourse.
They've been having some conversations where Jesus has been describing to them
who he is in great detail.
And he's actually been capturing it with words like I am.
He says I am.
And he goes through this whole litany of ideas of who he actually is because he
wants to make sure that they understand who he is.
And when we get to the end of chapter 14, he stands up and he says, guys,
let's get up and let's leave this place.
And it's believed that he begins to do exactly what Ben talked about the other
day.
He takes a walk with the disciples and maybe he walked through a vineyard or
maybe he walked past a temple that had a vineyard on it.
And just like Jesus is coming to do,
he uses it as an opportunity to teach a lesson about who he is.
And when we get to verse one of chapter 15, here's what he has to say,
I am the true vine and my father is the vine dresser. Uh,
every branch in me that does not bear fruit, he takes away.
And every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes that it may bear more fruit.
Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you.
And so here's what I want you to do. Verse four,
abide in me and I in you as the branch
cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abide in the vine.
Neither can you unless you abide in me.
I am the vine and you are the branches.
Whoever abides in me and I in him,
he it is that bears much fruit for apart from me,
you can do nothing.
And if anyone does not abide in me, it it is, excuse me.
If anyone does not abide in me,
then it is he who is thrown away like a branch and withers
and the branches are gathered and thrown into the fire and burned.
But if you abide in me and my words abide in you,
Then ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you by this.
My father is glorified that you would bear much fruit and so prove to be my
disciples. And as the father has loved me, so have I loved you.
So here's one more time,
abide in my love and if you keep my commandments,
you'll abide in my love just as I have kept my father's commandments and abide
in his love.
These things I have spoken that you may have joy and that joy may
be in you and that your joy may be full
May the Lord had a blessing to the reading of his word.
You see,
he begins right from the beginning by telling us that we need to
abide in him, uh, that the goal is to abide in him.
And he goes right from the beginning by breaking down the idea of abiding.
And I love the approach that he takes because he takes a moment to just kind of
unpack these roles in the relationship of abiding.
He takes a moment to unpack what everybody has to do and everybody's
responsibility when it comes to this concept of abiding.
And he starts by unpacking his own role.
He says right from the beginning, I am the true vine.
Now this is a term that speaks to the vineyard,
but it's also a term that speaks to a larger narrative that's found in
scripture. You see, most of the time when the Bible talks about a a vine,
it's talking about Israel.
And a lot of people spend time searching for Israel because they believe that
Israel was the way to connect them to God the Father.
And so they spent a lot of time believing that Israel was the way.
And he's not saying that Israel's not important,
but what he's actually saying here is that no, Israel is not the true vine.
I am, I am the true vine.
I am the way and the truth in the life.
If you are looking for this abiding relationship with God,
then it comes through me.
You see what he's doing here is much more than just giving an illustration.
He's making a declaration of his divinity,
claiming to be fully God and fully man and saying that if you wanna
get close in this relationship to God the Father,
well it's only gonna come through me.
And so he describes himself, uh, but he doesn't stop there.
He also describes God the Father.
And he says that my father in heaven is the vine dresser. Now in the vineyard,
the vine dresser has a an essential role to play when it comes to the
cultivation of the vine. And so when he is calling God the Father,
the vine dresser, he's saying that he is the keeper of the vineyard.
He is the one that cultivates the plant so that it will have the best possible
fruit. He's saying that his father in heaven is responsible to give
fruit through Jesus,
to give the fruit everything that it needs in order to flourish.
So God the Father has a role in all of this. And then lastly,
he defines who we are and he says that,
that God the Father is the divine dresser. That I am the true vine.
And that you, your role, your job is that you are the branches.
And the branches have one reason for existence.
Branches are there to produce fruit
that our whole lives of following Jesus.
All of this proximity and closeness to Jesus is designed to do one thing
to bear fruit. And here's the key with the fruit.
The fruit doesn't look like us.
The fruit that we bear when we're in close proximity to Jesus looks like Jesus.
And so the whole design of this abiding was this three-pronged thing where all
of it works together and all of it to produce fruit.
And through that God gains glory from how we live our lives.
Jesus gives us this beautiful metaphor here,
this picture of what it looks like to be established in the faith and abiding in
Jesus and the ultimate result which is to bear fruit.
When we abide in Christ, we bear fruit
and he makes it clear what our role is as branches.
We got one job, bear fruit.
And in verse four, Jesus says,
abide in me and I in you as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it
abides in the vine. Uh,
neither can you unless you abide in me and I am the vine.
In you are the branches.
He just flat out tells us our responsibility is to abide in him.
And that's the way that any of us, all of us that we produce fruit.
And I wanna look at this word abide because I think it's a word that kind
of gets breezed over just a little bit when it comes to our culture.
You know, here's the thing, abide is not common language.
It's not language we would use in a normal conversation with people.
And sometimes we try to translate a word from the Bible with a common word from
English language. And the problem with that is,
is it doesn't necessarily speak to the depth and the gravity of the word. Uh,
there's some words that just are so deep in their context that they need a
little bit more emphasis to understand them completely.
And I believe that abide is one of those words. You see,
sometimes we just kind of breeze over it and we often translate,
abide with the word remain. Uh, indeed some of our translations,
our Bible translations translate the word abide, uh, to remain. And yes,
it means to remain, but it's a whole lot more than just remaining.
You see this idea of abiding it,
it means to stick really close to the Lord.
It means to stay in close proximity in relationship with the Lord.
Abide means to keep in fellowship with it. It means to stay connected to,
it means to embrace, to hold close.
It means to have an intentional relationship where we are staying rooted and
grounded in the Lord. It it's in our current context. It means to stay put,
to stay focused on it. It means that we are in Christ and he's in us.
And if we are in Christ,
it's so that he can work in our lives and through our lives. Oh yeah,
abiding is much more than just remaining.
It has this depth and that depth is meant to transform
our whole lives. You see,
the concept of biting is not just taking a walk for a moment,
is taking a walk with Jesus for our lives.
And that walk walks right past this earth and into the next life with the
Lord for all of eternity. Abiding is much more than just remaining
and means stand put with the Lord and allowing him to do
the work on our lives that needs to be done.
The work that the passage earlier calls pruning,
cutting back the things that don't bear fruit and giving us the things that do,
that's the idea of abiding.
So when Jesus is telling us in this passage to abide,
we need to know that it's much more than just a simple change to our lives.
It will change everything that we do forever.
And in that kind of abiding we produce fruit.
He says in verse five that whoever abides in me and I in him,
it is he that bears much fruit for apart from me, you can do nothing.
But if you abide in me and I abide in you, then you will bear much fruit.
So abiding produces fruit.
But he also gives this like this little bit of a warning here.
And he says that there's something that happens if you don't abide.
He says that if anyone does not abide in me,
that he is thrown away like a branch and he withers and that branches are
gathered, thrown into the fire and burned.
And if you abide in me and my words abide in you ask whatever you wish and it'll
be done for you. But if you don't abide,
there's this thing called withering that happens in your life.
And it's a simple concept.
A physical branch has to stay attached to the vine, right?
A physical branch has to stay attached to the vine in order to stay alive as
follower of Christ, we have to stay attached to God.
We have to stay attached through Jesus. If we're gonna spiritually be alive.
And if we're gonna be productive,
then our goal should be to stay attached to the vine. But here's what happens.
We get caught in that spin cycle
and we start to separate ourselves.
And when we start to separate ourselves,
we break away from the vine.
When we break away from the vine,
there's this withering that begins to happen.
And I've experienced this for myself at times in my life where I have chosen to
separate from God.
And the problem with withering is that it's not this thing that happens all at
once, right? It is like this slow creep
where you begin to separate yourself from the things of God and all of a sudden
you stop showing up to church or you stop showing up to your small group. Uh,
and then quickly you start to separate yourself.
And then separation starts to look like isolation.
All of a sudden where you used to walk with a whole lot of other believers,
now you no longer walk with other believers where you used to read the Bible,
you no longer read it because you've begun to separate yourself from the true
vine.
And all of a sudden isolation starts to feel like disorientation
and you find yourself in this place
and you don't even remember where to go to reestablish your faith.
That's what withering looks like,
where you find yourself so far from God, you can't remember
how to get back. You ever been there before?
Maybe even some of us are there right now
at this place of just withering.
And it's really dangerous because if you wither too long, uh,
what what Jesus says in this passage is that uh,
you get to a place where your only, uh, recourse is to be thrown in the fire.
And what he is talking about there is this spiritual death that comes as a
result of our withering,
where we just realize that like we are no longer alive in Christ,
that spiritual death is a very real thing.
It's the ultimate separation from God and spiritual death.
I'm just gonna tell you it's much worse than physical death
because spiritual death lasts for all of eternity.
You see, when we choose to separate ourselves from the true vine,
when we choose not to bear fruit, there's a consequence
and that consequence is withering.
And if you are there right now,
I want you to know two things.
Like while you may be withering in this very moment,
I want you to know first that you don't have to stay there.
Like you don't have to stay in this place of withering,
that God has something greater for your life. God has something greater for us.
We don't have to stay in a place of withering. And second,
that God wants you to know
that he wants to walk with you to that greater,
that you don't have to stay in this place of withering,
not even one more day. You know, as the passage concludes,
Jesus takes time to unpack a few more things that happen when we abide
and he talks about this greater that's coming.
He impacts the things that we get when we actually abide,
when we actually spend the time in close proximity to the Lord.
There's some great rewards that come for this. And so in verse eight,
he tells us that abiding in Christ, when we abide in Christ,
we have the privilege of bringing God glory from our lives.
Like when we embody in Christ, God is glorified through the way that we live.
Because all of a sudden the things that God cares about become the things that
we care about. And when we start living that way,
God gets the glory.
When we abide, we glorify God. Second in verse nine,
he talks about how if we abide in God,
we get to actually experience and walk in the love of God.
Like my kids were loving,
getting close to their father because they knew that I loved them.
They knew that I wanted to spend time with them.
They knew that no matter what they did,
I was still well pleased with their life and I loved them.
And that same kind of love is what I experienced in Christ.
And I didn't have the best example of what it meant to be a loving
father.
The only way I learned it was from how God loved me,
unconditional real love.
You see, when we stay in close proximity to the Father,
that's the kind of love that we have access to.
It's a love that transcends anything that we could do.
It's a love that we didn't earn and a love that we don't deserve.
It's a love that carries us all the way through to eternity.
It's an abiding kind of love. And in that abiding,
we get access to the love of God. You know, lastly,
he talks about the joy that we experience. You know,
joy is a special thing because it's not based on our mood or our situation or
our circumstances.
My grandmother used to tell me that joy is different from happiness because
happiness is based on happenstance.
And what happens to you starts to make your happiness.
But joy is much different from that with joy.
Doesn't even matter what's going on in your life.
'cause the world doesn't give joy and the world can't take it away.
This is a different kind of joy.
It's the joy that only comes through an abiding relationship with Jesus.
You know,
as I began to hear about that kind of joy and all the things that come from
abiding relationship as a young man,
I remember the first time a pastor preached this message into my life.
I wanted this like I was like, man,
you get joy and love and hope and you get to be with Jesus one day.
That's the kind of relationship I wanna be a part of. I want this abiding thing.
But I remember this nagging question that kept grabbing a hold of me as I was
trying to understand abiding. And it's a simple question like how
Well then how do you abide? Like what am I supposed to do?
? Because if we're not careful,
this abiding can become this theological construct that actually never takes
root in our lives. And it just becomes something we talk about.
We need to abide. But I wanted to live it.
So I began to ask, what does it look like to abide?
I began to go to the word of God to see what it looked like to abide.
And so for the rest of your time, our time together today,
I wanna share some practical ways that we can actually abide in
Christ. And these are things that I've experienced as I've lived,
as I've read the word of God and as I've learned.
And I just want to impart to y'all what God has been imparting to me.
Well here's the first one.
If we are gonna abide in Christ and we need to begin or
continue to walk with Jesus, you know that walk that Ben talked about,
it was just a short walk.
And I experienced so much during that 20 minutes that it's something that I
wanna experience for the rest of my life. And I want you to experience,
and maybe you're in this moment right now and you have never begun an actual
walk with Jesus. You've never been a follower of Christ. Well,
can I just say like we would love to talk to you about that at hope.
We have an area called the next steps area at all of our campuses.
And even for those of you watching online,
we would love it if you would let us know that you are interested in learning
what it means to walk with God.
Because we want to help you to take that journey. It's a really big deal.
And we want you to know how to walk with the Lord.
And if you have been walking with the Lord for a long time, can I tell you?
And I want to encourage you To walk a little more
and maybe even to walk a little closer,
to continue the walk that you have with God because
he wants to walk with you. And where he's walking us to
is something better. And here's the second thing I wanna encourage you to do.
In order to abide,
I want to encourage you to abide by reading and living God's word. You know,
if we are gonna learn how to abide,
it is only gonna come through us reading the word of God,
applying it to how we actually live our lives,
and then grabbing the hand of Jesus and walking with him.
You see,
scripture teaches us how to abide.
The Bible says that it's profitable for instruction and correction and training
in righteousness. It teaches us how to abide.
So I wanna encourage you to make scripture,
the reading of the Word of God,
a real part of how you live your life.
I can tell you that it'll bring you closer to God
and anything will. Well, here's the last one.
The last way to abide is I want to encourage you to stay focused on
Jesus.
You know what I've found over the years is that when I get caught up in the spin
cycle,
It's very easy for me to move outta proximity with the Lord because I
begin to focus on everybody else and everything else.
And everything else in my life begins to get attention, right?
And the one thing that I neglect to pay attention to is the
thing that has the power to change all of those other things,
Jesus.
And the only way that we can truly abide is by our focus
being on Jesus.
You know the thing that was so beautiful about that walk the other day,
it was me clearing all the distractions from my life and taking just a moment to
focus in on Jesus.
And so when we do that,
that we realize how good it is to be in proximity with the Lord and that
proximity brings us great peace and we're reminded over and over and over
again that peace with God is something to be desired.
And that when we walk in that kind of peace,
it changes everything about our lives.
It's only through focusing on Jesus that we experienced.
That.
It's only through abiding.
And you might be in this place right now, you're like, I hear you,
I hear you Dwayne, and I want to abide,
but I'm not sure where to start. Well,
I want to close with just a little bit of an an anecdotal story.
You know, um, there's this guy, right?
And he and his wife are heading out to go hang out for the morning and they're
driving in their pickup truck and she's sitting next to him in her seat and
he's sitting in his seat and they've been married for a long time,
let's just say 25 years or so.
And they're going to go get a breakfast of bacon and eggs.
Fewer mornings are better than that.
And they're going out to hang out and they notice that there's a truck in front
of them and there's two other people.
There's another couple in the truck in front of them and they can kinda see
through the window.
And what the wife begins to see is that the husband and the wife and that truck
are very close to each other. They seem to be cuddling a little bit.
Now he's in his seat and he is driving,
but she's kinda really close to him and they're hugging and they even take a
moment to have a little kiss. It seems like for whatever reason,
they're a lot closer in their car than this couple is in theirs.
So the wife leans over to her husband and she says,
I wish we were like them. I wish we were close like them.
I wish that we spent time together the way that they seem to be spending time
together. And we were like that when we first got together.
But now for whatever reason, we seem so far apart,
you sit on your side of the car and I sit on my side of the car for whatever
reason. We seem to be distant now we once were close, we seem to be distant.
And the husband looks at her
And he says some words that just seemed to resonate in my heart.
He says, dear, you know, I love you.
The driver's seat is fixed. I never moved.
I've never moved. And if you want to get close to me,
baby, you got an open chair, come on over and get close to me.
You know, I tell that story for two reasons. One is because
I love riding a truck with my wife and being close to her.
But two is because I believe that this is what God is saying to us today when it
comes to abiding.
He has been faithful from the very beginning and he has been fixed
and he's never moved.
And if you find yourself in a place today where you realize that you're far from
God,
I want you to know that you have an open seat and an open opportunity to come on
and get close to him. He's never moved. He's always been in the same place,
fixed and ready with open arms to receive you.
And the opportunity to abide is right in front of you.
Don't you miss walking in the cool of the day
with the Lord?
Don't you miss the peace that comes from proximity to God?
Well, I want to encourage you, the way that you get back to that
is by choosing to abide in here.
And the one thing I can promise from abiding is that your life
will bear fruit.
You'll quickly move towards something greater.
Let's take a moment and pray together and let's close our time. Father God,
I thank you for your word. That is true.
I thank you for the way that you encourage us to abide.
I thank you for your love that is poured out on us. And Father,
as we take steps towards abiding in you,
we pray that our trust and our focus will be completely on you. Father,
lead us and guide us towards the life of abiding because it's the only way that
we can bear the fruit that you wanna bear in our lives.
And so we trust you with this.
We look forward to seeing what you will do in our lives.
And we'll be very careful when we abide and produce fruit to give you praise and
honor and glory because we'll believe that it's because of you working through
us, that we are bearing fruit. And that God the Father, the vine dresser,
is preparing us for greater work. We believe in you, we trust you.
We ask for your perfect will in our lives. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.