Morgan Teruel: Hey. Thanks so much for listening to Sandals Church. Our vision as a church is to be real with ourselves, God, and others. We hope you enjoy this message.
Pastor Fredo Ramos: It was a Sunday night, and I had just gotten into my car. And, I was on my way home for the night, and I realized that something was starting to happen to me. And I I didn't know quite what it was, but I remember I drove home. I got into my house, closed the door, and I just sat on, my love sack at the time. I had a love sack, you know.
I gotta tell you, at the time, I was 21 years old. I was almost done with college and I, I had a good job. I had great friends in my life, but for whatever reason, I had begun to sense there was just this heaviness in my life. And at the same time that there was this heaviness, strangely enough, I felt a kinda hollowness to it as well. It was both weighty and empty.
That's how I felt as a 21 year old with a lot of things going well. And I had this experience happening and I didn't know what it was. And I gotta tell you, it was because I had just left church service. I found myself at a church that night and I was wrestling and just processing with everything that I felt like the pastor had said and and what the sermon was on and what what whatever was going on inside of me. And I gotta tell you, for the first moment of my life, I think I genuinely began just to pray.
And I remember praying and, having kinda just this this conviction set, you know, sit in. And not just a conviction because, like, I did bad things, but like a conviction of, like, my my life was missing something. And for the first time, I felt like I was being confronted with the very person I had been missing. And I began to just confess sin, confess things in my life. And at the same time of that weight and conviction, there was, like, just this profound release and experience of just, like, God's love and his grace and his joy, and it was it was so overwhelming.
And I felt like that night in that moment, I prayed and I I gave my life to Jesus. I'm getting emotional just thinking about it right now. I'll never forget that moment. 21 years old, Sunday night. And I gotta tell you, I I went to bed and I got up the next day, and I felt different.
And at the same time, nothing was different. Life just continued to go the way it did. But I found myself, as many Christians do when they maybe first have this encounter, I started going to church, and I went to church often. And one of the first people I met there who became, like, a good friend of mine and a mentor to me as I was kinda introducing myself, telling him my story, what I had gone through, he he was like, I remember him smiling. He had this great smile.
He still has this great smile, and he was smiling, nodding at me. And he said, Fredo, it sounds like you've had an encounter with Jesus. But I wanna tell you something. You can't live off encounters with Jesus. You need to know what it's like to be with him all the time.
And that really struck me. And I share that story with you because we're gonna come across a passage today with Jesus when he reveals continuing through the gospel of John, reveals to us an I am statement, and he's going to say to us a very similar reveals to us an I am statement. And he's going to say to us a very similar phrase. You have to be with him all the time.
Pastor Fredo Ramos: And and we're going to discover that
Pastor Fredo Ramos: there is no version of the Christian life apart from this one thing that Jesus is going to explain to us and teach to us today. And so wherever you might be in life, whether you follow Jesus or you don't, you need to hear about this one thing that Jesus is speaking to us about today. And so I'm gonna ask that if you are willing and able that you would stand with me for the reading of god's word. And we're in John chapter 15, Jesus giving to us his last I am statement. He says these words starting in verse 5, I am the vine.
You are the branches. If you will remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers. Such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.
If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you. This is to my father's glory, that you bear much fruit showing yourselves to be my disciples. As the father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love just as I have kept my father's commands and remain in his love.
I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this, love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. This is God's word. Let's pray together.
Heavenly father, as we have gathered here today as your church and people, we pause in prayer to acknowledge that you have gathered with us too. And I pray, god, that we would hear from you. That as you are with us, would you speak to us, god? Would you, as Jesus said, give us ears to hear and eyes to see so that we might receive and be open to taking in all that you have for us in Christ. We pray these things in his name.
Amen. Amen. Thank you so much. You guys can be seated.
Pastor Fredo Ramos: Hey, Sandals Church. Before we jump into the message with pastor Alfredo, I wanted to give you another opportunity to get more involved with what we're doing here at Sandals Church. One of the ways to do that is by giving financially at donate.sc. Now let's jump back into pastor Fredo's message.
Pastor Fredo Ramos: Now John chapter 15, you gotta understand, comes to us, as one of Jesus' kind of final words. This is a word that he gives on the last night before he is to be betrayed, arrested, tried, and then crucified. Now what's unique about John's gospel is that there are 21 chapters, and chapter 13 is Jesus in the upper room instituting the lord's supper, and then we have the scene where he washes his disciples' feet. Now I just said that's in chapter 13 of 21 chapters. So 8 or 9 chapters of Jesus' story according to John are dedicated to just his final moments.
So John takes 21 chapters to talk about the whole story in life of Jesus but dedicates almost half of it to the last part of his life which tells us as the readers we gotta really pay attention to what he's saying here. If we want to encounter Jesus, we got to listen well to these moments. And in Jesus' final moments, he's having a meal with his disciples and he's giving to him his last instructions, which kinda makes me think. Like, if you knew you were on your last night of life, what would be your final words to those that you love the most? Out of all that you've done, all that you've lived, all that you've experienced, what would you narrow it all down to in your final words?
Because that's what we see Jesus doing in John 15. He's narrowing 3 years of ministry and teaching down to this one thing. Because for 3 years, he's healed people. For 3 years, he's cast out demons. For 3 years, he's taught his followers about God and life.
For 3 years, he's preached the good news and shown the world around him what happens when God's kingdom and love and life break into our own kingdoms and how we can live. And now he is about to summarize everything he has said in 3 years into one single word. And you know what that word is? Abide. Abide or remain in.
There is no Christian life without this one thing according to Jesus, abiding in Him. And here's why that is, because encounters with Jesus can begin change without a doubt, right? Encountering Jesus can begin change in your life, but listen, abiding in Him actually sustains it. So some of us kind of experience Christianity only on a weekend to weekend basis. We have these encounters where we maybe enjoy a song, we we like what we're hearing, right?
Maybe there's someone that's cute that we go to church with, like, right? We have all these reasons that kind of lead to encounters and that can spark change. Like a conversation with someone who maybe, enlightens you a little bit and brings an answer to something you've been wrestling with and questioning about, like, that can that can spark change, but abiding according to Jesus is what actually sustains it. He says there in verse 5, if you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me though, he says, you can do nothing.
Thanks for the vote of confidence, Jesus. Like apart from you, we can do nothing. Remain in me, I in you. We cannot live the Christian life unless we learn this thing to abide. We can't we can't do it.
We can't live life apart from abiding in him. And I gotta tell you, nothing in life seems harder to try than to be a Christian without Christ. Nothing in life seems more difficult than to try to be a Christian without Christ, which is why abiding is so central for Jesus. This word in the whole discussion of John chapter 15 shows up 10 times alone just in this discussion. But in the entirety of John's gospel, this word abide or remain in shows up not just 10 times, not just 20, not just 30, not just 40, not just 50, but over 60 different times the word abide is used throughout this gospel.
Again, an encounter can leave an impression on you and shape you, but the ongoing abiding is actually what sustains us. And so if we're gonna take in the message of Jesus from this particular gospel, we cannot do so without considering that he is inviting us in to a life of abiding with him. There is no authentic version of Christianity for any one of us without this one thing. And my fear as a pastor when I kinda survey the larger culture we swim in and the larger culture of the world is that there are a lot of versions of Christianity that don't have this as a primary aspect to it. What do I mean by that?
Well, there's versions of Christianity where we talk about Christian morality, Christian truth, Christian sexuality, Christian laws, Christian nation. And, oftentimes in these discussions, they kind of sound true, but what I'm asking is where's the abiding in Christ? And the reason why I asked that is because according to Jesus, when you abide in him, 2 things become evident. My joy, he says, is now your joy and you have a love for one another. Oftentimes these other versions of Christianity lack a kind of expression of love and joy.
And it leaves me thinking, I don't know if that's an authentic expression of Christianity. You might be hijacking words we use, scripture we use, but I don't know if that's what Jesus is getting at when he talks about first and primarily learning to abide in him. Abiding. So what does it mean? What does it mean to abide?
Quick definition. The word in Greek actually is meno. Can you guys say meno? Mhmm. Mhmm.
Menno. To meno in Christ. The word means to dwell, to remain, to stay, to continue to be present, to continue in relationship, to endure, to accept, to wait, to suffer for, to submit to, to be faithful to. Let me ask you, do these words describe your life with God right now? Do you abide in Christ?
And do these words describe the lives of the people that we are leading here at Sandals Church? Do do we as a body, do we as a church community know how to abide in Christ? Because there is no authentic Christian life without first understanding what this looks like. You know, part of my, everyday kind of morning routine is I drink coffee. I've drank coffee for a number of years.
When life got hectic, I just started drinking coffee. And over the seasons of life, like, I have learned to make coffee in a variety of ways. I've gone through seasons where, like, I wanna look cool, so I'll do a pour over, or a French press. Right? Or I just you know, I don't have time, so I just push a button, I fill a pot and out comes coffee.
Right? And and regardless of how you make coffee, what you learn from people who know how to do it well, whether you push buttons or you just, you know, you pour I'm at a stage right now where I just push a button. That's all I got time for. I push a fancy button and I get a great cup of coffee. But what you learn from yeah.
Amen. But what you learn from people, who who know how to make it well is that you have to allow the coffee grounds to at least experience some level of what they call steeping. The grounds gotta steep. In other words, the hot water has got to interact in such a way with the ground so that what? You can get a great taste and experience of the coffee.
The coffee gets better and the flavors are actually experienced by you when you allow the coffee to steep. And what you couldn't taste before, you can now taste in the coffee. Why? Because you've let it steep. You see, if you apply that same picture to your life with Jesus, you got to learn to steep in him.
You gotta learn to allow yourself to steep in Jesus. Why? So that you can begin to do things you never could do before. You you find yourself when you abide and steep in Christ, you find yourself now a little bit more generous when you used to be stingy. You find yourself more bold when you used to be afraid.
You find yourself with the ability to forgive when you used to hold grudges. When you abide in Christ, you are able to do things that you could not do before. And what's happening here? According to Jesus in John 15, fruit is growing on the branches of your life. Amen.
And the only way the the only life that can actually do something is the life of a branch that's connected first and foremost to the vine. And and my thought today for us as we think about what it means to encounter Jesus is this, the world desperately needs to see people who know how to steep in Christ, who know how to abide in him, who know what it's like to be with him. In the early church, there's this beautiful moment where, the the disciples are leading the way, they're preaching, conversions are happening, miracles are happening, and it's said there Luke records in in Acts 4 that this is what people experience from the early disciples. It says there, when they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus. Take note of that.
These men had been with Jesus. Who have you been with lately? Who have you been with? I think it's easy and all of us have had experiences like this where we, spend time with people and we can tell that they have been with certain individuals. You'll spend time with people and you can tell that they have been spending a lot of time with cable news personalities.
Right. You spend time with people and you realize that they have been close to this or that. Right? It just it rubs off them into you. And so my question is, have you been with Jesus?
Because we can only give away what we first possess. And, of course, as a pastor, I love to, theologize with the best of them. Right? And that there's fruit to to share of that. I love to study scripture and to help help explain what it means and and there's fruit for that.
I love both of these things, but there is something else about being with Jesus and then giving that to somebody else. There's another level. Those other things are great, but to be with him, there's a whole other level to being able to offer that and to in turn not just experience it, but as Jesus says, to then turn as he said, love one another. To allow the abiding, the the the steeping, the time with him to then turn into love, the fruit of love. Now here's how I think this can happen.
How do we actually abide in Christ? My first thought is we practice being in 2 places at once. Like, did you know I mean, we're in this advanced beautiful age of 2023. For years, we've had the iPhone and because of that, we have all gotten good at being at 2 places at once. We're all good at doing this.
A study actually showed, just a few years ago that the average person opens and touches their phone over 2,000 times a day. I, for sure, am breaking that record y'all. Like, every Sunday, when I get the report that said you were on your phone 2% less this week, I, like, praise Jesus. Like, that's fantastic. But it'll still stay, like, 7 hours.
Oh my, good lord. I got a full time job just on my phone, man. But I am good and so are you at being at 2 different places at once And that is actually how we learn, surprisingly enough, to abide in Jesus. Because at work, you're at work, but you're also on your phone. Right?
Some of you secretly doing it. You're at home, but you're on your phone. Some of you you're on the freeway, but you're on your phone. You gotta stop that. Right?
But to abide is to embrace the fact that god's presence is always with you. And to and and to have you draw your attention to that and to not leave that kind of place, right, comes down to to learning to be 2 places at once. So that when you're drinking coffee, eating breakfast, you're doing so in god's presence. You're you're on your way to work or you're getting ready for work, you're doing so in god's presence. You do laundry and you answer email in god's presence.
You change diapers in god's presence. You discipline your crazy children in god's presence. You work out in god's presence. You go on vacation in god's presence. You enjoy food and recreation and life all in god's presence.
Listen now. We even sin in god's presence. We got to learn to draw our attention to the fact that we are always 2 places at once. We are living our lives and we're also in God's presence. Jesus said it like this here in the story.
He says, as the father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now if we just pause there, that's an astounding thought to embrace. The same way that God the father has loved God the son is how Jesus has said, I have loved you in this way. That eternal never ending love to celebrate you, love to draw attention to you, Jesus, is exactly how Jesus says he loves us. And so his invitation is simple.
Remain in this kind of love. Stay here. And then he explains this is how it happens. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my father's commands and remain in his love. In other in other words, keeping the commands are simply just doing what Jesus has told us to do.
And what he's saying here is that there's not a physical location you have to run to to find god's love, but that in the actual act of keeping commands, in the actual life or in the actual act of living the Christian life, you are in God's presence while you do it. So you you're remaining in his love in the act of doing whatever you're doing that Jesus has told you to do. You are 2 places at once. Whatever you're being told to do by him, you are also simultaneously experiencing god's love through that act of obedience. You are 2 places at once, doing what he's called you to do regardless of how hard it is, and at the same time, experiencing and receiving his love for you.
We embrace this practice. Secondly, now, listen, we practice doing what Jesus himself practiced. In this larger conversation, in John 15, Jesus, in in a passage right before we read this in in chapter 2 I'm sorry, in verse 2, talks about a gardener and the role the gardener plays in pruning the branches. He says this, he cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit. It's kind of a harsh thought to think about.
While every branch that does not bear fruit, he prunes so that it will, what? Bear even more fruit or be even more fruitful. And so oftentimes, God is cutting branches out of our lives in order to foster more growth in our lives even in places where things are going well. It says, where you are fruitful, he will cut and prune. And and that that's kind of hard to hear, right, because it it it leads us to consider that not all the growth we think we're seeing and experiencing is the kind of growth that God wants us to have in our lives.
Some things in our lives will need to be simplified and cut off in order for us to be more fruitful with them. And and this is a challenge for us, but I'm starting to see it even even more so in my own life and in the lives of others. Like, I I think it's time for us to consider that our lifestyles may need to become more simplified. Why? So that we can actually start to practice the very things that Jesus himself practiced.
They gotta be pruned. They gotta be cut. Now I I wanna be gentle here and and very just kind and and clear as a pastor when I say things have got to be cut off because what I'm not saying is that if you suffered great loss in your life right now, maybe through the loss of a loved one or you got terminally ill, right, that this is God's way of bearing more fruit in your life. I wanna be careful to not go down that road and and to think, man, that awful things are happening to you so that God can lead you and and and bring more fruit and you're like, that's just not I don't think that's the case. God and Jesus is not the author of evil or sin, but he can certainly redeem those things.
What what I'm after are the other areas of our lives that may have to be removed in order for more attention to be on him. Now I'm no green thumb. Even if I mark my finger green, it would not be a green thumb. Right? So I I learned all this just from doing doing some research, but we're told that bushes left to themselves can oftentimes grow into themselves if they're not cut.
In other words, a bush, a rose, a plant will quite literally get in its own way of light and so it needs help to grow in the right direction and to the right ends. And so you prune it to stop it from wasting its own energy and becoming unproductive unto itself. This is the kind of pruning and cleaning that Jesus is talking about god the father, the gardener, is doing. In fact, one new testament scholar, n t Wright, put it like this, you cut out particularly the parts of the plant that are growing inwards and getting tangled up and you encourage the shoots that are growing outwards, he says, toward the light. You prune the rose, listen now, you prune the rose in other words to help it become its true self.
We get cut and pruned so that we might become the truest version of who god desires us to be, where he actually can do far more with a lot less because he's allowed certain branches to be removed, certain things to be cut away and this is how we actually can actually just practice what Jesus himself practice. Part of the reason why we struggle to obey Jesus is because we don't have time for him. Like, I I think, generally, people like and appreciate Jesus. They're just too busy for him. They're just too busy.
Their lives are too stuffed out. My own life is too stuffed out to just do the things that Jesus is calling me to do. And so what I wanna ask us is this, what has God maybe been removing from your life in order to bring more fruit? What needs to get pruned out right now in your calendar, in your relationships, and the extra things that you find yourself doing so that you can actually begin to practice what Jesus himself practiced, and in so doing, experience a life of abiding in him. Because none of us will grow without this pruning process.
It has to happen. In my own life, for the last few years, like, I've been I've been wearing this little necklace right here, and on it, there's a word. Anyone guess what the word is? It's not abide. Though that makes sense now that I've been given this message.
The word the word is slow down. Slow down. And I I wrote this word on here because I felt like God was inviting me into a season of my life to do that very thing, to go slower with my pace so that I could actually experience not just knowing right things about God and not just working for God as a pastor, but actually, like, live the life that Jesus has called me to live. You guys remember a few years ago, 2020? You remember 2020?
Forgettable year. I remember multiple times in just kinda navigating just the chaos of what that season was, the thought that, man, the pace I was moving at before this was not a healthy one. And slowdown became a word by God, I think, just as as a way of an invitation to remove things, to allow things to be cut out of my life. And I'm starting to hear this more too now in the in the world. Like, even if you're not maybe in a religious setting, we talk about slowing down and changing our pace.
Right? We've all learned from 2020. Of course, we have. Right? But it's interesting that in slowing down, it it's allowed me to think about what actually is important in my daily life, and what actually is not important to to what it means to abide in Jesus.
Because I am regularly amazed at how slow Jesus went in his life, but how impactful his life was. The man never went to school, yet more schools have been started because of him. He never got an education, yet more people with degrees spend their time trying to understand his teaching. He never went beyond 40 miles from his house and yet his name is talked about in almost every corner of the earth. His life was cut short, yet the life of Jesus is the most divided life in all of human history.
You say his name, and you're going to see some kind of division. Yet he seemed to never be in a rush. He moved at a unique pace. He knew how to be slow. And there's a few areas of his life that continue to amaze me as I read through the gospels and see people who encountered him as he moved slow in in the way that he was able to be and take time to be silent.
He knew how to be silent. He knew how to move slow and and take time to be in prayer and and to study scripture. Jesus knew scripture like crazy, man. You poked him and scripture would bleed out of him. He just he knew his word.
And he also took time and he slew he slowed down to be with people. He he always seemed to to be, okay with a lot of interruptions in his life. And I'm I'm amazed at the rhythm that he was able to follow. And for a long time, Christians have tried to model this rhythm by what we call spiritual disciplines. And these spiritual disciplines, number 1, I'll just be honest, I don't like the word because I'm a 9 on the anagram and discipline just, nah.
Practice to me sounds like that's more fun. They played sports, so practice makes sense. But, also, spiritual is a bit troubling because these practices are not just something I do with my spirit. They're they're something I do with my whole body. My whole life is involved with these.
Right? And so these are practices that Christians for centuries have tried to do as a way to model his pace of life, things like prayer, things like scripture, things like time with people, fasting, generosity. Right? All of these things that we would say mark our lives, sharing the good news, bringing the good news to people. But the danger is that we treat these practices and disciplines as an end in themselves rather than a means to an end.
Right? All of these disciplines are meant to be a means to an end that leads you ultimately to abiding in Jesus. We pray to abide in Jesus. We read to abide in Jesus. We give ourselves away so that we might experience and abide in Jesus.
Right? All of these things are not an end in themselves and you will remain in a rut of your life if you constantly think you just have to do this to do it versus seeing that Jesus has loved you the same way the father has loved him. The point of these practices is that you might experience the very love that Jesus has for you and in so doing, remain and abide in him. Stay close in him. And according to Jesus, what this does for you, there in verses 12 and 13, he says my command is this, that you love each other as I have loved you.
There is a lot of talk today around what is the way forward for the church. What's gonna happen to us? How how are we going to move forward? How's the world gonna move forward is one question. But how how is the church going to make an impact?
I'm curious, and I have a hunch that a lot of it is going to be rooted in our ability first to abide in Jesus and then to, as he said, abide with one another. In other words, to live a life of unity. It's no accident that just 2 chapters later after John 15 and John 17, the last recorded prayer we have of Jesus is he's praying for unity. Unity. Unity.
He's praying that we would be 1. That can't happen if you and I continually forsake what it means and looks like in our lives to abide first in Jesus. And so if you're looking at your own life wondering where you see, maybe small amounts of division, pride, a lack of care, a lack of presence to your community, It could all be rooted in the fact that you have forgotten what it looks like 1st and foremost to abide in Christ. And then to hear the words of Jesus that he calls us friends. I don't know about you, but I love to be around people who are my friends.
I get life from them. And to think that Jesus says I no longer call you servants but friends, and that greater love has no one in this than to lay down one's life for a friend. We have a friend in Jesus and a savior in him, someone who longs to be with you, not because he has to, but because he actually likes to be with you. Jesus loves to be with his people. And what an opportunity we have as we think about the great length that he had gone to on the cross to take on himself what should have fallen on us in order that we might draw close to him, and become his friend, and experience his love, and then in turn offer that love to the world.
Encounters are beautiful, but you need, as I was told years ago, to learn what it's like to be with him, to be with the God who is powerful, wise, the great I am, but the one who is also your friend. Your friend who has laid down his life for you. Let's go to him in prayer now. Father, we thank you for your love today, god. We thank you for the ways that you have demonstrated your love in giving us your son, Jesus.
And, lord, we look to you now as the vine, and we ask that you would help us to stay connected as a branch. Not trying really hard to follow you, but just remaining in you, connected to you, abiding in you. Would you lead us to a place where we might simplify our lives now? Maybe for some, we confess sin. God, would you lead some to confess a whole life of sin in which they have been running from the very source of life.
So would you help them come back to you as we experience you as the one who has given us love and life? We pray these things in your name. Amen.