“Abide in Love”
John 15:1-12
1 John 4:7-21
I have a Muslim friend who I see fairly often while he is at
work. Nearly every time I see him, he
will say to me, “Don’t forget about me.”
It’s our little code phrase that serves as a reminder of our commitment
to pray for each other, which is indicative of our relationship with each
other. He and I have become good
friends. We talk about our families, and
our work, and other things. But there
are times when we our conversations get much deeper, and we talk about
spiritual things. He knows
that I’m a pastor, and he believes that I have an inside track to the heart and
mind of God, as if somehow I have obtained access to the heavenly throne room
of God’s very self, access which we does not have. The
god he believes in is a distant god, a god who is for
all practical purposes so apart from human beings as to be nearly unconcerned
about our real human lives. The idea
that God or any god would come as a human being is not only a foreign thought to
his religion, it is also an impossible one for him to believe. For him, his god is completely other, and
therefore his task in life is to be faithful enough and obedient enough to
hopefully gain his god’s love and favor and earn for himself entrance into
paradise.
One of the things I often hear from
people is that Christianity, like Islam, is just another religion for people
choose, but that is such a sterile, uninspiring characterization of what
Christianity really is. Christianity is
not just a religion, it is more than that, Christianity is a faith, but it is
even more than just a faith. For
everything that one can say about Jesus Christ, there is one thing which is
plainly clear: Jesus had such an intimate, personal, and devoted relationship
with the Father, that their relationship was one of
complete and total communion with each other.
If you want to know who God is, look at Jesus. If you want to know what God says, listen to
Jesus. If you want to know what God
does, follow Jesus. It is our confession
of faith that Jesus alone is so uniquely related to God the Father that we know
him to be the Son of God, the very Word of God incarnate.
For John, it is this unique
relationship between God the Son and God the Father that becomes the resounding
theme of his whole Gospel. From the very
beginning of his Gospel, John writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh and lived
among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full
of grace and truth.” For John, in the
person of Jesus of Nazareth, is the complete and total incarnation and divine
presence of none other than the Almighty God.
Our text for this morning from John’s Gospel returns us to his
resounding theme of Jesus’ unique relationship with the Father. Jesus proclaims, “I am the true vine.” Here we have the last of the great “I am”
sayings of Jesus in the Gospel, which is Jesus’ own testimony as to who he
truly is.
Numerous times in the Gospel, Jesus refers to himself as “I am”:
“I am the bread of life”, “I am the light of the world”, “I am the good
shepherd”, “I am the resurrection and the life”, “I am
the way, and the truth, and the life.”
How comforting and wonderful it is to know that the one, who is the
Christ, the one who is our Lord and Savior, and the one whom we follow in faith
and obedience, is none other than the eternal, sovereign, and loving God of all
grace and glory. But, what is even more
significant about our text for this morning is not what Jesus’ says about his
own relationship with the Father, but what Jesus’ says about our relationship
with him.
In it’s
fullest expression, Christianity is a relationship – a relationship between the
God we know in Jesus Christ and human beings, a relationship that is none other
than an intimate, enduring communion between the Triune God and ourselves. Jesus
says, “I am the vine, and you are the branches.” “Abide in me, as I abide in you.” “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved
you – abide in my love.” It is the very
foundation of our faith and way of life that just as Jesus Christ is in us, we
are also in him. He is the vine which
connects us with the Father and with each other, he is the vine which gives us
the Father’s nourishment to grow, the vine which gives us the Father’s will and
purpose to blossom, and the vine which gives us the Father’s grace to become
fruitful in our lives of faith.
What Jesus both declares and offers all of us is the same
relationship with him as he has with the Father. This is an offer the Christian community
cannot pass up nor neglect. The question
for us then, both as individuals and as the community of faith, is how are we
going to respond to Jesus’ call to abide in his love? How do we live a life that abides in
love?
At a first glance of the text, it
would seem that the answer is clear – if you want to live a life that abides in
Jesus Christ and therefore abides in his love, then you have to bear fruit. Now, I don’t know about you, but the idea of
having to produce more fruit in order to be able to abide in Jesus and in his
love, isn’t necessarily so comforting or so easy. In fact, having to produce more seems to echo
too much for me the message that is so prevalent in the Americanized Christian
culture, which says that in order to be a Christian you have to produce more
and more and more. To me, that sounds a
lot like the message of our fast-paced, machine-driven, technological,
cutting-edge society with its emphasis on production, production, and more
production!
To be honest, if this is what Jesus means by abiding in his love,
then Christianity at best is no different from any other religion out there, or
at worst no different from the world in which we live. If our relationship with God and therefore
with Jesus is based solely on the quality and quantity of our production then
all of us are truly in trouble. If this
is what Jesus means, then like my Muslim friend, there is nothing else for us
to conclude that God is indeed apart from us and therefore we must produce more
fruit in order to gain God’s love and favor.
Surely Jesus means something else besides just doing more work…and I
believe he does.
My friends, Jesus is not calling us to be more productive, but to
be more loving; not to do more, but to be more, so that our abiding love in
Christ and in each other may be the fertile, strengthened, and healthy branches
upon which God’s fruit can be grown.
Jesus is calling us to abide in the one who is the true source of
fruitfulness – himself. He alone is the
true vine, the only one who makes it possible for us to be fruitful in our
lives. So maybe abiding in Jesus is more
than about bearing fruit, since we cannot bear fruit on our own anyway.
Maybe the key to living a life that abides in Jesus, and is able
to bear fruit, is to follow our calling to put ourselves in a position to
remain connected to the true vine, so that we can remain nourished, enriched,
and strengthened so that we may be fruitful through him. It’s not simply about doing more, it’s about
being more – being more in communion with God, being more in communion with
Jesus, building up our relationships with Jesus and with others, deepening our
spirituality, and expanding our vision to see what God is doing in the
world. If we want to live in a life that
abides in Jesus, the answer is simply – abide in his love – remain in, stand
firm in, dwell in, the same love the Father has for him, the same love the
Father has for the world, the same agape love we are to have for each other,
just as God first loved us.
So often the Americanized Christian culture equates the
effectiveness and health of a church with the quality and the quantity of its
works. In this way, one might easily
conclude that the church that is doing more is a more effective and healthier
church. Not only is that not always the
case, it distorts the nature of what it means to be the church in relationship
with God in Jesus Christ. The
In his first letter, John the Elder,
tells us that God is love, not that God just has love, but that God is
love. The very nature and character of
God is love, not a love like that between spouses, or like that between
friends, or even like that between parents and children, but a love that is
self-giving and self-sacrificing, a love that does not shut down when it is not
returned, a love that does not turn away when disappointed, a love that does
not turn to hate or apathy when rejected, a love that is not just spoken, but
enacted. As John the Elder writes, “…God
is love and God’s love was revealed in this way: God sent his only Son into the
world so that we might live through him.
In this is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us.”
The very identity of our communal relationship with each other is
to be founded on the love we have been given, the same love that is the nature
and character of the communal relationship of the Triune God. How can the
If we the church want to be more effective in our ministry and
mission, if we want to be a healthy church, if we want to produce fruit for the
kingdom, we must first abide in love. We
must first remain in, stand firm in, and dwell in the love God has for us, and
love each other with that very same God-like love. It cannot be the other way around. We cannot be fruitful in hopes to gain love, we must love in order to be fruitful. Therefore, we must begin to change the
perspective and the priorities of not only ourselves, but our children as
well. We must first abide in love, in
the same love that God has for us through Jesus Christ, and then we must be
strengthened and nurtured and grown in our love for one another. We must remember the foundation upon which
our communal relationship is built, the love of God in Jesus Christ, who is
alone the source of our strength, our nurturing, and our growth. He alone is the source of who
we are and who we are to be.
When we abide in love, we will be more fruitful, we will want to
spend time communing with God and with each other, we will want to be immersed
in God’s Word, we will want to be spiritually renewed and enriched in our
journey of faith, we will want to carry his Gospel to the ends of the earth,
because we will have the assurance of God’s abiding presence in our lives, and
the faith to trust that God will make our abiding love bear fruit for His
kingdom.
God is God because God is love through
Jesus Christ. God without love is not
God, just as the church without love is not a church. Love is the glue which holds us together as a
community, because it is the nature and character of the very One who calls us
into being, who has brought us together and made us one with him. Love is the visible and tangible expression and
embodiment of the very Gospel of Jesus Christ, and it is the promise of him,
the promise of the very one who is himself God’s love for the world, that if he
abides in us, and we abide in his love, then we cannot help but be fruitful,
which is exactly what God wants us to be.
Amen.