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I I can't jump into this week's sermon without praising God for what he did last week. Sons and daughters running to the altar, flooding these altars, giving their lives to Jesus. I don't know about but if you were here, was it an amazing, like it was this really amazing thing to see? And for me, service after service after service, the altars were full. People came home from the far country, some for the first time, some for the first time in a long time. And something happened in this room and in people's hearts that only God can take credit for. And what happened last weekend was just one part of a larger conversation that we've been having. Several weeks ago, I introduced you to a word that many of us are weren't familiar with: interiority. Interiority is making your inner life a priority. And when week one, we started learning our responsibility to pay attention to the life beneath the life. As Paul said in Colossians 1, it's about Christ in you. He says that's your hope. And then in Colossians 3, he says it's about you being hidden in Christ. So this is about Christ in you and you being hidden in Christ. According to the scripture, if you're serious about following Jesus, your inner life, your soul will become your priority. And to be honest, in this last day of what will be this series, I kind of got a little sad because I've got all these verses I didn't even have time to unpack because the Bible is full of this conversation. And just to show you how much it addresses this idea of interiority, priorities, prioritizing your inner life, how much that matters to God. Let me just point out a few we didn't even get to. It's where his spirit is at work in you. Ephesians 3, I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his spirit in your inner being. That's where his spirit is at work in you, in your inner being. It's where the wisdom and revelation of God will come to you. Psalm 51 says, Behold, you desire truth in the inmost being, and in the hidden part of my heart, you will make me know wisdom. It's where the wisdom and revelation of God comes to you. It's where renewal happens in your life. Second Corinthians chapter 4, so we do not lose heart, though our outer self, our exterior, is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. And then the wisdom of Proverbs says this in Proverbs 20: the human spirit is the lamp of the Lord and sheds light on one's inmost being. What does that mean? It means that God has given every one of us an inner spirit that acts like a built-in light and it reveals our true motives, our thoughts, and our deepest character. God intimately knows your heart and he uses and shapes your interior life as a compass that guides you. So if your interior life gets off, the whole direction of your life will be off. The Bible unmistakably is clear on the importance of prioritizing your inner life. We established that in week one. In week two, we learn that you are what you love. You become like what you worship, like what you pursue, like what you love. We learn that whatever you truly desire is proven by the level of your passion in pursuit of that thing. We learn that our habits, not our feelings, but the things we do over and over again are what shape our loves and desires more than anything else. That you can act your way into the life that you want to live. Last weekend in week three, we saw a man who came into himself, the scripture says. He had to lose everything on the outside before he slowed down long enough to take an honest look on the inside. And when he did, he was disgusted by what he saw, what he had become. But when he returned home, he found a gracious, patient, and forgiving father. But that father was running down the road to meet him, to shorten the distance on the road home. Today, in the last week of this conversation, I feel like I need to address what many of us might be asking right now, especially if you were one of the ones that came back to the Father last weekend. You came home and you said, Okay, I'm in. I want God to transform my interior life. But now, what does that actually look like? Not a momentary spiritual high, but what does it look like as a sustained way of living my life? And Jesus gives us that answer. And the answer is really just one word. It's a, it's, it's, it takes, um, it's it's it's a it's a big, it it explains a lot, but it's just one word. In John 15, Jesus said, if you if you want life, if you want wholeness, if you want spiritual passion and flourishing and fulfillment in your inner man, in your inmost being, Jesus said, You're gonna have to learn to abide. Just one word. But doing that changes everything. John 15 is an incredibly tender passage. And in order to fully understand why it's so tender and meaningful, you have to examine the timing and what was going on when Jesus used these words. He said these things. This was the night before the cross, after the Last Supper, on the way to Gethsemane. He knew what was coming in the next 12 hours, and in that moment, the betrayal had already been in motion. The cross was waiting for him. Jesus gathers his closest friends and says, I want to tell you something that's gonna hold you together when I'm gone, and it feels like everything has fallen apart. And here's what he chose to say in that crucial moment. I am the true grapevine, and my father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch of mine that doesn't produce fruit, and he prunes the branches that do bear fruit, so they will produce even more. You have already been pruned and purified by the message I have given you. Remain in me, and I will remain in you. For a branch cannot produce fruit if it is severed from the vine, and you cannot be fruitful unless you remain in me. Yes, I am the vine, you are the branches, those who remain in me, and I in them will produce much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. Abiding in Christ is remaining in Christ. That's what it means to abide. Remain. Jesus is not just making a casual suggestion here. This is a dying man's urgent message to the people he's the closest to. And out of everything he could have said in the hours before the cross, he chooses to say to them, Stay connected to me. Don't let go, abide, remain. The word John originally used here to capture what Jesus was saying is the Greek word meno, and it appears 11 times in just nine verses, which means it must be really important. Jesus must really want us to understand this. The word means remain, stay, dwell, make your home in, stand fast. It carries the idea of permanence, settled presence, of not detaching or leaving. Because of the meaning of this word, one translation of verse 4 reads this way: Make your home in me as I make my home in you. Jesus is saying, if you want a centered, flourishing, productive, fruitful life, a healthy soul, I can't be the one you visit on occasion. He's saying, make your home in me, move in, dwell, abide, remain in me. Now think, think about what makes a home a home versus a place that you visit. When you visit somewhere, you may not even fully unpack because you're always aware you're eventually going to leave. You never fully settle in. But a home is different. Home is where you let your guard down, you don't have to perform, you belong without having to earn it. You're just authentic and real. That's what Jesus is describing, not a spiritual life built around highs or just occasional times with God, but a life where you've moved into it, where you've stopped keeping your bags packed because it's temporary. You've settled in, you stay connected to Him. And it's not just a discipline you add to your schedule, it's become as natural as breathing to you. Abiding in Christ is living in Christ the same way a branch is connected to a grapevine. It doesn't strain, it doesn't perform, that's just how it lives. I want to slow down a minute and really look at the image Jesus chooses of the vine and the branches because he doesn't choose this accidentally. This has been a long, ongoing conversation in Scripture. Throughout the Old Testament, the vine was God's primary image when he referred to Israel. The prophets used it over and over again. Isaiah 5, Psalm 80, Jeremiah 2, God planted the vine, he tended the vine, he built the wall around the vine, but it kept producing wild grapes. And it kept failing to be what God intended for it to be. But then Jesus comes along on the scene and he says, I am the true vine. Pay attention to the word, the qualifier word. He says in verse 1, I am the true grapevine, and my father is the gardener. Why did he have to use the qualifier true vine? Because he's making a stunning claim. He's saying everything Israel was supposed to be and couldn't manage to sustain, I am. I'm the vine that actually works. I'm the source that won't run dry. And if you stay connected to me, you will produce what you could never produce on your own. And this is so important, especially for those of us that are strivers. Pay attention to the branches. Jesus doesn't tell us to try harder to produce fruit. He doesn't say have more discipline. He says, remain in me, abide in me. Because the fruit is not the product of the branch's effort. The fruit is what naturally happens when a branch stays connected to the source of life. Now think about it for a moment. Have you ever gone to a pecan grove or an orchard or a vineyard or anything like that and got really quiet and heard any grunting or straining? No. Sounds really stupid to even bring it up, almost even comical, because branches don't grunt or strain to produce fruit. There is no five-step strategy for fruitfulness in a pecan orchard. They just stay connected, and the life of the vine flows through the branch until fruit appears. This is the most countercultural thing Jesus said about spiritual growth. We live in a culture that believes in self-effort, in systems, and strategies and discipline and hustle and willpower. And Jesus says the secret to fruitfulness, to flourishing, to spiritual formation is not more effort. The secret is more connection. Because apart from me, you can do nothing. Not you can do a little, not you will do less without me, but you can do absolutely nothing without me. And that's hard to grasp for people that are used to making things happen. But at the same time, if you grasp it, it can be incredibly liberating for you because it means that the pressure to produce fruit or for your own spiritual transformation is not on you. The pressure is on you to stay connected to the one who produces the fruit. Fruitfulness is not your issue. Faithfulness is your issue. If you will remain faithful and abide in the vine, it's his job to produce the fruit. All you gotta do is abide, stay close to the source, and when you stay connected to the source, life flows, growth happens, fruit is produced organically and naturally. Abiding in Christ, remaining in the vine, is the only way to practice interiority, to live with your inner life as the priority of your life. The deepening of your interior life is not some destination that you eventually arrive at. It is the constant posture of your heart every day, every morning, and every moment of honest prayer and quiet attention. Eugene Peterson, who spent his entire pastoral life trying to help people understand what making their inner life a priority actually looks like in their everyday life, he wrote this. So the task is not to get God to do something I think needs to be done, but to become aware of what God is doing so that I can respond to it and participate and take delight in it. Our task is not to try and convince God to do something. Our task is simply to become aware of what God is already doing in us and in the world, and then respond to that, participate in that, take delight in that. That's abiding. Not trying to manufacture some spiritual experience, not performing some burdensome religious activity. It's it's staying awake and tuned in to what God is already up to in you, seeing it and saying yes to it. Now I can't address John 15 and skip over the most difficult part of the conversation. As much as Jesus talks about branches abiding in the vine and producing fruit, he also says a lot about pruning. Remember, Jesus calls himself the vine, you and I he calls the branches, and the father he refers to as the gardener or the vine dresser. He, verse two, he, the father, cuts off every branch of mine that does not produce fruit, and he prunes the branches that bear fruit so they will produce even more. The father is the vine dresser, the gardener, and the gardener prunes. I've had the opportunity many times in my life to prune grape vines. If I have opportunity time-wise today, I'll tell you a little bit about that. But to a bystander who doesn't understand the value and importance of the process, pruning in a vineyard can look violent and aggressive and even wasteful. During pruning, it looks like the vine dresser is removing what is perfectly healthy. And if you didn't understand what was happening, you'd think they were destroying the vine. But the vine dresser knows something the branch doesn't know. The prune branch will produce more fruit, not less. When verse 2 says he prunes the branches, the original word for prunes can also mean cleanse. Pruning is not punishment, it's cleansing, it's purposeful shaping. The Father is removing what is draining life from the branch so that more life can flow through the parts that remain. Placing a priority on your inner life, the care of your soul, will sometimes feel like loss. God often allows things to be stripped away that we were counting on. Seasons of difficulty come, but those times are not proof that the gardener is absent from your life. Those seasons are what actually prove the depth of his care. Because the vine dresser doesn't waste the storms of your life, he uses them to prune you and shape you into his image. When he prunes, he's not cutting you down, he's cutting away what is keeping you from becoming everything he designed you to be. And this pruning thing, it only makes sense. It only feels right if you're abiding in the vine. If you're disconnected, pruning feels like waste. It feels unjust. But if you're staying connected, if you're making your home in him, you can trust the gardener's hands and you can trust his heart, even when you don't understand what he's cutting and why. Remember that verse from Colossians 3, we kept referring back to these last few weeks. For you died to this life, and your real life is hidden with Christ. The whole conversation in the last several weeks has been about the hidden life, not the exterior life that everybody sees. That's the one Paul says we're supposed to have died to, but the inner you, the part of you that God is most interested in, that's where the real you is located. Not out here, but in here. Not in your reputation or your performance or your public presentation. Your real life is in him, in here. So if the real source of your life comes from the hidden and unseen parts of you, it means that Jesus is not asking you to add one more thing to your to-do list. He's not trying to get you to God, he's trying to awaken us to the presence of God that is already within us. And he's saying, connect to the Christ in you, remain in Christ in you, abide in the Christ in you. And Paul says to us what it can produce. If we actually live that way, he says, don't worry about anything in Philippians. Instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need and thank him for all he has done, then you will experience God's peace when he exceeds anything we understand, which exceeds anything we understand. His peace, listen to this, will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ. When does that happen? When you live in Christ. God's peace will guard your heart and mind. Your heart and mind is another description of your inner life. If you have any peace in your life, it is there because you have guarded your inner life. The word guard Paul uses here is a military term, and it means to stand as a sentinel over, like posting a guard at the gate. When you're abiding, when your real life is hidden with Christ, his peace is not a feeling that comes and goes with your circumstances. It is like a soldier standing watch over your soul, guarding what gets in and guarding what comes to your heart and mind. That's the goal of prioritizing your inner life. It's not just about a deeper prayer life or more engagement with God's word. All that's great. But a person whose inmost being is being guarded by the peace of God is a soul that is so anchored and connected to the vine that the things that used to shake us at the foundations can't find their way past the sentinel of the peace of God that is watching over our hearts and minds. That's what abiding produces. Not perfection, not the absence of struggle, but a peace that doesn't make sense to the people watching your life from the outside, and it may not even make sense to you. It's a peace that passes understanding beyond human comprehension. Abide. Stay connected to Jesus, not just in the dramatic moments, not just in the crisis in the ordinary Tuesday, on the ordinary Wednesday, in the quiet moment where nobody is watching. Make your home in Him. That's how you live this out in your everyday life. Jesus closes this whole conversation about the vine and branch with what might be the most tender statement in the whole passage. He says, I have loved you even as the Father has loved me. Remain, abide in my love. Not perform for my approval, not earn your place at my table, not prove you deserve to stay, but remain. In my love. What he's saying is, my love is already there. It was there before you decided to come back home from the far country. It was there while you were living it up in a life of sin. It was there when you were running down the road to meet him. It was there putting the robe on your back and a ring on your finger, and it's here right now in this room at this moment, settled and certain, and it's not going anywhere. You know how to live this out? Stay there. In his love. Make your home in it. Take up residence in it. And from that place, everything else will follow. The fruit, the peace, the formation, the becoming a new and different person, it all flows from one thing: a branch that decides to stop disconnecting from the vine, but chooses to abide. Now let me give you something really practical you can start doing right now to put this into practice moving forward. You could call this the daily return. Since you can produce nothing of value apart from him, work this into your prayer life in your daily routine. This is a prayer you can pray. You are the vine, I am the branch. Apart from you, I can do nothing. Jesus, I'm staying. Jesus, I will remain. It doesn't have to be eloquent, it doesn't have to be long, it just has to be honest and consistent. That's what abiding is a thousand small returns to the vine. Now let me leave you with the fun fact that most people don't know. Okay. I grew up on a vineyard. That's why the biblical imagery of John 15, the vines and the branches, is always so personal to me because I've actually seen and done everything that Jesus talks about in John 15. I see how it's such an incredible image of what the spiritual life is. My uh my grandfather was a pastor, but also had we had a small family farm and and we raised the early part of my life strawberries and and watermelons, and and you know, like people would come and pay to pick, or we would pick and then we would sell and go to farmers markets. I'm I'm the guy in every country song, sitting in a pickup truck selling off the side of the road, you know, I'm selling turnips in a flatbed truck, crunching on a pork run when she showed up, you know, that that old song. Yeah, that's me. I'd done that all my life working on a farm and and and so the University of Arkansas called my granddad and said, uh, Mr. Gibson, we we've created a new seed, and and and it's a Concord grape without seeds. It's a seedless Concord, which is not a big deal. Now then it was a massive breakthrough, but we need some farmers that are willing to give up some land, plant some vineyards, try this. And so they provided all the the seed, but we had to provide the land, and so we we cleared some new ground and we took out all of our watermelon hills and our strawberry patch, most of that. We left a little and we went all in with the grapes. Um, and we we cut every post, like every cedar post. We went in the woods, trimmed them, we made hundreds of posts. I was with him digging every post hole. We strung the lines and then we planted acre after acre after acre of these, these little bitty, snuh, little bitty vines that we put one by one in the ground. And I remember I was a little boy, and I'm like, we're planting this, I want grapes tomorrow. And my grandpa said, Brian, these won't really produce fruit for five years. And for a little boy, that's an eternity. That was I was barely that old, five years, before I can eat a grape off of all this work we've been doing. There are some things that you learn when you do the work that you might not know if you weren't in the process. And they were just, let me give you these really quick some things that I just jotted down. These are not even on your screen after I was finished with my sermon. I'm like, I just gotta pass this on, stuff I know that I wouldn't know had I not grown up this way. The imagery that Jesus uses for our spiritual growth and formation is intentional because you being formed in the image of Christ is painstakingly slow. And in a culture that is all about immediate gratification and the demands instant results, we check out on the spiritual growth process. We don't stay, we don't abide because we don't realize it's gonna take a long time. You've got to you've got to get to the point where you trust the gardener and you choose to remain. This is the long play, it's not overnight. Second, I saw firsthand that pruning really is necessary, it's not wasteful. If the vine dresser doesn't prune often, then the vines eventually become unprofitable. It is costly if you don't prune. That's why God will prune people out of your life. That's why God will prune blessings and good things out of your life. Sometimes He prunes the good things to get you to the best things. And it's hard to be happy when God prunes out the good things because he's not yet given you any hint about the best thing. And it's hard to let go of the good, but you gotta trust the hands and the heart of the gardener. He's taken that because he wants to give me best. Remember what Jesus said, He only prunes the branches that are bearing fruit, he cuts off the branches that are not producing any fruit, which means if you are being pruned, you're fruitful. He wouldn't be pruning a vine that's not fruitful. So if you feel like you're in a season of pruning, just know it's because the father sees some fruit and he believes there's more potential in you. That's the only reason pruning would ever happen. Third, there's fruit hiding there in you and in the other people around you that you don't see. I can't tell you how many times as a kid when they were teaching me how to had my shears, they were teaching me how to prune or teaching me especially how to harvest grapes, and they always put me in front because they had to clean up all my mistakes. And as a kid, I can tell you how many times, whether it's my grandma or my grandpa, they were coming behind me, and I hear this. I'm a few vines up front. My grandma would say, You missed it, Brian. And she'd clip it and pull it up, hold this cluster of grapes. This one was hiding, this big cluster of grapes was hiding behind a leaf. That's money, she'd say. You better pay attention because there's fruit down there hiding that if you're not careful, you don't see. The biggest clusters of grapes can be tucked away way down in there, and they're easy to miss. I'm telling you, there's fruit in your life. If you're connected to the vine, there is fruit in your life, there is fruit in other people's life. The Lord has to remind me of this because I look at some people and say they're a Christian. I'm going, Ain't no fruit there. And the Lord said, Treat them like that vine, your grandma just keep digging. It's in there. There's fruit in there, hiding in plain sights. If they're connected, you're connected to the vine, you will produce fruit. Why don't you stand with me across the room, if you will, and have our prayer team make themselves available to serve you today? As always, I have a little prayer for us to pray, just to kind of bring this all together. But this is kind of different than last week where we ran home to the Father. This is like, okay, now we gotta go live this, we gotta go abide, remain, be faithful, let him work on the fruitful. That's his business. My business is faithfulness, his business is fruitfulness. We're these these people are here to help you pray about anything in your life. But if you just need to sit in this today and let God do something in your heart, commit to abide in the vine. Here's the prayer. Jesus, you said it clearly, remain in my love. So we do. We commit to do that. We're not visiting anymore, we're not just passing through. We're here to stay. We're branches that have decided to stop allowing ourselves to be disconnected from the vine. Do what only you can do in me from the inside out. Form me, through me, fill me with more of you, and let the life that flows from you flow through me. Shape my inmost being into your image. Lord Jesus, as we conclude that moment, I just ask you to bless your people with the truth of your word. Will you bless them and keep them? And will you make your face shine down on them? Will you be gracious to them? Turn your countenance their direction today and give them peace in Jesus' name.

unknown 31:12

Amen.