Nothing Apart From Christ
Introduction
- Introduce self
- Go ahead and grab a bible or get yours and turn to John 15
- In your church bible’s it’s on page ________
- Get ready to look at your bible a lot as we go through this passage
- I’ll have you flip back to chapter 13 at one point, and we’ll look at some verses surrounding our text too
- So be ready with your bible
Read the Text: John 15:1–5
[1] “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. [2] 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. [3] Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. [4] Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. [5] I am the vine; 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.
Pray
1. Jesus is God
- It’s easy to pass over those first two words, I am, but they have a lot of meaning
- Where else in the bible have we read I am?
- Earlier in this book in chapter 8 we hear it
- Jesus is telling some Jews who are bragging that their father is Abraham that Abraham himself was looking forward to the day Jesus the savior would come to Earth
John 8:56–59
[56] Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.” [57] So the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” [58] Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” [59] So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.
- So Jesus is claiming to be God when he says “before Abraham was, I am”
- That’s why they tried to kill him with stones
- A man claiming to be God was blasphemy!
- but that’s a weird way to say that
- “before Abraham was, I am”
- Why does he say it like that?
- Let’s take a look back into the OT to when Moses was talking to God at the burning bush
Exodus 3:13-15
13 Then Moses said to God, "If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?" 14 God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM." And he said, "Say this to the people of Israel: 'I AM has sent me to you.'" 15 God also said to Moses, "Say this to the people of Israel: 'The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.' This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.
- say I AM has sent me to you
- so we see that Jesus has a purpose in using that title
- he is claiming to be God
- vs. 1 in our text is last of seven I am sayings Jesus has in the book of John
- I am the bread of life
- our spiritual hunger will always be satisfied in God
- I am the light of the world
- thanks to Jesus we see a great light and can know God and truth
- I am the door of the sheep
- if anyone enters by Jesus they will be saved
- I am the good shepherd
- he watches over us and cares for us and saves us when we’re lost
- I am the resurrection and the life
- thanks to Jesus those who trust in him will be raised to new eternal life when they die as he was raised
- I am the way, the truth, and the life
- no one can come to Father God but by faith in Jesus and his saving work for you dying on the cross
- I am the true vine
- what does that mean?
- The vine part is explained in later verses, but why does it say true vine?
- The OT often uses the vineyard or vine as a symbol for Israel
- Check out Psalm 80:8-9
Psalm 80:8–9
[8] You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it. [9] You cleared the ground for it; it took deep root and filled the land.
- How did the nation of Israel do though after coming into the promised land God cleared for them?
- Not great! They didn’t abide in God but instead turned from God and worshiped other Gods
Exodus 6:7
7 I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.
- Israel was not devoted to God so he let them be destroyed
- The vine was no longer protected, no longer abiding:
Psalm 80:12–13
[12] Why then have you broken down its walls, so that all who pass along the way pluck its fruit? [13] The boar from the forest ravages it, and all that move in the field feed on it.
- So if Israel was supposed to be the abiding vine, devoted to God and obeying him and living for him, but they failed - who is the true vine that didn’t fail?
- Jesus is the true vine that bears good fruit where the nation of Israel failed to bear good fruit
- Jesus abides in the Father and the Father in him
- A lot of stuff in the OT points forward to Jesus
- Where men and the nation of Israel failed over and over again, Jesus is the true and better Adam who never failed
- Jesus is what Israel was supposed to be, devoted to God
- Can you be devoted to God like Jesus without him, or are you Nothing Apart from Christ? [PAUSE]
- You can try and do things to make it look like you’re abiding in Christ, like you are something without him
- Everything looks great on the outside of your life
- It won’t work
- It’s like an example I heard from Pastor Paul Tripp,
- You can go to a dying barren apple tree and attached a bunch of fresh apples from the store to the branches
- It looks great for a while!
- But what’s going to happen?
- Those apples won’t last
- They’re all going to rot because they’re not abiding to the life giving source in the branches
2. God Prunes Us That We May Bear More Fruit
- Let’s look at vs. 1 & 2 again:
John 15:1-2
[1] “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. [2] 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.
- Jesus is the vine
- God the Father is the vinedresser, or gardener as the NIV translated it
- The branches are those who claim to be in Christ
- “Every branch in me”
- Those who claim to be following Christ
- Abiding in him is following him, living as he did which means obeying the Father
- So there are branches that don’t bear fruit
- You could say branches that aren’t growing anything
- Branches that aren’t producing anything good
- Growth in the love of God and the love of others
- Denying yourself and putting others first
- The reason the branch is there is to produce fruit
- Fruit here means good results coming from the life of a follower of Jesus
- We can do nothing apart from Christ
- Until God opens our eyes to see how lost we are and how desperately we need a savior, we’re just going to live for ourselves
- Until we are brought to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ we will continue to be our own God, ruling our own lives
- Until we abide in Jesus, God who humbled himself and came to Earth as a man, lived the perfect life we can’t because we sin all the time, and died the death that we deserve for our sin in our place, then was raised from the dead defeating death for us and going before us up to heaven to the Father to prepare a place for us
- We can’t produce good fruit on our own because we can’t do what God calls us to until we are made alive in him
- Until we die to ourselves, our own wants and desires,
- Until we repent and turn from our sin to God and ask him for forgiveness
- And admit we need him to save us
- We are dead in our sin
- Jesus died, taking all of our sin on himself so that we could no longer be separated from God
- When sin no longer separates us from God thanks to Jesus, we can abide in him
- We can say “God, I’m spiritually dead without you”
- I need your sustaining power to renew me everyday so that I can live for you and abide in you
- abide means to accept or act in accordance with
- you accept that you are nothing without Jesus and what he did for you when he took all of your sin and made it no more by dying on the cross as a sacrifice to bring you peace with God
- are you a branch in Jesus the vine?
- do you depend on him as your source of life?
- or are you trying to do it on your own?
Look at our first two verses again:
[1] “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. [2] 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.
- Fruit is when we are doing God’s will
- Loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, & strength
- Loving others
- But sin gets in the way of those things
- There are things in our lives, though we are abiding in Christ, that stop us from bearing as much fruit as we could
- So God prunes those who are bearing fruit so that they may bear more fruit
- Pruning is cutting away dead or overgrown branches or stems, especially to increase fruitfulness and growth.
- The practice entails targeted removal of diseased, damaged, dead, non-productive, structurally unsound, or otherwise unwanted tissue from crop and landscape plants
- God wants you to be more like Jesus
- Most of the time for us to grow we need some pruning
- That means we need to go through some cutting off of unwanted stuff in our lives
- This doesn’t feel good!
- God uses hard times and trials in our lives to prune us
James 1:2–4
[2] Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, [3] for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. [4] And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
- Not many of us have gone through a lot of hard stuff, but look back on your life
- You may not be thankful for hard things you have gone through, but how has God used those hard times to strengthen you?
- How has God used those hard times to drive you to him?
- To strip away your pride so you stopped turning to yourself or the ways that the world tries to fix things and you turned to God?
- Times where you look back and remember how hard it was, but you also remember that you’ve never prayed so much in your whole life
- Times where you were at the end of yourself so you cried out to God begging him for his help because you couldn’t do it anymore?
- There is a popular lie out there that says becoming a Christian is about having your best life now where you are healthy and wealthy
- God loves you too much to give you all of the things your greedy heart desires
- He is a good Father who cares for you
- Like a surgeon who cuts into you to remove bad stuff that will end up killing you, and in his cutting he saves your life
- He knows what is best for you and that is to abide in him!
- To rely on him for everything!
- To be a branch that is connected to the vine of Jesus Christ
- Don’t be a branch in Jesus that does not bear fruit!
- God the gardener will take you away!
John 15:1-2
[1] “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. [2] 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.
- Don’t despise the pruning God is doing in your life
- It shows he loves you
- My wife had a friend named Irene in the fourth grade.
- Irene spent a lot of time at Kadi’s house growing up and one week they spent a week at the lake.
- After five days of being gone Irene’s mom called to ask if Kadi’s parents had seen Irene because they hadn’t seen her in a couple days.
- Let me remind you that Irene was ten and her parents hadn’t seen her in 5 days.
- Kadi’s parents explained that they were all at the lake and they thought she had permission to go with the family.
- Kadi told Irene that she wished her parents were more like Irene’s
- and she could do whatever she wanted and her parents wouldn’t care.
- She said to Kadi, “I would rather have your parents, at least your parents love you. Mine didn’t even know I was gone.”
- Irene wanted discipline, boundaries, and protection because she recognized that Kadi had those things and that she was loved.
- Irene felt like she was on her own in the fourth grade...because she was.
- She didn’t have a vine to abide in, she was a rogue leaf on her own
Hebrews 12:5–8
[5] And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?
“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,
nor be weary when reproved by him.
[6] For the Lord disciplines the one he loves,
and chastises every son whom he receives.”
[7] It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? [8] If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.
- God does not prune branches that aren’t bearing fruit
- He prunes you so you can bear more fruit because in that he is glorified
- If we skip ahead to verses 8-10 we read:
John 15:8–10
[8] By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. [9] As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. [10] If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love.
- So how do we abide in Jesus?
- By keeping his commandments
- What are those commandments?
- They are the things that will bring us the most joy:
Mark 12:30–31
[30] And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ [31] The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
And back to our chapter, look in your bibles at vs 10:
John 15:10–11
[10] If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. [11] These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.
- What about that? If we abide in Jesus our joy will be full
- OK let’s move on to vs 3:
[3] Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you.
- what does Jesus mean there?
- That word Jesus had spoken to his disciples is back in chapter 13 when he washed their feet.
- Hold your place and flip back a page or two to Ch. 13
- Peter was like:
John 13:8
“You shall never wash my feet.” Jesus answered him, If I do not wash you, you have no share with me.”
- He gave them the example that he as their teacher and leader humbled himself to do a dirty task of washing their nasty feet
- A leader is a servant
Then Jesus said in vs. 10:
John 13:10
And you are clean, but not every one of you.
- Jesus was talking about Judas who betrayed him when he says “but not every one of you.”
- Jesus didn’t mean that they were perfect when he called them clean
- But they were united with him with sincere devotion
- like branches are united with the vine
- Judas was a branch that got cut off
- He did not abide in Christ
3. Jesus is Our Spiritual Source of Life
- Let’s look at vs. 4:
Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.
- Without being connected to the vine a branch cannot bear fruit, a branch cannot survive
- The front yard in my first house was separated from the neighbor’s yard a long row of really thick hedges
- We had a chain link fence, but you could barely see it because these crazy hedges were constantly overtaking the fence
- So I had to trim the hedges every once in a while
- I’d run an electric trimmer down the fence line and cut it back until it was even with the fence
- Then I had to do the tops, because it looked really bad
- So I’d run the trimmer across the top to flatten it out
- A bunch of huge branches sticking up would fall onto the top of the hedges
- Usually I would grab them all and throw them down into the yard so I could clean it all up
- This one time I had this brilliant idea
- I thought, I’ll just grab these chopped off branches and shove them down into the hedges
- No one will notice, they’re so thick anyway
- and it worked! At first
- You couldn’t tell what I had done, those green chopped off extra parts blended right in
- Problem solved, job done
- Well a few days later I noticed something
- The nice green hedges had tons of ugly withered brown branches all over in it
- It looked terrible
- My plan hadn’t worked, of course!
- Why did the discarded branches that I took away turn brown and die?
- Because they no longer received any nourishment from the vine
- They couldn’t live alone as a branch
- Look at vs. 4 again:
Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.
- We need the life that comes only from one source, Jesus Christ!
- Without him we cannot survive and we are dead in our sins
- Jesus describes himself as living water
John 7:38-39
38 Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, 'Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.'"
39 Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.
- we are the branches and we cannot make it without being fed from the vine
- there are no Batman branches who say “I work alone”
- we need to drink from the well that is Jesus to survive
John 4:14
but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."
4. Abide in Jesus So You Can Bear Fruit
- Let’s look at vs. 5:
John 15:5
I am the vine; 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.
- remember abiding in Jesus is keeping his commandments just as he kept his father’s commandments:
John 15:10
If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love.
1 John 2:6
whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.
- Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing
- this doesn’t mean you can do nothing at all
- People who don’t abide in Jesus get cut away and go on living their lives for themselves and keep doing whatever they want to
- you can do nothing means that apart from Christ you can do nothing of eternal value
- you can not produce spiritual fruit
- we see some spiritual fruit in this book:
- Answered prayer:
John 15:7
[7] If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.
- Joy:
John 15:11
These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.
- Love:
John 15:12
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
- What about these fruits of the spirit?
Galatians 5:22–24
[22] But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, [23] gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. [24] And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
- God prunes you so you can produce more fruit, and become more like Jesus growing in your Christian character:
2 Peter 1:5–8
[5] For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, [6] and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, [7] and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. [8] For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
- Once we accept Jesus as our Lord and savior and repent of our sin, why doesn’t God just take us up to Heaven to be with him right away?
- Because he wants to work through us loving others
- He wants us be effective and fruitful, doing the work of the Father on this Earth, blessing others and showing them God’s love because we are so thankful he first loved us!
Let’s read our last verse one more time:
John 15:5
I am the vine; 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.
- So abide in Christ!
- How do you do that?
- By doing what he commands us
- Why would we give up control of our lives and submit to Jesus?
- Because we can’t bear fruit unless we abide in him
- and because he died for us!
- He saved us from trying to be a branch on our own
- Skip a few verses down to John 15:12:
John 15:12–14
[12] “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. [13] Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. [14] You are my friends if you do what I command you.
- We choose not to do what Jesus commands
- We call this sin, choosing our own way
- Sin separates us from God
- But Jesus loved us with greater love than anyone else has, laying down his life for us!
- If you put your faith and trust in Jesus dying for you and you repent, turning from your sins to trust in Jesus, he calls you his friend!
- The Creator of the Universe humbled himself and came down from his mighty place in heaven to become a weak human like us and die a brutal death in our place so that we can be his friend
- It’s only by the sacrifice and blood shed by Jesus that we can be saved to be a branch that abides in him
- So that we can bear more fruit!
- For apart from Jesus we can do nothing
John 15:5
[5] I am the vine; 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.
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