He is Risen… He is Risen indeed! So goes the traditional Paschal greeting. I hope this Holy Week has been a time of contemplation and renewing for you. It was a tumultuous week for Jesus’ disciples. At times it must have felt like it was passing in the blink of an eye… and at times it must have felt like it dragged on for an eternity. Fear, doubt, despair… and then, suddenly, on Sunday, indescribable joy.

But even that present joy brought with it a trepidation… because it didn’t erase the past. As He had told them would happen, when the soldiers came they all left Him. Did we really believe all along? By the end of John’s gospel, Jesus will deal even with that all too human weakness.

But between now and then, while He is still here (because we now know, now we understand, that He is going away), what do we ask Him? There is so much He tried to teach us that night when everything came crashing down.

The relationship

Many a Pastor has told us that “Christianity is not a religion but rather a relationship.” The meaning of that statement appears to be clear – and if not, the Pastor will expand. It is because a religion is all about what we humans need to do to get right with God whereas what God really wants is a relationship with us… and God has already done everything that is required to make that relationship possible, Sovereignly, unilaterally, by His Grace.

Like any other succinct phrase, that saying, even though true, cannot capture the full reality of what the mission of the Christ accomplished. For one thing, the word relationship is probably woefully inadequate if I am honest about how easily, and often, I have messed up my relationships.

Do I even know what a true relationship is?

Obviously, our understanding of what a relationship ought to be is one of the many things in my life that Jesus came to revolutionize. Just like my concept of “love”… Before He came, before I knew Him, before I gave Him my life, I thought I knew what love meant… Boy was I wrong!

Above all, relationship means a relationship of love. Sure, the character of that love is tuned by the role the lover and the beloved play in that relationship. As we have learned from having the New Testament in Greek, the word we translate as love can mean many things: friendship, affection, love of family, love of parent and child, love of husband and wife. But we have also learned that, in God’s eyes, there is only one standard for Love = agape = sacrificial Love.

John 3:16a For God so Loved the world, that He gave His One and Only Son…

The God who made us at the beginning of Creation, created us in His image because He wanted to have a relationship of Love with us for all eternity. And even though we messed up that plan by choosing to reject Him, He never changed His mind. And back then and there, He and the Eternal Son, agreed on the plan of Salvation: The Father would give to us His Son to teach us what Love is.

That was the essence of the mission. That is the end result of the rest of that verse:

John 3:16 For God so Loved the world, that He gave His One and Only Son, that whosever believes on Him will not perish but have everlasting life.

That eternal life that we receive the moment we repent, the moment we believe on Him, is manifested inside us as His Love.

That is why we can love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us, turn the other cheek when insulted and struck.

That is why we can love the unlovely, why we visit the prisoner, and feed the hungry, and care for the sick.

That is the only way that we can live fulfilled lives, with supernatural peace in our hearts, when we ourselves are the hungry, and the powerless, and mourning a wound that no one else can see or understand.

I like to think that no other love can enter Heaven except the Love of God.

And that is why we who have believed, have that Kingdom guaranteed (Luke 12:32). It is the one and only requirement.

In this viewpoint, everything Jesus taught us was directed at teaching us how to Love. That is why our life is not devoted to a “religion” where you have a “checklist” of things, actions, rituals, to perform that prove we deserve God’s reward. Instead, my life is meant to be just one thing: a witness that points out to the world that I am a child of The Living Loving God.

John 1:12-13 …but as many as received him, to them gave he [the] right to be children of God, to those that believe on his name; who have been born, not of blood, nor of flesh’s will, nor of man’s will, but of God.

Therefore, every teaching in the gospel, from the Sermon on the Mount forward is all about this: How I am called to Love… which is the same as how I am called to live. We already saw this in chapter 14 of John’s gospel.

John 14:23 Jesus answered and said to him, If any one love me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our abode with him.

The Presence of Jesus and the Father inside us is our token now of the eternal life promised in John 3:16. We live here in this world by the power of that eternal life.

Love and Obey… by abiding

Jesus took His teaching into “overdrive” that last night He spent with the disciples… there was so much still left to teach…

John 15:1-3 I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. [As to] every branch in me not bearing fruit, he takes it away; and [as to] every one bearing fruit, he purges it that it may bring forth more fruit. Ye are already clean by reason of the word which I have spoken to you.

Jesus has already made plain in chapter 14 that His departure is imminent. There He began His revelation of the role of the Holy Spirit as the Comforter who will remain with us forever because He will abide in us. In so doing, He will be Jesus’ Presence in our lives, He will remind us of everything He taught us and continue that teaching.

This now is a “new” teaching: this idea of abiding. In John 14:23 Jesus used it of Him and the Father abiding in our lives. And then He uses it to describe the same thing with the Holy Spirit. Can you imagine being one of the disciples at that point? These are definitely “spiritual words”, concepts that cannot be understood literally, concretely. To understand them requires us to think abstractly, think beyond the limitations of our flesh and blood.

But Jesus has always expected His disciples to be open to that kind of thinking. Remember the whole discussion about the bread of life in Chapter 6? (John 6:63 It is the Spirit which quickens, the flesh profits nothing: the words which I have spoken unto you are spirit and are life.)

Chapter 15 similarly begins with spiritual words: But the abiding that Jesus is talking about can also be understood with a worldly analogy: the grapevine and its branches… and the fruit they give as a result of that relationship.

The first thing that Jesus tells them in those first three verses is that this is the way the Father planned the relationship to be. He is the vinedresser, the one that designed the whole plan for His perfect purpose: Jesus is the vine, the only thing in that analogy that can stand on this (fallen) Earth and not only Live, but bring forth Life.

We, His disciples, are meant to be the branches. It is not our job to seek life out of that Earth. Our life can only come from the vine. And everybody knows that the purpose of the branches is to bring out the fruit. But to do that in a healthy way, the way that fulfills and preserves both the mission of the branch and the vine, requires the care of the vinedresser:

Branches that give no fruit, simply suck life out of the vine and give nothing in return. The vinedresser has no use for such self-serving branches. They are cut off and thrown away.

But even the branches that give fruit are not exempt from the caring eye of the vinedresser. Because for the fruit to be good and grow to its full capacity, it cannot be allowed to grow wild, grow too many together so that they choke each other. So, the vinedresser prunes (the word “purges”) those branches and they then grow bigger stronger and bear much fruit.

Does the pruning hurt? Probably; in the same way that Jesus’ Word hurts when it cuts through the sins that we try to keep hidden in our hearts. (Hebrews 4:12 For the word of God [is] living and operative, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and penetrating to [the] division of soul and spirit, both of joints and marrow, and a discerner of the thoughts and intents of [the] heart.)

You see, that word “clean” in the verse where Jesus says the disciples are already clean, is the same Greek word as the word “purges” or “prunes”. (Later, Paul will describe this as the convicting work of the Holy Spirit.)

So, as usual, Jesus starts chapter 15 of John with Truth in advertising: This abiding is not an easy thing because it requires that we accept His definition of what our relationship with Him and the Father is meant to be like.

John 15:4-6 Abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abide in the vine, thus neither [can] ye unless ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye [are] the branches. He that abides in me and I in him, *he* bears much fruit; for without me ye can do nothing. Unless any one abide in me he is cast out as the branch, and is dried up; and they gather them and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.

My relationship with Him is to be a branch; to understand that I am nothing without Him and that my life means nothing without Him. In fact, it is worth nothing without Him.

Does this bother you? If it does, it means we have been listening to the world too long, listening to the enemy lie to us too long.

I am nothing.

Can I say that? Or does rebellion rise inside my heart and say, wait a minute, I am a person, I am unique, I have gifts, I have something to contribute to this world?

I am nothing.

I can prove it to you. I cannot save this world. I cannot even save my loved ones. I don’ t have that power. And one day, I am going to die and eventually no one will remember me.

I am nothing… Solomon himself finally reached that conclusion in Ecclesiastes.

I am nothing outside God’s Plan.

But isn’t this a tautology? It should be a self-evident truth… I did not create myself, I did not create the Universe or this planet. The only reason I exist is because God chose to create me. Doesn’t it then make sense that outside God’s Plan I, my life, my existence, has no meaning?

If you really think this is demeaning, I invite you to imagine yourself living, existing, outside this Universe, outside space and time. That thought makes no sense…

And yet, isn’t that the root of all our problems: that we want to live our lives our own way regardless of what God’s Plan for us was when He first made us?

In that sense, then, Jesus command to us that we abide in Him, is nothing else but a call to return to our original design.

Abiding is the only way for us to fulfil our purpose… to bear fruit

John 15:7-8 If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will and it shall come to pass to you. In this is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit, and ye shall become disciples of mine.

How do we abide? By allowing Jesus’ words to abide in us. This is another if and only if proposition. Just like we cannot love Him without obeying Him, and we cannot obey Him without loving Him, the only sure way to abide in Him – through thick and thin, through everything the world throws at us – is to have His word abiding in our hearts.

Please do that. Please, choose a gospel and make it your own. Read it over and over until you know how one verse follows another, how one teaching leads to another, how every Truth and every Promise are woven together…. Until you know what it was like to walk with Him.

Is Jesus, in verse 7, giving us a license to ask for anything in the world, and He promises that we will get it? Yes and No… Yes, if we are abiding. Because if we are indeed abiding in the vine, it is the vine’s life that flows through us… not the world’s life. And when we are living through that Life, we are not going to be asking for worldly pleasures or riches or to have our way or to have our enemies destroyed.

No, if we abide, we will be asking for things already in accord with God’s Will. And the Promise is that we will receive what we have asked for so that it will flow out of our lives as fruit pleasing to God and as a witness to the world of the Love of God. This is how the Father is glorified. (Which is, after all, our purpose; as it was the Son’s.)

This is a crucial Truth and commandment because there are other kinds of fruit. Jesus warned us about that in the Sermon on the Mount:

Matthew 7:15-21 But beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but within are ravening wolves. By their fruits ye shall know them. Do [men] gather a bunch of grapes from thorns, or from thistles figs?

So every good tree produces good fruits, but the worthless tree produces bad fruits. A good tree cannot produce bad fruits, nor a worthless tree produce good fruits. Every tree not producing good fruit is cut down and cast into the fire. By their fruits then surely ye shall know them.

Not every one who says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of the heavens, but he that does the will of my Father who is in the heavens.

Looking back at this passage, illuminated by John 15, it becomes even clearer: We must apply these words of the Sermon to ourselves first, to always check our hearts, our motives: We are called to bear good fruit in this world. And through that fruit it should be evident to the most casual observer that examines our lives that we are children of God.

But at the same time we cannot miss the way Jesus phrased this teaching: “beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing”. So that we are also commanded to observe the fruit of the lives of those who are around us, especially those who are in positions of power (e.g. prophets). And we are called to judge the fruit of their lives as to whether it is fruit being born from the vine, the Son of God, or it is fruit being born of the earth of this fallen world.

We cannot judge the heart of those people because for that, they answer to God. But we can judge their fruit and decide whether to follow them or not.

David told us so, in the first Psalm, using the same analogies:

Psalm 1:1-3 Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the wicked, and standeth not in the way of sinners, and sitteth not in the seat of scorners; But his delight is in Jehovah’s law, and in his law doth he meditate day and night. And he [is] as a tree planted by brooks of water, which giveth its fruit in its season, and whose leaf fadeth not; and all that he doeth prospereth.

I would hope that the good fruit of the vine would be obvious to all of us. But Paul did not think it was entirely obvious… because he felt he had to spell it out for the Galatians.

Galatians 5:19-24 (NASB)  Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: sexual immorality, impurity, indecent behavior, idolatry, witchcraft, hostilities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarn you, just as I have forewarned you, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law…

Abiding means living within the certainty of the if and only if

It turns out there is only one if and only if…

John 15:9-10 As the Father has loved me, I also have loved you: abide in my love. If ye shall keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love, as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.

There is only one if and only if because when we abide in Him, we abide in His Love:

I cannot claim I love Him if I don’t obey Him. I cannot claim I obey Him if my life produces no fruit (which means I am not abiding). I cannot claim to be producing fruit if it is not the fruit of Love. No other fruit abides forever. This is how Jesus lived; this is how we are fulfiled:

John 15:11-14 I have spoken these things to you that my joy may be in you, and your joy be full. This is my commandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, that one should lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends if ye practise whatever I command you.

There is one and only one Love: Agape, sacrificial Love. It is in that Love that we are called to abide. And if we do, everything else follows. I think this is the beauty of the if and only if… of the life Jesus is calling us to. It is simple.

It is not a religion where you have to learn a certain number of rules, and keep a certain number of rituals, and make sure you do them all right and don’t forget a holy day here and there. There is nothing to remember, no rules to memorize… All He requires of us is that we live like Him. And it is simple because whichever aspect of His Life you choose to imitate, to start with, it will automatically lead you to the other aspects that are by definition also part of that Life:

Choose to Love Him and you will be drawn to His Word. Choose His Word and you will be taught to Obey Him. Obey Him and you will produce the fruit of Love. Produce the fruit of Love and you cannot help but Love all His other children.

If you are the Father’s child, you know it.

John 15:15 I call you no longer bondmen, for the bondman does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things which I have heard of my Father I have made known to you.

The branch lives from the Life of the vine. And it was that vine Who said: John 4:34 …My food is that I should do the will of him that has sent me, and that I should finish his work. We have that kind of Life available to us now… And if His Word abides in us, then that Word is part of that Life and we know that we know how we are called to live.

If I am the Father’s child, I know what He requires of me.

This is our purpose. This is what we were each one individually made for… and it was so planned before the beginning of time:

John 15:16 Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and have set you that ye should go and [that] ye should bear fruit, and [that] your fruit should abide, that whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name he may give you.

We need this certainty that comes with abiding in the vine because, as Jesus told us in the Sermon on the  Mount, this world is ultimately our enemy… and we need each other.

John 15:17 These things I command you, that ye love one another.

John 15:18-19 If the world hate you, know that it has hated me before you. If ye were of the world, the world would love its own; but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, on account of this the world hates you.

I am nothing outside of the vine… I have nothing outside of the vine. Oh, how hard it is to say that! But it is the truth. All the good that matters, all the good that we have in this life, comes from the vine. Everything else of this world is fleeting, is a lie, is a trap. And you see, as soon as I acknowledge that, and say so aloud, the world will hate me, because the world wants above all to be the god of my life.

John 15:20-23 Remember the word which I said unto you, The bondman is not greater than his master. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my word, they will keep also yours. But they will do all these things to you on account of my name, because they have not known him that sent me. If I had not come and spoken to them, they had not had sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin. He that hates me hates also my Father.

John 15:24-25 If I had not done among them the works which no other one has done, they had not had sin; but now they have both seen and hated both me and my Father. But that the word written in their law might be fulfilled, They hated me without a cause.

This is also a kind of if and only if. The world, everyone in the world, knows that there is a God and they know in their hearts who that God is. I am not making this up… and the Church did not make this up. This is what Jesus said. We shall see in Chapter 16, the mechanism through which this revelation was spread to the whole world.

But for now, we have Jesus’ declaration of the ultimate if and only if: You cannot claim to love God if you hate Jesus. Which means, I cannot claim God is on my side if with every word I speak, and deed I do, I bear fruit that has nothing to do with the fruit of the Spirit, that does not come forth out of the sacrificial Love of God.

John 15:26-27 But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who goes forth from with the Father, *he* shall bear witness concerning me; and ye too bear witness, because ye are with me from [the] beginning.

And there it is, the final guarantee of that certainty: The Holy Spirit.

And so we end Chapter 15 with a “teaser”… the circle of our if and only if will keep expanding… to include our mission to witness, to spread the Word.