Abide In My Love
Fruitfulness, Part 12:
Abide In My Love
July 7, 2024
Pastor Mike
John 15:9-11, 16
Back on April 21, shortly after Easter, I began a twelve-part preaching series on fruitfulness. Fruitfulness is a theme that runs through the Bible from cover to cover. We’ve encountered it in the Genesis creation story, in the erotic poetry of the Song of Songs, in the prophetic words of Jeremiah, in the parables of Jesus, and beyond. The ancient Hebrews, Palestinians, and Greeks who recorded and passed on the stories that would one day become our scriptures were people who lived close to the ground. As they searched for the words to describe their life with God across the centuries, words for what they had learned about God’s desire for humankind, they contemplated their grape vines, their wheat fields, their olive, date, and pomegranate trees, and they thought, God wants precisely this: that we remain deeply rooted in the Spirit, so that we might bring forth gifts for the world. God wants us to bear good fruit – fruit that feeds body, heart, and mind.
As I bring this series to its conclusion today, I hope that the fruit-bearing metaphor has rooted itself in your own imagination, and that you have become curious about and attentive to your own sense of call.
Here at the end, I want to revisit some words from the Apostle Paul. In the first chapter of his letter to the Colossians, Paul writes this: “We are asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of [God’s] will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, so that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and growing in the knowledge of God” (Col. 1:9-10).
This is Paul’s prayer for Christians in the Church. He hopes that we are putting our faith in action, that we are not merely hearing the Word but also doing it. But he also acknowledges a sequence here, a priority. Before the fruit can be offered, it must ripen. “May you be filled with all wisdom and spiritual understanding, so that you may bear fruit in every good work.” We must be filled, we must be rooted, we must be well ourselves if we are to sustain the work of helping others to be well. “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). If we are going to multiply and share divine love in this world, we must experience divine love for ourselves. The fruit of the Spirit is the fruit of the Spirit. We are vessels, channels, branches, and we must be connected to our source.
In his great teaching on the vine, Jesus told the disciples, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love” (John 15:9). If Jesus loves us the way that the Father has loved him, we ought to wonder, ‘How has the Father loved Jesus?’ Answering that question will tell us a lot about the love we have been created to participate in, the love that will empower us to “walk worthy of the Lord.” How has the Father loved Jesus? Asking that question brings us to the very heart of the fruit-bearing life.
First, God prepared the way for Jesus. God appeared to a teenage peasant named Mary, announcing that she would conceive a child by the Holy Spirit who would save his people from their sins. God spoke to Joseph in a dream and commanded him to remain with Mary despite the scandal of her pregnancy and to guard her from the hateful violence of Herod. God led this family to Bethlehem for the child’s birth and guided the Eastern Magi there by a star. These Gentiles came to worship him, and in worshipping him, they confirmed his identity as the Savior of all people.
God set his Son in a religious community where Jesus would grow up connected to the sacred within and around him. God set him in a humble and loving Galilean home in which Jesus would grow up learning the ordinary trades and stories of his people. When the time was right, God sent John the Baptist into the wilderness to preach a baptism for the repentance of sins, a message that stirred the heart of Jesus and compelled him to step out of the obscurity of his origins into a life of dramatic public ministry.
Through all this scandal, danger, obscurity, and silence, God loved Jesus by preparing the way for him, and Jesus loves us by preparing our way. Jesus makes a way for us. We can trust him to guide our steps as we put one foot in front of the other. If we look backward and consider the roads by which we’ve come to this moment, we will say, ‘He helped me to get here.’ And as we look ahead, we can say, ‘I know that he will open the doors that need to be opened and frustrate the paths that need to be frustrated.’ Jesus works in us and for us long before we are aware of it. If you are uncertain of what the future holds for you, trust that grace goes before you into the unknown. You will meet the love of God there in the people and places that have been prepared for you.
How else has the Father loved Jesus? Well, God appeared to Jesus in a few moments of sublime spiritual clarity. At his baptism in the Jordan River, Jesus saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove. He was embraced by the light of God, and he heard the voice of his Father speaking to him: “You are my beloved Son, with you I am well pleased.” The Spirit came down and anointed him with power for ministry. The voice and the anointing go together. Love is power. Affirmation is power. Later on, atop the mount of Transfiguration, Jesus was illuminated from within. In this presence of Peter, James, and John, his clothes became dazzling white and his skin glowed. And again there was the voice of the Father, speaking now to the world: “This is my beloved Son, listen to him.” At both baptism and Transfiguration, the Father explicitly affirmed the goodness of Jesus: “You are beautiful. You are good. You have a voice that is worth listening to you.” The Father loved Jesus by separating the veil between eternity and time and naming Jesus’ essence, calling forth the very best that was within him.
This is how Jesus loves us. Jesus cuts through the murky, turbulent realities of the world to speak to our essence, to affirm that we are good and that we have our origin and our end in love. He steadies us in our God-given identity. Jesus breaks through to us – not often, perhaps, but enough – in moments of pure spiritual insight. He affirms our belovedness and anoints us for ministry in his name.
A third way that the Father loved Jesus was by empowering his ministry. God answered Jesus’ prayers and supplied power for miracles of healing, forgiveness, and multiplication of food. God surrounded Jesus with friends and coworkers, men and women who saw him, provided for him, learned from him. God was there in the day-to-day grind of ministering to the needs of the crowd, and God was there in the secret place when Jesus needed to slip away and pray. Jesus sustains us, too. He gathers us into a community of servants, helps us to endure the demands of our baptismal ministry, and provides our daily bread.
The Father also met and held Jesus in those moments when Jesus suffered most. There were many times when Jesus was exhausted and hungry. For forty days in the wilderness he experienced an onslaught of temptation. At the end of his ministry, he was insulted, betrayed, tortured, abandoned, and killed. In all of it, God was there. Even in the garden of Gethsemane, as Jesus prayed that the cup of suffering might pass from him, the Father received that prayer, and allowed Jesus to speak his agony without shame or reproach. The depth, trust, and honesty of their love kept all fear at baby. God went into the darkness with Jesus, shared the pain of his Son.
Here, too, is Jesus’ love for us. When we are tempted, when our strength fails, when our bodies are sick or hungry or worn out, when we feel abandoned, when our love proves to be costly and being faithful means sharing in the sufferings of others, when voices of anger and fear and despair begin whispering to us, when the ground collapses under us and reliable ways of thinking shatter, when we grope about in the dark for God – Jesus is there, holding us close. He cries with us, and he also works creatively over and within our chaos. The darkness is not dark to him (Ps. 139:12).
Finally, God the Father loved Jesus by vindicating him. God raised Jesus from the dead. God broke the power of sin and shame. God did not let suffering to have the last word over Jesus’ story but gave Jesus a future beyond the worst things that could happen and did happen. And Jesus will vindicate us, too. Whether the worst for you is a relapse or a frustrated dream, whether it is facing a long-buried trauma or nearing the end of life in old age, Jesus promises that we “will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” (Ps. 27:13). There will be a way where we think there is no way. He will make us new.
What can we say about the Father’s love for Jesus? It was a love that prepared the way; a love that affirmed; a love that provided; a love that suffered; a love that made new.
What can we say about Jesus’ love for us? It will be a love that lights our path, that calls forth our true self, that meets us in our daily work, that holds us when it all shatters, that lifts us up again. If we abide in him. If we make prayer our priority.
But we cannot stop with ourselves. We are branches, remember. This love is ours when we are rooted in the Vine. But our purpose is to bear fruit for others. From the Father to Jesus, from Jesus to us, from us to the world. I think, at last, that we’re ready to define the fruits that God has called us to bring forth.
Friends, go prepare the way for someone. Help someone, even when they are not aware of it, to find their footing in this world. Care for the children in your community, be the warm presence they carry with them unconsciously through years of turbulent change. Be a voice for the voiceless. Pay the first month’s rent for that family in secret. Tell the stories. Sing the songs. Keep the roof on the Church. Love others by preparing their way.
Bear God’s fruit by intervening in other’s lives at moments of critical decision, by affirming their goodness and validating their call. Tell someone, “God is well pleased with you.”
Bear God’s fruit by helping others get through their day-to-day labor with a measure of dignity and space for rest and even with joy. Help lighten the load when you can. Learn from each other, support each other, provide for each other.
Bear God’s fruit by being there for others in the worst of times. Compassion costs, but don’t run from the cost. Go and offer the gift of your presence; send the text that says, “I’m thinking about you, is there anything I can do.” Drop off the meal, watch the kids, affirm that tears are healthy and holy.
Bear God’s fruit by helping people to celebrate when light finally shines in their darkness, when long-closed doors begin to swing open, when wounds are brought to the surface and begin to heal. Just as you go down into the depths with people, go up onto the mountaintops. Push pause and say, “Don’t you dare move on from this yet. This is worth celebrating. We’re having a party.”
This is fruitfulness. It touches every nook and cranny of life and demands our complete attention. It manifests in the planned and the spontaneous, the critical moments and the small, mundane moments. It takes all of us. It is preparing, affirming, providing, suffering, and celebrating love. And it can only happen as we… abide. May it be so. Amen.