Re:Connecting... to Jesus

Re:Connecting to Jesus

Let's turn together to John 15 and read vv. 1-9.

I'm really excited about the new series that we're kicking off this morning. It's called Re:Connecting. Not reconnecting as in connecting again, but re:connecting as in "regarding connecting" or "about connecting". God is all about connecting because He is a relational God. He connected with Adam and Eve relationally in the garden, walking with them in the cool of the day. The Fall broke that intimate connection but God maintained the connection through temporary sin offerings until Jesus could come and bridge the gap through his death and resurrection. The thing that broke the connection between God and man - sin - was perfectly dealt with by Jesus dying for our sins so that the intimate relationship between man and God could be restored through faith in Christ. So intimate is the connection we have with God through Christ that God the Spirit even makes His home inside of us. God is all about connections.

In the NT, the church is compared to a building, a family, a body, a bride - all these different pictures speak of being relationally connected to God, to Christ, and to each other. In John 15 Jesus uses the metaphor of the vine and the branch to illustrate the Christian's vital connection to Jesus. Like a branch draws its life from the vine, so do we draw our life, our salvation, and our ability to bear fruit from our relationship with Christ, from our connection with him. The concept of connecting runs deep in the Bible.

And it runs deep in our hearts as well. As human beings God has built it into us a deep longing to connect.

• We want to feel like we belong - a strong family helps a child to grow up with a deep sense of roots. Connections that go deep and last a lifetime. A dysfunctional family often produces children who spend their lives even into adulthood looking for connections to make up the lack of connection when they felt growing up.

• Good friendships are also built on connecting in a real way. We choose friends based on our ability to connect with them on a deeper level.

• On top of that we have this desire to connect to a community. Whether it's a clique at school, or a sports team, or a church, or a group of people rallied around a cause, we love to feel like we're connected to a community of people and who care about us and have our back and with whom we share a common cause.

This sense of connecting is very important in the church. They say that when someone visits a church, the thing they care about even more than whether the worship or sermon is good is whether they make relational connections. Making those kinds of connections are incredibly important to our connectedness to the life of a church and when someone doesn't make relational connections, often it's only a matter of time before they move on to another church. This has been true in my life. When I was a young man in my twenties, someone invited me to a small church that was meeting in a home. Maybe 15 people - 20 on a good Sunday - attended. When I left that Sunday I had no intention of returning but the pastor reached out to me in a very personal way, and I ended up returning. Then I began to connect with the people, and it felt like family. We would have lunch often after the service. I remember one cold fall day a number of us driving to a field and playing football or soccer or something and then returning to a roaring fire and some hot cocoa at the pastor's home. I felt connected. A year later, at a time when I was beginning to feel disconnected with that home church for a number of reasons, I started going to a bible study that some college age people from a large church had started and relationships - connections - began to form, and I felt the Lord leading me to the church they attended. So I went from a church of 20 to a church of 600 and yet it didn't feel cold and impersonal at all because I felt connected to my new friends. Connecting is really deeply ingrained in us.

In this series we're gonna be looking at some basic connections that are vital to the church's health and growth. Our goal in this series and for this year is very simply to help more people get more connected to the life and vision of Grace Community Church. That's it: helping more people get more connected with the life and vision of GCC. To that end, I want us to look at this amazing passage in John from a different vantage point then we normally would. Normally I think most of us would probably tend to personalize this - Jesus is speaking to me individually and personally. And that's true and beautiful and I recommend you take some devotional time to meditate on John 15 personally. But that's not how I want to approach it this morning. I want to look at what Jesus is speaking to us together as a community of faith, and how he wants to connect (or reconnect) us to what's most important to us as believers.

So here's what I want to ask you to do this morning. I want to ask you to switch your hearing filter from "personal" to "community". Put your "group ears" on, if you will. We've all got them. Later this afternoon the Green Bay Packers will be playing the Dallas Cowboys and you can bet that as their coaches focus them and motivate them for this huge game, they're talking to them as a team and they're listening to the coach as a team, they're listening with their "group ears" on. The coach is probably saying things like we need to be focused. We need to be disciplined. We need to play with energy. Each of us needs to play our best for the good of the team. No one is thinking, "how can I show off my skills and hot dog it out there so that I look good, even if it hurts the team?" Each one is thinking, "how can I do my part for the good of the team". That's how I want us to hear this message and this series: how can we as a church pull together to see more people get more connected to the life and vision of GCC?

Three basic and totally essential convictions for us as a church to keep in focus as we work together to get more people (including ourselves) get more connected:

1. We need to stay vitally connected to Christ

Abide in me, and I in you…I am the vine; you are the branches. Vs. 4,5

The metaphor is a beautiful one. We are branches and Jesus is the vine from which we draw all our life and resources and all our ability to bear spiritual fruit to God's glory as we stay connected to Christ. As I was meditating over this passage, something jumped out at me right in the first verse. Jesus says, I am the true vine… The word true there means genuine, real, not counterfeit or fake. This implies that there are many fake vines that people can attach their lives to, but only Jesus is the true vine.

Jesus commands us and warns us: stay connected to him. Abide in him, remain in him. The greatest danger any believer or a church can face is to become disconnected from Christ, either by falling away or by substituting the true vine for being connected to a fake vine. Jesus warns that when a branch gets disconnected, it withers and dies and is no good for anything except firewood. So our greatest conviction needs to be staying connected to Christ.

God calls different churches to different visions. God has called Victory Highway Church to a different vision than Hope Church which has a different vision than Big Flats Wesleyan which has a different vision than GCC. How different churches implement God's vision can and should differ - but the vine we're connected to must not differ. There is only one true vine and that's Jesus. Jesus must always be central to our preaching and our fellowship and the ministries in a church.

Simply put, everything we do as a church should be to help connect people to Jesus. Not just concepts about Jesus, but to the Person of Jesus. From our connection with Jesus, we draw our salvation - there is no other name given under heaven by which man can be saved. From our connection with Jesus we draw our spiritual life - no other vine can supply God's love, life, grace, and transformative work to us other than Jesus. From our connection with Jesus we draw our ability to serve God effectively and for our lives to have an eternal impact. Jesus says in verse 5, "apart from me you can do nothing." Nothing we do apart from Jesus will matter for eternity because it is only through our connection with Christ that we can do anything of eternal and lasting consequence.

Everything we do should be centered on Jesus, and that means centered on his word, the Bible. In verse 7 Jesus equates his abiding in us with his words abiding in us. Col. 3:16 says, "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly…" At the center of our vision must be the goal of connecting people in a living way to Christ by connecting them to a living faith in God's word. Our number one priority as a church and as individual believers must be to stay vitally connected to Christ.

2. We need to make growing in relational connectedness to one another one of our highest priorities

Jesus says in verse 10 that if we are to abide in his love, we must obey his commandments, and then in verse 12 he says, this is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Listen, I'm no horticulturalist, but I do understand that a strawberry stem presses strawberry goodness through the strawberry branch (known as the petiole) so that strawberries, not apples, not coconuts, not oak leaves, are produced. The branch just channels what the stem is supplying. What Jesus is saying here is that if we are drawing his love through us, it will result in love for one another. Jesus loves you, so if his love is flowing through me, his love for you will flow through me. And vice versa.

Walt is going to be doing a message on connecting to one another in a few weeks so I'm not gonna get too deep into this, but just this: everything we do as a church should be motivated by a love for people and a desire to connect with them and connect them to Jesus. Nothing can kill a church faster than when traditions and preferences become more important than reaching people with the love of Christ.

• Instead of asking, "Is this effectively expressing care for people?" and "is there some way we could be doing this better?" churches often take a "this is the way we've always done it" attitude and lose sight of the priority of caring for people.

• I've heard of long time church-goers (not in this church!) asking a visitor to move because they had the audacity to sit in "their" seat. When churches lose sight of their mission and vision, it's easy for them to get petty. When saving a seat becomes more important than saving a soul, or wanting people to feel welcome, that church has seriously lost sight of its priorities.

• We don't want to go there, at GCC we want to prioritize people and every ministry and program the church has should in some way be an expression of love for people.

• And individually Jesus calls us to examine how we can grow in love for one another and connect with one another. One of the burdens on the leadership's heart is that we do better at encouraging and envisioning people to connect to the life and vision of the church, and to make the effort to connect relationally, but ultimately no one can make us do it, we need to choose to do it . Jesus commands us to love one another, but we have to choose to obey his command. But this passage reminds us that it's not optional to our Christian walk. We can't say, "I love Jesus and am vitally connected to him, but I have no interest in being connected to his church." Jesus says that our love for each other gives us an accurate measurement of whether we're connected to him. If his love flows to us, it will flow through us. Out of obedience to Christ we all must prioritize connecting relationally with others.

3. Connectedness to Christ and one another will produce results that glorify God

By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. Vs. 9

Jesus emphasizes the importance of bearing fruit in this passage. Producing fruit is evidence of connectedness to Christ, not producing fruit is evidence of being disconnected to Christ:

• Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit (vs. 5)

• By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples (vs. 8)

• Every branch of mine that does not bear fruit he takes away (vs. 2)

• If anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. (vs. 6)

• I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide…vs. 16

What does Jesus mean when he says "fruit"? When Jesus says "fruit" he's talking about our lives and our church producing visible results that bring glory to God. From character that's visibly becoming more Christ-like to influencing a believer to get more connected to Christ (discipleship) to leading someone to faith in Christ, fruit is visible evidence of our connection to Christ and it brings glory to God.

So let's make it our prayer and our aim this year to bear a lot of fruit for the glory of God. Last Sunday I had the privilege of preaching at Bridgeway Sarasota and I shared the same message I had preached here the week before about making forward progress. That message isn't just for us individually, it's also for us as a church. God has more fruit He wants to bear in and through GCC but it's going to take all of us working together. In a couple weeks Jeff is going to bring a message about God's call to every believer to get connected to ministry.

The fact is, we need each other. That's the way God designed it. God has wired it into our hearts to want to be a part of something that's bigger than us. We live in a very individualized society but inside we miss being part of a team and I believe that for the believer that team is the church! The church needs you to contribute your gifts and energy and love and time and resources and skills. And for the sake of your spiritual health you need to contribute too. Ministry that brings glory to God is a vital evidence of connectedness to Christ and to one another.

Let me remind you of something: we should pray and expect big things from God and that means expecting God to do big things in our church! But there are two ways that God does big things: by doing big things, and by doing small things that accumulate to a big thing. Get connected, even if it seems like a small thing, and believe God to do big things - bear fruit that lasts - even through small things.

One last point that we need to look at about bearing fruit. The Father doesn't just passively hope that we bear fruit, He is a husbandman who tends to us to help us bear fruit, and then bear more fruit. Everyone goes under the knife. If someone isn't bearing any fruit, He cuts them off. But when we're bearing fruit, God prunes us - cuts us back - so that we will bear more and better fruit. If you let a fruit tree just grow and grow without pruning it, the result is less fruit, not more. And the fruit gets harder and less sweet. It's good to arrest expansive growth by pruning. God does this in our lives, and I think there's a timely word for us as a church family too.

Walt, Jeff and I have been, and will continue to, prayerfully walk the walls of GCC and our vision, not so much with an eye to expand it and make it bigger, but rather to define it, to make it sharper. Our mission - like the mission of every church - is massive. But our vision needs to be sharp and specific if it is to be effective. So there might be ways God will prune us back so that together we can be more fruitful for the glory of the Lord. To see more people get more connected to the life and vision of the church.

1. Look at whether there are ministry programs that need to be improved/changed to make them more fruitful. Sometimes churches can emphasize doing things with excellence and I think there is validity to that but I also think there can be some problems with that. What can happen is that churches start emphasizing doing things with excellence more than doing things with love. The product becomes more important than people. I think there is a more biblical metric than excellence and that's effectiveness. How can we be more effective in the Lord's work? How can we be more fruitful? Because our priority is people we want to look at what we're doing and ask how can we do it more effectively, meaning reaching more people or discipling more people or caring for people better?

2. Maybe some ministries will need to look different than they do now. We don't want to become that church that says, "but that isn't the way we've always done it". That's really a way of saying, Lord, don't prune that branch - we've gotten used to it the way it is.

3. Maybe we'll find there are things we're doing or ministry programs that need to be cut.

4. And the pruning process will probably make room for doing new things that we're not currently doing.

All of this is to say, let's be flexible and let's all be involved. Let's prioritize doing what we do well so that it is as effective at caring for people as possible. Pruning is to make us more fruitful in the work of the Lord so we bear more fruit! As we close let me encourage you to do three things:

1. Pray for God's leading, pruning, and blessing for fruitfulness this year

2. Prayerfully consider where you're connected and if there are other ways that God wants to connect you here.

3. If there's a ministry on your heart for the church, let Walt, Jeff or me know. We can't guarantee that we will be able or be led to incorporate it, because we don't want to add things that don't fit a more narrow vision of what God's called us to do, but on the other hand, that thing on your heart might be exactly what the Lord wants to speak to us.

Jesus calls us to stay connected to him, commands us to connect with one another, and confirms our connectedness by bearing fruit through our lives for God's glory. Take a moment of quiet to allow the Spirit to apply this message to our hearts. Let Him speak to you.