Well, good morning, church. It is great to see you take your
Bibles and open up to the Gospel of John chapter 15.
John chapter 15, that's page 958.
If you're using a Bible in the seat around you, if you don't
have a Bible, please take that one.
And we would love for you to have that as our gift to you.
I want to welcome those of our church family at Forward
Kitchener who are joining us throughout the month of
September for our series as we walk through this journey of
being devoted as a church family together.
And earlier on, when you came in, both in Kitchener and here
in Cambridge, you would have received a Communion Cup.
If you did not receive a Communion cup when you came in,
would you just raise your hand? We're going to make sure that
you do receive 1. And we will be having Communion
together a little bit later in the service.
Communion is a sacred time for us as Christians to come and
remember what Jesus has done for us on the cross.
And just as those community cups are being handed out, I have a
privilege of announcing a marriage that's coming up here
in our church family. So my pleasure to announce the
marriage between Bradley James Francis Bates of Cambridge, ON
and Liza, Virginia Nil of Guelph, ON.
The wedding is to take place, Lord willing, on Saturday,
September 27th in the Township of Puss Lynch in the county of
Wellington. And we want to extend God's
great blessings to Brad and on their wedding day and for many
years of marriage ahead. Would you join me?
All right. Well, last week we launched into
this series called Devoted, and we heard this one really simple,
important, critical, foundational truth for our
lives. And it's simply this.
Jesus has won the victory over sin, that all of us are sinners
by nature and by choice, that we have all failed.
God created this barrier between US and God.
But Jesus came, paid the price, so that you and I could be
reconciled and made right with God.
That there's nothing you or I could ever do or ever need to do
to be made right with God. It's the best news in the whole
world. It's the news that gives life
and joy. It is God's gracious good gift
to us. Amen.
Well, as we start into the second week of the series, I
want to ask you this question. How would you define success in
life? How would you define success?
If you're like most people, success probably looks something
like this. Do.
Are my family relationships in a good place?
Are my friendships in a good place?
Do I have a career that I like and enjoy?
Am I advancing in the career that I want to advance in?
How's my schoolwork going? Am I passing in my my classes
and all that I'm trying to get involved in?
Do I have good physical health or my finances in good order?
Do I have a healthy bank account?
Some of us, you might define success just as am I just
participating? Like am I just existing and
getting through the day and participating in life?
And I, I, I just want to say, I'm not sure how you define
success, but participation awards are not success.
OK, I'm not sure what they are, but they're not success.
They're something for some of us, success might just be, hey,
did I make it through the night and sleep the whole night
without having to get up and go to the bathroom?
That's success in life. And it is fair for every single
person to have their own definition of what success is.
You can have that, your own dreams, your own ideas of what
success looks like in your life. But in John chapter 15, Jesus is
going to give to us his definition of success, that
Jesus has one goal, one definition of success for every
single one of his believers. It is one overarching thing that
all of us have in common that has been given to us by our
Creator and our Redeemer. This is what our Savior wants
for us. So turn to John 15 beginning at
verse one. I am the true vine, Jesus says,
and my Father is the gardener. Every branch in me that does not
produce fruit he removes, and he prunes every branch that
produces fruit so that it will produce more fruit.
You are already clean because of the word that I've spoken to
you. Remain in me, and I in you.
Just as a branch is unable to produce fruit by itself unless
it remains on the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me.
I am the vine, You are the branches, the one who remains in
me, and I and him produces much fruit because you can do nothing
without me. If anyone does not remain in me,
he's thrown aside like a branch, and he Withers.
They gather them, throw them into the fire, and they're
burned. If you remain in me and my words
remain in you, ask whatever you want, and it will be done for
you. My Father is glorified by this,
that you produce much fruit and prove to be my disciples.
As the Father has loved me, I have also loved you.
Remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you
will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commands
and remain in his love. Here's what Jesus teaches us in
these verses, that the goal of the Christian life is increasing
fruitfulness. He uses this metaphor of a vine
and branches in this passage. And sometimes when people are
studying John chapter 15, they're putting a lot of energy
and trying to identify what does he mean by vine?
What does he mean by branches? And we miss a theme that keeps
repeating throughout these verses, and it's the theme of
increasing fruitfulness. In verse 2, he says every branch
that produces fruit is to produce more fruit.
In verse 5, he says every branch should produce much fruit.
In verse 8 he says it again produce much fruit.
Some translations will even say produce much more fruit.
And there's this progression, as Jesus is teaching in John 15,
that as we go through the journey of our lives as
Christians, your life, my life, should be increasingly bearing
more and more fruit. And this idea of fruitfulness is
not a brand new idea in Scripture.
In fact, if you go back to the book of Genesis chapter 1 and
verse 28, God gives to the very first humans before sin ever
comes into the world and messes things up.
God and his created design for humans says this is part of the
mission, the purpose that is given to every one of us.
And it's this to be fruitful and multiply.
Now most of the time when we hear that word be fruitful and
multiply, we think go and make lots of babies.
And there is a part of that that's true.
But fruitfulness is not limited to making lots of babies.
God made humans from the very beginning of creation to be
people who were fruitful. We've talked about this before.
As humans, we are made in God's image, which means we're not
God, but we are made by God to reflect what God is like, to
give the world, the people around us, all of creation, a
little taste of what God is like.
If you want to best sum up your purpose in life as a human
being, it is in everything you do, wherever you are, that you
are always reflecting God to this world.
That is your ultimate purpose. And so fruitfulness is the
evidence of the fullness of God in your life.
It's when everything about you is reflecting everything about
what Jesus is like. It's when you are filled with
love and joy and peace and gentleness and goodness and
patience and all those words in Galatians 5 of the fruit of the
Spirit, when all of that is just normal for you and increasingly
normal. It's when you are filled with
both grace and truth, just as Jesus was filled with both grace
and truth. Everything that you see about
who Jesus is, fruitfulness is the more that Jesus is in you.
It is coming out into every part of your life.
That is the idea of fruitfulness.
Your life, my life, will produce the same kind of fruit that we
see in the life of Jesus. It's going to impact your
character. It's going to impact your
behavior. It's going to influence how you
spend your time, your energy, the way you think.
It's going to influence the way you work, the way you relate to
people. It's going to influence every
single part of your life that it would be increasingly become
more and more fruitful. The Christian life is ultimately
about you and I as humans becoming who we were always
meant to be, people who are more fruitful.
Now. One of the great tragedies in
the lives of so many Christians is that we end up in one or two
different ditches as we journey through the Christian life.
On one ditch, one side of it, we go, as long as I said a prayer
and ask Jesus into my heart and, and now everything's OK because
now I know I'm going to heaven and it's all good.
I've got the gift of eternal life.
And this is where the story ends.
And so we go on with the rest of our life to to just continue
pursuing our dreams, our goals, our ambitions, our desires to be
able to create our own version of a fruitful, successful life.
But the problem with that thinking is you have not yet
actually started to reveal the fruitfulness that you were
created to reveal. So don't stay stuck in that
ditch of just saying, hey, I said my prayer.
I'm good. No, you're not good.
You've just started and now is the opportunity for you to begin
to learn what it means to be increasingly fruitful with your
life. But there's another ditch on the
other side of the road. And the other ditch is this
people who've been around Christianity for a long time who
go Kirk I've, I've done it all. I've gone to every Bible study
there is to go to. I've read my Bible every single
year from front to back. I know exactly everything there
is to know about the Christian faith.
I've served everywhere there is to serve and I'm good.
I've I've had people come to me and say, why long time
Christians who've come to me and said, why do you and Derek keep
telling everybody that they have to keep growing as disciples of
Jesus? I'll let you know a little
secret because you still have to keep growing as a disciple of
Jesus. You're not nearly as fruitful
yet as Jesus wants you to be. All of us are designed, until
the very last breath we take on this earth, to be increasing in
fruitfulness. That is what Jesus is calling us
to. So I want you to ask yourself
this question. Is my life reflecting more of
the fullness of God today than it was five years ago?
Are you increasing in fruitfulness?
Jesus says this is so important that the fruitfulness that we
exhibit with our lives is actually how we glorify God and
how we prove that we are disciples of Jesus.
That's how important this is. This is not something that you
can just Passover now. As soon as I give a challenge
like this, if we have to have increasing fruitfulness, I also
know that there are kind of a couple different personalities
that respond in different ways. So some of you, you love a good
challenge. You're like, he's challenging me
right now to step up and be more fruitful.
I received that challenge. I am going to prove myself.
You are like people who go to Looney Dog Night at Blue Jays
games, OK. I was at a Jays game a couple
weeks ago and there were 96,000 hot dogs that were eaten in one
night by Blue Jays fans, 13 of them by three members of my
family. I did not have one.
I had a son who had eight. But it was hilarious watching
people in the crowd because there's just this sense of a
competition. People are watching the numbers
show up on the screen and going, oh, man, we think we're going to
break a record tonight with how many hot dogs we're going to
eat. And so people kept ordering more
and more hot dogs because they're wired for that kind of a
challenge. Now, on the other side, some of
you are going, Kirk, you're challenging me to greater
fruitfulness. And I actually don't think I
could ever do that. I don't think I could measure up
to that. I, I don't think I can ever get
to that kind of place because of all the stuff that's going on in
my life and the places where I'm feeling broken and wounded and I
don't feel very close to God right now.
I don't think I could ever get there for greater fruitfulness.
But I I think that this passage, if that's you, this passage is
an amazing gift to you because it shows us that no matter where
you are, there is always hope for your life to have greater
fruitfulness in it. Here's the catch for all of us
that we need to understand. Great greater fruitfulness can
only happen when we abide in Christ.
It's the only way. That idea that I can work hard
enough to bear more fruit with my life, that I can work hard
enough to be good enough, is not what Jesus is teaching here.
In the Old Testament, the nation of Israel is often referred to
as a vine. And what we see is that over and
over again, no matter how hard the nation of Israel tried to
live up to the standards to do the right thing, all that it did
was over and over again reveal how they could never measure up,
that they weren't able to be a true vine that could produce
good fruit. Over and over, the Bible reminds
us that when you put your hope in a country or a leader or
being religious or anything else to help you produce good fruit,
all of it's going to come up short and producing the kind of
fruit that God wants because only one is perfect.
Only one has been everything that God wanted humans to be.
And his name is Jesus. So Jesus comes along into a
culture that understood Israel as being the vine.
And Jesus says I am the true vine.
I'm the only one who has honored God.
I'm the only one who's capable of producing the kind of fruit
that God wants in your life. And then Jesus makes this mic
drop moment. It is one of my favourite verses
in all of Scripture. And I think it's also one of the
most jarring verses in Scripture too.
He says you can do nothing without me.
Just think about that. Think.
Think about the last seven days of your life.
Think about all the things that you tried to do over the last
week. Think about all the ways that
you try to care for your family, to work hard at your job, all
the things that you tried to do to maybe help someone who is in
need. Think about all the things that
filled your calendar over the past week.
And Jesus comes along and says this, You can do nothing without
me. That no matter how many projects
you completed, no matter how many hours you spent being nice
to people, no matter how many items you checked off your To Do
List this week, in the eyes of God, all of it amounts to
nothing if it's done apart from Christ.
Most of us are really, really busy with our lives.
But what if, in the eyes of God, many of us are really busy doing
nothing that actually matters? It's kind of a sobering thought,
isn't it? Jesus uses this picture of a
vine and branches, and what he's trying to say is that it's not
about you trying harder to produce more fruitfulness in
your life, that he is the one who actually produces the
fruitfulness. What Jesus wants to do is to
take the fullness of who he is and have that flow into you that
he would flow into your life. The vine exists to give the
branches every single thing that you and I would need to be
people who are increasingly fruitful with our lives, that we
would be people who are creating the fruit that we were always
meant to produce. Pastor Charles Price, who is
formerly from the People's Church in Toronto, he said it
this way. He said there is only one who
can live the Christian life and it's Jesus.
But but what does abiding mean? And I want you to think about
this. Every person already knows how
to abide. The question is more who or what
are you abiding in? See, what you pay attention to
is what's going to shape who you are and who you're becoming.
Everything you put your attention on is shaping you into
someone. So abiding requires making space
for your attention to be on Jesus.
We, we live in a really unique moment in human history.
There is this endless amount of information that you and I have
access to. Honestly, there are not enough
hours of the day or days in the week or, or days in a year or a
lifetime for you to access every ounce of information that is out
there. We it's not that we have limited
information, it's that we have limited attention to put on the
information that's available to us.
Right. And some of you know exactly
what I'm talking about because you already know that you can't
have a conversation for more than 30 seconds and put your
full attention on the conversation, right?
Our attention spans are limited. Every single day you and I are
bombarded with people trying to get our attention.
And there are some things that you will make a conscious choice
to put your focus on. You're, you're going to make a
conscious decision to put your focus on your work, on your To
Do List, on your family, on your friends, on messages that are
coming to you when your kids are crying, whatever it may be.
You make conscious decisions to put your attention somewhere.
And then sometimes there are things that happened that will
will interrupt where you're putting your attention.
And now you have to put your attention in two or three other
things because somebody else wants or needs your attention in
some way, shape or form. The currency of having your
attention is what most businesses are actually in
business to do right now. They are trying to capture your
attention. They put so much energy into
capturing your attention and my attention and then trying to
keep it. It's the psychology behind the
news that you watch. It's the psychology behind the
video games that you play and the social media that you use.
Once Upon a time, way, way back in the old days in the early
2000s, you used to be able to scroll a website.
And eventually you would reach the end of a page on a website.
And then you would have to make a decision, Do I want to keep
looking at anything on this website?
Well, that became a bit of a challenge for businesses.
And they started to go, hey, we've got this problem.
People are tuning out. At a certain point, we're giving
them an exit to their attention. And so along came a guy named
Aza Raskin, who works in Silicon Valley.
And Aza says, I've got a solution for that.
So Aza is the guy who got rid of the end of the web page.
He's the one who made it possible for everything to be
endless scrolling. So today, when you scroll
through any of your social media feeds, the reason why you can
keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and
scrolling and scrolling, you can
now blame ASA. It's his fault, OK, he's the one
who set that up. But after he created this, as I
had a moment of reckoning, he calculated the total number of
hours his invention created in people's usage, and this is what
he figured out. The combined total of 200,000
more human lifetimes is now spent scrolling through a screen
every day. May not be social media or your
phone, but I want you to think about all the things that have
your attention on a daily basis. Now, let me ask you, what's the
fruit that's coming out of where you're putting your attention?
What's the fruit coming out in your life?
What's what's it all doing to your soul?
What? What's it doing to your
relationships? What what's it doing to your
character? When I look around here, here's
what I see. I see a fractured world in
culture where we can't even agree to disagree anymore.
I I see marriages that are barely hanging on.
I see couples who are roommates instead of truly being one.
I see families where there's an undercurrent of tension that
nobody really wants to talk about.
I see abuse and control. I see loneliness and anxiety and
fear and hopelessness and exhaustion.
I see people who are angry and irritable.
I see people who are bored and have no real direction or
purpose in life. I see people, some people who
are just working so hard their body is wearing wearing down and
their relationships are falling apart and maybe I'm missing
something. But none of that feels like
fruit that comes from Jesus. If you're going to abide in
Christ, you have to make an intentional decision to turn
your attention towards Him. What that means for all of us is
you're already maxed out on your time.
I know that. I hear it from everybody.
And so it's going to mean you have to give up some other
things in order to put your attention on Jesus.
This is not something you can add on to your life.
And I don't know what that looks like for you, but here's a
couple things I've had to do over the course of my Christian
journey. I've had to.
I've always enjoyed noise. I love noise for whatever
reason. But I've discovered it's really
hard for me to hear God and have good conversation with God when
there's lots of noise going on. So I've had to find ways to get
rid of noise and be in silence. And you know what?
It sucks at first when you're trying to figure out how to do
that. It's hard, but man is it good
for your soul. I've had to cut out some
activities I love to do. Like, I don't watch as many Blue
Jays games as I used to. I can't watch all day football
on Sunday. Why?
Because it all takes time and I need to have space to spend time
with my Saviour. Life is going to be this
constant tug and pull for your attention.
And abiding in Jesus is going to require you taking the time to
really consider what kind of attention are you paying to
Jesus. And He has you put your
attention on him. Here's what He's going to show
you. That abiding is a way of life
where you receive God's love for you and express your love for
Him. This is not just about, hey, I
had this moment in my week where I checked the box and said I
abided in Jesus because I spent some time with him, That it's
actually meant to be a way of life for us, a love relationship
from him to us and us back to him.
Jesus makes this remarkable statement in verse 9.
He says, as the Father has loved me, I have also loved you.
Remain in my love. And I don't know how much you've
ever thought about how God loved Jesus, but here's a couple
things the Bible says about how God loved Jesus.
The Bible says that God is well pleased with Jesus, that that
God delights in him and enjoys him and cherishes him.
The Bible says that God's love is not found in a moment.
It was a love that existed and continued on before time even
began. That's how God loved Jesus, and
Jesus says as the Father loved him, he's also loved you.
There are some of us who are so distracted and so busy with our
lives, you have lost sight of just how much you are really
loved by the King of all kings. And I want to challenge you.
You need to create some space to see the love of God for you.
Even in the hard times of life, God's love is showing up.
Sometimes it shows up by comforting us in the hard times
of life. Sometimes His love is showing up
because He's using the hard times of life to prune some
things away from us so that we can be even more fruitful in the
future. But His love is still there, and
He's still at work. But there's another side to this
because sometimes we get so focused on, I just want to sit
and enjoy the love of God for me.
But we've missed the other side of what Jesus says here, that we
remain in His love by keeping His commands.
That abiding means obedience. It's not simply this warm and
fuzzy feeling of I'm just going to receive God's love in my
life. Abiding requires action on your
part. It requires surrender of your
whole life in obedience to him. When Jesus was asked, well what
is the most important command for us all to know?
Like if abiding is about obedience, what is the most
important thing for you to know? What should we obey above all
else? And Jesus answer was love the
Lord your God with all of your heart, all of your soul, all
your mind, and all your strength, all of who you are is
to be focused on loving God. When you love God with all of
who you are, you're abiding in Christ.
You're living in obedience to Jesus.
But what does that look like? How do we grow and show our love
for God? At this point, I'm going to say
goodbye to our forward Kitchener family and I'm going to ask
Pastor Steve to come and share some things with you.
For those of you who are here in Cambridge, if you look in a seat
front around you, you will see a brochure we handed out last
week. And I want to ask you to pull
that out and look at the front panel of that brochure.
There are a lot of things that you can get involved in in the
Christian life. There are a lot of activities
you can do. There are a lot of ways that you
can connect, and there's so many things that are great.
They're good things to connect with.
We shared a whole bunch of things with you earlier this
morning. Those are great steps to take.
But I want to share with you, and we're going to do this over
the next couple of weeks as well, begin to share with you
the absolute essential spiritual practices that you need to put
in place if you are going to continue to grow as a disciple
of Jesus, if you are going to continue to abide in Christ, if
you're going to learn what it looks like today to love God.
These are three essential things to put in place, not optional.
They need to be part of the normal rhythm of your life.
OK. And the reason we want you to
focus on these things is because it's been proven time and time
again that over the long haul of your life, when you do these
things, you grow, in this case, in your love for God.
For some of you, this is going to be the first time you've ever
considered some of these things. For others, you've been doing
them for a while. And right now, I want you to
consider not just checking off something off of a list, but how
does God want me to go deeper into living this out in my life?
The first thing is this spend time with God.
I, I don't know about you, but I, I find it really hard to
build a love relationship with someone if I don't talk to them
or don't let them talk to me. Pretty difficult to build a
loving relationship with someone, right?
And so if abiding in Christ is meant to be a love relationship
between God and me, I need to spend time with God.
I need to spend time praying, which is my time of talking to
God. I need to spend time reading the
Bible because reading the Bible is the best way for God to speak
to you. There was a study that was
recently released that that said this.
When people read their Bible one or two times a week, it has
virtually 0 impact on their life.
Virtually none. But there's a tipping point when
people When someone reads their Bible four times a week, a whole
bunch of stuff, for whatever reason, starts to change.
People who read their Bible at least four times a week would
see loneliness, anger, and bitterness drop close to 40% in
their life. People who read their Bible at
least four times a week are almost 60% less likely to view
pornography or consume alcohol. People who read their Bible at
least four times a week were 220% more likely to go and
disciple somebody else. See, there is a power when you
get into the Bible because when you get into the Bible, the
Bible starts reading you and changing you.
It is God's word coming into your life.
And some of you go, I don't even remember what I read the last
time I read the Bible. And I want to say it's OK, You
don't have to remember every single thing you read.
It's about getting God's Word into your head and into your
heart. And he begins to change you
through that. So this fall creates some space
in your life to spend more time with God.
And we want to help you do that. So if you don't have a way of
regularly reading your Bible, starting tomorrow, we are going
to send out five days a week of a scripture reading for you.
It'll be sent directly to your e-mail and also as a
notification in the Church Center app every single day.
What you need to do is just take out your phone right now and
sign up. You take out your phone, you
text the word Bible to our text line.
And then starting tomorrow and throughout, as long as God wants
us to keep doing this, we are going to send out a Bible
passage every day so that as a church, we are making Bible
reading a normal part of our life.
Reading the Scriptures is the single most important thing you
and I can do to help us grow as disciples of Jesus.
It's the biggest spiritual formation exercise in your life.
That's the first spiritual practice that's going to help
you grow and express your love for God.
The second one is this, give generously to God.
Now I know in Canada, if pastors really want to take people off,
talk about money. Matter of fact, I am sure there
is someone who's in the room right now who's like, I knew
this was going to come eventually.
I knew he was going to talk about money at some point.
And I I want to say to you that from God's perspective, giving
is not about God needing more money.
Giving is about where your heart is.
But God doesn't need more money. God already owns everything.
Giving is about where your heart is.
Jesus said this where your treasure is there, your heart is
also. And the reality is there's a lot
of us here who love what our money can do for us more than we
love God. And one of the ways we grow in
expressing our love for God is to say, God, I'm going to give
my finances to you instead of keeping it for myself.
Now, I recognize that for some of you, this is a really
difficult thing because of the financial realities that you're
facing in life. I want to ask Micah so Farley to
come on up and join me here on stage.
Micah serves in as a one of the leaders in our kids ministry
here at Forward Cambridge. He and his wife Samantha have
three young children aged 5 and under.
You can imagine the kind of genuine chaos that happens in
their everyday. And Micah's going to join me up
here on stage because Micah recently shared a story with me
that I thought, man, this would be a great thing for us to hear
as a church family. And Micah, thanks for coming up
here and sharing this today. I'm just wondering, could you
maybe walk people through the story of what God did in your
life around the whole area of money and giving?
Yeah. So back when I was in college, I
had convinced myself because as most college students, I did not
have a lot of money. And so I convinced myself that
instead of giving a tithe or giving anything to the church, I
would give God a tithe of my time or my effort.
And I remember a little bit of time after that I bought a new
car, a car, because my other car was older than me and so it was
breaking down constantly. So it was time to upgrade.
And so I got a new car and I was really excited about it.
And it was going to be this thing that would be a big relief
to have a reliable vehicle. And after a couple months, it
stopped being a reliable vehicle where I was constantly paying
for repairs and I used to repair my car myself.
So it was a lot of time, a lot of effort constantly.
Every week it was a new problem, a new thing broke.
And I was getting frustrated. I was getting really angry.
And I remember I prayed to God and I turned my frustration at
God and I said, why would it break down?
The whole point of this was that I was supposed to be saving
money. I was supposed to be putting
myself in a better position with this.
And the Holy Spirit responded immediately and said add it up.
And I paused because that's not the response I was expecting.
And so I pulled bank statements and I added it all up, and the
number to the cent was 10% of my wage.
And I remember the Holy Spirit immediately gave me the
revelation that if I give my 10%, God will bless the 90% that
I have that remains. But if I withhold that 10%, then
I'm on my own to a certain extent.
And so God clearly showed me that he was willing to bless me
in this extremely practical way, but I had kind of stopped him
from being able to do that. And so, yeah, that.
Was that's gotta be like a moment, aha moment when you see
10% show up on that, adding it up.
I froze for a while. Yeah, I stared at a number for a
long time. Yeah, I'm sure.
How has you know you start to give as a result of what God
teaches you in that moment? How has making giving a part of
your life help to grow your love for God?
So the rest of that story is that that very day I was like,
Nope, I need to. I went to the bank, got 10% of
my week's wage, brought it into the church, didn't feel great,
but I dropped it off. And from then on, I never had
another problem with the car. So it was a very clear
indication from God being like, hey, this is how it works.
And so it really deepened my love for God because I realized
that it wasn't just on a spiritual sense that God was
caring for me. It wasn't just my heart or my
mind and a lot of the things that we talked about, but it was
a very practical, very real thing that I needed where I
didn't have a lot of money and he was stretching my money and
allowing things that. Should be breaking down a lot
more often. Should be an issue a lot more
often. He was extending all of that for
me. And it was a great realization
of just how much He loves me and just how much He takes care of
all around me. And so that now when there are
money issues that things are tight, I can give to God and I
can say, God, I'm giving this to you and I need you to bless the
rest. And he's been faithful.
So the worry goes, the anxiety goes, all of that goes because I
can trust God with everything. That's amazing, Micah, thank you
for sharing that. Appreciate me.
I just want to challenge you and encourage you like where if
someone were to come, if God were to come and examine your
bank accounts and your money, what would it say?
What would it reveal about where your heart is?
Is your heart after a love for God or something else?
Third way, third practice for us to grow in our love for God is
to regularly worship together with God's people.
And I don't know how else to say this other than to say it.
If you want to love God, you need to keep growing and loving
what Jesus loves. And there are is very clear by
the fact that the church is called the bride of Christ how
deeply Jesus loves his bride. You know, even the choice of the
word church is not an accident. When Jesus said I'll build my
church, it wasn't an accident because in that culture, in that
time, the word church meant the gathering of a group of people
as an assembly to make decisions for a community.
So when Jesus uses that word that I'm going to build my
church, he's saying I am building a group of people who
are going to gather for the purposes of God.
That's the whole point. If you want to grow in loving
God, if you want to express your love for God, gathering with the
church cannot be something that's optional in your life.
It's not. Do I have nothing else to do
today? And so, OK, I guess I'll go to
church this Sunday. Hebrews chapter 10 tells us it's
a command. Do not neglect assembling
together. And so some of us need to take a
step to gather with the church more often in the coming year.
But then when we do gather, it's not about just checking a box
and going, yeah, Kirk, I come to church every Sunday.
It's fine. I've checked the box.
That's not what it's about. It's also about how do you
engage when you are gathered together as the church.
Jesus said true worshippers will worship him in spirit and in
truth, that we have to be engaged in expressing our love
for God as we gather together to worship.
The early church, the first Christians, they understood that
to me, gathering was to be a place of worship, a place of
learning the Bible together, a place of prayer and fellowship
with each other. If your idea of coming to church
is I've come, I've checked the box because I came and sat in a
seat, but I didn't talk to anybody while I was here, you've
missed part of the point of being gathered together as the
church. Stay in fellowship and encourage
each other. What step does God want you to
take to keep growing and gathering as a church?
This is essential in expressing our love for God.
It's not only the reality of they studied the Bible together.
There's one more thing that the Bible said that they did
together as the early church and that was take communion.
And we're going to do that right now and you can pull out your
Communion Cup. In First Corinthians Chapter 11
and verse 26, it says for as often as you eat this bread and
drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.
If you look a few verses earlier in First Corinthians 11, it's
actually calling out the lack of unity in the body of Christ.
It's this sense of you're all living for yourself, which
sounds very familiar to the culture we live in today, hyper
individualized culture where we do what I want, when I want, how
I want. It's about me.
And what Paul was saying is that when we come together as a
church to celebrate communion, it's to be a community activity
together because we need to remind each other that none of
this is ultimately about me or you.
It's all about the Vine King Jesus.
It's all about us abiding in him that matters.
We're here because of his death. We're here because of his
resurrection. We're here because of his grace.
And that's what communion does is it reminds us again, together
as a community, we're proclaiming the Lord's death to
each other and saying it's not about me, it's about him.
So I invite you to pull out the wafer.
This represents the body of Jesus that was on the cross.
That Jesus, the Son of God, is a human, came and paid the price
that all humanity was supposed to pay, but he did it in our
place so we could be saved. Take this in remembrance of
Jesus. And if you open up the cup, this
represents the blood of Jesus that was shed on the cross, a
blood that promises forgiveness of sin once and for all.
Time, past, present, future. Your sin is fully forgiven if
your faith is in Jesus alone. Amazing.
We take this in remembrance of what Jesus has done for us.
Father, thank you for sending your Son Jesus.
I pray God that you would help us in a world that is filled
with so much noise and so many distractions and so many things
trying to get our attention. Help us to be a people who abide
in Christ. God, would you grow our love for
you this year And as we encounter your love for us, I
pray that you would make this the most fruitful year that we
have had as a church family. In Jesus name I pray, Amen.
Let's stand and worship the Lord together.