Princeton Presbyterian Church

Princeton Presbyterian Church (EPC) Sermon # 1685

May 11, 2025

John 15.1-11    Click here for audio worship.

Dr. Ed Pettus

(This is an extended outline, not a verbatim transcript.)

 

“The True Vine”

 

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. 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. Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. 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. 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. 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. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. 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. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.

 

 

 

• Vines

 

On Easter Sunday we started looking at some of the “I Am” statements from John’s gospel: Jesus says I am the resurrection and life, I am the light of the world, I am the bread of life, and today, I am the true vine. Jesus, like any good Rabbi, used a lot of metaphors to get His point across. Light, bread, vine...it paints for us a picture, rather several pictures, images for our minds to absorb, to grasp something more of the revealed Son of God. But it is not just in the images, it is also in the first two words. “I am” reverberates all the way back to Exodus 3 when God tells Moses to tell Pharaoh that “’I am’ has sent me to you.” “I am” is a mystery in Exodus 3. Scholars debate how the Hebrew should be translated, but Jesus reveals more and more of the meaning of “I am” through the metaphors he lifts up for us. Bread, light, vine…metaphors that continue a long line of metaphors from the Old Testament: shepherd, rock, parent, judge, refuge. Much of what we know about God comes through metaphors. Biblical metaphors are images that open up for us something about God but not everything about God. They build, by the many images, a larger understanding of who God is and what God does, who Jesus is in this particular case of John’s gospel, but also who God the Father is.

“I am the true vine.” I imagine that when the people around Jesus heard that metaphor they probably thought of a grapevine. If they did not, they should have! After all, this is the One who is the bread of life, the bread, the body broken for us. Grapevine would be an appropriate vine for Jesus: grapes that make the wine that becomes the metaphor for His blood shed for the world. “I am the true vine,” Jesus says.

I don’t know much about grapevines. I have picked some grapes from time to time but never paid much attention to the vine itself. All I recall is that the vine goes everywhere, grapes hang all over the place, some grapevines are that way. I remember the grapes clustered together in a restaurant arbor. You could stand up at your table and easily reach up to pick some fruit. What I remember about grapevines is the abundance of grapes.

Jesus is the vine that supplies the branches that they may produce fruit. We are the branches and we are called to produce fruit, fruit to repentance, fruit of the Spirit, fruit of devotion to God’s Word…

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. (Psalm 1.1-3)

There is even a fruit of praise in our worship...
Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name. (Hebrews 13.15)

 

 

 

• Abide in Christ

 

How do we become bearers of fruit? By abiding in Christ, abiding in the true vine. When we think of the word abide, it is a word we seldom use. To abide is to dwell, live, stay, remain. We might think of abiding in a house or home. Jesus speaks of abiding in His love and we abide in His love by keeping His commandments. Eugene Peterson in The Message, which is a paraphrase of the Bible, uses the phrase for abide as “make yourselves at home”. Make yourself at home in My love! Settle in to your favorite chair, get yourself a glass of sweet tea, and listen to some music. Abide in my love.

As I reflect on this notion of abiding I also think of it as being connected. We are connected to Jesus, connected to the vine, attached in such a way that we dwell in His presence. If that is a valid idea, we might ask ourselves, to what are we most connected? To what are we most engaged? What do we spend our time on the most? What do we think about, dream about, yearn for, for these are the things in which we abide. What are we living into? Are we living into biblical fidelity and authority? Are we living into worship and prayer? Ultimately, are we living into Jesus Christ? That is what it means to abide in Him. We make our home with Jesus. We take up residence in the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven which is the person of Jesus Christ. We are connected to the Lord.

You’ve probably seen that commercial from US Cellular about how cell phones are meant to help us connect and yet the irony is that we are less connected. Of course, they want to sell us a phone and their service so they try to convince us that they want us to be more connected by using our phones less. We connect somewhat to people by phone call, less so, more so by text. We connect by social media, even less personal. We connect over vast distances and yet we cannot connect to the person standing next to us. We are looking at the screen and not our neighbor, watching a YouTube video while sitting in front of the TV, or playing a game that draws all our attention away from family and friends even while at a gathering that seeks to make contact with family and friends. Jesus calls us to be connected to Him, the branch abiding in the vine. We cannot do that if we are constantly distracted by other things of the world.

Jesus says, “apart from Me you can do nothing” (John 15.5). We tend to think that apart from our cell phone we can do nothing! Apart from Instagram we can do nothing. Have you left your home and forgot your phone? How did those of us born before cell phones survive those years?! The real truth is we cannot survive apart from Jesus. Our connection is with Jesus, dwelling in Him, in His Word, in His life, in His righteousness, in His faithfulness. Abiding in Jesus is possible only in obedient love.

 

 

• Obedient Love

 

Jesus tells us to come home, or to get connected, by abiding in His love, by staying in His love. And we stay in that love by keeping His commandments, that is, through obedience. We keep commandment by following the command, holding to it, hearing and obeying it, and in order to do this we must learn them. Biblical illiteracy has become a growing problem in the church. Statistics tells us that, in general, we do not know the Word of God very well. My thoughts on that issue are that we have too easily fallen into the practice of reading the Bible only to gain information. We get our “read through the Bible in a year” programs that keep us on a rigorous pace to get it all read, but the problem with such a strategy is we are not formed or transformed by the “in-formation.” We read it too quickly because we are overburdened with the task of reading it all just to be able to say we have read the Bible.

We are so bombarded with information these days that we have come to believe that is where truth abides, in information, more and more information. Not true! I think is is much better to have as many well read and studied portions of Scripture that truly connect us to the true vine, than to skim over all the words of Scripture just to say we have read the whole Bible. Now, I think it is valuable to read the whole Bible, but not at the expense of knowing the Bible so deeply and some passages so tenaciously that they truly effect how we live and obey Christ. Keeping commandment means more than just knowing the information. The demons know them, but the question is are we formed by the commandments? Because, information without formation is useless.

 

A key verse in our passage for today is verse 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. We can see the connection – if you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love. There is a deep connection here, just as Jesus has kept the Father’s commandments and Jesus abides in His love. It is something like a cyclical pattern. To abide in love is to keep commandment, and to keep commandment is to abide in love, and by abiding in love we keep commandment which means we abide in love because we have keep commandment, which means we abide in love. The source of this connection and attachment and abiding is Jesus, the true vine. And we are the connected branches awaiting Jesus’ skills at pruning the branches so that we may bear lots of fruit.

Jesus was once asked, what is the greatest commandment? And he said to love God and love neighbor. On those two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Sometimes we may not know what do to in a given situation. Jesus summed up the whole of the law and prophets in the word love. We keep the commandments by loving, and when we love, we abide in Christ, and when abiding in Christ we keep commandment. This is the circle of discipleship.

 

• The True Vine

 

“I am the true vine,” says Jesus. We can draw from that statement that there must also be false or fake vines. Along with cell phones and social media, we think we need to always be connected to news outlets. We believe that we have to be informed and up to date on the latest of everything. When someone asks if we saw this or that, we might feel behind if we have not heard or seen. It’s called FOMO, fear of missing out. F-O-M-O. But, a problem in our time is that much of the news is fake or false. It drives us to be connected to our phones or to the news or to something outside of what Jesus calls for our connection. As the metaphor goes in John 15, the branches are connected to the true vine so that fruit will come forth. The branches of the vine only need to do one thing, and that is something that is natural, that is to stay connected to the vine – to abide in the vine.

Jesus calls us to abide in Him as the branch abides in the vine. Just like a branch that is cut off from the vine, we cannot bear fruit without abiding in Jesus Christ. The branches on a grapevine do not really “do” anything for they are simply a part of the plant. But we are called to abide in Christ and this is something in which we have a choice. Unlike a branch, we can abide in other places. We can pull ourselves away from the true vine. We do it all that time! We abide in the computer or the phone or our work or any number of worldly pursuits.

This is not to say that we cannot watch TV, or do our work, but it is to say that we often abide in pursuits other than Christ. In this metaphor, abiding in Christ is tied to abiding in His Word and in His love and those two are connected. Two things come to mind here: 1. Abiding in Jesus Christ is about knowing Jesus’ Words. 2. Abiding in Jesus Christ is about knowing Jesus Christ. We can abide in Him by getting to know Him. We abide in Him by getting into His Word. Two disciplines specifically help us in these two statements: prayer and Scripture reading. There are more, but just these two demonstrate that ours is an active life as a branch. We are like a branch on a grapevine in some ways: connected to the vine, producing fruit, but we are unlike those branches as well: we have choices in our connectedness; we can willingly reject the vine. Unlike a branch we are active in our remaining connected to the vine.

The two ways are clearly reflected in the Words of Christ. Fruitful branches are pruned in order that they may bear more fruit. Fruitful branches can only bear fruit if they are connected. Apart from the vine they are worthless. Fruitful branches glorify God in bearing fruit and in being disciples. The second way is one of destruction. Unfruitful branches are removed, gathered up, thrown to the fire, and burned. It is a simple decision marked by fruitfulness on the one hand and bonfire on the other.

All of this hinges on abiding with Jesus. Abiding offers a greater sense of residence together. Jesus promises to be with us and invites us to be with him. Jesus’ promise to abide in us is a promise of constancy. Jesus will stay with us throughout our lives. Jesus will be faithful, even when we might not. It is through the Spirit that we are able to abide in Jesus.

The good news today is that Jesus abides in us and we in Him - the true vine. The good news is that the promise of abiding is sure, a sure and certain hope. Let us imagine our lives through this text, with the knowledge that Jesus abides with us, dwells within us through the Holy Spirit – with the awareness that we are called to abide in Christ, to get to know Jesus, to dwell in His Word, to stick with it. Jesus is the vine and we are the active branches. Let us abide in Him. Amen.