Abiding in Christ — August 11, 2024
August 11, 2024
John 15:1-12
Abiding in Christ
Dr. Craig Goff
Professor Lois Eades once shared a comment at the beginning of one of my very first college classes at Trevecca Nazarene University that I will not soon forget. I have shared it before.
She was not a physically dominating person. She was about 4’11” tall and weighed just under 100 pounds. She spoke very quietly, almost whispered, even when she was lecturing, but I definitely heard what she said that day. I don’t know how many other times she may have said it or how many other people in class that day heard it and were impacted by it, but I know that what she said was exactly what I needed to hear at the time and have needed to hear many times since then.
What she said was simply – “God is bigger than what’s the matter.”
I needed to hear those words that day because I was afraid. I never expected to be sitting in a college class room. I can assure you no one who knew me expected me to be sitting in a college class room. If I had I would have studied some in high school which I never did. But, there I was trying my best to do what I thought the Lord was calling me to do and not sure if I (or the Lord) was going to be able to pull it off.
So those were just the words I needed to hear.
God is bigger than what’s the matter and God is beyond our comprehension. The smartest theologian who has ever lived, whoever that might be, has only known a small, small fraction of all there is to know about God. Even Thomas Aquinas looked over his “Summa Theologica” and said, “It is all just straw” compared with all there is to know about God.
The Bible itself strains to describe God and things of God beyond this present world and life. The best the Bible can do to describe the next world is with the material of this world, and so we hear about streets of gold and celestial cities with gigantic walls and gates of pearl. Of course, the Bible also acknowledges that we can’t even begin to fathom all that God has for us.
Yet, while we don’t know all there is to know about God, we Wesleyans believe the essence of God’s nature has been revealed in Jesus and in one simple word found in 1 John 3 among other places, “God is love.”
God is love without qualification and God’s love is for all the world, for everyone without exception. God’s love is not limited to a select few while everyone else is just out of luck.
In the Great Commission found at the end of the Gospel of Matthew Jesus gives his disciples the commandment we still follow today as part of the United Methodist Church mission statement to make disciples of all nations for the transformation of the world.
God seeks to transform the world because God loves the world.
In our text today we are told that as we abide in Christ, who is the very embodiment of God’s love, the world will be transformed and we will bear fruit – visible manifestations of God’s blessing.
Let’s look at verse 5 and following
You can point to a lot of examples in the history of the church and places around the world today where abiding in Christ results in the kind of fruit described in John 15.
Great hymns are written about those times and those examples.
As for example in the words of the hymn written 100 years ago:
Lift high the cross, the love of Christ proclaim
Till all the world adore his sacred name
But there are other times in the church and places in the church where the cross has been lifted up, but Christ’s name is not adored in the ways we might expect it to be…
There are places in the world where the kind of growth you would expect to see when Christ is proclaimed it is hard to track, when it is hard to find any of the kind of fruit described in our text today.
Barbara Brown Taylor, who is one of the world’s best living preachers once talked about spending time in Georgia; not the Georgia where she lives near Atlanta, but Georgia, between modern day Russia and Turkey in the Kachar Mountains, east of the Black Sea.
At one time, a thousand years ago, the church in that Georgia was a lot like Camelot. Kings and Queens commissioned artists who were brought in from Constantinople where the Hagia Sophia, the biggest church in the world was built, to build similar structures with exquisite arches, frescoes and stone work which still exist today, but only as ruins or the occasional museums.
The church in Asia Minor and throughout the east, North Africa and other places where it once dominated the culture and the government has fallen on bad times. There are those who would say it is dead.
I just read a book called The Lost History of Christianity about the history of the church in the east. It is not real encouraging. It is easy to see why there are those who pronounce the church dead in those places.
I have to believe there were Christians in those places who prayed just as fervently and were just as faithful as any other Christian in any other place, but it’s hard to find the kind of fruit in some of those places that seems to be described in John 15.
And if we are honest, not all that easy to find that kind of fruit in our own church tradition and in our own Sanctuary.
And it is easy to get discouraged.
It is also important to remember there are 66 books in the Bible. John 15 is one text. We interpret every text of Scripture in light of the whole Bible. To interpret one text in isolation from other texts is called eisegesis. Scholars agree that is not a good thing. When we interpret Scripture, we need to consider how it connects with all other Scripture.
While John 15 says “when we abide in Christ we bear fruit,” the Bible also tells us in the Psalms and in 2 Peter, “with the Lord a day is like a thousand years, or like a watch in the night.”
In other words, what we might see as a permanent set back or a setting with an almost total lack of fruit, might just be a little pause to the God who is love, which is why sometimes those in the Roman Catholic Church say, “we are having a bad ‘century’.” It happens.
In fact, what can look like death and the end to we mortals, might be the beginning of new life… kind of like the crucifixion and resurrection.
No offense, but sometimes we are not as smart as we like to think we are.
As I read over this text which is all about the importance of bearing fruit, I couldn’t help but think back over my own ministry. You could never tell it by looking at me, but I’ve been around a while.
I’ve been preaching about 40 years now and my preaching has changed somewhat down through the years.
I actually shudder to think what I would have thought of myself as a preacher of 64 when I was 30.
I’m pretty sure I would not have been overly impressed. I would have looked at my 64 year old self and said, or at least thought, “Where is the fruit? Your children don’t attend church every Sunday.” And they don’t, maybe every Christmas Eve. My 30 year old self would probably accuse my 64 year old self of not even nurturing my own children as well as I could have. I might push back some. I did get them to camp and on some mission trips and to Chrysalis, but I would agree I could have done better.
Of course, as a 64 year old preacher speaking to my 30 year old self, I think I would caution against being too rash. I think I would encourage my 30 year old self to see that our concepts of growth and fruit and grace may not be the same as God’s and that God might see fruit where we don’t easily see fruit.
I would also encourage all of us to recognize that the church in places like what is now Turkey and Egypt aren’t dead and their influence is greater than we probably realize.
God might be at work even in our own church and in our lives more than we realize. God really does see things we don’t see. God really is bigger than what’s the matter.
Those who abide in Christ really do bear fruit.