Description / Transcription
Well, it’s good to be you this evening. We’re continuing in our series in the upper room discourse, or fittingly the farewell discourse, in the gospel of John, and our text tonight is chapter 15, verses 1 through 17. If you will join me there. Listen now to the Word of God.
““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 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.”
““This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are My friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in My name, He may give it to you. These things I command you, so that you will love one another.”
Let’s ask for the Lord’s help. Our Lord and our God, we hear Your Word and it is a sweet melody to our ears. May You by the power of Your Spirit do a mighty work in the hearts of my friends here tonight. Would the meditations of my heart and the words of my mouth be forever pleasing in Your sight, my Lord and my Redeemer. Amen.
So in my life I’m sure, as many of you have, I have often thought about what is the basis for all relationships. You will often hear that a relationship is based on love, and that is wrong. Others may say it’s communication or sacrifice or quality time, and wrong, wrong again. It has taken me quite some time to figure it out, but I’m here to tell you that I’ve actually got the real answer. So be careful now as you listen and you don’t want to miss it. You ready for it? Prepositions.
Prepositions. Yes, indeed, prepositions are the basis of all relationships. My Greek and Hebrew professor Will Ross is here somewhere tonight. I know he’s nodding his head in approval. There are rules for using prepositions.
First off, you’ve got to use the right one. You can’t say “I walked through my friend in the park.” Rather, you should say, “I walked with my friend in the park.”
My favorite rule, which I’m trying to implement in my own life, is that you can’t end a sentence on a preposition. Winston Churchill famously commented on ending sentences with prepositions, saying, “This is the type of errant pedantry up with which I will not put.”
There are many prepositions from which to choose, such as in, at, to, from, towards, across, through, between among, of, with, by, about, and on it goes. I could go further but you get the point. The way in which we relate two things to one another is by way of preposition.
Now as we consider our text tonight, Jesus wants His disciples to know what their relationship with Him is supposed to be, and He uses a very peculiar preposition, and it is a preposition that we don’t often utilize with other human relationships, and that preposition is “in.” He uses is repeatedly.
Verse 2 – every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away.
Verse 4 – abide in Me and I in you.
Same as verse 5 and 6 – abide in Me.
Verse 9 – abide in My love.
Again in verse 10 – abide in My love and abide in His love.
Verse 11 – these things I have spoken to you that My joy may be in you.
Now looking at it, it can be difficult to wrap our heads around this idea. Jesus, what do you mean by abide in me? How are we supposed to be in You? How are we supposed to abide in You? We can’t physically put ourselves inside of You? And this idea is not just reserved to our passage but it’s all over the place.
Paul says in Christ, or in Him, about 150 times in his letters. One of the most verses that speaks of this in Paul is 2 Corinthians 5:17 – therefore if anyone is in Christ he is a new creation, the old has passed, behold the new has come.
So with that said, what I believe this text we have before us tonight is getting at is one of the most central doctrines of the Christian faith, which is union with Christ. Union with Christ is so important because it is the very essence of what it means to be a Christian. So it is proper to say I am a Christian for I am in Christ.
So we ask ourselves, what does it mean to be a Christian then? What does union with Christ mean anyway?
To get a working definition of union with Christ, we have a systematic theologian Louis Berkhof to thank. He writes in his systematic theology this union may be defined as that intimate, vital, and spiritual union between Christ and His people in virtue of which He is the source of their life and strength. This doctrine of union with Christ is what Christ is getting at here in our passage and he explains it with this analogy of the vine and the branches.
What we’re going to do tonight is unpack how exactly Jesus explains our union with Him in this passage. Verses 1 through 11 we will have our three points – 1, He is the true vine; 2, we are His branches; and 3, we abide in one another. Then verses 12 through 17 will cover our application.
Jesus first tells us that He is the true vine, His father is the vinedresser and we are the branches. Backing up a little bit from our passage, the verse immediately prior to it, chapter 14, verse 31, it seems that Christ may have taken His disciples to a vineyard to help guide this analogy. He says to them, “Rise, let us go from here.”
We don’t have the next verse telling us that they got up from the table, that they walked downstairs, out of the house and into this garden, but if we can imagine for a moment that they did excuse themselves from the upper room and walked through a garden, we can imaging Jesus walking and speaking and showing His disciples the different plants and the flowers in the garden. Then He walks by a vine and He says to them, “You see this vine here? I am the true vine, My Father is the vinedresser, and you, My friends, are the branches.”
Now why would Jesus say that He is a true vine? This would imply that there is some other vine to which He is comparing Himself. Scholars note that there are several places in the Old Testament where this vine language is used actually to describe Israel. If you look in your ESV, you can see little cross reference next to Jesus’s use of true vine that points to Jeremiah 2:21, and that says, “Yet I planted you a choice vine, wholly of pure seed. How then have you turned degenerate and become a wild vine?”
Another text to look at is Psalm 80 where it says that God brought a vine out of Egypt and planted it but that its fruit had been plucked and all the animals of the field had fed on it.
Isaiah 5 also speaks on this, but it broadens this to not merely one vine but to actually to an entire vineyard.
Where the Old Testament Israel was fruitless and spiritually dry, Jesus says I am the true vine. I am the true Israel. I am the source of spiritual life and fruitfulness.
This ties in with all of Jesus’s “I am” statements that are laid out in John. In John 14 Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” John 6 says, “I am the bread of life.” John 8, “I am the light of the world and before Abraham was, I am.” John 10, “I am the door and I am the good Shepherd.” John 11, “I am the resurrection and the life.”
And He says in our passage here, “I am the true vine.”
So what are all these “I am” statements getting at? They’re all pointing to who Christ is. John tells us at the end of his gospel in chapter 20, verse 31, he says Jesus did many signs but the ones we read in his gospel are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name.
This is probably very familiar to most of you, but when Jesus says “I am,” He’s actually choosing these words very precisely to make a theological point. The phrase “I am” is the same phrase that’s used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament that is used in Exodus 3, “and when Moses asked God for a name to give to the enslaved Israelites if they were to ask Moses who sent him, and God says to Moses, ‘I am who I am.'”
So we don’t have life in a mere man or a people like Israel because a mere man in all of his sin and a people in all of their sin cannot produce spiritual life. It takes the God-man to produce spiritual life.
Point one – union with Christ means that Christ, like a vine to its branches, is the source of life.
Point two – we are His branches.
Now beginning in verse 2, it says “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.” We see that there are two types of branches that are going on here. There are those that don’t bear fruit and there are those that do.
It’s tempting to think that these two types of branches are equally a part of the vine. This would be an easy conclusion to make because there’s no way that a branch, if you go outside and you look at one of the trees outside and you see all of its branches, you’re not going to assume that someone stapled on a dead branch onto that tree. With that in mind, we often think that there are legitimate Christians out there who eventually lose their faith and never come back.
This is what happens often with our kids when they go off to college. The faith that they once had is no longer. That makes us even doubt our own faith, doubt our fruit. We doubt if we ourselves are Christians at all.
Do you remember the disciples during the last supper when Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray Me.” What do they do? With sorrow, each one of His disciples asked Jesus, “Is it I, Lord?” Is it me? Am I the one that’s going to betray You?
I’m sure that some of you are asking that very question tonight – is it me? Lord, have I betrayed You?
But friends, who was the one that would betray Jesus? It was Judas. Friends, let me tell you, if you believe the gospel to be true, if you believe that Jesus, a man who lived 2000 years ago died and rose again and is alive right now, if you believe that you are a sinner in need of grace, I want to make it abundantly clear to you that you are not Judas. You can have faith that is as fragile and as weak as a spider’s web, and that is still saving faith, because our status before God does not rest upon the strength of our faith, but it rests upon the strength of the object of our faith, which is Christ, the living and true branch.
When Jesus says that these branches that don’t bear fruit, what He has in mind, He doesn’t have disciples in mind, He has Judas in mind, because like Judas, these branches only have the appearance of being a part of the vine. These branches, they attach themselves to the vine and try to take part in the life, in the fruit brought forth by the vine. Yet they were dead from the very beginning. The reason why they are dead is because they did not abide in the true vine. Jesus says in verse 6 of our passage, “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.”
John in his letter 1 John, chapter 2, he says that there are many antichrists, those that oppose Christ, who oppose God, and they were sent out from us but they were not of us. For had they been of us, they would have continued with us.
So those of us that are in Christ, even if we have weak faith, even if we have doubts, we are promised that we will continue and that we will persevere by the power of the Holy Spirit, which is the same power that raised Christ from the dead. It is by that power that we will persevere to the very end.
Friends, take comfort in the words of Jesus when He says in John 6, “My sheep hear My voice and I know them and they follow Me. I give them eternal life and they will never perish and no one will snatch them out of My hand.”
The branches which Jesus refers to in verse 6 that are gathered, that are thrown into the fire and burned, you’re not going to face this. It is those who never abided in Christ, who did not continue in the faith, that will suffer such a fate.
However, this does not mean that the Christian life is easy, because it’s not. Jesus says that there are branches that will bear fruit but the road to bearing fruit is challenging and we see this in three ways.
The first is that the fruit is not from us. So verse 5 says, “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.”
Our fruit-bearing cannot and will not be from self-production. Our fruit-bearing is derivative. It’s dependent upon the life-giving vine. This cuts against everything in our culture that says in order to achieve, in order to be accomplished, in order to make something of your life, it has to come from within you. You must find it in yourself to go out there and make a lasting impact because no one is going to do it for you on your behalf.
This can so easily creep into the Christian life to say that in order to please God, in order to live the Christian life, in order to fight sin, in order to build the kingdom, in order to stand before God and not be condemned, it’s up to you to get it done.
Friends, have we forgotten Christ? Have we forgotten that it is He that accomplished what we couldn’t do? A temptation is to think then in light of this that God does all the work in our sanctification, in all of our fruit-bearing, and we can just sit back and we can relax. But that’s not right either. We’re not these puppets on a string that God uses to just move around and do stuff with. Rather, we’re active players in our fruit-bearing.
Another temptation is to think that we share the work of sanctification with Christ, but the problem there is that there’s no amount of work, no matter how small, we can be given that we can actually achieve on our own. So fruit is not to be borne by us alone. Not by Christ alone. And it’s not us working together with Christ to bear fruit, but it is Christ giving us the power and the means to produce fruit.
So Pastor Kevin, he wrote a helpful article on this, on sanctification, where his basic point is that we work out our sanctification as God works in us. God giving us the power and the strength to be able to bear the fruit. The branch is fruitless without the vine, but it is the branch that ultimately bears fruit, so the fruit is not from us.
The second is that the fruit is not for us. Often we switch our roles by making ourselves the vine and Christ the branch. We want a Christ who will bear good fruit for us. Jesus, I want a family. Jesus, I want a level of financial stability. Jesus, I want my church to have everything that I’m looking for. Jesus, I want my life to be in order. Jesus, I am unhappy with my job. Will You give me another one? Jesus, my kids are crazy. Will You fix them for me?
Friends, true life in Christ does not look like the world being catered to our desires. True life in Christ is bearing spiritual fruit, and to what end? Verse 8 tells us that by bearing much fruit and so proving to be My disciples, My Father is glorified.
Presbyterian, listen up for a minute. Does this sound familiar to you? Westminster Shorter Catechism, question one – What is the chief end of man? Answer – Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.
Charles Hodges, a biblical counselor and guest lecturer at RTS, and he says that 2 Corinthians 5:9 is his biblical counseling theme verse. That says, “So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please Him.” And the way that Hodges applies this in the counseling room is by getting his counselee to say, “I want to glorify God with my life more than I want to breathe.”
So that’s what Jesus is saying here. Jesus is saying that it is for the glory of God that any spiritual fruit is borne in our lives. By taking this posture of humility it puts us in our place. We’re not our own, we don’t live to please ourselves, but in all things we are to glorify the Father.
A third way that the fruit-bearing is hard is that it is painful. Again, verse 2 says that every branch that does not bear fruit, He prunes. Now for everybody who like me thought that Jesus was referring to a dried plum, pruning is a knife, or it’s a process with using a knife or scissors, to cut away the branch and that assures that the vine stays healthy.
Jesus is painting us a picture of the Father, the vinedresser. He’s walking around the garden of the vines and He’s cutting off parts of the branches. They may be diseased, they may be blocking light for other branches, they may be brushing up against other branches. This process is painful for us.
Now I know that a plant doesn’t have a central nervous system so they actually technically can’t feel pain, but if you can imagine the pain of having something cut off from you, it hurts. We don’t like it.
But what are we told at the end of our verse here? Every branch that does not bear fruit, He prunes so what? That it may bear more fruit. So the pain of fruit-bearing, of God removing the sin, and even the good things in our lives, is meant to produce more fruit for the sake of God’s glory and yes, even our good.
But friends, in light of all this fruit-bearing not being for us, that doesn’t mean that there is no benefit to us in God’s vineyard. Again, we’re not just puppets on a string, being used for God’s purposes. God loves His people and seeks to bless us. Paul says in Ephesians 1:3, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in Christ,” there it is again, “with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.”
The spiritual blessing then that Jesus seeks to give His disciples in our passage is His joy. So He says in verse 11, “these things I have spoken to you that My joy may be in you and that your joy may be full.”
Often we tend to mix up joy and happiness, thinking that they’re synonyms, that they mean the same thing. But there is a certain uniqueness to joy in the Bible. To compare it to human emotion like happiness is actually shortchanging it. I would define joy as the experience of the benevolent presence of God by His people. I’m taking this definition from Psalm 16:11. You can look it up later.
Now sure there are instances in Scripture where the presence of God, even for His people, is not good for them. But the presence of God is meant to be joyous for His people as they encounter Him and are filled with His presence. Remember what happed to John the Baptist in his mother’s womb when Mary greeted her when she was pregnant with the Lord Jesus? It says in Luke 1:44, “the baby in her womb leaped for joy.”
When God’s people encounter His presence, they are filled with joy, and this joy that we have in the Lord is possible even in the midst of our pain and our sorrow.
Paul, writing to the Philippian church from a prison cell, he writes his letter and it’s dripping, it’s dripping with joy in the Lord, his joy in the Lord, his joy in prayer, his joy in his fellow Christians. So you ask yourself how can a man who is in a prison cell write such a letter like this, with this temperament. It’s because of his union with Christ. He has the presence of the Lord.
To put it another way for you, a pastor friend of mine told me that when his wife was giving birth in the hospital she was in a serious amount of pain, I’m sure as many mothers here now can attest to that. She was in a serious amount of pain. She was uncomfortable. She was stressed. There was people yelling at her, telling her to push, she’s crying, she just wants it to all be over. Then like that her baby is born and now for the first time she gets to hold her baby. What did she feel when her baby was handed to her for the for the first time? What did she feel when in the midst of her pain and her uncomfortability that she is still feeling in that moment? What does she feel? She feels joy because despite everything going on around her and in her, despite her pain, for the first time she gets to hold her baby, she gets to look at his face, she gets to feel his little hands, his feet, his ears. She gets to kiss him on his forehead and on his cheeks.
This is joy. The experience of God’s benevolent presence.
Our union with Christ means that we have His joy, and not only do we have His joy, but we have it to the fullest. Three times in the upper room discourse here in chapter 15 verse 11 and again 16:24 and 17:11, Jesus says that His disciples will be filled with joy.
Now, Presbyterian, remember the first Shorter Catechism question. Man’s chief end is not only to glorify the Lord, but it’s to enjoy Him forever.
For our third point, it is in this life-giving vine that abides in us and we abide in it.
Jesus uses this word 10 times in our passage, He uses this phrase “abide in Me,” abide in Me and I in him, abide in My love. This word “abide,” it’s not really used anymore. We mainly use it when it comes to following rules and laws and so we say “I will abide by the rules.” Children, abide by the rules of your parents, okay? We tracking here?
So what does Jesus mean here when He says “abide in Me?” Now this is the Greek word meno, which means to remain, to stay. In Luke 1 going back to that story, Mary greets Elizabeth and John the Baptist leaps for joy at the presence of Christ and Mary praises God for the blessing of Christ and she remained with Elizabeth about three months.
In John 11:6 Jesus heard that His friend Lazarus was ill and He stayed two days longer in the place where He was.
So these uses of meno, meaning to remain and to stay, they refer to places and to time, but the word abide in English refers to a person. Jesus is saying to His disciples you have union with Me, you have My love, you have My life, you have My joy, you have My word which made you clean, you have My Father’s guiding hand as He makes you more like Me. Now would you remain there? Would you stay there? Would you find your rest there?
Friends, do you think that God loves you? Do you think that He looks upon you with delight? Do you think that He wants to bless you with His presence? Maybe most of us don’t, but it’s true. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him shall never die but have eternal life. What is this life? It is life in Christ. It is life abundantly filled with His joy and His love.
This is the same love that Christ receives from His Father in heaven. Verse 9 says, “as the Father loved Me, so I have loved you.” In response to this love, Jesus commands us to remain in it, to stay in it, to abide in it.
So don’t give up on His promises. Don’t give up on His atoning sacrifice, because not only did Jesus die and rise again for you, but He will also remain in you. He will never leave you or forsake you. He will never cast you out. His love is an everlasting love that dwells in the hearts of His people. The blessings we receive in His abiding love will never run dry.
Friends, if you want spiritual fruit in your life, don’t micromanage your sin. Don’t do that. But love Christ. Sing to Christ. Worship Christ. Rejoice in Christ. Delight in Christ. Abide in Christ as He abides in you.
We understand that union with Christ means that Jesus is the true vine, the very life of His branches, that the Father prunes for His own glory, and this all takes place in the mutual abiding of Christ with His people and His people in Him.
With this divine love that dwells in us, what do we do with it? So here’s our application.
Verse 12 and 17 tells us to love each other. Pastor Zach and Pastor Tom earlier in our series, they were able to speak of this love for others in their texts, and this was a love for one another in service. But then Jesus in our passage, He actually kicks it up a notch and He says that not only are we to love one another in service, but we are to love one another in sacrifice.
So in our passage He says you ought to love one another as He loved you and in verse 13 He says greater love has no one than this – that someone laid down his life for his friends.
Now in a culture that believes that the greatest love that you can give to someone is to affirm them, it’s to affirm them in their own path, their own lifestyle, the “you do you, I’m happy for you” mentality. But Jesus says something different. He’s got something different in my mind. Jesus says that the greatest way to love someone is sacrificing yourself for them. And for what? That they may repent of their sins, trust in Him for salvation, abide in Him and glorify and enjoy the true and living God.
One of my favorite verses in the Bible is Matthew 1:21 because it sums up the mission of Christ in one verse. It says she, Mary, will bear a son and you shall call His name Jesus for He will save His people from their sins. How did He do this? By denying Himself, living a life of perfect obedience to the law of God, dying a sinner’s death, rising from the dead, and giving us His righteousness.
So we not only reflect His image, but we reflect His life and his sacrifice in our love for one another. Again, we are to love one another sacrificially to the end of glorifying and enjoying God forever. You see, Jesus was, He was and is the best glorifier and enjoyer of God in the history of the world. Later in the upper room discourse Jesus prays His high priestly prayer and in chapter 17, verse 4 He says, He prays to His Father, I glorified You on earth, having accomplished the work that You gave Me to do.
Friends, our love for one another with Christ as our example and carried out in sacrifice, should lead one another with the help of the Spirit to glorify and enjoy God. So the way in which you relate to your spouse, to your family, to your friends, to all of your spheres of influence, it should be one of sacrifice so that they may have the chance to glorify and enjoy their Father in heaven.
Ask yourselves how will my relationship with this person further their love and enjoyment of God. What will it mean for me? Will I humble myself? Will I lay down my own wants? Will I lay down my own convenience? Will I lay down my own desire for a certain outcome? Will I lay down my very life? Because that’s what Jesus did. If it means that this other person will see Jesus as more beautiful and more lovely than all of their heart’s desires, then friends, the answer is yes.
In closing, I just want to focus on Christ as our friend. Verse 13 – greater love has no one than this, that someone laid down their life for his friends.
This is the degree to which Christ loves His disciples and that we should love one another. There is no greater love. Now we need to pause here for a moment and try to understand what exactly is happening here. When Jesus calls His disciples his friends, He is bringing them into the inner circle of His life. He is acknowledging the desire for Him to be near to His disciples. So Jesus is Lord, but now He is our peer. We won’t just see the King in the throne room in heaven, but now we’ll get to see Him in His living room.
Believe it or not, friends, He actually likes us. We get to hang out with Jesus. We get to spend time with Jesus. We get to laugh with Jesus. If we’re struggling with something, just like a friend would, Jesus says, “I’ll pray for you.” That’s literally what He is doing right now as He intercedes on our behalf to His Father.
This friendship that we have with Jesus, it contrasts with the idea of servanthood. Verse 15 says no longer do I call you servants for the servant does not know what his master is going but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you. This is where the shock comes in because this is the way that we often think about the Christian life. We think that we’re servants of God and all our relationship with Him is just doing stuff for Him. Now, of course, we are called to be servants of God. Jesus says in verse 14 you are My friends if you do what I command you. Certainly we’re not His friends if we disobey Him. But friends, we’re not merely His servants.
One of the movies that I watched growing up was Annie. It’s a musical. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about an orphan named Annie and she desperately wants to find her parents because the orphanage is run by this cruel Miss Hannigan. Miss Hannigan treats the orphans as slaves because all they do all day is chores. The orphans sing together, “It’s the hard-knock life for us, it’s the hard-knock life for us, instead of treated we get tricked, instead of kisses we get kicked. It’s the hard-knock life.” Then Christmas rolls around and the billionaire Oliver Warbucks wants to take in an orphan and his secretary chooses Annie to stay with them for Christmas. When she gets to his mansion, she’s greeted by all of these people who work for Warbucks and the secretary asks Annie, “What would you like to do first?” The she looks around in the giant room, she sees the marble floors, she sees the golden chandelier, she sees the expensive art on the walls, and she says, “I think I’ll start with the windows first, then I’ll move to the floors.” She tries to pick up a sponge out of a bucket to start cleaning and the secretary stops her and says, “Whoa whoa whoa, you don’t understand. You don’t have to do any cleaning for us while you’re here.”
Annie really doesn’t know how to reply. She doesn’t understand. She asks, “Well, how am I going to earn my keep?” The secretary replies, “Well, you’re our guest, Annie.” Then she was given a seat at the table. She was fed. She was clothed. She was given her own room with a warm bed. At the end of the movie, sorry to ruin it, but she’s actually adopted into the Warbucks family.
So friends, do you think that the Christian life is like Annie in the orphanage? Do you think that that’s what heaven is like? Do you think that when you arrive to heaven that the first thing you’re going to do is grab a sponge and a bucket? When that day comes, and you step into the heavenly dwelling place of God and you finally get to see Jesus face-to-face, Jesus is going to say, “You don’t understand. You’re My friend. Abide in me.”
Let’s pray. Our God and our Father, because of the redemptive power of Christ we thank You that You have saved us a seat at Your table. I pray that my friends here would know that they have a friend in Jesus who invites them to abide in His wondrous love and joy. We know in a deep way the sin and sorrow of this world and in our own hearts. Lord, I pray that we hope together and that final deliverance from sin and welcoming us into Your warm embrace and singing to You together, hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes, shine through the gloom and point me to the skies, Heavn’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadow flees, in life, in death, Lord, abide with me. Amen.
