Committed to Remain

Awesome! Hey, it really is good to see everybody here today. Thank you. I know some of us live right off of County Line or right off of a main major road, so you had no problems getting here. For others of us, we had to navigate some of the ice and some of the snow, and I just want to say thank you so much for being here. You’re my favorite if you had to navigate ice and snow, and if you didn’t, you’re my favorite too, and I don’t just say that to everybody, so there you go.

We come to our time in the service of congregational prayer. So what I want to ask you to pray for is just our spiritual depth in 2025. Just like when Beth was doing our call to worship earlier, you know, we just want to be as vibrant spiritually as we could possibly be here. And our spiritual vibrance, our evangelistic impact, the success, if you will, of our ministries is going to depend totally on how deep we are spiritually with the Lord. So what we’re going to do, we’re just going to pray for a moment, and we’re going to pray that God continue to take us deeper in spirituality in 2025, and then I will put a bow on that. So y’all take it away. Turn to a neighbor, pray for us that God would make us even more spiritually deep in this year, and yeah, we’ll go with that. Thank you.

O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds Thy hands have made, I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed. Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee, How great Thou art, how great Thou art. Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee, how great Thou art, how great Thou art.

Lord, we live in Charleston, South Carolina, and for some reason we had snow this week. How great Thou art! Surely what Isaiah said is true, that You have storehouses of snow, and You choose by Your own hands and wisdom and power to open the gates, and You throw snow wherever in the world You want it to be. Literally, God, we had snow in Charleston. God, every time I went out of my door or looked out the window this week, I just shook my head in disbelief. God, what other supernatural things do You want to do here? How great Thou art! How great Thou art!

How majestic is Your name in all the earth. The Man of Sorrows who gave His life for us, how could we not surrender ours to Him? The One who does not just rain snow in the Low Country, but the One who crossed the chasm of space and time from Heaven to Earth, became a man, and died for us. How can I not surrender all to You? God, may we be a church that surrenders all to You. Lord, take us and make us a spiritually deep church. I beg, Lord, let us start with me. Father, root out the stuff in my heart and in my life and in my mind that is keeping me from You, the impurities, the barriers. God, reveal that in our church and get that stuff out of here. Prune us, Lord, that we may walk with You in a different way. I pray, Holy Spirit, You get a hold of me right now over the next few minutes, that You would give this church a better sermon than what I’m going to preach, that You would move the spiritual needle of our hearts and our community because of what happens here for the next few moments. God, we love You. Get me out of Your way, and it’s in Your name I pray. Amen.

Amen. Well, I really do want to invite everybody to be back here at 6 o’clock tonight for a time of prayer and worship. Now you need to know I’m not teaching on prayer, we’re not doing a Bible study on worship, we’re just really going to pray and we’re just really going to sing a few songs. This is going to be kind of a no-frills sort of evening, though I expect it to be a rich and a meaningful one. We’re even making it as intentional as possible to not even provide child care, and here’s the thing about that. I remember a couple months ago with the Thanksgiving Eve program, and we had children mixed in with all the adults and the big kids, if you will, and the children Got to see the adults thanking God through their talents and through their words, and we want to provide the same opportunity for the young ones tonight as well, for them to partake in what a family night of worship and prayer can look like. So if you’re free tonight, please join me and a few others at six o’clock in the old church. But for now, you go ahead and get your copy of God’s Word and open up to John chapter 15. John chapter 15. I will be there in just a few moments with you.

You know, Becky said something a few minutes ago in the welcome time. She said, “I hope that you loved the snow or had joy in the snow because it was coming regardless.” Man, I found that to be true. You know, Tuesday at about 2 o’clock, I was really curious: is it going to happen or not? You know, we had—we made the decision on Sunday to go ahead and cancel Wednesday night stuff, and I reached a point on Tuesday where I was like, “Man, if nothing happens, I’m going to feel like a fool. What’s going to happen?” And then it starts icing, and I get really nervous about the ice. I don’t want power to go out. I don’t want that to happen to our community. And then you hear the ice let up, and it starts to become snow and all that, and you wake up Wednesday morning, and all of us got that white Christmas we wanted, just three and a half weeks after the fact.

And we went out—we went outside to kind of play in the snow, and I—I realized like my enjoyment of it just wasn’t very high. I—I—I wasn’t having a good time. I—I’ll be honest, it wasn’t until somebody invited me to go do something in the snow that I really started having some fun. I wish that I had thought of sending the video to our AV booth to have it put up there. The most fun I had in the snow this past week was when somebody had invited me to be tugged along behind a four-wheeler, my hands on a tube, and go off of a ramp. It was at least 20 feet high. I flew at least 100 feet.

But life is like that. Life is like that, where you can either sit on the periphery, on the fringe, on the outside of something, kind of observing it, wondering what’s it like to actually enjoy the thing, or you go and get your hands dirty and you get involved with it. Man, my kids have taught me this is life. Becca took one of our children up to Columbia for a birthday party yesterday, and she had our baby with her, so I was just one-on-one with another one of our children all day, and that child would not let me sit on the periphery, on the fringe, of whatever they were doing. They were like, “Dad, you’ve got to be on the floor with me. Dad, we have got to be playing Little Tikes basketball.” I’ll let you guess which one of those that was. And it was so much fun, but it wasn’t fun until I fully jumped in. It wasn’t fun until I just really got into it.

Life with God is the exact same way. It’s like an untimed snowstorm. It’s like hanging out with one of your kids and they just want to play basketball with you. I feel like God all the time is inviting us into a deeper relationship with Him. He’s offering us these invitations all the time. He’s like, “Hey, I’m doing this really cool thing. Do you want to be part of it with me? Do you want to come play basketball with me? Do you want to come sit on the floor and just hang out with me?” And we sit on the fringe. We sit on the outside, and we’re just watching. We’re like, “What’s it like to be involved with that? Are they actually enjoying what they’re doing? Do they mean the words they’re singing or they’re saying?”

When God laid this deeper series on my heart a few months ago, I fully believe that God was starting to offer our church an invitation to go into a deeper relationship with Him. The past three weeks, I’ve been preaching on a couple spiritual habits that God gives us for us to have a richer, more fuller relationship with Him. I started with the habit of fasting and prayer. You know, that’s denying yourself food, embracing the discomfort of hunger, so that you can nourish your soul and Then I talked about the habit of sharing your faith in Jesus—that is, denying yourself some comfort, especially in social situations, and sharing the hope of the Gospel with people. And then last week we talked about financial giving—that is, denying yourself the comfort of material financial gifts and provisions, so that you can have more of God through trusting Him with your finances and putting your money where your heart is.

Today we’re going to talk about commitment. Today is not necessarily a habit; it’s more of a foundation. It is more of a driving force. Today’s sermon is going to kind of put a bow on this preaching series, but it’s also going to thrust us into the next three months. So next week we’re not preaching on “Deeper” anymore, but what’s going to happen next week Wednesday nights, we’re going to continue in this content, and Lord willing, we’re going to have a few folks be able to share their testimonies of how they are going deeper with the Lord through those three habits and how God is helping them love Him a little bit more.

You see, life with God is not about mustering up the strength to do a lot of inconvenient things for Him. It’s not about trying our hardest to be the type of person that one day He might like. Life with God is about embracing the invitations He gives us and letting Him channel His power and His life and His character through us. That’s what the heart of the “Deeper” series is all about.

In John chapter 15, what we’re going to look at this morning, Jesus explains this dynamic, and He will offer us today an invitation as we end a preaching series and go into a discipleship series. So if you will, this is John chapter 15. I’m just going to take it chunk by chunk as we march through the passage.

John chapter 15, verses 1 through 3, it says this. Jesus, He is here speaking to the disciples: “I am the true vine, my Father is the gardener. Every branch in me that does not produce fruit He removes, and every branch that produces fruit—sorry, and He prunes every branch that produces fruit so that it will produce more fruit. You are clean already because of the word I have spoken to you.” That’s John 15:1-3.

Jesus begins what’s this extended metaphor about our life in Christ, and He says there are some people of fruit. If you’re a notetaker, this would be that first little sub-bullet for you: people of fruit. But before He gets to the people, He says something about Himself: “I am.” Jesus does this seven times across the Gospel of John. Seven times He describes Himself in total, absolute terms: “I am the resurrection and the life,” “Before Abraham was, I am,” and here He says, “I am the true vine.”

You see, Jesus would have to say that He’s the true vine because He knows the nature of humans is that we give ourselves to false vines all the time. Man, we have all been there. The false vines are the things that we give our lives to; they are the things that we try to draw strength from and we try to draw life from. For me, across my life, my false vine has been people’s approval and relationships. I’d get down because I’ve disappointed somebody, so I leech myself onto somebody else to try to get their approval, and I suck the life out of them through their approval, and then I disappoint them, and then I had to go find somebody else to leech off of. That’s been my life. That’s been the thing I’ve had to struggle with. That’s been the thing I’ve had to walk with Jesus concerning.

It might be the same for you. It might be relationships and approval, or it might be finances. Your false vine might be your 401k. It might be what you got saved up in the bank. It might be the sort of financial stability and security either that you have achieved at this point or what you think would satisfy you later. Your false vine could be something you consume. It could be food. It could be how you might want to self-medicate by making yourself feel better if you consume the right types of things. That could be something that you drink. It could be a drug you do. Our false vines vary from person to person. In a room this size, we have about a hundred different false vines that we all attach ourselves to. But Jesus is saying He is the only true vine.

Jesus is the only one that sustains us. He’s the only one that holds us. He’s the only one that nourishes us. He’s the only one that gives us life, and He will give it to anybody. Jesus is the True Vine that will take any branch to be grafted onto Him, and He will have anyone, anyone who can say, “I surrender all, all to Him. I owe.” Jesus will take you. So before I even proceed with this passage, I want to just make you an offer. If you’re in here this morning and you’re realizing that you’ve been giving yourself to false vines this whole time, and you’re ready for a clean start, man, you have not done too much for Jesus to love you. You’ve not gone too far for Him to have you. You’ve never lived a dirty enough life that He won’t embrace you and hold you. Jesus is the True Vine, and He offers His life to anybody that will embrace Him. We’ve got to hear that.

And on that Jesus vine, there are two, two types of branches. That’s what He says in verse two: “Every branch of me that does not produce fruit He removes, but He prunes.” The Father, the Gardener, prunes every branch on the Jesus vine that produces fruit so that it will produce more fruit. There are two types of branches on the Jesus vine. The first are the producers. The producers are those who draw life from Jesus, and they bear the fruit of Jesus in their life. And then the second are the parasites. This might surprise you. I’m not very agriculturally inclined, so I don’t actually know what the type of branch is on a vine that doesn’t produce fruit. If you know the answer to that, please have a little bit of grace on me. But a parasite is something that shows up in the ecosystem. It’s a living organism that attaches itself to something else. It consumes, it eats, it is nourished by the thing it attaches to, but it doesn’t produce anything. A parasite is something that only consumes and never helps. It only takes and never gives. It eats, but it never produces fruit. And Jesus says that on the vine there are two types of branches. You got your fruit producers who are channeling the life of Jesus, and then you got your parasites who suck, suck, suck, eat, eat, eat, but never actually give anything.

When I lived in Lexington, we had a small little grape tomato plant. My thumbs are not green, as you can see, or as you could see if you have spent any time around me. My neighbors, though, were extremely skilled in, I would say, all things homesteading, which is extremely fascinating because we lived in a townhouse community, and there were these homesteaders, and I’m like, “This doesn’t really make sense. You ought to have some land outside of town.” Sam understands what I’m trying to communicate right now. And I would ask our neighbor, and I’d say, “How do I grow some tomatoes?” And Keith would come over. He said, “Well, you got some buds there. You got some suckers there. You just trim off the suckers and give a little bit of attention to the buds, and you’re fine.” I’m like, “Okay, great. So what’s a bud and what’s a sucker exactly?” And he had to walk me through this process of pruning. It’s where you look at a plant and you figure out where are the parasites, the suckers, they just take life, and where are the buds, where are the producers. Jesus says that’s how it is with Him. There are people that attach themselves to Jesus who produce fruit for Him, and there are others who attach themselves to Jesus who never produce fruit in their lives.

Here’s the deal. God wants you to bear fruit. He wants you to bear fruit, and God is not withholding Himself, making it hard for you to bear fruit. And one day God will sort out the branches. That’s not our job. Our job is to seek first the kingdom of righteousness, to seek Christ, to go deep in Him, and to produce fruit by His help. Here’s the deal. Both types of branches on the Jesus vine will experience some sort of pain in this life, amen. The fruitless parasites will experience an incredible pain of being removed from the vine, whereas the fruitful producers will experience the pain of being pruned. In this life, there is pain. The question is, what pain do you want? Do you want the pain of being cut off from Christ, or do you want the pain of Being pruned and looking a little bit more like Him afterwards. Jesus, speaking to the disciples, says in verse three, “You’re already clean. You’re already pruned. You’re already the way you’re supposed to be because the word I’ve spoken to you.” You see, here’s the deal: Jesus is the one who establishes you as a branch of Him. Jesus is the one who cleanses us by His word. Jesus is the one who initiates the whole thing of Christianity from start to finish. Christian fruit bearing is a Christ-centered, Christ-driven process. Ultimately, Jesus is the only person of fruit because He’s the vine that we, the branches, attach [inaudible] onto. The sap, the life of the vine, goes through the branches, and that’s what makes the branches bear fruit. You will never, ever find a branch that’s been cut off from a tree bearing fruit by itself. It’s got to be attached to something. It’s got to be attached to a vine. Jesus is the vine, but we, in our natural state, the Bible says, we are all detached branches. To mix metaphors, God says in the book of Ephesians that you and I and every person ever born are actually born spiritually dead. There’s nothing we can do in ourselves to make ourselves come alive in Christ. You see, Adam and Eve, they were born as God’s perfect children, perfect to a degree, I suppose, because one day after a lifetime of walking with Him, the Bible doesn’t describe how many days they had had together, one day they fell to the temptation of Satan and they disobeyed God and they sinned. And ever since then, the Bible says that you and me and your grandmother and your grandchildren, your neighbors and the cashier, [inaudible] every other person ever born has been born into sin, which means there’s nothing you can do, there’s nothing your neighbor can do to make themselves come alive in Jesus. We all need a Savior. We all need a vine to come and bring us onto Himself and to give us His life. We are all like dead branches on the side of the road, and Jesus says, “Hey, I’m going to take you and I’m going to make you come alive, and I’m going to bear my fruit through you.” And He does this by giving Himself for you on the cross. You see, God so loved the world, as it was recited earlier, God so loved the world that He gave His only Son for you. He gave His Son for you and for you and for you and for all eight billion plus people in this world. God so loved us that He did not withhold Himself from us. No, He took the initiative and He engaged, engaged us, and He gave us the very best thing, His Son. And Jesus would come and He would live a perfect life in our place, we were supposed to live, and He would die as a sacrifice in our place on the cross, a death we deserved to die. The Man of Sorrows, though, who gave His life for you, did not stay dead. No, the Man of Sorrows came back from the grave, and on the third day He rose, defeating sin and defeating death, defeating the grave, so that you can have life in Him. Amen. Thank you.

And if you have never given yourself to this man, Jesus Christ, before, then tune me out for the next few minutes and just do some business with the Lord of the universe, who once again is offering you an invitation to give yourself to Him. The greatest thing you could ever do would be surrendering to Christ and embracing the life that He has for you. Do you know Him? Jesus is the person of fruit because it is His life in us that bears fruit. But Jesus also explains the process of fruit, how you and me, how we can bear fruit. Read with me again verses four and five. Jesus says, “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 in him, produces much fruit, because you can do what? Something, a few things, a few well-intentioned things, you can do what without Jesus? Nothing. We can do nothing without Him. Now see, here’s the deal: bearing fruit for Christ is not complicated; it’s just hard. Jesus Himself says it is as simple as remaining in Him. My life says it is as hard as remaining in Him. Here’s the deal: detached branches don’t bear fruit. Detached Christians can’t bear fruit either. If you are a follower of Jesus and you live separated from His influence, you will not bear any Christ-following fruit. Imagine, imagine I carried up here with me a branch from an apple tree up in the Upstate. Maybe I go with Bryce back home to Simpsonville, and we ride up from there to Skytop Orchard, and I bring back one of those branches. I managed to get that off the property, and I bring it here. I got this 12-foot apple branch. Imagine we did it well enough so that some of the apples stayed intact and they stayed on. I’ve got a branch; there’s a little bit of fruit on it. But what’s going to happen to those apples after long on a branch that I’ve cut off from a tree? What’s going to happen? I’ve got a room full of agricultural experts. What’s going to happen to that branch? Will it produce any more apples? Why is that? It’s an apple branch. There’s no roots. It’s not connected to the tree. It’s detached from its life source.

We as followers of Jesus are the exact same way. We have no power to produce fruit on our own. All fruit you and me bear that is Christian in origin has come from Christ. It comes from the vine we are connected with. At best, our lives are like channels for the sap of Jesus. All the fruit that I bear in my life is the end product of Jesus taking His life and pushing it out through me. One Bible commentator put it this way: the key to the Christian life is the life of Christ in the Christian. The key to the Christian life is the life of Christ in the Christian.

Sometimes we stand on the edge of something that God is doing, and we look at those people over there who seem to really be enjoying what’s going on. They seem to act like it’s real. The God they talk about, they actually know He actually exists. They seem joyful. They seem patient. They seem self-controlled. They seem gentle. You know what I’m talking about, right? And we’re standing on the edge of it, and we’re just wondering, what’s it like? What’s it like to have what they’ve got? Could that ever be me in my own distinct packaging? It’s like this morning, Jesus is saying, yes, that can be, but not if you remain detached from Me. You’ve got to attach yourself to Me. You’ve got to draw life from Me, and that will be you.

The process of bearing fruit is as simple as remaining in Jesus. Jesus follows that process with two promises of fruit. He gives these two promises of fruit in verses six and seven. This is wild to me. If anyone doesn’t remain in Me, he is thrown aside like a branch, and he withers. They gather them, throw them into the fire, and they are burned. If you remain in Me, and My words remain in you, ask whatever you want, and it will be done for you. He starts with this negative promise of punishment. You see, the presence of fruit in your life determines if you’ll remain on the vine or if you will be removed and punished. A lack of fruit in your life as a follower of Jesus will result in punishment. No way around it. The Gardener will tend to His garden. He will ensure that His vine bears the maximum amount of fruit. God wants a fruitful vine more than we do, and He will stop at nothing to produce the fruit that He desires. The Master Gardener will tend to the vine, and those branches that show a consistent inability to bear fruit because they are living detached from the vine, they will be removed.

There’s a promise of punishment, but man, there’s also a promise of this incredible provision on the positive side. If you remain in Christ by His words remaining in you, then you have this astounding promise: you get whatever you ask from God. Anybody want something from God? Oh, come on, anybody want something from God? There we go. Thank you, R, for being an honest person. Come on, yeah. It’s an incredible promise that if God’s word remains in you, you ask whatever you want, and it will be done for you. That’s an incredible promise, but some terms apply, right? Jesus says that His word has to remain in us. I tell you what, man, when I dwell on Jesus and His word remains in me, it changes me. It changes the Things that I want you to see: Jesus is not saying that if you call yourself a Christian you can have anything that your heart would want on its own—that new truck, that perfect spouse, or even some illicit experience you know isn’t right. What Jesus is saying is that when we remain in Him by His Word remaining in us, we get to ask God for things that God would want to give, and God is always going to give you things He wants to give you. Your heart will be transformed, which means your desires will be transformed, which means your prayers will be transformed, which means as you express those transformed desires through your prayers to the God who’s been doing the whole thing, God’s going to give you the things that you’re asking for. Man, so the question is, how can you have God remain in you? Thank you for asking, man. It’s—it’s simple. I’m talking about reading your Bible before you open your phone. I’m talking about memorizing—yes, you can do it—memorizing Scripture. I’m talking about coming to Sunday school at 10, Wednesday night dinner at 5:15, and then staying for Bible study at 6. I’m talking about showing up tomorrow morning or Tuesday night for women’s Bible study. That’s what I’m talking about. I’m talking about reading your Bible on your own on a Tuesday so that God and His Word can come into your life and start to abide in you and remain in you. As the Word remains in you, it will change you, and it will produce fruit in you, and you will begin to ask God for things that He loves, and He will begin to give you those things that He loves. It—it will happen. If you want to see the supernatural provision of God in your life, the only thing stopping you from today and that experience is how deeply you’re giving yourself to Him. When you fully embrace Him, when you give yourself to Him, and He’s living inside of your life, you will begin to experience God’s supernatural provision for you.

However, getting things from God is not the goal. It’s not the goal of the Christian life. That’s not the goal of why God made all things. Jesus tells us what the goal is in verse eight. He says that My Father, Father, is glorified by this, that you produce much fruit and prove to be My disciples. Jesus brings it all back to the Father, and He says that the presence of fruit in your life proves that you are a disciple of Jesus, not just someone who calls Him Lord, Lord. When we prove ourselves to be followers and disciples of Jesus, our Father is glorified. In fact, this is the main thing I want you to take away from today’s message. If you’re a notetaker, write this down: our fruit is God’s glory. It’s the main thing I want you to capture from this, the main part of the deeper series. The main thing that I’m driving at with all this is that your fruit is for God’s glory. The entire universe and every person, including you, was made to glorify God the Father. That is the purpose and goal of all things, and it’s the purpose and the goal of every person’s life. The evil of sin is not just that we do bad things, but that we’re denying God His glory. When we live however we want to, without obeying God or submitting to Him, we are telling—telling God He’s not in charge. We’re telling Him He’s not really God. We’re telling Him He’s not worth trusting. But here at Sauldam Baptist Church, we are a group of people that believe God is in charge. Amen. God is really God. Amen. And God is worth trusting. True, man. So many of us call Jesus Christ Lord, and we call ourselves Christians, but if you look at American Christianity, man, the fruitlessness of our lives may reveal that we never knew Jesus at all. Man, if you were on trial for being a Christian—this is the way it goes, right? If you were on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you? Not just did you go to church regularly, did you give financially to the church, did you say grace before dinner, did you read your Bible occasionally, did you try to be a good person—that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is bearing fruit. Is your life marked by love for people who mistreat you, peace in chaotic and new situations, joy when hard times come, patience for those who disappoint you?

kindness toward those who hurt you, goodness when your heart wants to be bad, faithfulness when giving up on God is just plain easier, gentleness when a harsh word is on your lips, or self-control when your emotions are high. See, God is after fruit-bearing disciples who live like branches that remain on the vine. He is not after so-called Christians who do a lot of things for Him but ultimately don’t love Him. God is worth glory. The entire Bible is a saga of the King of the universe fighting for your good and His glory. That’s the purpose of your life, is to glorify the Father, and you do that by bearing fruit, fruit that you couldn’t bear on your own. So if our fruit is God’s glory, then we ought to pursue maximum fruitfulness. That is the heart of deeper. It is a way for us to pursue glorifying God as deeply and as powerfully as we can by pushing our lives as deep into Christ as we can, so that we would bear the fruits that only God can give us. Man, fasting is a way to go deeper in Jesus and remain in Him by nourishing your soul instead of nourishing your body. Sharing the gospel is a way to go deeper in Jesus and remain in Him by reminding yourself of the good news of how God saves sinners. Financial giving is a way to go deeper in Jesus and remain in Him by telling yourself that your wallet is not in charge, your financial situation is not King. Jesus calls His followers to remain in Him and to bear fruit for Him, which is the glory of God. Deeper is just an avenue for us to do that as a church and for you to do that as an individual. So I’ve been talking about this for a month. How do you want to go deeper?