Abiding in God (Kirk Giles) | Devoted

Well, good morning, church. It is great to see you take your

Bibles and open up to the Gospel of John chapter 15.

John 15 · chapter mention

John chapter 15, that's page 958.

John 15 · chapter mention

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

John 15 · chapter mention

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

John 15 · chapter mention

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

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

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 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

Hebrews 10 · chapter mention

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

1 Corinthians 11 · chapter mention

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.