The True Vine (John 15:1-8)

PODCAST The True Vine (John 15:1-8) June 25, 2023 | Kyle Bjerga TRANSCRIPT_______________________________________________+ The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy. Good morning. Go ahead and grab your Bibles and turn to John chapter 15. As you grab your Bibles, I’m also gonna ask you to do something that we don’t normally do, I want you to grab out your smartphone. If you have your smartphone, please grab it, you can ignore all the notifications. This is not to, to check what’s going on in the Cubs game or anything like that in London. But I do want to have your phones out for just a minute, we’re gonna do a little exercise together. If you don’t have a smartphone, I’m hoping somebody’s close enough to you can see what we’re going to do here. I had some people that iPhones and Androids do that this week. And it does work. But some phones are older. So this may not work for you. So again, you could look on with somebody else, if you see this. So what I want you to do, if you’re an iPhone user, I want you to go to settings. And I want you to find screen time. Wow. And I want you to click on screentime. If you’re an Android user, you should be able to go to settings as well tap digital well-being or parental controls, it might be the same one and see if a screen pops up. I was not expecting that reaction. But I think you know where I’m going with this. So everyone that has a smartphone and hopefully knew enough that you see this if you don’t hopefully you can you can look out with someone else. This should tell you how much time you have spent on your phone today, this last week or on average for the week. You can also like my phone tells me what apps I use and how long I was on those apps, as well. So if you have that picture in your mind, you can go ahead and turn it off and now put the phone away. So we’re not distracted. The average American, they say based on our spends about two months of their year on their phone. That’s the average American across all ages, anybody with a smartphone. If you add smartwatches into that mix, we start to realize we are very connected to our phones to our technology. So our phones and our watches can keep track of every step. Every breath, what you’re doing while you’re sleeping. It congratulates you when you’ve done well on your fitness goals. It reminds you of things, it talks to you, you can talk back to it. And it knows what you like and what you don’t like. Is there anyone in your life that knows you better than your phone? The better question might be is there anybody that you know better than your phone? Listen to a Professor Daniel Miller says about cell phones. He did this massive study through the University College London. And he says this at the end of the study. So the smartphone is no longer just a device that we use. It’s become the place where we live. So there is a concern with how connected we are to technology. We know this, we’ve talked about this here before but there’s a larger problem for American Christians. Because our stats in our phones aren’t that much different than the rest of the world. But there is something that is a little bit more concerning. Because if we leave our house without our phone, we panic. We need to go back and get it. But American Christians spend 15 minutes or less a day in Bible study and prayer with Jesus. There’s a big difference here in our phones and our time spent cultivating a relationship with Him. And so if we had a daily screen time that would show us how long have you spent cultivating your relationship with Jesus today or this week? Or on average? What is it for a week? What would it say? Because a lot of us have questions like why am I not growing spiritually? And a lot of times we need to look at this as possibly the reason the Scripture is clear that our spiritual growth is directly related to our communion with Jesus, our intimacy with Him. And part of that spiritual growth is called bearing fruit. What does it mean to bear fruit? We’re gonna talk a lot about fruit today. The fruit is the evidence that shows that you are walking with Jesus. Does your phone know you love Jesus? That’s a fair question ask. Does your phone know that you love Jesus because it knows everything else about you. I believe every Christian here wants to bear fruit. And God wants us to bear fruit. He wants to produce fruit in us that’s what he is about. And so our main idea this morning you’ll see there in your notes is this a faithful life is a fruitful life. A faithful life is a fruitful life. So the question we need to ask ourselves today in our passage is am I bearing fruit? Am I bearing fruit now we’re going to jump around in the text today. Hey, so I want to start just by reading chapter 15, one through eight. That’s where we’r...