Last Words Group Study - Part 3 - Rock Point Church

So what does it mean to abide? It just means that you offer yourself to God and allow him to develop the fruit of the spirit, which is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control.

And you know what? The good news, they don't have to make any laws against this kind of fruit, so feel free to share it with everyone. Yet remaining or abiding in Christ is not an automatic act. To abide in him, we have to set everything aside,

the things that we might draw strength from and begin to look to Jesus for those things. One of the things that that you know that you're on the right pathway of remaining in Jesus is just you have this real sense of just of your own personal weaknesses and your need for him. You know, when we dwell with Christ,

his words act like pruning shears, cutting away the parts of our lives that will not produce good works. And those honor him.

As we worship God alone and ask Jesus to tear down the idols in our lives, the spirit begins to break up the hard soil of our hearts and allows his plans for us to just take root in our will and that's incredibly important. Also a greater hunger for God's word and really a desire to voluntarily,

I gotta say voluntarily place ourselves under the accountability of other Christians won't seem terrifying, but actually will become desirable.

Then a new God confidence will sprout up in our lives and we'll start to believe that we can really do all things that Jesus, the Master Gardener, has planned for us to do before the foundation of the world.

Jesus promised those who abide in him are no longer slaves to him, but were actually his friends. Now that's astonishing, but even makes it more incredible is the fact that he goes one step further and he says, Because of this deep relationship that he has with his friends,

the Father will give them whatever they ask when they ask it in Jesus' name. Now you may be thinking, So let me get this straight. You're telling me Christians can really ask for absolutely anything in Jesus name and they'll receive it?

I mean, don't get it. Does asking in Jesus name give our prayers some kind of turbo boost or are they some magical formula that forces God to give us anything that we want? Sadly, some have taken those promises to mean those very things, but it's really not the meaning of the passage.

First, doing or praying Jesus' name is about aligning with his will and his purposes. Jesus said that when we glorify him it's the same as glorifying the Father. So in essence this is a plea to God asking him to help us desire and pray for the things that he wants most, what needs to be accomplished in his kingdom.

So to pray according to his will is to pray that God receives the most glory possible. You know, as humans, sometimes we pray and ask for things that, you know, might be right and sometimes we pray selfishly according to our own desires. Just as Jesus humbly accepted the plans that God had for him,

he wanted most in his life that he would make the Father's name famous. When we pray in Christ's name, it should constantly remind us to align our thoughts, our will, and even our emotions with God instead of trying to coerce him to do what we want him to do.

Now you might be thinking, so can I know the will of God? Well, one's simple. The most direct path of knowing God's will is always through his word. But I think at this point I need to forewarn you. When you, as a friend of God, begin to pray according to his will,

God's name gets magnified and that's good, but it often results in the world's hate for Jesus is now aimed at you.

One of the greatest examples of this took place back in 1943 during World War II. That's when Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was a prominent Lutheran pastor, finally had the guts to stand up against Hitler's persecution of the people in Germany. You know at that time many of his fellow evangelical pastors

who conformed to the Nazis party ideology that the Jewish persons, people that were converted to Christianity shouldn't be baptized because they were subhuman. Imagine that. And because he refused to comply to this law, Bonhoeffer was sent to Flossenburg Concentration Camp. And he was executed in 1945,

and that's sad because it was just before the allied troops liberated all the death camps. He wrote in his diary, which actually became the book, The Cost of Discipleship, about suffering. He said, suffering is the badge of the true Christian. Disciple is not above his master.

He found that Luther concluded that suffering was among the marks of the true church. The word discipleship means allegiance to the suffering of Christ and therefore not all, it's not all that surprising that Christians should be called to suffer.

You know, as Christians, we shouldn't expect smooth sailing when it comes to our interactions with the world. I mean, in fact, I think if we never experience opposition, it may be an indicator that something's wrong.

But I don't want you to go overboard with this. Conversely, I think hatred leveled against us doesn't mean that God is blessing us either. We should always seek God to determine the source of our conflicts and ask if our suffering is the result of our own sin.

And I think we can really take the advice of the Apostle Paul who really knew a little bit about suffering. Now he says, As long as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. But at the same time, if it's time for you to stand for God, stand firm. You're gonna be richly rewarded.

The Apostle John ends chapter 15 with a direct quote from Jesus who is speaking in his prophetic voice. He's looking ahead and he informs us it's the plight of all true Christians in every generation until he returns, if they persecuted me, guess what? They're going to persecute you.

Because all believers are connected to Jesus, they will at times get the same treatment that Jesus did. But the real question is, what made Jesus, who just went about the countryside healing people and talking about God such a polarizing figure? I mean, think about this. All of his life, Jesus was hated.

All the way from King Herod and his attempt to kill him as a young child to the religious leaders, the Sadducees and the Pharisees who tried to convince the Roman overseers that he was a huge threat to the peace of Jerusalem, that they had to have him crucified, why did the establishment hate him so much?

Why does his own brothers malign and reject him? Simply put, it was because of his perfect life and the light that just emanated from Him. His light revealed their darkness. They hid their darkness under these thinly veiled cloaks of self righteousness, but the truth is they were exposed and everybody

who wasn't blind by the power knew it. Recently, read an article and accused Jesus of just being paranoid, that his death was caused accidentally by it was a byproduct of the itinerant teacher getting caught up in some kind of political undercurrent between the Jews and the Romans,

that he was the victim of a few French groups who tried to make him their king. The article went on to say, this kind of made me mad, that in the last few hours of Jesus' life, he succumbed to the pressure of his imminent arrest and possible death, and he started getting paranoid

and was so convinced that anyone who identified him in that present day or in future generations would actually suffered the same fate. And they actually diagnosed him and they said that he suffered from delusions of grandeur. Imagine that.

And many well adjusted, smart, and I guess educated people have decided that this is the case. But there's a problem. The only problem with this diagnosis is it ignores the facts. There's a group called the Center of the Study of Global Christianity who tracks persecution of Christians

all over the globe. They found that 900,000 Christians have been murdered in the last decade. Now, these are people who are just sharing their faith and being killed for it.

This equated about ninety thousand a year, or this is incredible, one Christian is murdered every six minutes for their faith. Another group you may have heard of, the Voice of the Martyrs, which is a global Christian research, but they also serve as a defense organization, estimates that 900,000,

which is almost a billion, Christians have been executed for their faith since the time that Jesus walked on the earth. So let me ask you So who was paranoid? Was it Jesus? Or was it the world itself that saw the Prince of Peace as a threat? The Lord of love is someone to hate?

Who's paranoid today when Christians find their churches being attacked even though they're living quiet, restrained lives, just hoping their witness of honesty and integrity and the love of gentleness would just speak for themselves? With every opportunity for the gospel to break through into new people groups,

there's also grave danger. But thank God that in this generation, there are still brave men, women, and even children who are empowered by the helper, the spirit of truth, who comes from the father and will not stop until every tribe and every tongue is introduced to the king who is persecuted for their sake. Let me pray.

Father, I just wanna thank you because I had this opportunity to study Revelation not too long ago when I found that there was a special place for those who give their life for Christ. It says that they are sat under the throne room of God, under the table that you stand on. It's amazing.

And constantly they cry up, When will you avenge our blood? When will you make things right? And you are not deaf. You're not deaf to their ears. And you are waiting. You are waiting till the full grouping of people comes in. You're waiting to every tribe and every tongue is representative.

And let me tell you, we don't deserve it. We take the most lovely people as the world and we kill them and they die for their sakes. Father, living in Gilbert, that's really tough because we don't really have spiritual persecution like that.

But I just ask that we would learn to abide in Christ in a way that His Spirit of truth is so within us and we have those fruits of the Spirit that we just can't stop talking about Jesus. We might not die for the faith, but it might be hard at work for the faith.

Or it might be hard in your small group for the faith because you're so excited about Jesus and other people just don't get it. Or maybe you go to school and you're a student and the classroom and the teachers say that you can't talk about Jesus. God, just give us the strength and the understanding

that all the tears and suffering that we have here, you're gonna catch in a bottle and it's gonna be glorious. And that you will give us one day a reward that's greater than we can ever imagine.

You're giving us crowns, you're giving these gifts that we'll be able to lay down at your feet every time we have a worship service and say, look what Jesus did through lowly me. Look how powerful he is to do this with me. Oh, how I long for everyone under the sound of my voice to hear,

Well done, good and faithful servant. You are really faithful over some little things. Let me give you much more. We can't wait to see what's going to happen when we get there, but until then, empower us to do the work that you have for us to do. We ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen.