Okay, good morning. Welcome to Seoul Bible Church this first Sunday of March. I'm glad to have you all here. I do pray that the Lord is blessing you so far this morning, that you are abiding by being here. So we are thankful for that. That is our theme this year is abiding in Christ. And we're continuing to work on that. So I'll be continuing in that vein, uh, this morning as we continue in our Sunday school program here for the adult Sunday school. But before we do that, we do have a monthly verse, which goes along with the theme of abiding and it is John 15, six. So, John 15.6 says, if a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered. And men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. John 15.6. All right, let's look at this for a few minutes here, and then we will come back and try to sing it, and then we'll move on. Okay, are we ready to try this? Let's go ahead and try it here. John 15 says, if a man abides not in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withered. And men gather them and cast them into the fire and are burned. John 15 says. All right, very good. So we are working on this theme of abiding. This is a commandment of God, right? This comes from the last, really one of the last conversations that Christ has with his disciples and he's giving them, you know, that last minute pep talk before he's prepared to leave to go to heaven and he's saying, abide in me. as I and you. And so that's what we're talking about, and that's what we've been talking about, and that's what I will be talking about this morning and on through this month. Now, we just looked at John 15.6, and this morning I'm going to be using John 15.4, a couple verses up, as the starting place for this morning's discussion. And so John 15.4 says this, Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine, no more can ye, except ye abide in me. So, Jesus puts forth very clearly this idea of the vine and the branch. And the point being that comes across is fairly obvious. Jesus being the branch is the source of all strength. And we are to be tapped into that strength as the branches. And we must remain connected to the vine to get the strength that we need to abide. So we are commanded to abide and then we are given the example of how that happens. But the problem is abiding is not easy. We read this verse and we say, okay, abide in Christ and I in you, but abiding is not easy. Now, In order to understand this, we have to understand what abiding means. And I spent a lot of time looking in dictionaries, trying to find abiding, and they had a lot of really, you know, related but not really, it didn't really kind of fit. And then I started looking at some devotionals on abiding, and one of them said that in the simple form, And the way that Jesus would have used it is that abiding means to stay or remain. So abide in Christ means to stay or remain in Christ, in the things of Christ. So that seems pretty easy, right? I mean, stay, remain, don't move. Not a whole lot of action required there, right? Seems pretty easy. But it's not. And the reason it's not as easy as it might seem is our natural tendency is not to stay. Our natural tendency is to wander, to wander off. We see this in Isaiah. chapter 3 of 53 of Isaiah verse 6 the first part of that verse says all we like sheep have gone astray we have turned everyone to our own way so abiding means to stay but we're not wired that way we have to work Stay that seems kind of counterintuitive You got to work to stay but we do we have to work to stay because it's not our nature It's not our nature to stay Cuz we are as natural man sinners We have a sin nature and that sin nature Gives us the Wandering mind one causes us to wander and not stay attached as we should and there's a reason why Abiding in Christ just maybe doesn't seem natural. It doesn't come natural. It takes work to do it And that's because in the truth of the matter we are not natural branches Says abide in me I am the vine, you are the branch. But we're not natural branches. We didn't just grow out of the vine. We were placed there. We've been grafted in. Artificially grafted in to salvation. And we have a picture of that as well in Romans chapter 11 verse 23. Now, Romans chapter 11, okay, we're gonna mix a lot of metaphors. We're talking about branches and vines, and we're talking about sheep, and now we're gonna talk about olive trees, but it's the same concept at the heart. In Romans 11, 23 says, and they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again. And it's talking about the olive tree, and you branch that olive tree in. And it's something that we do in modern times. Many times you can find places in nurseries, plant nurseries, or even online if you look at some. You can find some plants that they've grafted different branches into one stalk, I know there's one place, it's called, I don't know, some kind of tree. And it's like a pear tree, but they've grafted in apple branches and cherry branch. And this tree produces like eight different kinds of fruit when it grows up. Because each branch grows whatever it was growing before. It's been grafted in. But God does that to us. Through sin, and the sin of Adam and Eve, the original sin we were, removed from God. Through salvation we're put back in that vine and we're taped up and we're grafted back in there and then we grow into that vine. So that is the picture that we're seeing here. It's not easy to abide because it's not our nature. It's not our nature to abide in the in the vine because we're not natural branches. We've been grafted in. And we sometimes have the tendency to be like the branch that we came out of, or the vine that we came out of. So we have to continually work to be abiding with God. Our sin nature is at odds with God's holiness. Jesus is the only one who can constantly abide, right? We're singing constantly abiding. We're singing about Christ, not us. We're trying to constantly abide, but he is the only one who can't. Now, if we are going to abide in Christ as he in us, we have to do that by tapping into his power, into the vine. So the power to abide doesn't come from us, it comes from him, but we have to work to receive that power, to get that power. So abiding takes work. Abiding is like sanctification. You don't get it all at once. You don't get, you know, you get saved and you get a big box of abiding, right? We don't get that. It comes slowly it comes from God. He is the source of our ability to abide But it's up to us to seek it out. So Abiding is against our nature. That's the first point why it is so hard to abide is It's against our nature. It's against our sin nature that we all have even after salvation we all have that sin nature and But also, abiding takes work. And we all, to some degree, have a little bit of adversity to work. It's hard. You have to do things. You have to take action. Abiding requires constant action. So here's some of the actions that we must do to abide. The first one is connecting to God through listening to him speak through his word. So the first thing we gotta do is connect, listen. Okay, now how do we do this? Two ways. We all should be having a daily time of personal Bible study. Reading God's word. Looking into God's word. trying to understand the Word of God. That's one way that we work at connecting and listening to God speak. The second way is attending church regularly and hearing good preaching. So we work on our own to read the Bible. We should have a good reading routine that we read and study the Bible. And then we go to church and we hear Bible messages presented to us. So, we're going to see in a lot of these things there's a private aspect and a public aspect in all of this. And neither one is more important than the other. They're both important. God has told us this, that It's important to connect. The next item of action that we must do to abide is communing with God by responding to his word through prayer. Now again, there's a private and a public aspect to this. Not only should we be privately reading the Bible and studying on our own, we should be praying on our own. We should have a daily time of prayer, a prayer closet that we go to, that we pray about the things that we would ask God for. And Galatians 6.5 kind of sums this out. For every man shall bear his own burden. You've got burdens, you've got things that bother you, that you need to bring to the Lord. You do that during your private time of prayer. As you have this private time of prayer, you will be abiding in Christ. And then we have corporate prayer, okay? For us, this would be Wednesday evening prayer service. where we come together and we pray for one another. In the school, every Monday, we have Warriors Club, 815, where we come together or we invite people to come together and pray together for the things of the school. Now we're praying on our own all day every day for the things of the school, but Just as Galatians 6.5 says, every man shall bear his own burden, in Galatians 6.2, just before that, it says, bear one another's burden. And so, fulfill the law of Christ. And fulfilling the law of Christ equals abiding. So again, individual prayer, very important. Corporate prayer, Very important. Equally important. One is not more important than the other. It's not like God says, here is my commandment. You can do A or B. No. God says, this is my commandment. Do A and B. Do them both. They're both important. They're equally important. So we should pray individually. We should pray corporately. We should read the Word of God and study the Word of God privately. We should study the Word of God and hear the Word of God and listen to the Word of God publicly. So, looking at His Word, praying back to Him, the next one is something that is kind of difficult, okay? That is rehearsing Gospel truth. What does rehearsing gospel truth mean? Well, first of all, memorizing. Memorizing the Word of God. We've all been trying to memorize these verses here, John 15, 1 through 7, right? We've been trying to memorize them. Some have been trying to memorize them in both English and Korean. But we're trying to memorize it. It's important. What did the psalmist say about memorizing scripture? Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against thee. OK? The thing that hampers our ability to abide is sin. How do we fight against that sin? that would keep us from abiding so we can abide. Hide God's word in our heart so that we may not sin against God. So Bible memorization. I tell my Bible class all the time, memorizing is not just something you do to get a good grade on a quiz. As a student, that's something you want to do, get a good grade on a quiz, but that's Not even the important part of memorizing scripture. The important part of memorizing scripture is so that when you are tempted, that scripture pops up. Oh, wait, I'm not supposed to do that. That's the purpose. And that's hard. Memorizing is hard. You've got to work at it. You've got to read it over and over and over and maybe write it over and over and over. That's really hard. The second part of rehearsing God's truth is memorizing it but then meditating upon it. You memorize it and then you repeat it to yourself from time to time and you think about it. What is God saying? What a blessing this is to know these verses. So we memorize, we meditate on it. We have to do our homework. Right? There you go. Another one of those nasty words that students never want to hear. Homework, right? But we have homework. It takes work. It takes effort. You can't just come and sit in church and just enjoy the hour that you get to be around all your friends and go home and never think again about what was said. Pay attention to what was said or do any of the things that we are supposed to do. We don't do our homework. We're not going to abide. We can't. It just doesn't work that way. All right? So we've got to listen to God's word. We've got to respond to God's word. And then we've got to rehearse God's word. The fourth thing is developing a moment-by-moment awareness of our need for Him in every situation. Instead of relying on our own strength, we have to come to the conclusion that we need God every moment of the day. We never know when sin is going to pop up. We have to be ready. How are we ready? By doing the first three, gets us ready for developing this moment-by-moment awareness that we need him. He is the vine. He is the source of our power. We cannot do it on our own. We are supposed to try. We have to put in the effort to do it, but we can't do it on our own. only through Him. And so we need to develop this awareness that it's only through Him that we abide. OK? Next one, trusting in Him. When we are tempted to find our own solutions to our problems, right? We run into a problem, the first thing we think is, what am I going to do? And that's not the right answer. The right answer is, Lord, Tell me, what am I going to do, right? Give me that power. Okay, the next one. Even harder than the rest, maybe. Submitting to Him in obedience. Refraining from sin. Pursuing righteousness. So, not doing this, taking action not to do this, and taking action to run after His righteousness. And that's really hard when his path seems different from our own desires. We want X, Y, and Z. The next five years, Lord, this is my five-year plan, X, Y, Z. And God says, no, we're doing W. What? No. X, Y, Z? No. W. Right? And we have to say, OK, W it is. Put this away. Right? That's not easy. We're stubborn. We're hard-headed. We don't like to do what people tell us to do. And we don't like to do what God tells us to do, because we have our sin nature. OK? It's, you know, when babies are born, I think the first word that any baby ever learns is no. It doesn't matter. This sweet little baby, you say, hey, Pick up your toys. No. Do this. No. Right? That's how we are. We're quick to say no. God says, I want you to do this. No. Right? We have to stop saying no and start submitting to his will, submitting to him in obedience. And then persevering with endurance with the company of saints. with our eyes fixed on the Savior as we run the race. Hebrews 12, 1-2 is where we get this, right? Where it says, surrounded by such a great, what was it? Cloud. Cloud of witnesses, there's the word. I always say crowd because it makes more sense to me. crowd, cloud, whatever. We're looking at a bunch of witnesses. We're running with other people. We're not running along. Look around. We're all running in this together. We're all in this race together. There's people all around the world running the race with us. And we should be running with them. We should be persevering. That means we don't give up. We don't stop. We keep running. OK? Why? Anybody want to run a marathon tomorrow? We don't have the day off. We have a day off school. Anybody want to run a marathon? No way! I can't run 26 miles. Why not? Never ran 26 miles. But guess what? If we said, you know what? Maybe next March 1st, we'll run a marathon, and we all started going out, and we ran from here to EMART and back. A little farther, a little farther, maybe eventually we could run 26 point whatever it is miles for the marathon. Maybe we wouldn't win, but we would cross that finish line and we would say, I did it, thanks to God, right? Because I put in the work. That's what it's like to abide. It takes work. And we think, OK, well, it's staying. That means not moving. It takes work not to move. Trust me. Some of us know that. It takes a lot of work to not move. So we've got to connect and listen, both personally and as a group. We've got to respond in prayer, both personally and in group format, corporate format. We've got to rehearse the gospel through memorization, through meditation. We've got to develop our awareness that we need God every moment. We've got to trust him when we want to do things our own way. We've got to trust his wisdom. We've got to submit to those things in obedience. We've got to refrain from sin, pursue righteousness, and persevere. Now, some of the reasons why we don't like to do that is, you know, persevering is, we said it would be like preparing for a marathon. And I guarantee, if we started preparing for a marathon, and we said, OK, tomorrow we're all going to meet and we're going to run one quarter of a mile. And we all came here and we ran one quarter of a mile. Those of us who work in SES would all come into work on Tuesday morning complaining that we could barely walk. Our legs hurt. Our muscles hurt. My lungs hurt. I haven't breathed that much in 10 years, right? It's painful. And that's the last point. What makes abiding so difficult? The first point is it's against our nature. It's unnatural for us as sinners with a sin nature. The second part is it takes work. The third part is learning to abide can be painful. We look at 2 Timothy 2, 3. It talks about, Thou therefore endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. So that tells us there are going to be hard times. There are going to be painful things. There are going to be less than pleasant things. And we are to endure them. We are to go through them. Why? It makes us better. It helps us to stay still, to abide in Christ. And really, this whole thing about enduring hardness, it's really kind of not hard set. Because what might be hardness for one person is not the same as what's hardness for another person. You know, the Lord has given me a lot of past experience to kind of teach me things. Lord knows that's the way I learn. Give me a book, I'll read the book. Ask me what it said, I won't be able to tell you a thing. Send me out somewhere and say, do this, this, this, A, B, C, D. I'll remember how to do it. I can do it, right? It's just the way we have different learning abilities. When I read this, endure hardness as a good soldier, it resonates with me. Because even though technically I wasn't a soldier, OK? Soldiers are army guys. I was an Air Force guy. So I was an airman. But I know what it's like to endure hardness. Now, if you ask any of the other branches, they will laugh and say, yeah, the Air Force doesn't know anything about enduring hardness. And we do, we got it better than everybody else, we admit it. That's why we're better than everybody else. The idea is this, endure hardness. What does it mean? Well, in my military career, if I was to be asked, what was the time that you endured hardness as a soldier, as a military member? I would probably say, well, it was somewhere around January and February of 1986. It's the first time I remember enduring hardness. Because that's when I came up for a military exercise, and we left the Philippines, where it was always 80, 90 degrees. And we came to Korea in January. And Korea in January is pretty much always the same. Cold. And we didn't stay in a nice, warm place with undull heating. Oh, no. They put us on the golf course at Osan Air Base in those old green army tents. And in that tent, we had one little, in the middle, one small little stove that ran on jet fuel, because jet fuel is a lot like kerosene. And the rules with jets, if we filled the tanks with jet fuel, And when the plane comes back, they take the jet fuel out of the tanks so it doesn't corrode still. But when you take it out, you get pieces of metal and rust and whatever is inside the tank. And so the idea is we don't put that gas back into the jet because it's impure somehow. And we don't want to cause further problems. We don't want a jet, any airplane, but a jet, when the engine quits, halfway through your mission, it's not a good thing. You can't just pull off to the side of the road, right? You're 20,000 feet in the air. So we would have these stoves, and we would get these stoves going, and it would barely heat. And we would sleep in two sleeping bags. They gave us two sleeping bags, a summer weight and a winter weight. And the first thing they taught us, or those people who were our supervisors taught us, young guys, it was our first time there. You take that summer weight sleeping bag, and you stuff it inside the winter weight sleeping bag, and you sleep in both of them. Because it's cold in Korea in January in that tent in the middle of the field. And we would dress. I mean, you would go to bed with your long johns on, a sweatsuit over that, gloves, hat, scarf. And you got in bed, and you zipped up the sleeping bag. zip up all the way up and it had one little hole like that, your face would stick out. And that's how you slept, because it was freezing cold. And then in the morning, you'd have to go get a shower, and the shower was like, you know, 50 yards away. And you had to run to it, and it was another tent. And you'd run into the tent, and you had to be careful, because it just had wood flat, you know, on the bottom. And it's below freezing. So they're covered with ice. And so you run on them. And if you've ever stood on ice in your bare feet, it's a little painful. And so you run over. And the shower was a big cord. And you pulled the cord. And so if you got to the shower too early, if you were the first person in the shower and you pulled that rope, the water was like 200 degrees. You'd be like, ah! Getting scalded. If you went too late, if you were the last guy in the shower, you got ice cold water in the middle of the winter in Korea. So everybody was trying to be in the middle somewhere. So you could get water that wouldn't scald you, but wasn't freezing either. And doing that, we would think, wow, that is really enduring hardship. Living like that is really enduring hardship. I go to Korea in the middle of January, and I live in a tent. That is hard stuff. And then I open up my history book, and I read about some guys who spent their winter months in Josephson Reservoir. And I say, wow, I had it easy, right? So suffering, what one person suffers and thinks is suffering might not be nowhere near as much suffering as others suffer. But we are to endure it. Whatever suffering comes, we are to endure it. OK? So what is hardness? What is the hardness we're to endure? Temptation. OK? We all like shiny things, right? We're on our race. We're racing. And someone has a shiny thing. Whoa, look at that, right? You know, we all hear the joke. I'm doing the best I can. Look, squirrels, right? We do that. Or temptation, sin presents temptation. We've got to endure and refrain from that temptation. Sometimes hardness comes in the form of rebuke. We don't like being yelled at. We don't like being corrected. But sometimes we've got to do that. We get rebuked. What are you doing? Or just correction in itself. Sometimes we just don't like to be corrected. But why would we want to endure hardness then? If it's painful, why do it, right? That would be the Epicurean way of thinking, right? If it's painful, don't do it. But we need to do it because it makes us better. All right, going back to the marathon race. I can't run a marathon. No way I'm going to run 26 point whatever miles today. If I practiced and had sore muscles, burning lungs, whatever, in a year, I might be able to run 26 point whatever miles for a marathon. I might not be the fastest marathon runner, but I would be better than I am today. So enduring that hardship of having to go out there every day and run, to do the exercise, to put in the effort, it makes us better. So yeah, memorizing scripture, maybe that's something that's hard. You know, praying in a large group with other people, you know, maybe we're shy. We don't like to do that. But we need to do that because it makes us stronger. It causes us to refocus on abiding in Christ by enduring hardness. Okay? Now, this reminds me of a story. Maybe some of you know this story. Maybe some of you have heard this story. But I heard this story from a pastor probably about 20 years ago now, and it kind of makes sense. And it's a story of how shepherds keep sheep from wandering off. Okay? Now, we all know the Bible story, the lost sheep that leave the 99 and go find the one. We know the idea about sheep and we just talked about all we as sheep have gone astray. We like to wander. Well, when the lambs are born in the spring and the shepherds are guarding the sheep, and you got them all in one area, and you're watching them, and you're counting them, and one's missing. So you go out, and you look for that sheep. And you find it, and you bring it back. And then you sit down, and the next day or a couple hours later, you look around, and you're missing one again. And you go out, and you find that sheep. And there he is out wandering around. So you bring him back. And the shepherd will do that one, two, three times, bring the sheep back. But if that little lamb continues to wander, the last time the shepherd brings it back and he takes that little lamb and he holds it in his lap and he grabs one of its legs and he just snaps it, breaks its leg. I'm sure that's not without pain for that little lamb. And then he takes that leg and he puts it back together, puts a cast around it, and puts that little lamb next to him. And now that little lamb can't go anywhere. He's got a broken leg. So he stays there beside him. And as that lamb heals, he takes that cast off. That lamb stays there beside him. It doesn't wander anymore. Why does it not wander? Because it remembers what happened the last time it wandered away, right? So it endures hardship. It does that. So in the story, there's some things that we need to understand. That sounds pretty harsh, break the lamb's leg. That's pretty harsh. But you've got to think about it. Why did the shepherd break the leg? And the reason is because wandering away from the shepherd could cause harm to the sheep. There's bears and lions out there that could tear it up. Not only that, but if you know anything about sheep, sheep are kind of one of the dumbest animals there is on the face of the planet. Because if a sheep falls into a hole and lands on its back with its feet in the air, it doesn't struggle to get back to its feet. It will just lay there until it dies. If someone doesn't come pick it up, it's not getting back on its feet. So there's danger. If we wander away, not only is there things that could harm us out there, but we could just fall in a hole, get comfortable, and lay there and shrivel up and die. And so there's a purpose. There's harmful things. So the action of the shepherd is not taken out of anger or not taken out of, you know, some kind of weird desire to just break a leg of a sheep. The action of the shepherd is taken in love. That rebuke, that pain inflicted on the lamb is out of love to produce the abiding that is necessary. Now, I'm sure, I know for a fact, I got a lot of spankings growing up. I know I got spankings growing up. But you know what, if I think about it, I can't remember any of them. Maybe one or two maybe, but I can't remember. I was probably disciplined hundreds of times. I don't really remember them. But you know what the evidence is of my being spanked as a child and receiving discipline as a child? I kind of don't do those things anymore. The result is, for some degree, some might disagree, but I kind of am a functional person in society because of the discipline that I got. the shepherd disciplines out of love. And through the pain of correction, the mending of ills, right, that leg heals up, and the action of repentance, the lamb learned to abide. The lamb learned to stay next to the shepherd. And as we go through the pain of being corrected in our Christian lives, You know, how do we get corrected? Sometimes people come up and yell at us. Sometimes we're supposed to be reading the Bible, right? And you're reading the Bible and it says, thou shalt not do this, and you're like, uh-oh, right? Or thou shalt do this, and you're like, uh-oh, right? That's rebuke as well. What do you do when you read something in the Bible that says you're supposed to or not supposed to be doing it, and you're either not or you are? You correct. You start doing what the Bible tells you to do. That will mend up your sinful nature in some way. It's not going to get rid of it, but the more you focus on doing the things of Christ, the less you have to focus on being Sinful, right? And if we come to Christ and we repent, oh, I didn't even know I was supposed to do this, God. But please forgive me for doing it. And I'll work to not do it again. And as we do that, as we put in the work, endure the hardship, we will come to abide in Christ. So abiding is not easy. It's not something that comes naturally. It's not something that doesn't come without a degree of effort on our part. We can never do it on our own, but we have to put the effort in to try, to use God's power to do what we're supposed to do. And it's a continual process. It doesn't just end. You keep abiding, keep abiding, and you abide more and more. Just like, same idea as sanctification. Let's pray. Lord Heavenly Father, we thank you for this morning. We thank you for your word. Lord, we pray that you would help us to continue to seek to abide in you, to continue to trust, to endure, to do the things that you commanded us to do. read your word, to pray. Lord, to run with each other, to help each other, encourage each other. Lord, we pray that you'll be with us now through the rest of this day. Help us as we have the opportunity this afternoon to go out and place your word in the hands of others. Lord, we pray that you would help us to abide. that we could put away fears, desires, whatever may be standing in the way of helping us to abide, that we can set those aside and run the race the way you would have us to do. In your name we pray, Lord. Amen.