Bill Johnson - How Do We Glorify God
Verse one, we’re going to read eight verses. Verse one: I am the true vine; my Father is the vine dresser. Jesus is giving a lesson, a metaphor, an illustration of an extremely profound reality. Let me tell you where we’re headed before we get there so that you’ll be able to picture it as we read it. If you take a vine, a grape vine, a vine that grows grapes, the branch connects to the vine, but the fibers of the branch and the fibers of the vine are so intertwined that you can’t separate them. You can cut the branch off, but there is actually a growth into itself, and that is the actual picture in Scripture of abiding in Christ: you can’t tell where He ends and where you start. There’s this intertwining of hearts, of minds, of wills; there’s this yieldedness to the heart and purposes of God so deeply that I can’t tell where He starts and where I am. That’s the work God is doing in us, and that’s the purpose of this illustration.
Verse two: Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit. God rewards all growth with pruning. How many of you want to grow? Yeah, He rewards all growth with pruning.
Verse three: You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. The word «clean» there is the same word as the word «prune.» You’re pruned; I pruned you. And then He says, «But you guys are already pruned because of the word I spoke to you.» What does it tell us? The discipline of God comes from His voice; the circumstances are just to get our attention. Oh, the whale swallowed Jonah, and that was the discipline of the Lord? No, it just got his attention so the next time God spoke, he was actually listening. He prunes us with His word; it’s called a sword for a reason.
Verse four: Abide in Me, and I in you, as the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine; neither can you, unless you abide in Me. Boy, isn’t that the truth? There’s nothing eternal I can produce through my own efforts, but everything is available if I yield to Him. I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit. Without Me, you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in Me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered. They gather them, throw them into the fire, and they are burned.
Verse seven: If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask whatever you desire, and it will be done for you. Please listen carefully—this is a verse I like to bring up; our team brings it up fairly often—these verses from John 14, 15, and 16. In three chapters, Jesus repeats one thought four times. Four times in three chapters, and the thought is this: whatever you ask for will be done. Four times he does it. Whatever you ask for will be done. In this particular verse, he creates the context for the absolute; he illustrates how I can live in such a way that I experience the overflowing fullness of God’s joy through answers to prayer. According to verse seven: abide in Me, let My words abide in you, and you will ask whatever you desire, and it will be done for you.
I don’t like the teaching that basically says if you pray for what God tells you to pray, He’ll answer your prayer. I know there’s truth there, but God makes Himself vulnerable to the desires of His people. This isn’t a license to control or manipulate God, but it is an invitation for a relationship where you actually have input and interaction into the outcome of things. The effort in consistent prayer is not to persuade God; it’s to deal with the powers entrenched in the area that we are pushing into, and the process transforms us so that we become responsible stewards of what we’ve just prayed into. See, Israel, if they would have walked into the Promised Land in an 11-day journey it was supposed to take, they would have wandered right out. They didn’t have the parameters for how to do life. They were careless in their worship of the golden calf and all these other foolish things. They wouldn’t have had the maturity to maintain the inheritance.
So the Lord puts us in situations where we push to build strength so that once the answer is released, we have the maturity to use it for His glory. There’s this overriding theme: if I could communicate one thing today, it would be this: when it becomes my passion for His will to be done on earth and for Him to be glorified as a result—that’s two sides of the same coin. When it becomes my passion to see the will of God done on earth—I don’t mean the parts that benefit me; I’m talking about the absolute demonstration of the Lordship of Jesus. When that becomes demonstrated, and God is glorified in all the earth.
In first service today, I read this from the Passion Translation of one of the psalms, and it said there’s a day coming when all the kings of the earth are going to give Him thanks because they’ve heard His voice. All the kings of the earth will give Him thanks because they’ve heard His voice. So God has these lofty plans, these lofty dreams, and I’m not angry about this, but I do get frustrated to hear so many believers say, «Well, that can’t happen until Jesus returns.» That’s only because we have greater faith in the return of Christ than we do in the power of the gospel. How does it end? I don’t know how it ends; I have ideas, and so do you. Neither of our opinions are worth much unless we got them from Him, you know? But the point is, the power of the gospel can change anything. He gave me an assignment not with the intention of ignoring me. He didn’t say seek for Me to be glorified in the earth; it’s not going to happen; I’ll come back someday and then it will.
Seek for My will to be done on earth as it is in heaven; it’ll just keep you positive in your thinking and keep you active until you die. He gave us an assignment. Why? Because of His personal dream to see something happen on a planet that has been marked by sin. He paid a price for the healing of the land and the healing of the people who live there, and He wants to see that world mirror the reality of the one He’s in complete charge of. So here He says: if you abide in Me, My words abide in you. I’ve had quite a few nights in the last couple of months, especially, where I’ve been awakened in the night. I don’t know if this happens to you, where you’re just perfectly sound asleep, and then all of a sudden your brain is working 100 miles an hour. How did that happen? It was a dead start. How did I suddenly wake up? I’ve got a million things going through my mind, and I’m just wide awake and physically tired, but wide awake mentally.
What I’ve been doing of late, rather than what I’ve always done, is just anchor my affection in Him. In recent days, I’ve had to bring another tool into my toolkit, and I will lay there and I won’t do this out loud because I don’t want to wake anybody, but I’ll lay there and just begin quoting Scripture: Psalms 34: I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise will continually be in my mouth. My soul shall make its boast in the Lord; the humble will hear it and be glad. Magnify the Lord with me; let us exalt His name together. I sought the Lord, and He heard me; He delivered me from all my fears. Taste and see that the Lord is good—and just lay there and begin to quote Scripture. What’s happening? The verses may have nothing to do with what’s in my mind. It doesn’t have to; it’s the living voice of God.
It’s the living voice of God that brings all the random stuff; it starts pruning: «This thought isn’t necessary; this one won’t help you; this one’s illegal.» It starts pruning all these illegitimate thoughts that are competing for my affection and restores me to this railroad track that already has a predetermined destination. It puts me on this thing: «I rejoice in the Lord always; again I say rejoice!»
I had somebody ask me just a few weeks ago, if you had to live the rest of your life on just one verse, what would it be? That’s easy: John 3:16. It’s hard to get any higher than that one; that’s the grand finale of all Scripture: For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have everlasting life. That’s not just an evangelism verse; that’s a «here, Bill, stay alive» verse. Get centered into what I’m saying and doing; become anchored in My presence once again.
This will help you fight off every distraction that is simply there to dilute your affections for Christ. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son; that whoever believes in Him would not perish but have everlasting life. Something happens in that midnight hour, 3 a.m. hour, where I was so awake; suddenly, I’m anchored into the person of peace.
Verse eight: By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so you will be My disciples. By this, My Father is glorified: that you bear much fruit. What is this in that verse? By this, if God’s going to be glorified by it, we probably ought to figure out what it is. By this, My Father is glorified, at minimum, in His answers to prayer. A fuller definition would be me abiding in Christ until there are answers to prayer, but that’s the «this.»
I want you to picture this: you have a concern for a relative, and it just wakes you up at night, and you pray. The next day, you do the same, and you pray for several days. And then all of a sudden, you get this phone call, and that relative was spared in an accident, or they turn their heart to the gospel and receive Christ; whatever it might be, you got an answer to prayer. What you don’t see is the angelic realm that witnessed the interaction between a born-again person, created in the image of God, who yielded themselves to be a worshiper by choice, interacting with the Great I Am and having an audience with the King of all kings, making a request that actually shaped the course of history.
The angelic realm celebrates: «Your plan worked! Your plan worked! You created them in Your image, and even when they fell, You restored them. You brought them into a place of co-laboring; You brought them into a place of partnership with the Almighty God. Fallen, redeemed man partners with the Almighty God; they pray, You act—things change; Your plan worked!»
By this, My Father is glorified: that you bear much fruit. By this, this abiding in this felt reality of the Spirit of God, the greatest reality in my life is the presence of God. To live unaware of it is a waste of time. To live unaware of this most precious gift of all—that the Holy Spirit Himself would dwell in me and rest upon me—to live unconscious of that one thing is to sell myself short of every divine purpose that He has created for me. I owe Him answers to prayer; I owe Him answers. He decided a long time ago to answer—that’s why He gave me promises. He gave me promises to pull me into a place of relationship with Him where together we would affect the course of history. It was already written; my name was already written in the document: this is what My son is created to do.
I can stand away from the river and say, «Well, there’s no current where I’m at,» or I can move to that which has been flowing since the beginning of time. God created us to co-labor with Him to see His purposes in the earth: be fruitful, multiply, subdue the earth. He engages humanity, engages people with divine purpose.