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Date: Fifth Sunday of Easter Text: John 15:1-8
www.kongsvingerchurch.org
Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church.
Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern Minnesota.
We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.
And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg.
The Holy Gospel according to St. John, the 15th chapter.
Jesus said, I am the true vine.
My Father is the vine dresser.
Every branch of mine that does not bear fruit, He takes away.
And every branch that does bear fruit, He prunes, that it may bear more fruit.
Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you.
Abide in me, and I in you.
As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.
I am the vine, you are the branches.
Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit.
For apart from me you can do nothing.
If anyone does not abide in me, he is thrown away like a branch and withers, and the branches that are gathered and thrown into the fire
and burned.
If you abide in me and my word abides in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you.
By this my Father is glorified that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.
This is the Gospel of the Lord.
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
You may be seated.
So let me ask you a question.
When you think of the Antichrist, kind of an ominous phrase, isn't it?
The Antichrist, the one who is opposed to Christ.
What do you think about?
Do you think about that movie, The Omen, and Damien, and you think about the Hollywood versions?
Do you think that the Antichrist is something that we need to worry about, you know, in the future?
Maybe in the distant future, maybe in the, well, not so distant future.
But the Antichrist is nothing that we need to trouble ourselves with today.
If that is what you think, your thinking is in grave error.
The Antichrist, the spirit of Antichrist, which is preparing the way for the man of lawlessness, has been
present, working in the church for two millennia.
And God the Holy Spirit has actually commanded every Christian to not be
naive, to not believe anybody who just comes along claiming all kinds of stuff.
And you're going to note that much of the Christian church today is marked by a bunch of people who do not do what
Christ commands, or what the Holy Spirit commands in our epistle text.
Listen to these words.
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God.
The do not believe portion there in that epistle text is an imperative in the Greek,
which means it's a direct command, orders from God himself.
So if somebody comes along and they tell you a tall tale about their exploits and all the things that they're doing,
of the demons that they're slaying, of the dead that they are raising, and they are not sound in how they
handle the biblical texts, then you need to know you are commanded by God to not be a dupe.
You're commanded by God to search the scriptures and to test everybody.
And oh, by the way, that applies to me.
Nobody gets to say, well, Rosebro said it, therefore it's got to be true.
Rosebro's a sinner, and Rosebro's capable of messing up all kinds of stuff, and I do it with regularity.
Therefore everything I say gets to be tested.
Even the Apostle Paul, his message was tested by the church in Berea when he brought the good
news of Christ being the Messiah, and also that he was an eyewitness to the resurrection.
They said to the Apostle Paul, hey, slow down there, text, we're going to need to check to see if what you're
saying is true.
And what did they do?
They examined the scriptures and found that the message that Paul was bringing was in accord with and a
fulfillment of the very scriptures that they had in their possession at the time, which was only the Old
Testament.
So that being the case, we are commanded by God to test.
So listen to what it says, and the reason is given.
So beloved, do not believe every spirit.
Test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.
False prophets?
Present 2 ,000 years ago?
I would argue here that false prophets have been present for 2 ,000 years.
The spirit of Antichrist has always been present in the church, and if you know your book of Revelation, then you know
full well that the dragon is quite upset and is very annoyed and very agitated
because he knows his time is short, and so what is he going to spend his last days on planet earth doing?
Waging warfare against the saints.
Congratulations, you're now in a war.
You've been in a war the whole time.
I pointed it out before, the great Walter Martin used to point out that on the battlefield, anybody who does not
come to grips with the fact that they're in the middle of a battle, they become casualties.
He used to describe people who would stick their head in the sand and not listen to
anything the Bible had to say as far as testing the false teachers.
He said that they had the flaming darts of the evil ones sticking out of their posterior.
It's quite the graphic thing, but it's true.
So do not believe every spirit.
Many false prophets have gone into the world, and I would note this past week, I don't
normally talk about stuff like this from the pulpit, but it's too important not to mention.
This past week, major leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation and the Charismatic Movement put out
a document called Prophetic Standards.
You can find it at propheticstandards .com, and I would note that the standards that they are claiming for
prophets is not the biblical standard at all, and what they have said is alarming to say the least.
These are people who claim that normal Christianity involves you and I performing signs and wonders,
of us acting in the miraculous, of us having, well, encounters with the Holy Spirit and blissing
out supposedly on the glory of God.
You can already tell that this theology is whack.
It's not from God.
No scripture talks this way.
But these people in their prophetic standards, here's one of the statements that they made that something that they
reject.
Listen carefully.
We reject the notion that a contemporary prophetic word is on the
same level of inspiration or authority as scripture, or that God always speaks
inerrantly through prophets today.
They reject the idea that God speaks inerrantly through prophets today.
And the reason why they're saying this is because, I don't know if you've noticed, but the Charismatic Movement has taken it on the chin, and rightly so,
because every one of their prophets said that Trump was going to win the election in November.
And when that didn't happen, they went all QAnon on us and claimed that he's going to be inaugurated,
not Biden, in January, while when Biden was inaugurated, they then turned around and say, he's waiting in the wings.
He's actually still the president.
He's flying around on Air Force One.
He's pulling all the levers.
He's really the one in charge, and he will visibly make manifest his presidency in March.
March came and went.
They moved it back to April.
April came and went.
Now they've moved it back to August.
This is called moving the goalposts, right?
And since all of these people said, thus saith the Lord, Trump is going to be reelected, well,
according to the biblical standard laid out in Deuteronomy 18, they are shown to be false
prophets.
Anyone who speaks in the name of God and says, thus saith the Lord, and then predicts the future,
and the future doesn't take place, Deuteronomy 18 says they're a false prophet.
And the penalty laid out for these false prophets in Deuteronomy 18 is death by stoning.
In the ancient theocracy of Israel, in the Christian church, it should be excommunication.
We don't stone them.
We'll leave that up to God.
But the point is, is that these people are rejecting now not only the biblical standard for prophecy,
but now Deuteronomy 13 is in play.
Deuteronomy 13 says that if somebody prophesies something and it comes to pass,
and then they say let us go after other gods that you do not know, don't listen to them.
So Deuteronomy 13 is in play because these people now are claiming that God speaks
errantly.
If God speaks errantly, we are in big trouble.
Because scripture says God does not lie.
If God speaks errantly and God's in error, we should be really worried.
Because maybe God is suffering from dementia.
Maybe he has the early onset of losing his mind.
If God speaks errantly, oh man, you have no assurance of your salvation at all.
The world has slipped into complete chaos because the king of the universe doesn't have a sound
mind anymore.
He engages in deception.
And so you'll note then, that in the statement of theirs, there's one statement that they make that I actually agree with.
They claim that a false prophet is somebody who operates under a false spirit masquerading as the Holy Spirit.
That is true.
But what they fail to recognize is that everybody who claims to be speaking prophetically today, they are
also, well, masquerading as true prophets of God and the Holy Spirit that they are preaching and
teaching is not the Biblical Holy Spirit because the Biblical Holy Spirit never lies, cannot speak
We are in a lot of trouble.
And you'll note, many good churches are harassed and conjoled and are
caused to dwindle down to nothing because the big distinction that these folks say is, do you attend one of those
dead churches?
You know, the kind where they do that liturgy thing?
And the pastor, what does he do?
He preaches the word and tells sinners that they need to repent and be forgiven.
We need to just come alive and be awakened by the new thing that God is doing.
That's how they talk.
But here, the Holy Spirit has warned us 2 ,000 years ago that many false prophets have
gone out into the world.
And of course, that document that was just put out, somebody can actually, according to them, prophesy falsely and still be a
true Christian and actually still be a true prophet.
They just can make a few oopsie -doopsies and slipsies and stuff like that.
It's unbelievable when you think about it.
Different God, all together.
So note then, John, the same John who wrote our epistle text, he explains to
us what it means in part, not in totality, to abide in Christ.
In 2 John 9, there's only one chapter in 2 John, it says this, Everyone
who goes on ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ does not
have God.
Whoever abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son.
Abide in the teaching of Christ, to go on ahead and abide in the teaching of Christ, where is the only place
I can go today to find the teachings of Christ?
The Bible.
Period.
Full stop.
What are we to be about the business of doing?
Well, part of the way in which we abide in Christ is by abiding in His Word, abiding in
His teaching.
And that requires us to recognize that the fulfillment of the Great Commission, Christ says all authority on
heaven and earth has been given to me, and He gives the church a task, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching all that I have commanded, and
lo, I am with you always to the end of the age.
Have the marching orders changed?
No.
The marching orders are the same until Christ shows up.
And I am not authorized to teach anything in Christ's church, because believe me, this church belongs to Christ,
and I'm a part of it, but it don't belong to me.
I am only authorized by Jesus to teach what He has commanded, and I can only think of one place to find that,
the Scriptures.
And anybody who teaches contrary to it, I am under biblical command to rebuke and to
silence and to call them to repentance, and so are you.
So that being the case then, again, consider our text from 1 John.
He says this, by this you know the Spirit of God.
And here he gives a theological test.
John wrote 1 John against the Gnostics.
If you're not familiar with this heresy, and it is a heresy, the Gnostics taught that the
world as we know it, everything that you can see, smell, taste, and touch is an accident
created by a demi -urge, and that it's all evil, every bit of it, every bit that you can
smell, see, taste, or touch, and that the whole goal of life is to be
disconnected from matter and live in pure spiritual form.
And it's only the spiritual that is good, evil is matter, matter is evil.
And so they denied that Jesus Christ is God in human flesh, because in their way of thinking,
it would be unseemly, it would be unthinkable that God, who is Spirit, would take on
human flesh.
So the Gnostics taught that Jesus only appeared to be human.
He only looked like he was human, but if you had paid close attention, you would note that wherever Jesus walked, he never left any
footprints.
This is how they talked, right?
Well the Apostle John, who traipsed about the Galilean wilderness for three years with Jesus going from
town to town, baptizing, teaching, casting out demons, all this kind of stuff, he was there
with Jesus.
He touched Jesus.
He ate with Jesus.
He saw that Jesus had to take care of his bodily needs like the rest of us, and he knew full well that
Jesus had come in the flesh.
And he then basically says that one of the ways in which you can tell that the Spirit of error versus the
Spirit of truth is that every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God, and by that he means
the real one.
He says every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God.
Every spirit that does not confess this is not from God.
This is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming and is now present in
the world already.
The nightmare isn't then, the nightmare is now.
It's not coming, it's presently here and has been.
So little children, he assures us, you are from God and you have overcome them, for he who is
in you is greater than he who is in the world.
Who's the they there?
The false prophets, the false teachers.
They are from the world, therefore they speak from the world and the world listens to them.
We are from God.
Whoever knows God listens to us, and by that he means listens to the words of the apostles.
Whoever is from God listens to the ones God has sent.
His prophets from the Old Testament, his apostles in the New, they listen to them.
If they don't listen to them, they're not from God.
Whoever is not from God does not listen to us.
By this then we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.
And from here I'd like to take a quick look at our gospel text and note what Christ says.
Jesus says, I am the true vine, my father is the vine dresser.
And here's where we're going to need to make an important distinction.
What is the fruit of the Holy Spirit?
Well, Galatians 5 lays this out for us.
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
goodness, gentleness, self -control.
Sounds like ordinary stuff, right?
And yet it is absolutely extraordinary.
Is our world filled with that?
No, just see Twitter if you're not sure, okay?
This is why TikTok is so much fun.
It's a whole other conversation, but you get the idea, right?
You're going to note then, we as Christians are called to what?
Bear fruit.
We are not called to roll on the ground and bark like a dog, cluck like a chicken, or speak gibberish.
We are called by the work of the Holy Spirit to bear the fruit of the Spirit, which is shown in
sobriety, shown in love for each other.
And you're going to see the consistency here between what Christ says and what the Apostle John writes for us in 1 John.
So Jesus says, every branch that does bear fruit,
he prunes so that it may bear more fruit.
Have you ever noticed that Christian life is a little difficult?
Have you ever noticed that just living is difficult?
Breathing, at times, seems to be annoying.
The whole point is this, is that God, the Holy Spirit, producing the fruit of repentance in us of love, joy,
peace, patience, you got the idea, that when we begin to bear fruit, out come the pruning
shears to cut off dead works, to cut off selfishness, to cut off all
the things that are inhibiting the fruit from being born, and those things are taken off by God the Father,
and the pruning process is anything but fun.
It is absolutely necessary.
And then you'll note these kind words from Christ, that already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you.
It is Jesus who has made us clean.
So what does he say?
Abide in me.
And you're going to note that Christ makes it clear, just a little bit later in our Gospel text, what he means to abide.
If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you.
Even Christ makes it clear that in part the way in which we abide in Christ is by abiding in
his word.
Are you tired of hearing the Bible?
Are you sick and tired of coming to church and noticing every three years we hear the same biblical text?
I already heard that text.
I already know it.
You know nothing.
You need these words like I need these words.
These words are the very sap that keep us alive and keep us connected to Christ.
So abide in me and I in you.
As the branch that cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you
abide in me.
And those who depart from the word, run beyond the biblical text, off into air, Christ
describes them as those who've been cut off from him.
Dead branches.
You know I always like it when we have live plants on the altar because they last a little bit longer.
Have you ever noticed that?
But when we get flowers that are fresh from the florist, what are they?
They're cut.
How long do they last?
A week?
Two?
If they're in water, not that long, right?
I am the vine, Jesus says.
You are the branches.
Love for others is done in the ordinary.
It is done in the changing of diapers.
It is done in the preparation of meals.
It is done in the hard labor of day -to -day work, of creating Excel spreadsheets, running payroll,
caring for your parents who are getting sick and dying.
It is done in the ordinary.
It is done in the hugging of your children, of dressing them and kissing them on the forehead and patting them on the back
and sending them off to school.
Love is done in the ordinary of a wife loving and caring for her husband who's had a hard day at
work or a husband who comes home and says, Honey, I can see that you're stressed out.
I'll take the kids.
Let me take care of dinner for you tonight.
It is done in how we treat each other here in church, recognizing that we're all sinners and that
we inevitably are going to step on each other's toes, but when our toes are stepped on, we say, I forgive you.
It is recognizing that there are some among us that come on hard times, and those of us who the hard
times have not come on, we pitch in our resources to make sure that our brothers and sisters are
cared for and they don't go without.
This is love.
This is the fruit of the Spirit.
This is what we are called to.
It's ordinary.
It's mundane.
There's nothing glorious about it, and yet this is exactly what it means to bear the fruit of the Spirit.
Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is who bears much fruit.
Apart from me, you can do nothing.
If anyone does not abide in me, he's thrown away like a branch and withers, and the branches are gathered and they're thrown into
the fire and burned.
This should warn us.
If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be given to you.
By this my Father then is glorified.
How is God glorified?
Not in us performing signs and wonders, but by us bearing the fruit of the Spirit.
That's how God is glorified, and so we then prove to be Jesus' disciples.
And you'll note that John's message is in complete accord here because there's a second part to our epistle text.
Give me one second here.
I have the joy of allergies this season.
Lovely.
Green has come back and so has green from my nose.
All right.
Don't worry.
I'll sanitize my hands before communion.
Give me a break.
Slipsy -doopsies.
Okay.
So note here the Apostle John, then after warning us about the Spirit of Antichrist, his next point is
this.
Beloved, let us love one another.
Let us love one another.
Love is from God.
Whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.
Anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love.
Don't sit here and tell me that you've had an encounter with Jesus, that you've been soaking in the Spirit, that you can
speak in tongues and all that other kind of nonsense.
Let me talk about your life of holiness and how you are sacrificially loving others around you.
That's the fruit of the Spirit, not this other stuff.
So in this, the love of God has been manifest among us, that God sent his only son into the
world so that we might live through him.
And this is love.
Not that we've loved God, but that God has loved us, and he sent his son to be the propitiation for
our sins.
So brothers and sisters, the Holy Spirit knows full well, God knows full well that each and every one of us is guilty of
being naive, guilty of listening to voices that if we would just open our Bibles we would recognize are not the
voice of God and they're speaking by a different spirit.
Each and every one of us is guilty of being deceived, and you'll note we're complicit in our own deceptions.
And so note this, that even when we have done this and broken the first commandment by doing so,
that we have a Savior who has taken all of this sin and the consequences of it
upon himself, and he has propitiated the wrath of God.
He has suffered it in your place so that you and I can be forgiven, and this is love.
Love is not some weird concept that's decided and defined by the greeting
cards.
I always like to, yeah, remember those precious moments things?
Oh, they're so cute, but every time I see them I just...
Precious moments, Jesus, he wouldn't harm a butterfly, let alone send somebody to hell.
That's not Jesus.
Jesus is something different, and he demonstrates his great love for us by laying
down his life, taking our sin upon ourselves, and dying so that you and I can live
eternally rather than suffer the wrath of God.
And so note then, because of the great mercy and forgiveness that we have from God, because of Christ,
that this then defines our love for each other.
Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
No one has ever seen God.
If we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us.
So let us repent, brothers and sisters, yet again.
All you ever preach about is repentance.
Yeah, I know, because I have to repent every day, every week.
Let us repent of all the ways in which we've been naive, and let us take confidence it is forgiven in Christ.
Be assured today that when you hear these words from me, take, eat, this is the body of Christ, given into
death for the forgiveness of your sins.
Take, drink, this is the true blood of Christ, shed for you for the forgiveness of your sins.
Take note of those words for the forgiveness of your sins, and hang on to them tight, because
with the Lord's Supper today, it is another way in which God is saying to you, I love you.
And because I have loved you, love each other.
This is how God is glorified, in the bearing of fruit of repentance, which is love,
and joy, and peace, and patience, and kindness, gentleness,
goodness, and self -control.
Lord Jesus, please grant through your Spirit that we bear much fruit, and that you are glorified
in it.
In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Oslo, Minnesota 56744.
And again that address is Kungsvinger Lutheran Church 15950
470th Avenue NW Oslo, Minnesota
56744.
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