Upper Room Discourse

We are looking at the Upper Room Discourse from John chapters 14 to 17. This is the last night that Jesus spent with His disciples before He was betrayed and arrested. He knew He was about to die, so He shared the things that were most important to Him, the things that were really on His heart, the things He really wanted His disciples to know.

In John 14:12-15, Jesus talked about how He wanted to bring glory to God the Father by working signs and wonders through His disciples. Then He talked about intimacy with Him in verses 15 to 21, and how He will reveal Himself to those who love and obey Him.

The next thing I want to look at is intimacy and fruit. John 15:4-8 says, "Remain in Me and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself. It must remain attached to the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in Me. I am the vine. You are the branches. If a man remains in Me and I in him, he will bear much fruit."

Notice that Jesus doesn't just say 'fruit.' He added an adjective in front of it - 'much' fruit. In short, Jesus expects us to be fruitful on an ongoing basis. It is not a one-time thing we achieve in Him, but something we experience over and over again. We are to be fruitful for the kingdom of God in our day-in and day-out lives.

What determines whether or not we bear much fruit? This passage tells us that it is the remaining (or abiding) in Him. What does it mean to remain/abide in Him? It's this thing of intimacy again. Look at verse 7: "If you remain in Me and My words remain in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be given to you. This is to My Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be My disciples."

Jesus wants us all to be Charismatics, that is what He just said. But we need a Biblical understanding of what Charismatic means. It means, "to operate in His power, His charisma." In the original Greek, the root of that word 'kairos' is 'grace.' It is the ability to pick up on the Holy Spirit giving us grace-lets, manifestations of His grace.

That is what allows us to operate in the spiritual gifts, that we may bear fruit and glorify the Father. By the way, these gifts are not intended for us, for our own edification. Well, there is one gift that is intended for us, to build ourselves up individually in the Spirit. That gift is tongues and Paul calls it the "least of the gifts." But the other eight gifts are manifestations of God's grace to bless somebody else through you. That is why Jesus said, "I want my Father to be glorified, because you are producing much fruit, and so proving to be My disciples."

We have this Western way of thinking that sometimes gets in the way of our being able to understand what Jesus and the Bible are really saying. This Western thinking tells us that the thing that makes us "Christian" is our beliefs. We are Christian because we believe in Jesus and we believe what the Bible says.

But he Semitic way or thinking is quite different. The Bible is written in Semitic understanding, not Greek or Western understanding. When Jesus walked on the earth, He lived and communicated in a Semitic culture. Semitic thinking is very experiential in nature. Here is now someone with Semitic thinking would understand what Jesus said: the way we prove that we are Jesus' disciples is that He is living His life through us. He is at work in us, and He is in us.

In the Semitic culture, our relationship with God is experiential, not knowledge-based. God wants us to experience Him personally and to experience His power and His anointing flowing through us. That is part of the package that Jesus gave us when He gave us the Holy Spirit. We are to abide in Him (intimacy) and to bear much fruit (Jesus moving in power through us to bring glory to His Father).

We have a lot of people in America who think they are Christians because they raised their hands at somebody's invitation, or because they nodded their head or got their name signed up on the books. But they have never experienced the presence of Jesus, nor has He been able to work through them. They have no fruit to prove that they are His disciples, so the Father is not really getting any glory out of their life. And that makes me wonder what assurance do they really have? Are they really His?

One of the greatest New Testament scholars was a man out of America named Gordon Fee. He wrote a book called 'God's Empowering Presence.' He felt that the foundational doctrine of the Apostle Paul is this: you can know you are a Christian by the experience of the Spirit. If you have no experience of the Spirit, then you have no assurance of salvation, because the experience of the Spirit is the guarantee, the deposit.

Jesus wants us to experience His spirit and His power and His anointing in our day to day lives. That is part of the seal of the Holy Spirit in our lives, and that is part of the guarantee that we have truly been saved and belong to Him.

So let me ask you this: are you experiencing the Spirit moving in your life? Are you filled with His peace? Are you having a revelation of Jesus and experiencing intimacy with God? Is God working through you by His power to glorify His name?