Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God the Father and our
Lord Jesus Christ,
Jesus refers
to himself in many ways in John’s gospel.
“I am the bread of life,” he says.
He also calls himself the light of the world, the good Shepherd, as we
explored last week, and the resurrection and the life, among other names which
help us understand who he is and what it means for us to walk alongside
him. Why does he call himself the true
vine?
Some
passages from the Old Testament help us find the answer. Prophets like Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah
compared the Israel of their day with a vine.
God said through Jeremiah, “I planted you a choice vine, wholly of pure
seed. How then have you turned
degenerate and become a wild vine?” The
Lord gave his beloved chosen people the best he had, but even so, as human nature often does, they turned away
from him. He said through Isaiah: “I
will tell you what I will do to my vineyard.
I shall remove its hedge. It
shall be devoured and trampled down. I
will make it a waste. It will not be
pruned or hoed.” The people suffered.
The faithful cried out and clung to the Lord.
“Give us life and we will call on your name.”
They waited
for the Savior who would undo the imperfections in God’s vineyard. Jesus came,
then, to fulfill the mission that the Lord Almighty gave to Old Testament
Israel. He was reliable, faithful, and
always in tune with God’s will – the true vine, as he said.
Now, every
vine has branches, and so by using this word-picture, Jesus also called
attention to his close tie with everyone who believes in him. We are the branches. We abide in him and he
abides in us – and all for a purpose.
The most important part is bearing fruit, which many of the people in
Old Testament Israel failed to do. By
fruitfulness, Jesus doesn’t mean external things like making our names great or
making a mark in the community or piling up money or any of the other things
the world encourages us to chase.
Christian fruitfulness is a more inward quality. It comes from faith in Jesus and means first
of all being like him. Paul described
fruitfulness as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
gentleness and self-control. Paul also
wrote this in another passage: “This is my prayer: that your love may abound
more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to
discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ,
filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ – to the
glory and praise of God.” Fruitfulness
for Jesus refers to qualities we can’t see or touch – like goodness,
understanding, love, truth.
Any
Christian can acquire this kind of fruitfulness by sticking with Jesus. It doesn’t take special ability or extra
energy. God can take a small amount of
fruitfulness and multiply it to abundance.
The Holy Spirit works ceaselessly and steadily to transform God’s people
and often in ways that surprise us – by cutting and pruning when we feel like
sitting back and thinking only about what pleases us. Although pruning can be unpleasant, it
produces great results. Martin Luther was an expert on this subject.
He said that
Christ interprets all the suffering he and his people pass through as the
diligent work and care that a vine-dresser expends on his plants to make them
grow and bear fruit. Jesus teaches us
that the affliction and suffering of Christians is actually quite different
from the way it looks to the world.
Christians are not afflicted without God’s consent and his will. Choppy times are signs of God’s grace and
fatherly love, not wrath and punishment, because they serve our well-being.
To use
Luther’s words, we learn the art of believing that anything that distresses us
doesn’t happen to harm us but for our profit.
We compare this to a vine-dresser who hoes and cultivates his vine. The suffering of Christians is a help and not
a harm. It enables us to bear better and
more abundant fruit.
Our faith,
you see, gives us a comforting way to understand our afflictions. “Happy is the Christian,” Luther said, “who
can apply the picture of God as a vine-dresser in hours of distress and trial,
when the devil assaults and torments him and the world reviles and defames
him as an apostle of the devil. Then he can say, ‘See, I am being fertilized
and cultivated as a branch of the vine.
All right, dear hoe and clipper, go ahead take away unnecessary
leaves. I’ll gladly suffer it, for these
are God’s hoes and clippers. They are
applied for my good and welfare.’”
God works on
us, then, to make us fruitful. We look
on whatever we suffer as God’s way of making us more trusting of Christ, more
loving, more joyful, kinder, more patient, gentler, and so on.
Fruitfulness
is a necessary part of our walk with God, not because we need to earn our own
salvations, but because our fruitfulness glorifies the Heavenly Father and it
proves that we are disciples of Christ, not among the branches who will be cast
away and burned in the fire. God’s
loving work prunes us and purifies us and transforms us more and more into the
image of our Lord.
The world is
a perilous place, though. Temptations
abound and there are plenty of false vines for us to get tangled up in. Then, too, our flesh is weak and we may
wonder if we throw away the loving restraints that God places upon us. Will we turn out to be one of the fruitless
branches that are tossed out?
That isn’t
the Lord’s intention for us. Jesus
assures us that we are clean now through our faith in him. He obeyed God’s law for us in every way; he
defeated the devil on our behalf; he paid the price for our sinfulness and rose
again from the dead. His willingness to
wipe away our sins will never run out.
He declares us to be righteous – just the way he wants us to be – and
passes his fruitfulness on to us. He
makes us patient and loving; he shares his kindness and self-control with
us. He empowers us to remain with him,
to stick with him, to abide in faith.
He doesn’t
ask us to do anything that’s too hard for us.
We keep on reading the Bible regularly and coming to worship on
Sundays. Many folks think about gardens
at this time of year. As a result of weeding
and planting and watering, a garden grows to abundance. So the Holy Spirit works on us. God uses our Sunday worship and our daily
Bible reading to prune us and make our lives with him fruitful and abundant.
Another aid
to fruitfulness is our daily prayers.
“If you remain in me, and my words remain in you, ask whatever you will,
and it shall be done for you.” God
gives us the privilege of coming to him at any time. He surrounds us with his love, including the
times when he prunes us by shaking us up.
He is good company and the experience of his presence strengthens us to
cope with the times when the world strikes at us with special ferocity. We talk to the Lord about our joys and our
griefs, about our fears, and about the small things of each day that contribute
to our happiness or make us uneasy. We
talk to him as we work in the kitchen or sit by ourselves or when we are busy
with some task that doesn’t take a lot of concentration. We ask him to make us fruitful, remembering
that he is in us and guiding us even at the times when we aren’t aware of him.
We remember,
too, that there are different kinds of prayer – prayers of praise and prayers
of request, prayers in which we ask forgiveness and the moments of stillness when
we turn ourselves over to God and invite him to be with us, to use us and to
keep on making us fruitful. And if it
ever happens that we’re tangled up in worldly affairs, we ask the Heavenly
Father to prune us and make us right again for his vineyard, trusting that whatever
shaking up we undergo as he pulls away dead branches will be good for us.
We live in
the world and in God’s vineyard at the same time. He overcame the world through his Son and his
actions of pruning make his victory more visible in us. Good Christian fruit grows in us because we
remain in him. We stay in his Word and
we remember to say our prayers. We
welcome whatever he does with us and we rejoice in the hope that he will keep
us fruitful and flourishing in his vineyard.
In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.
The peace of God that passes all understanding keep your
hearts and minds in the knowledge of Christ Jesus. AMEN.
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