We live in a world of concrete and metal, cars and skyscrapers. Our food comes from grocery stores, markets and McDonald’s.
Jesus lived in a world of deserts and gardens, rocky clefts and fertile fields. The food that Jesus and his friends ate were the grains they saw growing in nearby fields and the fruit they saw growing weeks earlier.
The meat they ate was from animals that wandered the field and whose smell permeated the valleys and the streets of the towns.
The value of “things grown” was so evident in daily life that no one needed to explain why fruitfulness mattered. There were nothing then of mass-produced meats - a single McDonald’s hamburger may contain meat from a thousand cows.
No such thing as vegetation that was as much science as it was nutrition. Those freakishly huge and sweet strawberries we’re getting use to...there just not natural.
Unless you’ve ever lived or worked on a farm (has anyone here ever lived or worked on a farm?) it probably takes some imagination to picture just what living in such an agricultural society felt like, smelled like, tasted like.
But this is where the Jesus we know lived. This is the place and time that God chose to become one of us.
So Jesus, talking as he did to people who worked the fields and the seas for food, says this in John chapter 15:1-8 "I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch that doesn’t produce fruit, and he prunes the branches that do bear fruit so they will produce even more. You have already been pruned for greater fruitfulness by the message I have given you. Remain in me, and I will remain in you. For a branch cannot produce fruit if it is severed from the vine, and you cannot be fruitful apart from me.
"Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing. Anyone who parts from me is thrown away like a useless branch and withers. Such branches are gathered into a pile to be burned. But if you stay joined to me and my words remain in you, you may ask any request you
like, and it will be granted! My true disciples produce much fruit. This brings great glory to my Father”.
As you were listening to Jesus words just now you may have had a similar reaction to the one I have when I hear these words.
This is both tremendously comforting good news, full of promise and hope, and it is, at least on the surface, slightly harrowing. Just a little scarey. A bit demanding.
On some days a passage like this can be quite discouraging to me...it can leave me thinking that God really expects a lot of me when He KNOWS that I’m nowhere up to the task.
So then I can start to complain to God that He chose the wrong guy or that, if I’m honest, sometimes I’m just barely achieving survival in what sometimes feels like a desert wasteland of a life, and He wants WHAT!?!
What do you want of me God? You want me to bear WHAT?!? Fruit? You’ve got to be kidding!
I’m no horticultural genius, but I’m pretty sure the first thing you need if you’re serious about planting stuff that will bear fruit is good soil.
When I look around me, I don’t always see a lot of good soil. Crumbling sidewalks inside and outside maybe...but good, earthy, hearty, robust soil? Where is THAT to be found?!?
The Soil of the Gospel
Our key passage today says:6 “This same Good News that came to you is going out all over the world. It is changing lives everywhere, just as it changed yours that very first day you heard and understood the truth about God’s great kindness to sinners.
The NIV puts it this way: All over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and understood God’s grace in all its truth.
Changing lives everywhere. Bearing fruit and growing. The Good News of the gospel transforming lives, healing lives, bringing people to Jesus, bringing strangers together because of a common love for Jesus.
Creating in us a desire to see the justice of God happen around us. The poor hearing the good news. The oppressed released. God’s favour proclaimed.
That is some of the ways the gospel bears fruit, and I could talk a lot about that big-picture stuff. It’s very, very important.
But today I want to focus more on how the gospel bears fruit in our lives personally, and, particularly in the light of the quote from Jesus that we read earlier, how it is that fruitfulness happens in your life and my life.
"I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch that doesn’t produce fruit, and he prunes the branches that do bear fruit so they will produce even more.
My favourite seasons are spring and fall. But every spring there’s a necessary evil that I really don’t look forward to. It is the dreaded pruning of the backyard bushes.
I think about it ahead of time and I can already feel my back getting sore, my skin getting pricked and the inevitable whacking of my shiny head on some sharp branch I fail to notice in time. There’s a sadness too.
No matter how unsightly the bushes are, and no matter how much I know in my head that pruning the lilacs and hedges will EVENTUALLY produce something much better than what’s there, there’s a sadness in cutting away the sometime LIVE branches in order to allow for better blossoming later.
Every year as well I end up cutting down some big trunk. That really takes a leap of faith because I’m not just wrapping my head around some minor pruning on one branch that will result in blossoms, I’m removing a huge trunk in order to make it possible for some really significant growth that I have a hard time seeing in my mind.
It all seems rather severe, and for a while after the pruning happens, it doesn’t always looks so pretty. Big gaps fill the space that unhealthy branches and half-hearted blossoms use to take. It seems vulnerable.
In this passage Jesus says that God the Father is the gardener. He tends the garden of our lives.
And like a gardener His main desire is to see beauty and health and fruitfulness in our lives so that there is nourishment all around. He wants us spiritually healthy...not JUST for our own sakes but so that those whom our lives touch are blessed.
In the spring the immediate results of pruning don’t always look so hot. But half-way through the summer, that’s when the blossoms really burst forth. It takes patience and endurance to see fruitfulness in our lives.
St Francis de Sales said: “Have patience with all things, but first of all with yourself”.
Perhaps you, like me, need to ask God for faith to trust that He is creating something beautiful in our lives, that He is doing this with only loving intentions, and that He is always, always, faithful to finish what He starts in us.
You have already been pruned for greater fruitfulness by the message I have given you. Remain in me, and I will remain in you. For a branch cannot produce fruit if it is severed from the vine, and you cannot be fruitful apart from me.
Pruning, however painful, is a sign of belonging to God
That might seem like a weird statement. Sometimes our view of God is that He is very passive. He started created us, put things in motion perhaps, but He’s surely not actively doing things in our lives.
Or sometimes our view of God is that He is always very comfortable and comforting. Soft edges.
Never really shaking things up..I call this the “Nerf Jesus”. He would never do anything even in the short term to make us UNCOMFORTABLE, would He?
The writer of Proverbs says this: “My child, don’t ignore it when the LORD disciplines you, and don’t be discouraged when he corrects you. For the LORD corrects those he loves, just as a father corrects a child in whom he delights”. Prov 3:11-12
Actually, pretty much everywhere in the Bible we find that God is actively engaged in working within and among His people, and we find that he is no “soft touch”. Not even slightly.
I’m pretty lenient with my children on some things, but on anything that could impact their safety, that could lead them in an unnecessarily vulnerable position in their lives, I’m quite strict.
Sometimes they don’t know why we’re so careful with them. Sometimes I’m sure it seems I go overboard (and I probably do sometimes), but nothing matters to me more in my personal life than the safety and well-being of my family.
God is Father without flaws, unlike me. How much MORE does He take care with His children...with you and me. I’ve heard more than one person at CATM tell me that they were glad that, as they put it, “God would knock me upside my head sometimes to get my attention”.
If you feel like you are being pruned. If you feel in your belly like you’re learning some hard lessons about life. If you’ve experienced some “downsizing” in your life.
If you feel that God by His Holy Spirit is correcting you, you need to know and trust that He’s doing that BECAUSE He very much loves you. Sometimes a ship’s captain has to correct the path of the ship. The LORD corrects those he loves, just as a father corrects a child in whom he delights.
"Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing. Anyone who parts from me is thrown away like a useless branch and withers. Such branches are gathered into a pile to be burned. But if you stay joined to me and my words remain in you, you may ask any request you like, and it will be granted! My true disciples produce much fruit. This brings great glory to my Father”.
A few simple but profound promises from Jesus to you that I want to end with.
Continue to walk with Jesus, abide vitally in Him. Remain in Him. Do all that you can to strengthen your relationship with God.
Promise # 1 - Jesus promises that Your life will be fruitful above and beyond what you can ask or imagine.
The sooner we settle our hearts on following Jesus, if we’re not doing so right now, the sooner we WILL begin to see things change for the better. I remember the profound sense of my entire life being stalled out before I met Jesus. I had no clue how to move forward.
I despaired at the prospects for my life. Saying “Yes” to Jesus, receiving Him as my Lord and Saviour, that was the beginning of an incredible adventure that is still going on for me 26 years later.
Promise # 2 - Jesus promises that He is the Way to discovering purpose and meaning and joy in your life.
Jesus talks about letting his words remain in us. What does that mean? On occasion I’ve had opportunities to go elsewhere, away from the mission, to churches that were bigger and where there seemed to be more to gain.
But whenever those opportunities come up, my dad’s voice has always gone off in my mind, even without him being there. When I was growing up he would always say, “Do what you love to do. Don’t make the big decisions based on money or “success”. If you do you won’t be happy. Make your choices based on doing what you love”.
That’s the way he has lived his life. In a way, that’s my dad’s voice “remaining in me”. And so when I’ve had to make those big decisions, the choice has actually been pretty easy. Stay where I love to be. Stay with the people I love. And God has blessed those decisions.
When we let Jesus’ words REMAIN in us, when we drink in what He says to us and let that start to shape and define who we are. We want what He wants. We don’t want stuff that He wouldn’t want for us. So what’s the promise then?
When we make the decision to live for God, to stay joined to him, and to let His words remain in us, he says to us: “If you stay joined to me and my words remain in you, you may ask any request you like, and it will be granted! My true disciples produce much fruit. This brings great glory to my Father”.
Do you know that you can glorify God?
Promise # 3
As small and humble and limited as we are, Jesus says our lives can glorify God.
Isaiah 43: 7 “All who claim me as their God will come, for I have made them for my glory. It was I who created them."
We were made for God’s glory. The fruit God wants you to bear is for His glory. Your life matters that much. You matter that much.
And as the people of God, we need to grasp this high, high purpose. And to press one another on toward this high calling. May we honour God’s call in one another’s lives.
Apparently this complicated, messed up world is where God wants us to blossom. Only God can create beauty in the middle of concrete and steel. In the middle of lives that still sting from very real and painful things that have happened to us. This is where we’re planted...to bear much fruit.
Let’s pray. Would you do this with our lives, O God? Would you make them beautiful and rich. Would you cause our lives to bear great fruit for your glory O God? Thank you for your promises, Jesus. Give us boldness to take them to heart. Give us courage to remain in you. To get close and stay close to the True vine. In your name. Amen.
