John 15

Jesus said, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser.” If we are ever to grow in spiritual fruitfulness, we must make our peace with, and eagerly celebrate the first principle of Christian growth. Jesus is the vine. That is a pride-killer for people who imagine that we are the source of our own well-being. Without a heavy dose of God-reliance, we will never be fruitful. Whatever comes from our own homemade root cannot be the true Kingdom of God.

There is a second principle that goes with it and may be even harder for us to embrace. Our Father in heaven is the vinedresser. He will use His pruning sheers as the expert Gardner He is in order to bring about the best result, but it is normally going to hurt. The question that the Father asks us is this, “Do you trust Me?” The people of God are His plant, and He knows how to take away the unfruitful branches, and how to work out His providence to produce a greater result.

To abide in the vine must be the same thing that Jesus spoke of in an earlier place as abiding in His Word. It is His Word that makes us clean, and it is His Word that makes us fruitful. Apart from Him and His Word we have no beginning in spiritual things, and apart from Him and His Word we will never grow in spiritual usefulness. When we abide in Him, and His Word abides in us, we ask Him for things that are an expression of godly desires, and we can trust that it will be done for us. (Remember that everything agreeable to His perfect decrees will come to pass, yet there are many answers to prayer that we will not see here and now. We do have Him with us according to His promise, and having Him we have everything.)

If we want to abide in the Father and the Son, and to continue in His Word, we should obey that Word. To do this is to abide in His love. This is the way to have the joy of Jesus in us, that our joy may be full. He tells us the sum of what it means to obey His commandments, that we are called to a life of love. That love proceeds first from the vine. It is the fruitfulness of divine love that we receive and then respond to with love for God, and then especially with a love for one another that is the fruit of the love that we have received through Jesus Christ.

The supreme display of love has come for us in Jesus laying down His life for us, His friends. When He went to the cross, He went for those who would be His friends. He did what we could not do for ourselves. Only His atoning sacrifice could have cancelled our guilt. In a small way, we do something like the cross out of the great resource of divine love expressed for us in that cross of Christ. We lay down our lives for one another. This is the fruit that we should be seeking in our lives now. This is what we can ask for with confidence, and we can know that He will give us what we need, so that we will love one another.

We must admit that we do not do this loving of one another very well in this world at this time. This world is not a place characterized by love right now, but an environment where it seems so natural to be filled with hate. We find that we are the objects of the hatred of others who may hate us because they first hate our Master, Jesus Christ. To the extent that our way of living is not the world’s way of living, we may attract the animosity of the world. Even when we too easily fit into the patterns of life all around us, we may be surprised by the trouble that comes to us from others for no good reason.

We are reminded at such times that people hated our Savior without a cause. In some sense, Christ has taken us out of this world. When we try to fit back into it too easily, we may wonder why it does not really seem to work. We look all around us for reasons why we are dissatisfied, but it may be that the first cause of our troubles is that we are trying to fit too neatly into a world system from which we have already been delivered. If we would set our affections on Christ and His Kingdom again, we may feel like we are suddenly closer to home.

We need to stay close to our Master as His faithful servants, even if this means some suffering for us for a little while. Our primary association is with His Name. We have been brought into the family of the Father and the Son. In His Day, Jesus did many great works and spoke very impressive words, but this did not change the fact that He was hated.

We have a divine Helper as we travel through this life. He is the Spirit of truth, and He bears witness about Jesus Christ. The apostolic witness is recorded for us in the pages of the New Testament, through which we have been made aware of the amazing words and works of our Lord. Yet it is because of the work of this Helper that we have come to love the One that the world hates without a cause. It is because of this Helper that we have come to be united in the Vine. It is because of the Holy Spirit that we have been given the blessed privilege of bearing the fruit of divine love for our Lord’s sake in a world that may treat us with unjustified hostility. This is all part of the Father’s plan of pruning for those who are His beloved children. No matter what the cost may be, it is a great blessing to be united in the Vine.