John 15: “I am the true vine, and My Father is the vine-grower. 2 Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He [a]cleans it so that it may bear more fruit. 3 You are already [b]clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. 4 Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit from itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. 5 I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing. 6 If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them and cast them into the fire and they are burned. 7 If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. 8 My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit, and so [c]prove to be My disciples. 9 Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love. 10 If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love. 11 These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.
Well, I chose the message last week, and this morning, as a response to our hearing the results of our “Natural Church Development Survey.” As it happened, Bob Mills was sick last week, and unable to come during our Sunday School hour and share those results. We rescheduled for him to come December 1st during the Sunday School hour. I would strongly urge you to be there to hear what he has to share.
Just to summarize what he will be sharing, a few months ago, most of you took a survey designed to evaluate the health of our church. And, just to summarize, the survey asked you all about our church, and what you see in our church around 8 areas. These eight areas are the characteristics that are typically flourishing in a healthy growing church, and typically languishing in an unhealthy dying church. These are the eight characteristics; empowering leadership, gift-based ministry, passionate spirituality, effective structures, inspiring worship service, holistic small groups, need-oriented evangelism, and loving relationships.
And the strategy is that any church who takes this survey will then look at the results and see the areas in which the church is strongest, and weakest.
Well, when we took the survey, the two weakest areas were gift-based ministry and need-oriented evangelism.
Gift-based ministry can be described as a focus in a church of helping people identify their individual gifts, and finding or creating ministries through which they can serve using their gifts.
Need-oriented evangelism can be described as a focus in a church on connecting to lost people through their needs, and thus creating opportunities to build a loving relationship which can lead to salvation.
I began the message today with our Scripture reading where Jesus tells His disciples, “I am the Vine, you are the branches. The book behind the NCD survey that we took talks about these verses. They stress a point about the church being like a plant. One of the Scriptures they point to is Mark 4:26-29
26 And He was saying, “The kingdom of God is like a man who casts seed upon the soil; 27 and he sleeps and rises, night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows—how, he himself does not know.
In Jesus parable, the Kingdom of God is compared to a seed being thrown to the ground, and then it grows, and the sower doesn’t know how it grows. He didn’t make it grow. Sure, he applied some basic principles. He planted it where the soil was good and it would get appropriate sunlight. He made sure it was watered adequately. But, in the end, he has not clue how this little shriveled pebble of a seed, grows to a plant and eventually produces fruit.
And the authors of the book point out that plants are like that. If we know that the seed is good, if we apply some basic principles of growth when we plant the seed, the seed grows “all by itself.” That illustration is why this survey and book are called “Natural Church Development.” The authors are trying to reinforce the truth that the church is like a seed. God is the one who makes the seed. And He plants the seed of a church in the ground of this world. And the seed itself is good and healthy. It comes from God. And so to us the message is, if we will just apply some basic principles to the growth of that seed, it will grow, “naturally.” It will grow, “all by itself.” Because, if the principles are applied, it is not us making the church grow, or our spiritual lives to grow, it happens “all by itself” it is just a natural consequence.
And I agree with that regarding Christians. I agree with it because that truth is expressed in Scripture. We just read one such Scripture.
5 I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.
Do you see it there? You are branches attached to Jesus who is the Vine. But if you abide in Christ, if you are a branch that is tapped into the microscopic transition of nutrients, and moisture, from the Vine to the branch, you will produce much fruit. It will be natural. There will not have to be some magic to it, it just happens naturally.
Let me share with you another Scripture that tells us the same thing.
2 Corinthians 9: 8 And God is able to make every grace abound to you, so that in everything at every time having every sufficiency, you may have an abundance for every good deed;
God is producing fruit in you, in everything, at every time, having every sufficiency—you will have abundance for every good deed.
10 Now He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed and increase the harvest of your righteousness;
He will supply and multiply your seed and increase the harvest of your righteousness.
Well, that one idea, in the NCD book was so encouraging to me. They applied it to individual churches, if you, as a church are doing these things, there will be growth. But I want to again take it down to the individual level. Because the church is made up of individuals. They growth and fruit will come through individuals choosing to abide in the Vine. And if, collectively, our church, it’s leadership, become characterized as Abiding in the Vine, we will bear much fruit.
And as we did last week, if we are going to individually abide in the Vine, we have to know what that means.
I began sharing with you 5 things from this passage about what it means to abide in Christ. You have to be in the True Vine. You have to abide in the True Vine. You have to understand your dependence. You have to submit to pruning. If you do all that you have to get ready for fruitfulness, love and joy.
Prayer
We began last week with,
I. You have to be in the True Vine.
We started by looking at this simple claim from Jesus. “I am the true vine.” Jesus was claiming to be the, One and only true vine. What was He saying? Well, He was speaking to His 11 Jewish disciples, who would have associated the idea of the vine, the analogy of the vine, with Israel. In a number of places in the Old Testament, Israel is compared to a grapevine. And since they were all born as the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they were branches off of that Jewish vine.
But the Jewish teachers had taken it one step further than that. They believed that simply being born a Jew was enough to ensure your going to heaven when you die.
So, what does Jesus say to His 11 disciples here. Israel is not the True Vine, I am the True Vine. The only assurance of the eternal inheritance of heaven is if you are attached to me, not Israel.
And we reiterate the same truth to you today.
Acts 4:12 And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved.”
John 3:36 He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.”
So, you have to have the right vine. It’s not by birth or church affiliation. It’s by rebirth into the family of our Lord Jesus Christ.
II. It means you have to abide in the true vine.
What does that mean? Abiding in the True Vine means you are a Christian. You have to be a Christian.
It wouldn’t seem that we needed to say this, but if you are not a true Christian, you are not abiding in Christ.
Hold it, didn’t you just say in the previous point that a person has be “in” the True Vine, Christ not “in” any other vine? Aren’t you making the same point twice? No. Because if we look at these verses, we discover that it is possible to be “in” the vine, but not abiding in the vine. Look at the verses again.
“I am the true vine, and My Father is the vine-grower. 2 Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He [a]cleans it so that it may bear more fruit.
Notice first, that He calls Himself the true vine, we’ve already said that. There is only one of those. But He is talking about how many types of branches? There are two types of branches that are attached, or “in” the true vine. What are they?
2 Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He [a]cleans it so that it may bear more fruit.
One type of branch bears fruit, and the other doesn’t.
In other words, a person can be superficially attached to Christ, but not abiding in Christ.
If we think about His analogy. He is talking about a grapevine. I suspect that most of us have never grown grapes here in Kansas. I remember the Gordons, old members of Parkview, actually grew grapes in their back yard. But, even if you haven’t grown grapes, you have probably grown something. And practically anything you grow will end up with two types of branches, or stems. Ones that bear fruit, and others that don’t.
We have a rose bush in our front yard. And there have been years where that bush has just exploded with yellow roses. But there have also been years where it produced very few. Why? Well, it’s usually because I have let dead branches remain. I didn’t cut out the dead branches.
But, the moment that I do, I will usually begin to see immense growth and blooms from the bush. I have to go out with my pruning shears every year or so, and separate dead branches from live ones.
And that’s what He’s talking about here. There are two types of branches on the True Vine; the fruitless and the fruitful. And the truth is this. There are two types of people who attach themselves to Christ; fruitless and fruitful. So, you might ask, are these two kinds of Christians? You know, some people in the church are full of love, joy, peace and patience. They are people who love God, love Christ, love His Word, love other believers, love the world. And you can see that love by things that they do. They try to live pleasing God. They are faithful in meeting with other Christians. They spend time in the Word of God. They talk about their faith. They pray.
But, we also know that others in the church may be far less fruitful, or even fruitless. They call themselves Christian, but they don’t live like it. So, are these two types of branches, just fruitful and fruitless Christians? Well let’s read what Jesus said,
“I am the true vine, and My Father is the vine-grower.2 Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit,
What happens to the fruitless branch?
2 Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away.
Who takes away? God the Father. Remember that He said that He is the vine, and His Father is the vinedresser. So, if a branch doesn’t bear fruit, God takes it away. Well, where does He take it?
6 If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them and cast them into the fire and they are burned.
Oh my. It literally says there, “and they burn.” It is a present tense verb indicating an ongoing action. It’s like He is describing a perpetual fire on which dead branches are cast. There is another Scripture that says something similar.
Mark 9: 43 And if your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life crippled, than, having your two hands, to go into [a]hell, into the unquenchable fire, 44 [b][and where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.]
That’s a picture of eternal damnation. Jesus described Hell as a perpetual burning. The fruitless branches are cut off, and later gathered to be thrown into a perpetual burning.
Hold it. Didn’t we just read that these branches were in the vine? Do you mean that there are branches off of the true vine who will go to Hell? Yes. You say, but they were in the vine. They attached themselves to Jesus. They called themselves His disciples. But listen to what Jesus says in Matthew 7.
21 “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter.
What does this mean? It means that you know which branch is abiding in the vine based on its fruitfulness. A branch that is fruitful is abiding in the vine. A branch that is not fruitful, it produces no fruit, is not abiding in the vine. Jesus said earlier in Matthew 7.
Matthew 7: 17 Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 So then, you will [j]know them by their fruits.
We are told two things about these branches that burn. First, they are superficially attached to the vine. But, second, they bear no fruit. Let’s look at what that means. It means that those branches appeared to be attached to the vine. But, since they bore no fruit, they were receiving nothing from the vine. The connection was only superficial.
You see, some people are Judas branches. They call themselves Christian, they go to a church, they have been baptized, they receive communion, they even to do good deeds. But even the good deeds that they do are not good fruit, but bad fruit. They do good deeds out of their human strength, not by God’s Spirit. And their motives tell you that it is bad fruit. They are motivated by greed, like Judas. They want praise. They think that they are buying their way into heaven. They are doing good deeds to please someone else. They want the temporal earthly rewards for being good. There are many possible motives for doing good. But they are not producing Spiritual fruit by the nourishment of abiding in the True Vine.
They Judas branches. Why have I called them Judas branches two times now? Because Jesus said these things to His 11 disciples after the Last Supper in the Upper room. What happened at that Last Supper. Jesus identified one disciple of His 12 disciples as false, as a traitor, as His betrayer. That was Judas. Judas was a branch that was only superficially attached to Christ. At first, you couldn’t tell the difference between him and the other disciples. He said all the right words, he did good deeds, he was even given a responsibility as the treasurer. But he wasn’t spiritually attached to Christ.
It’s like that stem off of our rose bush. It is fastened to the bush in some way, but I can see that it is dead, indicating that there are no nutrients and moisture coming from the bush to that branch.
Now, my rose bush, is not a perfect analogy. Because that stem that I remove may have produced roses at one time. There are Christians who have been fruitful in the past, but may go through fruitless, or backsliding times. I can’t look around at our members and say, “you are abiding” “you are not.” That’s why God is the vinedresser, not me. The point is for every person in the vine to look at their own heart to determine if they are abiding in the vine.
To abide in the vine means having an ongoing spiritual life-giving relationship with the true vine: Christ. And that relationship will result in fruit.
How do I know that? Because there’s a second kind of branch.
2 Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; every branch that bears fruit, He [a]cleans it so that it may bear more fruit.
The second kind of branch bears fruit. It produces grapes. The fruit is the evidence that that branch is receiving life from the vine. It may be a few grapes, or many grapes, but it is producing fruit. And all true Christians produce fruit. What kind of fruit? The fruit of the Spirit; love, joy, peace, patience. The fruit of good works. The fruit of contributing to the spread of the gospel. But there will be fruit.
Jeremiah 17:8 7 Blessed is
the man who trusts in Yahweh And whose trust is Yahweh. 8 And
he will be like a tree planted by the water, That sends forth its roots by
a stream And will not fear when the heat comes;
But its leaves will be green,
And it will not be anxious in a year of drought Nor refrain from yielding
fruit.Matthew
3:8Bear fruit in keeping with repentance.John 15:8By this my Father is
glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.James 2:26For as the body apart from
the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead.
So, you have to be attached to the true vine, but not just superficially, but Spirit to spirit, life to life. And fruit is the evidence of the abiding.
Those are two things that have to be present in order to bear much fruit. In the individual believer and the church. That gets us to the third way that you abide in Christ.
III. You have to submit to pruning.
2 Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; every branch that bears fruit, He [a]cleans it so that it may bear more fruit.
Notice something. The branches owe their fruitfulness to the vine, but the vines also vary in their fruitfulness. Some vines are more fruitful than others. Which vines are more fruitful? The ones that abide in the vine.
“he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit.”
There are those who are attached to false vines. There are those who are false branches. But among the true branches you have some that are more productive than others.
Let me illustrate that with one of Jesus’ parables; the parable of the Sower. He described a man going out scattering seed in different types of soil. Three of the soil types were unfruitful and symbolized non-Christians who hear the preaching of the Word of God, but eventually reject it. But then He said that the Sower scattered some seed on good ground, and it brought forth fruit, but they didn’t all produce the same amount of fruit. Some produced thirty times the amount of seed scattered, some sixty, some one hundred-fold. What He was saying was that some Christians are more fruitful than others. Some branches from the vine produce more fruit than others.
So, what do you do if you have one branch that produces less fruit than another? You prune it.
That really takes us back to what He said about the Father. The Father is the vinedresser. The vinedresser has two responsibilities here. First, He cuts off the unfruitful branches, but second, He prunes the less fruitful ones to make them more fruitful.
God is the vinedresser. He is the owner operator of the vineyard. He doesn’t just want some grapes, He wants lots of grapes. What’s more, He wants the maximum amount of grapes that He can get. Well, how does He accomplish that? There is no fault in the vine that can be improved. The vine is Christ. So how does He get more fruit from you? By pruning.
What does it mean? If you want more fruit from any plant, you have to pinch off all the dead and superfluous stems and leaves. Some leaves on a branch are obviously dead. Pinch them off. But some leaves are superfluous. It’s got too many leaves. A branch only needs so many leaves for the function of soaking up sunlight and rain. It’s got to many. What does that mean? That branch is expending its resources in leaf production, not grape production. This is such a profound analogy. That branch is putting all its energy into receiving, rather than giving or producing. It’s become slightly narcissistic.
Oh. Preacher, now you are getting personal. Let me back up a minute. I know that we all come to Christ to receive. We receive salvation. We receive eternal life. We receive inner peace, hope, joy. But do you know why Jesus saved you?
Ephesians 2:10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.
Matthew 5: 16 Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.
2 Corinthians 9: 8 And God is able to make every grace abound to you, so that in everything at every time having every sufficiency, you may have an abundance for every good deed;
2 Timothy 2: 21 Therefore, if anyone cleanses himself from these things, he will be a vessel for honor, sanctified, useful to the Master, having been prepared for every good work.
2 Timothy 3: 16 All Scripture is [g]God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for [h]training in righteousness, 17 so that the man of God may be equipped, having been thoroughly equipped for every good work.
He saved you to produce fruit. To many who call themselves Christian are not getting that message. We hear so much today about churches that are growing in numbers. And I’m not talking about churches that draw the unsaved to hear the message of salvation. We’re not talking about attracting the unsaved to hear a message. I’m talking about churches that are seeing growth by drawing professing Christians away from one congregation to another. And what will those who go usually tell you the reason is? I’m going there because my needs weren’t being met at my old church. I wasn’t receiving the music I prefer to hear at my old church. They didn’t have the programs for my enrichment or entertainment at my old church. It is rare that you will hear someone say, I left my old church because I couldn’t find a place to serve there. I wasn’t able to produce Spiritual fruit there. It’s usually about receiving, not giving.
Now, by saying that, I don’t want to let us off the hook. Sometimes a church can have members attached to the vine, and a single member is just producing an over abundance of fruit. But they look around, and they are surrounded by dead and semi-fruitless branches, so they say, I need to go somewhere else where I can be a part of a more fruitful vine.
But that was a little side sermon. The point of the text is that God takes branches with little fruit and pinches off dead and superfluous leaves. A branch only needs so much foliage. And a good gardener knows this. All that extra foliage is sucking off all the nutrients and moisture that could be going into producing fruit. So, the vine dresser prunes the vine.
What does it mean to a Christian to be pruned? Well, let’s think about a vine and its branches. What does the vinedresser cut off of the branches? He cuts off parts that are dead, and parts that suck off the moisture, life and nutrients from fruit-bearing. For the Christian I think that comes down to two main things. The dead leaves are sin. We have sin in our lives. The superfluous leaves are the myriad things in our lives that are not necessary. But we are expending a great deal of energy producing them. So God prunes those to cause us to produce much fruit.
Now, we know what sin is, it is doing what we are told not to do, or not doing what we are told to do. And that includes our attitudes and motives.
But He also prunes the superfluous. Our lives can be full of frivolous and unnecessary things. Things that sap our time, energy, and fervor away from the most important. And that can be any number of things.
Let me use myself as an example. I have several games on my phone. Some of them I play more than others. One I like more than the others. It is putting puzzles together. Now, is there anything evil or sinful about putting together a puzzle? No, it relaxes my mind. But, I’ve found something out about myself. That, especially if I am kind of bored, or listless about my life, that I can gravitate to spending an incredible amount of time putting together puzzles. I can do the same thing with Netflix.
Some people read, play golf, do crafts, or any number of individual activities. In today’s world we can spend our lives, off in our little corner, doing the things that make us happy, that soothe us, and never involve another person, or God in any of it. And it is not the activity itself that is evil. It’s just that we don’t need that many leaves. You can only spend so much mental health time, me time, before it turns to narcissism.
And so, as a Christian, God prunes us for sin and superfluity. Sometimes that can be a lot of pruning.
https://biblehub.com/commentaries/john/15-1.htm
“Were you ever in a greenhouse or in a vineyard at the season of cutting back the vines? What flagitious waste it would seem to an ignorant person to see scattered on the floor the bright green leaves and the incipient clusters, and to look up at the bare stem, bleeding at a hundred points from the sharp steel. Yes! But there was not a random stroke in it all, and there was nothing cut away which it was not loss to keep and gain to lose; and it was all done artistically, scientifically, for a set purpose-that the plant might bring forth more fruit.”
If we, as Christians, and as a church, want to see “much fruit” it will involve God’s pruning us. Put it another way, God is not going to bless an un-pruned branch with much fruit. God is not going to bless a sinful and self-absorbed people with more people to shepherd.