John 15:1-8
1 I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. 2 He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. 3 You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. 4 Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.
5 “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. 6 If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. 7 If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. 8 This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.
Remain in Me
Do you know what this is?
It’s a balloon.
What does a balloon do? Why was it made? Why do people buy bags of them?
You blow them up. You decorate your house with them to celebrate birthdays. You make arches out of them for weddings. You twist them into fun shapes for festivals and fairs. You fill them water and throw them at each other.
Now I need 2 volunteers (I’m not going to throw a water balloon at you; you’re perfectly safe, I promise).
Volunteer #1, what I want you to do is to inflate this balloon using nothing but your hands. Go ahead. Give it shot. Can you do it?
Why not? That’s what it’s made for! It’s literally designed to be inflated. You can stretch it in every direction. It has the capacity and the capability. What’s the problem?
Don’t answer that question. Before we get to the root of that problem, I have a second volunteer.
Volunteer #2, your objective is the same. I want you to inflate this balloon, but I’m going to give you some help. Here’s a little hand pump.
Why was Volunteer #2 able to inflate the balloon and Volunteer #1 wasn’t? They’re balloons from the same bag. They were manufactured in the same plant using the same materials. I bet that if you were to mix them up and throw them on the ground, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the two. So, why was one able to be inflated, and not the other?
Because Volunteer #2 had a source.
Jesus said, “No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.”[1]
Like a balloon without a pump or a branch without a vine, a Christian without Christ cannot do what she is created to do. Every one of you was created to do something. Paul talks about this in his letter to the Christians living in Ephesus: For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.[2]
By the time you came out of the womb, there was work that God had created you to do. He made you and molded you to have all the qualities and capacity and capabilities to do the good works that he had prepared for you to do.
But let me ask you, what good is a balloon that won’t blow up? It’s going to find itself in the trash pretty soon, right? What good is a branch that doesn’t bear fruit? It’ll get tossed in the fire before you know it. What happens to a Christian who doesn’t do the good works he was created to do?
Jesus says, “My Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit.”[3]
The gardener plants trees with the expectation that they will produce fruit. It’s not just his expectation; it’s the reason, i.e. the purpose for which he planted the trees in the first place. If those trees don’t produce fruit, then the pruning shears come out. Branches get lopped off. Trees get cut down. If you’re not living up to expectations – if you’re not fulfilling your purpose – that’s a problem.
So let me ask you, are you doing what you were made for? God tells us what he wants us to do in the 10 Commandments, i.e. worship the one and only God; honour your parents; love your neighbour; guard your heart from thoughts of anger, lust, or greed. Do you keep all those commandments, or, like the rest of us, do you find your list of personal sins to privately confess growing longer each week?
Are you fulfilling the purpose for which you were planted? Paul talks about the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians chapter 5: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.[4] How many of those fruits can be found on your branches? Which ones are missing from your life? How many are eaten through by worms, or rotting neglected on the ground at your feet?
Do you sometimes feel like one of these balloons – trying to do what you were created to do, but merely being stretched in every direction only to snap back to this empty, limp shell of what you were designed by God to be?
If you can’t keep God’s commands, if you don’t produce the fruit you were planted to produce, if you can’t do what God created you to do, then Jesus says that you should fear the shears:
My Father cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit.[5]
If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.[6]
This isn’t a gentle rap on the wrist. This isn’t a strongly worded letter in the mail. Jesus warns you that if you can’t be what you were created to be, you will be hacked off, hurled away, burned in the fire.
And by the way, this isn’t some doomsday preacher on a street corner in downtown Edmonton trying to reach the godless. This is Jesus preaching to branches that are currently connected to him, i.e. people like you and me who call ourselves by his name – who call ourselves Christians – who may be compliant to his commands, but begrudgingly or heartlessly; Christians who are part of the outward church of God, whose names can be found in the membership logs, whose seats find themselves in these chairs, but who inwardly are lifeless, fruitless, wilting on the vine. This is Jesus speaking to you. This is the Gardener pulling out his pruning shears and reaching out for your branch.
Are you doing what you were made to do? Do you have reason to fear the shears? We all do.
When God the Father, our great Gardener, comes at you with pruning shears in hand, all you can do is close your eyes and dread the touch of cold steel threatening to sever you from your secure place in the vine, dreading the feel of warm flame licking your limbs as you fall into the fire. With eyes closed for fear of those shears, your heart leaps into your throat when hear the sound of the snip. You feel something fall, but it’s not you; it’s something falling off of you. You open one eye to see what happened. The Gardener is walking away, putting his shears away, and you’re still where you were a moment ago. The thing about shears is that they can be used to lop branches clean off, or to prune them so that they can grow even bigger and stronger and bear even more fruit.
That’s what Jesus says: My Father cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit… while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.[7]
It reminds me of my last Arbor Day while I was at Seminary. I got teamed up with Dr. Brug to tend to his little apple orchard. It was just me and him, a ladder and a pair of pruning shears. If you’re a gardener or a landscaper, especially of trees and shrubs, you know how important it is to prune your plants so they grow the way you want them to. That’s especially true of apple trees.
Every year in the Spring new shoots come sprouting straight up out of the old branches. A tree can double in size in no time at all. But if you let it keep sending out these shoots and branches and if you let it keep growing and growing, you’ll lose all your fruit. You’d think that with twice as many branches you could have twice as much fruit, but it’s the exact opposite. If all the energy from the tree gets spent on those shoots and branches, there won’t be any left over to bear fruit.
So, if you want your apple tree to produce apples, then every year you have to go through and prune off all the branches that are just a distraction and diversion from that plant’s purpose; you have to prune off all the dead weight that’s preventing your tree from bearing fruit.
Jesus is saying here that you’re like those apple trees. You need to be pruned too, every year and throughout the year. God planted you with the express purpose that you would produce fruit. And you are fruitful! I see it in you. I see fruits of love and joy and peace in this room. I pray prayers of thanks for your faithfulness in carrying out the unique responsibilities God has given each of you. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t have room for growth, or that you don’t have dead weight in your life that needs to be lopped off, before it becomes a distraction or a diversion from your purpose.
Sometimes we allow new shoots to steal our energy from bearing fruit. Sometimes it’s a new job or relationship that demands more time and causes more stress. Now you’ve lost your patience or love. New blessings that come from new growth fill you with greater joy but they sap your self-control and you pour all your effort into growing yourself, but lose your focus on doing what you were created to do.
But that’s why God prunes you, so that you can keep being fruitful, so that you can be even more fruitful. God prunes you through the preaching of his Word. That’s what Jesus says in verse 3, “You are already clean [the same word in Greek that Jesus used for “pruned”] because of the word I have spoken to you.”[8] It’s that Word that strengthens your bond with Christ. It’s His Word that teaches you God’s will. It’s God’s Word that opens your eyes to see good works you were created to do, to bear the fruit you were planted to produce. And it all starts with hearing God’s Word.
You know, in our Western culture we can be so focused on results. We can be so fixated on action. We can even base our identity on what we do. But I want you to notice that in these words Jesus never once says, “Produce fruit.” He says, “Remain in me.”[9] He repeats it 7 times in 8 verses: “Remain in me.”
To a degree the fruit will take care of itself. That’s what you were created to do. God made you and molded you to have all the qualities and capacity and capabilities to do the good works that he had prepared for you to do. The fruit will take care of itself, as long as you remain in him, as long as you stay connected to the source. Jesus tells you, “Remain in me,” and then he promises, “If you remain in me and I in you, [then] you will bear much fruit.”[10]
So grow! Grow in the grace of God. Just don’t grow for growth’s sake. Don’t grow to produce more plumage for yourself, to make yourself greater. Don’t send out your branches for any and every fun and flashy thing at your fingertips. Be wary of the dead weight that distracts and diverts from your purpose to bear fruit.
Instead, grow into Christ. Remain in him. Immerse yourself in his Word. Fill yourself with the Holy Spirit he gives you there. And see how God will cause you to grow good fruit. When you focus on Christ you might be surprised to see when and how and where these fruits first begin to appear. But they will. Because you’re connected to Christ.
And that’s the beauty of this vine and branches imagery. Jesus doesn’t command you to do the impossible and then stand by and wait to see how you find the power to do it. He lives in you and gives you the power to do what you would have been powerless to do otherwise and then steps back to see what you’ll do with it, i.e. what shape you’ll take, what fruit you’ll produce; how you’ll fill to capacity to do what you were created to do, as long as you stay connected to him.
Remain in him, just as he remains in you, and rejoice in the fruit he enables you to produce. Amen.
[1] John 15:4,5
[2] Ephesians 2:10
[3] John 15:1,2
[4] Galatians 5:22-23
[5] John 15:2
[6] John 15:6
[7] John 15:2
[8] John 15:3
[9] John 15:4
[10] John 15:5