The Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, The Love of God, and The Fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you All. Amen.
John 15:1 “I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. 2 Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it, that it may bear more fruit. 3 You are already 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 of 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 shall be done for you. 8 By this is My Father glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples.” (NASB)
No creature enjoys suffering. Human beings chief among them. We don’t like things that are painful. We don’t like breaking bones, getting cut, or tearing tendons, ligaments, and muscles. We don’t like being sick. We don’t like emotional or psychological pain. We don’t like spiritual suffering. When talking about his aneurism, Pastor Marston once told me that when a person is in real pain they want only one thing and one thing. They want it to stop.
Yet, in the assigned Gospel lesson for this morning Jesus teaches that we, like Him, will have to endure the pain of His pruning so that we will bear more and better fruit befitting a child of God.
When Martin Luther wrote about today’s Gospel lesson, he speculated what a conversation between the vinedresser and the vine being pruned would sound like. “Imagine,” Luther wrote [L.W. John 15:2] “the vinedresser coming along and chopping about [your] roots with his mattock or his hoe and cutting the wood from [your] branches with his clipper or his pruning hook, [you] would be prompted by what [you] saw and felt to say: ‘What are you doing? Now I must wither and decay, for you are removing the soil from my roots and are cutting my branches with those iron teeth. You are tearing and pinching me everywhere . . . You are treating me more cruelly than one treats any tree or plant.’ But the Vinedresser will reply: ‘You are a fool and do not understand. For even if I do cut a branch from you, it is a totally useless branch; it takes away your strength and your sap. Then the other branches, which should bear fruit, must suffer. Therefore away with it! This is for your own good.’. . I am doing this for your welfare, to keep the foreign and wild branches from sucking out the strength and the sap of the others. Now you will be able to yield more and better fruit and to produce good wine.’
“This is how Christ interprets the suffering which He and His Christians are to endure on earth. This is to be a benefaction and a help rather than affliction and harm. Its purpose is to enable them to bear all the better fruit and all the more, in order that we may learn to impress this on ourselves as He impresses it on Himself. As though Jesus were saying: ‘After all, this is the truth, and I cannot interpret it otherwise. I share the fate of the branches in every respect. The unbelievers will throw manure at Me and will hack away at Me. They will shamefully revile and blaspheme Me, will torture, scourge, crucify, and kill Me in the most disgraceful manner, so that all the world will suppose that I must finally perish and be destroyed. But the fertilizing and pruning I suffer will yield a richer fruit: that is, through My cross and death I shall come to My glory, begin My reign, and be acknowledged and believed throughout the world.”
“Later on you Christians will have the same experience. You, too, must be fertilized and cultivated in this way. The Father, who makes Me the Vine and you the branches, will not permit this Vine to lie unfertilized and unpruned. Otherwise it would degenerate into a wild and unfruitful vine which would finally perish entirely. But when it is well cultivated, fertilized, pruned, and stripped of its superfluous leaves, it develops its full strength and yields wine that is not only abundant but also good and delicious.’” Thus ends the Luther quote.
[Sermon from Rev. Alan Taylor] “I am the true vine (Jesus says), and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.”
God causes fruit to grow on the vine. God created us and then when we became gnarled and tangled in sin, He recreated us in Christ that we might bear good fruit. He grafted us into His Son that connected to Him, we might be God’s work of art, a vine that produces fruit that serves and gladdens the heart of His creation while giving glory and honor to Him.
There are two settled principles to be harvested, if you will, from Jesus’ words here in John 15 regarding the vine and the branch and the fruitfulness of the latter. First, if the branch is cut off from the vine it can do nothing. And second, unless the branch is pruned it cannot produce fruit.
The first point seems pretty self-evident. If you cut a branch off from a vine the branch is going to die. In fact, as to its relationship or its connection to the vine, it is already dead once it’s been cut off. Jesus says, “cut off from Me you can do nothing.” Without faith, without being graphed into the vine, “it is impossible to please God.” The point of this analogy is that everything is our lives, apart from sin, of course, is considered good by God, full of fruit that supports and loves our neighbor and gives glory to God, because He makes our lives good. Our faith is in Christ and Him crucified.
The point is, you can’t make anything in your life good. Remember, you’re the branch, not the vine. But, because you are grafted into the vine, into Christ, you are a good branch and bear good fruit!
God puts the shears to us, cutting away what is gnarled and tangled, so that we will produce fruit to our neighbors good and to His glory. This is the second of the principles harvested from this text in John 15. Unless the branch is pruned it will not bear fruit.
“My son (says the Proverb), do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.” If God didn’t love you He wouldn’t be active in your life. If He didn’t love you He wouldn’t take the time to prune and nurture you. If He didn’t love you, He’d cut you off and discard you. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews quotes this very passage from Proverbs and then he concludes his comments regarding God’s discipline, saying, “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.”
Christ Jesus is the vine. We are the branches. He nourishes us with His Word, He prunes us in our daily lives, forgiveness us our sins through the means of grace, and causes us to bear good fruit. The harsh weather of life and those who brush up against us, are used by God to prune us. But united in the true Vine we are nourished and kept alive until the day of the final harvest.
Amen.