34 The True Vine
XXXIV THE TRUE VINE
Bouqueron, above Grenoble, Sabbath forenoon, 19th April 1905. My Dear Robert, --After breakfast and family worship this morning, we each took our own favorite book and separated for the forenoon. I selected for my retreat the great vineyard that covers the sunny slope above Grenoble, and which commands a fine view of the rich valley and the beautifully-situated city below, and the splendid chain of snow-white Alps beyond. I know and am quite sure that I am now in the very heart of an immense vineyard, but it does not look like it. The scene all around me is like anything but a vineyard, as we in Scotland imagine a vineyard to be. For the vines all around me are the most unpromising, and almost forbidding things possible. They are black, dry, twisted, knotted, gnarled; hacked at the root with the vine-dresser’s axe, and hewn to pieces in all their branches with his pruning-knife. The truth is the vines all around me, both roots and branches, are more like brands plucked out of the burning than living things, or things with any hope of life in them. The apple-trees are covered with their snow-white blossoms. The cherry-trees and the plum-trees also are perfectly gorgeous with their gold and purple plumage. But it is only here and there that I can discover the smallest bud of green promise in all these miles on miles of vineyard. And yet though I have not been able to tell you the half of this hopeless looking scene, if you were to come to this beautiful land in autumn you would find this whole hillside simply groaning under its immense loads of gold and silver grapes. Now, dear Robert, being a minister, and always thinking of my Bible, and of my pulpit at home, this scene this forenoon has called to my mind the fifteenth chapter of John’s Gospel. For in that most beautiful chapter our Lord says to us that He is the true vine, and that His Father is the husbandman, and that we are the branches. Now, when we read that, and think about what we read, we at once see that our Lord was indeed the true vine in many ways; but first of all in His outward appearance to the eyes of the men around Him. Do you remember what the prophet Isaiah said about our coming Savior hundreds of years before He was born? "And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground. He hath no form nor comeliness, and when we shall see Him there is no beauty that we should desire Him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised and we esteemed Him not." Just as I would have despised these vines all around me this morning had I not known better. And then when our Savior actually came to this world all that, and much more than all that, was fulfilled in Him. For He was born into a poor and a despised man’s house. He had no schooling like you and your brothers. He was put to His father’s trade when He was about as old as Aird, and He worked with His hands till He began to be about thirty years of age. But all the time, and in spite of appearances, He was the true vine, and He was all the time under His heavenly Father’s husbandry. Dear Robert: learn by heart what your Savior says about Himself in the fifteenth of John, and often ask the Heavenly Husbandman to make you a fruitful branch of the true vine." And now, my brethren, though it is not written down in so many words, you may depend upon it that a thousand times when released from labor on the Sabbath day, our Lord would take the psalm-book and would find the place where this is written: "Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt; Thou hast cast out the heathen, and hast planted it. The hills were covered with the shadow of it, and the boughs thereof were like the goodly cedars. Return, we beseech Thee, O God of hosts; look down from heaven, and behold, and visit this Thy vine." And when the book of the prophet Esaias was delivered to Him, He would often find the place where this is written: "My well-beloved hath a vineyard in a very fruitful hill. And he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and planted it with the choicest vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and also made a wine-press therein. And he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes." And again, when He opened another prophet: "For their vine is the vine of Sodom, and of the fields of Gomorrah. Their grapes are grapes of gall, and their clusters are bitter. Their wine is the poison of dragons, and the cruel venom of asps." As Jesus of Nazareth, child and youth and man, read and reread a thousand times these prophetical Scriptures concerning Israel; and as He read and re-read His own mind, and heart, and character; and as He read and re-read the minds, and the hearts, and the characters of all men around Him; and as the Spirit of prophecy more and more took possession of Him, Jesus of Nazareth came to see, and to be fully assured, that He Himself had been chosen and endowed and ordained to be the True Vine. Ten thousand times all this was stamped and sealed upon His mind and His heart and His will and His purpose till He was able, in the upper-room that last Passover night, to speak out this most wonderful of all His parables to His disciples. Our Lord had never walked through a vineyard all His days without stopping His walk and discovering some new likeness in that vineyard to the kingdom of heaven. Till as time went on He came to see Himself as in a glass in every vineyard He entered. He had often said it to Himself, but this was the first time He had ventured to announce it to His disciples. And what made Him speak so plainly that night was because He had just had the wine-cup in His hand, and had distributed it to His disciples; that wine-cup into which, as He looked down into it, He saw crushed all the grape-clusters of His whole life, as well as His heart’s-blood in Gethsemane that night and on Calvary next morning. O, all ye who were at the Lord’s Table this morning and this afternoon; labor to enter into your Savior’s state of mind when He said that He was the True Vine. Do your utmost to enter into His heart. Work your way into His imagination as He handed round the cup and said, I am the True Vine. My dear friends, do you ever, and of your own accord, think of these things? To tell you the truth, I am afraid of you.
"I am the true vine, and My Father is the Husbandman." That is to say, no vine is ever a vine of itself. Every vine, if it had a tongue given to it, would say what the True Vine here says. It would say that it was its husbandman who had made it what it is. If I am a vine at all, it would say, it is all due to my husbandman and not at all to me. And herein is His Father glorified, when the True Vine lays Himself down in this Scripture before His Father’s feet. His holy birth, His holy upbringing, His holy life, and now His atoning death, which is at the door; all the planting, and all the watering, and all the watching that went to the production of the True Vine, is all recollected, and acknowledged, and comprehended by our Lord in that one word of His: "My Father is the Husbandman." "I the LORD do keep it," the Heavenly Husbandman had said as He administered His holy providence all through the earthly life of His Son. "I will water it every moment. Lest any hurt it, I will keep it night and day. Only let Him lay hold of My strength. And He shall cause them that come of Jacob to take root. Israel shall blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit." Till a whole world of untold things that had passed between the Father in heaven and His Son on earth, is all wrapped up in this one acknowledging word of our Lord: "My Father is My Husbandman." Think of all that also, all you thoughtful disciples of the Son of God.
Words would fail me to attempt to tell you the express and the immense comfort that came to me that Sabbath forenoon in that vineyard above Grenoble. As I staggered about among those hard, dry, hopeless-looking branches all, as it seemed to me, ready for the burning, and as these words of my Lord were then and there shed abroad in my heart, "Ye are the branches,"--what a comfort came to me. For that moment, as I remember well, and will never forget, every hacked and hewn and hopeless brand around me suddenly took to itself a tongue and spake comfort to me. "Come back soon and see us," they all said. "Come back and eat abundantly of our golden grapes in their season. Let not your heart be troubled," that whole vineyard broke out all around me in one concert of faith and hope and full assurance to me. "Keep up your heart, sir," their thousand voices said to me. And I did it till I came home singing the fifteenth of John to take up my husbandry in watering and watching for another season among you. And often, both before that Sabbath forenoon above Grenoble and since, to me in certain states of mind there is no sweeter or more reassuring word of my Lord than just this: "Without Me you can do nothing." When I have again been engaged in squeezing oil out of a flint, as Walter Marshall has it; when men are apt to act as if things were to be done in their own strength, as John Owen has it; what a restoring rebuke, what a reviving and strengthening remonstrance it is to hear the True Vine saying: "No more can you, except you abide in Me." O disconsolate soul! you and I give ourselves a whole world of unnecessary and even sinful anguish. We forget our true place and we suffer for it. We are not the True Vine, far less are we the Husbandman. God, our Father, is the Husbandman. And His Son Jesus Christ is to His Father and to us the True Vine. And it is in Him that all our fruit is looked for from us, and will ever be found by us. After my Sabbath forenoon among the melodious vines above Grenoble, I came home to my household, and sat down to my midday meal, as I well remember, singing these Gospel lines I cannot do without Thee, O Savior of the lost! Whose precious blood redeemed me At such tremendous cost.
Thy righteousness, Thy pardon, Thy precious blood must be My only hope and comfort, My glory and my plea.
I cannot do without Thee!
I cannot stand alone;
I have no strength nor goodness, Nor wisdom of my own. But Thou, beloved Savior!
Art all in all to me, And perfect strength in weakness Is theirs who lean on Thee.
"Abide in Me and I in you," is only one of His many so spiritual and so mystical-union expressions of that night, which it is impossible for me to explain to your satisfaction. But our Lord here employs an alternative expression which is a great explanation and encouragement to us. "If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you," He says. Now, I can understand that. That is neither too high, nor too deep, nor too inward, nor too mystical for me. I know not a few of His words already. I have not a few of them by heart already. And when He here asks that His words shall abide in me, He can mean nothing else but this surely; that I shall often recall and recollect His words; shall repeat them to myself at all times; and shall never cease to dwell more and more upon them. "Abiding," and "indwelling," may well be beyond me; but to commit to heart some of His promises and some of His parables is certainly not at all beyond me. I can easily do that. Indeed, speaking in this matter only for myself, I already do that, and I do nothing else nowadays with so much pleasure as that. I do not think I ever awake any morning that I do not take my stand that moment on some of His words, or on some of His servants’ words about Him. And so do many of you, I feel sure. Well then let us just go on doing that. Let us store our memories with His very identical words. Let His words dwell in our hearts richly, for He Himself says in this passage that to have His words dwelling in us is all the same as having Himself dwelling in us. I will give you again His own exact words on this matter to take home with you this communion evening. "If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you." That is to say--"Ye shall ask what fruitfulness ye will, as branches of the true vine, and you shall attain unto it, and so shall ye be my disciples." O! what a rich reward will that be, and that too for such an easy task! Just to go home saying, and to keep on saying, the finest Gospel passages to ourselves, till all we ask for shall be fulfilled in us and shall be fulfilled by us. Amen. Amen.