The Vine No.2 The Secret of Fruitfulness

John 15, 1 to 8 I am the true vine, and my father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit. While every branch that does bear fruit, he trims clean, so that it may be even more fruitful.

You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, and I will 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. I am the vine, you are the branches.

If a man remains in me, and I in him, he will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing. If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers.

Such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you remain in me, and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. This is to my father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.

What, after all, is Apollos, and what is Paul? Only servants through whom you came to believe. As the Lord has assigned to each his task, I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God makes things grow.

The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labour. For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building.

By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should be careful how he builds, for no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the day will bring it to light.

It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man's work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss.

He himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames. The other branches keep us abiding in you. For we know that we must be in love, but must remain a harvest that will last eternally.

You are the vine, we are the branches, keep us abiding in you. In your love, then we'll go. In your name, that the world will surely know that you have power to heal and to save.

You are the vine, we are the branches, keep us abiding in you. Christ, our Lord, we yield to you. Your commands we'll obey, for your love has won our hearts, and we long to glorify your precious name.

You are the vine, we are the branches, keep us abiding in you. You are the vine, we are the branches, keep us abiding in you. Now it's always the case that we have friends who are not regularly in attendance here at the town.

Let me spend a moment just telling you what we're doing. Each Sunday I try to bring to the attention of the congregation a few verses of Scripture, and I explain it. And my objective is always to bring my thinking into the confines of what Scripture teaches, believing that this book is infallible, whereas my words are not.

The most important thing, or perhaps one of the most important things in life, is that you respect this book as being God's word. I am persuaded myself that it is God's authoritative word that you and I need to listen to, read, digest. Far, far more important than any newspaper that you may get day by day.

And the tragedy is in our country that we have had this book for so long, and yet only a minority of our population recognize it as being God's word for them, helping them to live their lives. Well, we come to the 15th chapter of John's Gospel, as I say, and here our Lord Jesus is teaching His disciples. They've left the upper room.

They're on their way to Gethsemane, and just days ahead is the awful death which Jesus Christ has to experience. And it's night. He's walking with His disciples out from Jerusalem, down the Kidron Valley, and across to one of the gardens.

There's some light because it's Passover, and therefore there's a full moon. There is some illumination. And as the disciples are with our Lord Jesus, they actually are walking through vineyards.

And the possibility is that being fairly cool, there are fires burning. Some of the scrub of the vineyards being gathered together by the vineyard workers, and maybe they're warming their hands by the fire. And maybe it's this imagery that our Lord has in mind as He moves into the vineyards before He gets to Gethsemane.

And as He passes, as I mentioned last week, the temple, emblazoned across the temple is a picture of the vine. It was sculptured out of gold. Now, the vine was the national emblem of the Jewish nation.

All the purposes of God were to be wrapped up in the Jews, but they didn't do what He wanted. And so the Lord, in one sense, dismisses the Jews from the privileges that were theirs as He speaks to His disciples, and He says, I, I am the true vine. The purposes of God will be achieved by my life.

And you, you're going to be involved too. These 11 men, Peter, Thomas, James, Matthew, all of them involved in the purposes of God in doing for the world what the Jewish nation should have done for the world. Not as a literal vine, of course, but using the vine as a metaphor because the vine has rapid growth.

It shoots all over the place, and if it is well cultivated, it brings forth many, many bunches of grapes. Now, that is ideally what the Lord wants in our world, to be permeated by those whose lives are so fruitful that His purposes are brought to pass in and through their testimony. Well, then, that just by way of introduction.

Here's our Lord speaking to His disciples, and in the first verse, He says, I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. And in the eighth verse, He says, This is to my Father's glory that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. Now, for those who've been present in past weeks, let me just dip into the 14th chapter and run a contrast again with the 15th chapter, and then those of you who are just here today, you plug in your attention in a moment or so's time.

In the 14th chapter, our Lord has been talking about the salvation which He offers the disciples. He's been talking about the faith that they are to show as ultimately He leaves them. Now, in the 15th chapter, He's not so much speaking about salvation, but sanctification, not faith, but fruit, how you are to live your life as a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ.

All right, those of you who weren't listening the last minute, you start to listen again because I'm back into the 15th chapter. Now, one thing is most important as you listen to the Lord Jesus is that you recognize the composition of His congregation. I've already given you information as to what that was, the 11 disciples.

You see, there are three types of people according to the New Testament. There are those who confess Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour, true believers. There are those who reject Christianity completely, in other words, pagans, those who have no connection with Christianity whatsoever.

Some of you listened to any questions yesterday afternoon or at least the broadcast. You would have heard Ken Livingstone denying that he had any knowledge of the Christian faith. Well, I'm referring to that sort of person.

I don't select him for any other reason but by way of illustration. I'm not just speaking of the hot and tot in Africa. I'm talking about those who are not Christian people.

Well, the Bible recognizes obviously that category. There are those who want to follow the Lord Jesus as Saviour and live their lives for His honour and for His glory. There are the unbelievers and there are those in the former category who are Christians and yet they give very little evidence on the human level as to the genuineness of their faith.

So have you got that clear? Now, our Lord Jesus, when He is speaking on this particular parable, when He's relating to this theme, He has no unbeliever present. Judas has gone. There is no apostate there.

There is no pagan there. He has His disciples. He has, in effect, an example of the church as it ultimately will be as these men take His gospel around the world.

Now, amongst the company of those who confess Jesus Christ as Saviour, as within the compass of my voice here in the tabernacle, there will be those who will be very, very concerned to live fruitful lives, who will want their whole personality to be controlled by the Spirit of Jesus. They will be like a vine that has many, many clusters under its foliage. But then there will be others who, though they are connected to the Lord Jesus inasmuch as they recognize Him as Saviour, they've gone into John 14, they know something of salvation, they've never moved into being fruitful.

They've known very little in the area of sanctification. There is very little that indicates outwardly that they really are different from the pagan. I put it as shockingly as that.

But I do believe that there are a large number of people within so-called Christendom who are in that category. I am not disputing their salvation. I am disputing their sanctification.

I am not questioning their faith. I am questioning their fruit. And so our Lord Jesus, not wishing any of His disciples to be in that sad former category, speaks to them of Himself and by extension illustrates what He wants them to be.

I am the vine, you are the branches. The job of the branch is to reproduce the vine, the stem, with all its sap as their means of being fruitful. Well, that again is background information as I focus in upon the secret of fruitfulness, the secret of being a fruitful Christian.

And I want to bring three words to these verses as I did last time, which will help us to open up our Lord's teaching. My first word is supervision, the Father's ministry. My Father is the Gardener.

You want to be a fruitful Christian. I tell you that if that is the case, then you've got to understand what our Lord Jesus is here teaching in regard to the Heavenly Father. You see, Christianity is not just Jesus-centric.

It does not proclaim only the person of the Lord Jesus, however blessed and however honorable His name may be. It brings to us face to face with Almighty God, who is not some dispassionate being tucked away in the universe, remote from us, but a Heavenly Father who is near and involved in our circumstances. That's the reason why I preached to you, you remember, some weeks ago, some systematic addresses from Luke 15, which tell us of the Fatherhood of God.

Now, our Lord speaking to the disciples says, My Father, My Father is the Gardener. My Father is the Husbandman. What is the task of Father? Or rather, what is the task of a Husbandman or of a Gardener? Well, as far as vines are concerned, it's to endeavor to control the growth and to direct the growth and to look after the well-being of the plant.

Concern, lest the plant runs to leaf, lest there's disease, lest there is blight, lest there is withering and dying away. And so you have this homely illustration of the farmer. If you like, the old Dan Archer, those of you who are Ambridge fans.

A man who gives his life to the soil. A man who's concerned, like old Ted Ranger used to be here. One of the members that I love so much as I recall his memory.

Given to the nurturing and the cultivation of plants. My Father, He's the Gardener. And you? You are the branches in the vine.

And He has a concern for you. What's the nature of His concern? Three things. First of all, He's concerned to excite growth.

He's concerned to excite growth. And to do that, He exhibits care. And then He expects fruit.

First of all, He excites growth. The vine will grow very rapidly. That's why the trellises are often put 12 feet apart.

Now, when you get to the second verse, there is a rendering of the Greek verb, which I'm not too sure, either the A-V or the N-I-V, has got the sense exactly. The idea in the second verse of chapter 15, I think, is of the Gardener lifting up the trailing vine and ensuring that it rests on a trestle. Now, when in Scripture that verb that is translated here, I think, inaccurately cut off, when it's used on a previous occasion in John's Gospel, you discover that it has reference to our Lord Jesus and Him lifting up His eyes.

Our Lord Jesus lifting up His eyes. You come across that in the 11th or 12th chapter. I've just lost the reference at the moment.

When you raise or you lift up your eyes, that's how you can render, how you can translate the verb aero. Now, here is our Saviour. And I suggest to you that the context indicates not so much cutting off, chopping off, but lifting up.

In Acts chapter 4, you get the same use of the verb. The disciples lifting up their praises to the Lord. Well, here is this husbandman.

Here is this Gardener. He's very concerned about the well-being of the vine. And so what does he do? Well, he lifts up the trailing vine so that it's placed on its trestles.

He endeavors to cultivate it in such a fashion that growth shall be excited. Don't you sometimes in the Old Testament get this idea of the Lord God lifting you up? The Lord is my shield. The Lord is the lifter up of my head.

This is what the Gardener will do for the vine. This is what the Heavenly Father will do for Christians who are compliant with His will. He will lift them up to excite growth.

And in the very lifting them up, He exhibits His care. This is again what you discover in this second verse. He lifts up every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit, He prunes.

Or as the marginal note will give you at the bottom of the page, He cleans. Again, do you know anything about the vineyard? Anything about the science of cultivating vines? It's most important that the ground is clear and pure. It's most important that the plant remains washed and clean and pure.

This again is the job of the Gardener. He excites growth by lifting up the branch and putting it on the trestles. He will lift the foliage back and He will clean the stalk and He will go underneath the leaves to where there may be blight or insect and He will get rid of all that which would stop growth.

And then ultimately, of course, the husbandman, the Gardener, he wants fruit. Verse 8 seals the point. This is my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.

Now, what does all that amount to? Well, simply this. When our Lord Jesus was born on earth, you discover the great care that the Heavenly Father had for Him. Not so, I reminded you of that last week.

Prophetically, our Lord Jesus is referred to as a root out of a dry land, out of a dry ground. It says of Him, there is no form nor comeliness which would desire Him. And in many senses, and particularly when you consider the horrific death that He bore, you see the fulfillment of that.

Now, the vine itself is not a beautiful plant. The beauty of the vine rests not so much in its foliage but in its fruit. And the Heavenly Father was very concerned to ensure that the Lord Jesus achieved the objective for which He came on planet earth.

The Father was always with Him. He lifts up His eyes as though the Father has some glance, some look to direct towards the Son. He receives encouragement from the Father all the way along.

The relationship between our Lord Jesus and the Father is utterly unbroken. And it's the relationship of the Gardener to the Vine. Now, that same relationship is handed over in the Christian era.

As my Father has tended me, so He will look after you. I am the Vine, my Father is the Gardener, and you are the branches. And so the Father comes to excite growth.

The Father comes and He exhibits grace. The Father comes and He expects fruit. Now, my friend, if you follow the imagery, and I've tried to put it as clearly as I possibly can, I wonder how do you react to Father's ministry in your life? You see, there is foliage, yes? But maybe there is random growth.

And perhaps there's little fruit. And Father comes along and He sees the blight. He sees the things that are stopping, the fruit that He wants.

And so He washes, or He prunes, or He cuts. This is why the Apostle James can say, count it all joy when you fall into various temptations. Why? Well, it could well be that it's not the devil who is bringing certain unpleasant things into your experience.

It could be that Father is cutting out the blight. You see, Father has great concerns for you. That's why the chastisement of God when it comes into your life should be received as though it were for your benefit, which it is.

Do you respond, my friend? How does a person get clean? Well, he gets clean through the Word. This is the reason why I think intelligent, spiritual people will come under the sound of a Bible-based ministry on a regular basis. I'm not just referring to the tabernacle.

It's up to you to evaluate the nature of the ministry. But I am saying this, that as the Word is expounded, as it is explained, as it is brought to mortals in the 20th century, in effect it's Father washing the personality. You say sometimes you don't like what the preacher says.

I think that that preacher ought to therefore have your ear more often than not because there are times, you see, when the Word comes with a cutting and with a roughness which is necessary long-term for the production of what Father wants, fruit. And so our Lord spells out for us as He teaches on this particular parable of the Father. He tells us of the Father's supervision, the Father's ministry.

I am the true vine and my Father is the gardener. But more than that, let me bring another word. And the word is cooperation.

And the subject matter of this, the one who is asking for cooperation is none other than our Lord Jesus. Supervision, the Father's ministry. Cooperation, the Savior's priority.

Fifteen times you get in the authorized version abide in me, abide in me, abide in me. The NIV has given it, I think, a weaker translation. Remain in me and I will remain in you.

No, you see, the necessity for the branch to remain in the vine is so obvious that it almost doesn't need spelling out afresh. Without remaining in the vine, it can't get the nutriment, it can't get the sap, it can't get the benefit of all that the vine stands for. It's the stem that sends roots into Mother Earth and ultimately feeds the branch.

Now, our Lord Jesus is speaking of you and me and His relationship to us. I am the vine. You are the branches.

Therefore, abide, remain in me. And He's so emphatic that, as I say, He reproduces the command time and time again. Now, listen.

You'll never understand this unless you grasp this, that there is a distinction in Scripture between being in Christ and abiding in Christ. You say you don't understand. All right.

Being in Christ is what our Lord has been speaking of in the 14th chapter. Abiding in Christ is what He refers to in the 15th chapter. When you are in Christ, that is not something, in one sense, that you can do for yourself.

It's done for you. If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation. I cannot work for my salvation.

My salvation comes to me as a result of the sovereignty of God opening up my heart and mind so I ascend to scriptural truth and I become part of that great community of people known as Christians. But, you see, though you cannot choose in that divine sense to be in Christ, though you can't work for your salvation, the concept of remaining in Christ and abiding in Christ, that is something where you come very, very much to the forefront. You can make an effort.

You can cooperate. This is why I took the word cooperation and brought it to you as a lever so that you can understand this passage a little bit more. Cooperating with the Lord Jesus, you have to abide with Him.

To be in Christ is the union effected by God's creative power when we were saved. I repeat, it can never be suspended. But to abide, to remain, to continue to dwell, that's a challenge for the Christian.

And, you see, the period in which we abide in Christ is coextensive with our lives now. Our Lord Jesus, I repeat, in the 15th chapter, is not speaking about salvation. He's speaking about sanctification, not about our faith but our fruit.

And we have just the 60 years, 30 years, I don't know what it will be in your case or in mine, but we have a life's pilgrimage in which to work through this particular injunction of cooperating with the Savior so we can draw from the power that He had in His own life as He engaged in His public ministry. What does our Lord Jesus want to do? Want us to do? He wants us to remain in Him. To remain in Him so that we can reproduce Him.

He wants us to remain in Him so that we can do what He Himself did in His life. Did He not say to the disciples in the 14th chapter and the 10th verse, or rather the 11th verse, Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father in me, or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves. I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing.

We are not just to reproduce the life of our Lord Jesus, but the works of our Lord Jesus. And you do that, I say, by abiding in Him. That's something that you positively can attempt each day of your life.

Let me give you a further example just to seal the point. If you go to the 6th chapter of John's Gospel, you find our Lord Jesus depicting, predicting, if you like, His own death. And the benefits of that death in terms of the communion meal and spiritually in terms of the life that will flow into our being as we remain in Him and as we cultivate a pattern of life that pleases Him.

Verse 53 of John chapter 6 to give the context. Jesus said to them, I tell you the truth, unless you can eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.

And I will raise him up at the last day, for my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Verse 35.

I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry. And he who believes in me will never be thirsty.

Now what do all these metaphorical comments mean about eating His bread and drinking, eating His body and drinking His blood? Well don't you see the very benefits that Jesus came onto this earth to bring are illustrated here? He is the Savior. He is the one who has conquered death and made it possible for your sins to be forgiven. But not only that, He is the life force.

When you become a member of His church, then it is possible for His Spirit in all His fullness to come into your heart and life. But you see, you have to seek for that sort of experience. It's not a once for all.

Be being filled with the Holy Spirit. Be endeavoring all your life to be abiding in Christ. Live a lifestyle that pleases Him.

There are certain things that will be injurious to the vine, the insect, the blight, being in the dirt on the ground so the husband lifts the vine and he washes so that the insect will not be able to have its harmful effect. Don't you see, my friend, that in this sense our Lord Jesus is asking for your cooperation. You ask me, some of you, why am I so barren in my spiritual experience? And I put it to you that possibly the reason is you've never cooperated.

You've never cooperated with the Lord Jesus. Yes, you're saved, but it's gone no further than that. Yes, you're in the faith, but there's very little in the way of fruitage.

And our Lord comes back to us and He spells out in His command, in His repeated command, the necessity for you to abide in Him. Why? Because apart from Him you can do nothing. That's what He says, is it not, in the fifth and sixth verses? I am the vine, you are the branches.

If a man remains in Me and I in him, he will bear much fruit. Apart from Me you can do nothing. He didn't say, apart from you I can do nothing.

Apart from Me. You see how necessary it is to read the Bible. How necessary it is to come in prayer to the Lord Jesus Christ.

How necessary it is to bring your life under the direction and the teaching of His Scripture. That's what it means to abide in Him. Now, why are you trying to do that? Oh, come on, let me be really blunt.

Forget the noise of the children outside as they're coming away from their Sunday school classes and forget the person next to you. I don't care whether you've been in their tab 20 years, 40 years or 60 years. It could well be that you're in that category that this Scripture warns you against.

What about the fruit, my friend? Do you really abide in Him? Are you drawing strength from Him day by day and week by week? Or is yours a mere performance that you go through in terms of religion? Is your understanding of Christianity just a group of doctrinal definitions to which you give mental assent? That's very important, but it's not the essence of the importance. The most important thing is that you live within Christ Jesus as your Lord and your Savior, drawing strength from Him, coming under the authority of His Word. Do you do that? That's what the Lord Jesus wanted of His disciples.

He wanted it more than anything else. That's why He spoke about the supervision of the Father. My Father is the Gardener.

This is what the Father wants. This is why He speaks of the cooperation that He wants from you with Him. Remain in me and I in you because apart from me then you are doomed as far as spiritual success is concerned, which brings me rightly in my last couple of minutes to the third part of what I want to share, incineration, the believer's tragedy.

I give you my points again. Supervision, the Father's ministry. Cooperation, the Savior's priority.

Incineration, the believer's tragedy. If anyone does not remain in me, verse 6, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers. Such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.

Now did you hear properly what I said at the beginning? Our Lord is not speaking to those who are not Christian people. There are only the disciples there. Then in what sense can He speak of the disciples or potential disciples being burned in an incinerator? I repeat, it has nothing to do with their salvation whatsoever.

That doesn't even come into the questioning in the teaching of our Lord Jesus. He is teaching about the quality of life that they have lived having committed themselves to the Lord Jesus. They have been in the vine.

They have taken from His life. They have been bearing fruit. But the possibility is, our Savior says, that you can start bearing fruit in the earlier years but in the latter years to bear no fruit whatsoever.

In other words, your life becomes as valueless in terms of working for God as the vine that's gone wild, as the vine that has gone to seed or that has gone to leaf. What happens to that? Well, it's locked off. Thus the fires that were burning on the slopes as our Lord went down to the Garden of Gethsemane.

Now don't you see, my dear friend, that the Scriptures make it very, very plain but the thought is a horrific one that your life could be like that. That at the end of time, you've got nothing to show in terms of fruit, in terms of real value of Christian service. That my understanding of this passage is correct, I reckon, is clinched by the teaching of the Apostle Paul.

You remember his metaphor is different. In the chapter that David read to us earlier, he spoke about the Day of Judgment and the idea was of Christian people represented by various commodities, by various illustrations. There was straw, there was stubble, there is gold, there is silver, there are things that are precious, there are things that are valueless.

I, and Paul says, on the Day of Judgment all these will be put in the fires of God's judgment. Now that straw or that gold, it responds to the quality of service that you have offered the Lord Jesus Christ. And, of course, when straw is applied to fire, it burns, it's consumed.

There is nothing left. Gold, however, will come through the flame unsullied. It will come through the flame as precious as it was when it went through the flame.

Now the Lord Jesus is teaching the Apostle Paul by His Spirit that on the Day of Judgment there are those who will be saved as by fire. They have nothing to show. Their lives are full of just straw and stubble and hail.

They went through the performance, the ritual of going to church. They acknowledged a creed. Yes, they were saved.

They'd been into John 14, but never into John 15. They knew the faith. They didn't know the fruit.

They knew salvation. They knew nothing of sanctification, saved as by fire. The very word that is employed by the beloved John as he writes about the branches being thrown into the fire because they had no use at the earthly level for the gardener.

There was no fruit. There was nothing really worth keeping in terms of ongoing benefit from that vine. Now I'm through.

The teaching is somber, but I'm not responsible for that. It's straight from the Scripture I've given to you. My understanding is I've poured hours into this particular chapter during these last few days, but I come just to make this final point.

There are three categories of people. There are the unbelievers who want to know nothing of this Christianity, who have considered it, partially considered it, and rejected it. And then, within the Christian fraternity, there are also two groups.

Those who have responded, but they never really went any further. Saved. A lot of leaf.

A lot of random growth. But no maturity. No discipline.

No fruit. Nothing worth preserving for eternity. Their life's work up in the flames of the judgment of God.

But then, bless it be God, there's a dear old lady who spent 70-odd years of her life loving the Lord Jesus and living for Him. There's an old man with a stuttering tongue who could never have moved into the pulpit, but his life was consistent. There's a young couple who got married and opened their home to other people and lived for the honor and the glory of God.

You see, there are many, many ways in which you can show fruit, the sort of fruit that the gardener is looking for. Now I ask you, where do you find yourself? In which of those three categories? I am the vine. You're the branches.

Father is a gardener. Cooperate with Him and with His blessed Son and know fruitfulness in your life. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ...that we use to outline the teaching of this chapter.

May something live on in our hearts. May the great potential that is there of being part of the vine and all that we can be grip us so that something more of our Savior may be seen in the lifestyle that we adopt and the attitudes that we have throughout the whole of our being. And we ask that on that day when we are brought before you, there shall have been something worth living for which you will remind us of.

Send us then into the remainder of this day and into this oncoming week with a sense of your presence, the presence of the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now and always. Amen. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...