The Vine and the Branches

John 15:1-5 “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[a] 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.

THE TRUE BRANCHES OF THE TRUE VINE

I Union or abiding with Jesus is the basis for fruitfulness.

Jesus is the Vine, the Christians are the branches.

’ What is this abiding mean? Its cultivating communion with Christ, in Word and prayer and meditation of Him. First of all be, and then do; first of all receive, and then give forth; first of all draw near to Christ, and then there will be fruit to His praise. Union with Him bears not few but much fruit. What is this fruit? Two kinds of fruit. First is Fruit of character, the fruit of the Holy Spirit-Galatians . .The second is the fruit of people coming to Christ because of your testimony or sharing the Gospel. John 15:16.

II. The barrenness of separation. There is the condemnation of all the busy life of men which is not lived in union with Jesus Christ.. , the withering and destruction following separation from Him.

‘Without me, nothing.’ All your busy life, when you come to sum it up, is made up of plus and minus quantities, which precisely balance each other, and the net result, unless you are in Christ, is just nothing; and on your gravestones the only right epitaph is a great round cypher. ‘He did not do anything. There is nothing left of his toil; the whole thing has evaporated and disappeared.’ That is life apart from Jesus Christ.

And so,’ says Jesus Christ, ‘as long as a man holds on to Me and the sap comes into him, he will flourish, and as soon as the connection is broken, all that was so fair will begin to shrivel, and all that was green will grow brown and turn to dust, and all that was blossom will droop, and there will be no more fruit any more for ever.’

III. Thirdly, we have here the union with Christ as the condition of satisfied desires.

‘If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.’ ’ He is speaking about prayers. In fact, His abiding in us is largely the abiding of His words in us

What is meant by Christ’s words abiding in us? Something a great deal more than the mere intellectual acceptance of them. Something very different from reading a verse of the Gospels of a morning before we go to our work, and forgetting all about it all the day long; something very different from coming in contact with Christian truth on a Sunday, when somebody else preaches to us what he has found in the Bible, and we take in a little of it. It means the whole of the conscious nature of a man being, so to speak, saturated with Christ’s words; his desires, his understanding, his affections, his will, all being steeped in these great truths which the Master spoke. . See that Christ’s words be lodged in your inmost selves, by patient meditation upon them, by continual recurrence to them, and all your life will be glorified and flash into richness of colouring and beauty by their presence. If our whole inward nature is influenced by the continual operation upon it of the words of the Lord, then our desires will be granted. It means that if Christ’s words are the standard of your wishes, then your wishes will harmonise with His will, and so ‘ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.’

The condition of our getting what we will is our willing what He desires; We get our wishes when our wishes are moulded by His word.

IV. The last thought that is here is that this union and fruitfulness lead to the noble ends of glorifying God and increasing discipleship.

‘Herein is My Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit.’ Christ’s life was all for the glorifying of God.

And yet that is what we should all be-mirrors of the divine radiance, on which some eyes, that are too dim and sore to bear the light as it streams from the Sun, may look, and, beholding the reflection, may learn to love. Does God so shine in me that I lead men to magnify His name? If I am dwelling with Christ it will be so.

And if thus we abide in Him and bear fruit we shall ‘‘become His disciples.’ The end of our discipleship is never reached on earth: we never so much are as we are in the process of becoming, His true followers and servants.If we bear fruit because we are knit to Him, the fruit itself will help us to get nearer Him, and so to be more His disciples and more fruitful. And thus our action as Christian men and women will tell upon our inward lives as Christians, and the more our outward conduct is conformed to the pattern of Jesus Christ, the more shall we love Him in our inmost hearts. We ourselves shall eat of the fruit which we ourselves have borne to Him.

CHALLENGE:

1. Are you abiding in Christ? In His Word and Prayer?

2. Are Gods wishes and desires, yours also?

3. If you are abiding in His Word, fruit naturally follows. Do you notice it? Others are blessed?

4. If you need to abide more of Him, what practical steps you can do?