I am the true vine and My Father is the Gardener. He cuts off every branch in Me that doesn’t produce fruit, while every branch that does produce fruit, He prunes or in other words cleanses, so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Make your home in Me and I will live in you. No branch will produce fruit by its self; it has to stay connected to the Vine. I Am the Vine; you are the branches. If you make your life Me and I live in you, you will produce so much fruit; but if you are not living in Me, you can’t do anything. If anyone does not make their home in Me, they will be like a branch that withers and is thrown away. Those branches are picked up and thrown into the fire and are burned. If you make Me your life and My words live in you, ask whatever you want and it will be given to you. When you show that you are My disciples by producing fruit, you bring glory to My Father. (paraphrase John 15:1-10)
The best illustration of what Jesus was explaining in this passage is actually found in the lives of two of His disciples. In the first three verses of John 15, two paths are laid out, those who do not belong to the vine and therefore do not produce fruit and those who are in Christ and live their lives according to the words that Jesus spoke.
Judas walked with Jesus for as long as the rest of the disciples, for about three years. He slept, ate, drank and walked daily with God. He held a position of great trust among the disciples, because he was the one Jesus had chosen to entrust their finances to, Judas acted as their treasure. He, however, was not faithful to that trust. He showed his heart one day when he became upset because Mary, the sister of Lazarus, poured expensive perfume all over Jesus’ feet. He said that the perfume was wasted, and instead of it being used on Jesus, they should have sold it in order to have money to feed the poor. John points out that Judas could have cared less about the poor. He wanted the money to be put in the treasury so he could pilfer it.
In verse three of John 15, Jesus said that the disciples were clean because of the word He had spoken to them. Funny thing is, when Jesus taught this chapter, Judas was already gone. He had been cut off because he had chosen not to make Jesus His life. Judas made a decision within himself not to accept all that Jesus was teaching. He chose to live for himself, reject the vine, produce no fruit, and be cut off to be thrown away forever.
Peter on the other hand, well he was producing fruit. He not only followed Jesus, but he began to live in relationship with Jesus. That relationship changed who Peter was and began when Peter first met the Lord. His name was changed as was his life from that point forward. Was Peter perfect? By no stretch of the imagination, but the difference between him and Judas was that he wanted Christ.
Remember after the crowd found out that Jesus wasn’t going to provide them physical bread, and started to tell them that He was the Bread of Life, how they all left Him. Jesus turned to His disciples at that point and asked them if they were going to leave Him as well. Peter gave the best answer any of us could have given. He said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” How that must have warmed Jesus’ heart. Even as others left Him, the ones He had chosen were starting to understand. They were beginning to live in Him, as they realized that His words were the source of life.
That said, Peter had some things in his life that needed to be cut back, that needed to be pruned in order for him to produce as much fruit as he was capable of producing. Peter was a proud man. A couple times he was brash enough to openly question Jesus. Several times Jesus had to put Peter back in his place.
Not ten hours before he would deny knowing Jesus three times, Peter declared to the Lord that he would lay down his very life for Him. Of course we know that Peter was unable to keep that promise. When faced with the power of the Roman army, the anger of the Jews and his own humanity, he turned his back on the Holy One of God, on his Master, on his Friend. He found out that night that apart from Jesus he could do nothing. (Jh. 15:5).
You see Jesus had tried to prepare him. He had tried to get Peter to remain closer to Him that Peter thought he needed to be.. Jesus took his disciples to pray with Him after the Lord’s Supper. He knew how he was going to suffer, and knew that He needed to be so connected to the Father that NOTHING could deter Him from the cross. He asked the three disciples who were closest to Him to come with Him a little bit deeper into the garden and sit and pray with Him. This is how we know the heart wrenching prayers Jesus offered that night, but we too know that Peter, James and John were unable to stay awake and pray with the Lord as He had asked them to do.
Jesus didn’t tell them to pray for His sake, no he told them to pray so they would not fall into temptation. He said to Peter, “Simon, could you not keep watch for one hour? Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation.” By telling them to pray, Jesus was showing them how to remain in the vine, how to draw strength against sin, doubt, fear and temptation, but just like us they did not understand how much they needed to dwell in the very heart of God in order to with stand the wiles of the devil.
Because in the end that is exactly what happened to Peter. He fell to the enemy. In Luke 22: 31 Jesus warned Peter, “Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith many not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.” He knew that they would not be able to withstand the events of that night, and Jesus didn’t say that He would fight Satan for Peter, nor that He would stop Satan from coming to sift Peter. Instead He said, I have prayed for you. How powerful are those words? Simon, I have prayed for you. I think too often we take for granted the strength prayer can provide to us.
Prayer, the door to intimate fellowship with God, is one of the key ways He has provided for us to live in true relationship with Him, is one of the ways we remain in the Vine.
Jesus clearly explained to Peter that Satan was going to sift him or in other words test Him. God allowed Satan to do this in order to show Peter his own weakness, his own need for a Savior, his pride. You see sifting and pruning have the same results. The bad is removed and the good is left behind, thereby cleansing the plant or the wheat, causing it to become purified. To tell you the truth, I had no idea this passage, Luke 21:33 existed before a time of sifting or pruning took place in my own life.
Shon and I had been married for 13 years at the time. We had our ups and downs, but nothing big. God sent us somewhere cold, hard and lonely for 10 months, and in those ten months we had more thrown at us than we had had in our first 13 years of marriage. I was pretty proud that we were a healthy couple, that he was doing well in his career and that we were faithful to the church. By the time we were done with that period of sifting, we had both been seriously tempted to have affairs, our finances were in some major difficulties and the faithfulness to the church was replaced with a deeper, more real relationship with God. I confess, that was the most difficult period in my life, yet one of the most spiritually fruitful.
Too often we see Jesus and prayer as a genie in a bottle to rub so we can get three wishes and have an abundant life, free of pain and filled with prosperity. Well name it and claim it might work for some, but in my life it is the trial that actually produces the fruit. Why do we think that we should have it easy when Christ had to suffer the way He did? It is in His suffering we know Him most deeply, and apart from Him, apart from His suffering we can do nothing.
Just as this is true in our own lives, it was true for Peter. He did not just fail to keep His promise to Jesus, by not laying down His life for Jesus, he went above and beyond that to actually saying he didn’t even know who Jesus was. And when he heard that crow after his third denial, he looked into the eyes of Jesus, and was finally broken. The pride was stripped away. In its place came humility. It was then that Peter found He could not love the Lord in his own strength. It was through pain that He became even more dependent on the Vine.
So in order to remain fully in the Vine, God gave us His Word (Jesus), as Peter said, “You have the words of life”. Prayer then draws us even deeper into a relationship with the Vine, pruning gets rid of our desire to live on our own apart from the vine, and causes us to know that we are nothing without Him. The last way to remain in the vine is obedience and the fruit of that obedience is friendship with God.
Just as My Father has loved Me, I have loved you. Live in that love. I live in My Father’s love because I have done what He asked of Me, and that is how you can live in My love, by obeying what I have said to you. I say all of this to you so that you might be completely filled with joy. This is what I ask; Love each other just like I have loved you.
The greatest expression of love anyone can offer is to lay down his life for his friends. And as you love each other as I have asked you to do, you show that you are My friends. I no longer have to call you servants, because a servant doesn’t know the business affairs of his master. I now call you friends because everything I have learned from My Father I have made know to you.
You didn’t choose to follow Me, but I chose you. I selected you to produce fruit – fruit that will last, and as you produce fruit, the Father will give you whatever you ask in My name. This is the one thing I have asked of you; Love each other. (John 15: 9-17)
Philips, Craig and Dean have a song called, Friend of God. We sing it often at church, and yes, as we sing it we are thankful that God calls us His friend. But honestly, I think we have heard that we are His friend so often that we miss the utter amazement of being called a friend of God. I think within the church at least, we take the friendship of God for granted.
There were only two men in the entire Old Testament, which spans a greater length of time than the 2000 years that have passed since the birth of Christ, and in all that time only two men had the honor, no the blessing to be called friends of God. Those men were Abraham and Moses.
Yes, David was a man after God’s own heart, Joshua was obedient as he lead Israel, and Elijah was used to bring about some of the most amazing miracles in all history, but the title friend was not given to them.
That honor was reserved for two men that God spoke to as a man speaks to another man.…He, God Himself shared His heart with Abraham and Moses. If you think about it, there are no other people in the time before Christ whom God talked to in quite the same way He talked to them. For the sake of time, we are just going to look at the relationship God had with Abraham this evening.
The Lord promised Abraham that a nation would come from him, but as the years passed and no child was born to him and Sara, he began to wonder if he had not heard the Lord correctly. One night the Lord came to talk to him. “Do not be afraid Abraham, I am your shield, your very great reward.” Then the Lord took Abraham outside and said to him, “Look up at the heavens and count the stars – if indeed you can count them.” Then He said to Abraham, “So shall you offspring be.” And Abraham believed the Lord and in doing so was made righteous. Abraham chose that night to remain in the Vine, to live in the Lord and rest all his hopes, all of his future, his life in God’s hands.
Abraham showed that he was a friend of God, not just through his belief, but also through his actions. The son that God promised him finally came after 25 years of waiting. That son, the one Abraham must have adored and cherished, the Lord asked him to sacrifice. God asked Abraham to lay down his life, and Abraham obeyed. He didn’t argue, wrestle or hold back his beloved Son. He placed wood on Isaac’s back and walked him up to Mount Mariah. He prepared the wood on the altar, all the time knowing that his son was the sacrifice he would give. Isaac asked where the sacrificial lamb was and Abraham said the Lord would provide. Abraham believed that God would keep his promise through Isaac even if He had to raise Isaac from the dead. Isaac soon understood that he was the sacrificial lamb, and willingly gave himself to his father. Abraham raised his knife, and just as he was about to plunge it into His sons heart, the Lord said “Do not lay a hand on the boy. Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.” “There is no greater love than this, that a man is willing to lay down his life for his friends….Abraham was God’s friend…he laid down his life for Him.
STRANGER THAN FICTION
Harold Crick was a IRS Agent, who had no life. He counted the number of steps he took to get to the bus stop, how many times he moved his brush back and forth in his mouth each time he brushed his teeth, until the day he heard a voice in his head narrating his life, and then the narrator say that he was about to die….He took every step to find the narrator….tell rest of story.
What Harold realized was what Abraham lived out, The author’s will is far better than our own. If we remain in His love, we will produce fruit, and know what it means to be a friend of God.
The greatest example of one who remained perfectly in the Vine was the Vine Himself. Jesus, “Who being in the very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking on the very nature of a servant being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross. Jesus understood that the Author’s plan was the best one…no greater love has anyone than this, that he lays down His life for His friends, you are my friends if you do what I command…Remain in Me.
Study Guide
1. Ruminate on John 15. What does abiding/remain in the Vine mean. How do we abide in Him and how to we allow Him to abide in us?
2. Do you see the parallels of the lives of Judas and Peter? What can you learn from each one of their decisions?
3. Do you know that God calls you friend? What does that mean to you? Do you call God your friend, or do you see Him as a distant force that can’t really be known. Have you seen a new side of your relationship with God through this study?
4. Is God pruning a certain area of your life? Does he need to get rid of an area of pride or arrogance in your attitude toward Him or others. If you have been humbled, what have you learned, how painful was it, and what have you learned?
5. Will you decide to follow the will of the Author of all history, or will you have to be broken so you will listen to His call on your heart and your life.
6. Rewrite John 15:1-10 in your own words, through that you will find that you can and will be able to ABIDE IN THE VINE.
Father, Thank you for Jesus, our forever friend. Teach us through Your loving-kindness to remain in His love, to abide in the Vine. In Jesus Glorious Name Amen.
