Fruitful for the Father - The Vine

‘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 prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. 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. ‘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. If you do not remain in me, you are 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 done for you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. John 15:1‭-‬8 NIVUK https://bible.com/bible/113/jhn.15.1-8.NIVUK This is one of those images in the Bible that it's really easy for us to skip over without noting the significance it had when Jesus first said it. And believe me: this had huge significance. You see, in the Old Testament, as the commentator David Guzik points out, the image of a vine or a vineyard was frequently used to refer to Israel (Psalm 80:8-9). Jesus Himself had did exactly that in a parable around a week previous to these verses (Matthew 21:33-44). But what He says here goes further. Much further. He says that He is the 'true' vine. In other words, He is the real thing and all the others were fake. So although He uses the picture of the Jewish nation as a vineyard elsewhere, here He changes the metaphor and says that He is the true vine. What could this mean? I believe this is coded language for something that would be scandalous in Jesus' day, and for many is still scandalous now. He is saying that the primary loyalty of His disciples, His followers, is not to their nation or their betters or to their race or their gender but to Him. Being in Him, having Him as our vine, means putting Him first above all others, and being loyal to Him above all others. This is absolutely consistent with His revolutionary teaching elsewhere: ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters – yes, even their own life – such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. Luke 14:26‭-‬27 NIVUK https://bible.com/bible/113/luk.14.26-27.NIVUK As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’ Jesus replied, ‘Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ He said to another man, ‘Follow me.’ But he replied, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’ Still another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.’ Jesus replied, ‘No-one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.’ Luke 9:57‭-‬62 NIVUK https://bible.com/bible/113/luk.9.57-62.NIVUK And this is fully worked out when all labels society could possibly place on us are completely removed in the church (Galatians 3:26‭-‬28; Colossians 3:11) Why? Because in Jesus Christ our primary loyalty is to Him and to none of these things. Let me update this. In Christ there are no denominations. There is no polarisation: no left or right; no Republican or Democrat; no Nationalist, Unionist or Loyalist; no conservative, liberal or socialist; there is no black, white, Asian or mixed race; none of the strata or classes in society. None of these things matter. None of these things are our primary identity. Only Christ. Nothing else. Let me make this even more straightforward to understand. When our loyalty to any of these eclipses our loyalty to Christ and we divide the church along these fault lines then we have broken ourselves off from the vine. We have sinned. Something else has become our god rather than Jesus Christ. And the very thought that this could happen should fill us with horror. To fully understand why this is such a huge issue, we must first understand why Jesus is the vine. He Himself further explains this in John 15. His love is the nourishment He provides as the vine to His branches (John 15:9). But this love is not passive, it is active. This love is not just a noun, it is a verb. It does something. This love causes Him to lay down His life to save us (John 15:10). However, just as the lungs inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, Jesus wants His branches to take in His love and do something with it. He wants us to love (John 15:12), also with an active, not a passive love. You see, Paul teaches that the church is the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12: 12-31). And right in the middle of this teaching is the famous, and often quoted, passage on love in 1 Corinthians 13. But this was not intended to be read at weddings. This is not just a beautiful piece of poetry. This is the lifeblood of the Body of Christ. Or, to use Jesus' metaphor, this is the sap of the vine. This is why it is so utterly wrong and offensive to the Gospel when we allow the division and polarisation of the world outside to inflitrate the church. Let me give you another picture. In the 1990s a new word was added to the English dictionary. It's a horrible word with dreadful connotations. The word, the verb, is 'to Balkanise'. It comes from the Balkan region of Europe. It means 'to divide a country or region into smaller, mutually hostile states or groups'. It happened when the country of Yugoslavia fell apart and its nations turned in on themselves in dreadfully bitter wars, with the clearly expressed aim of wiping one another out. Colleagues, friends, neighbours, even family members turned on each other and sought to kill each other, because their primary loyalty was to their ethnicity, not to each other. We saw the horror of this barbaric war when we visited Mostar in Bosnia. It was the anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, when eight thousand men and boys, even babies, were butchered for no other crime than not being Serbian. We walked across the bridge where neighbours and friends had fought armed running battles with each other, before Croatian planes bombed it - a bridge that had been in place for over a thousand years (and was subsequently repaired) - to try and stop the bloodshed. Friends, we are still living with the awful after effects of these terrible wars. Yet there are still those who seek to divide society for their own awful ends. We cannot allow them to divide the church. We cannot allow them to Balkanise the Body of Christ. Jesus Christ is the True Vine. He is our source of sustenance. Our highest and deepest loyalties belong to Him and Him alone. All other vines are fakes. The only hope for our world is when we understand this and relegate all other causes to a lesser importance in our lives. Let us take our stand and demonstrate the glories of the Gospel by showing our love for Christ and for each other, regardless of our other affiliations. Jesus talks in these verses about the critical concept of being "in me", in verses 4-9, telling us six times that we must remain in Him, remain in His love. What could this possibly mean? We know that in Him there is no condemnation (Romans 8:1-2). In Him we should reckon ourselves as dead to sin but alive to God (Romans 6:11). We justly deserve death, but in Christ receive life (Romans 6:23). And God's love and grace shown to us in Christ Jesus unites us with people who would we would otherwise be naturally inclined to avoid (Ephesians 2:11-22). Our approach to this should be one of humility. All of us have no intrinsic right to be in Christ. We do not deserve to be there. We are there by grace. And if we are there by grace then we should treat each other equally, because we are conscious that it's only by God's grace that we are saved at all (Romans 11:11-24). This is why division is such an offence to the Gospel (1 Corinthians 1:10-17), and why the ultimate example to us in ridding ourselves of divisive attitudes is Christ Himself (Philippians 2:1-11). Moreover, in John 17 we see Jesus' last prayer before He leaves for Gethsemane and His eventually arrest. Knowing what He was about to face, He prays for His Father to be glorified in what He is about to do (John 17:1-5), His disciples (John 17:6-19) and all believers (John 17:20-26). In this prayer for all believers He prays for us to be completely unified twice, and for our unity to be as close as He is with the Father. Let the gravity of that sink in for a while. Jesus prays for us to be as close as the Godhead, and prays for it twice, just before He leaves to be arrested and condemned to death. If our unity was such a priority for Jesus Christ, and we profess to be His followers, should it not also be a priority for us? So we have seen that Christ is the true vine - meaning that He is our sustenance and must have our obedience and loyalty above all others. We have seen that being in the vine, in Christ, causes us to love one another and set aside all divisions among us as if they were anathema. We will next go on to see what it means to view God as THE GARDENER.