John 15:1-8

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Since Jesus is the vine, if you are to bear fruit, you must abide in Him.

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Confession of Sin

2 Peter 1:5–8 ESV
For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
There is nothing automatic about growing in maturity in the Christian life. You cannot just sit back and watch yourself grow and become fruitful. Peter in a very similar list to Paul’s found in Gal. 5 with a list of the fruit of the Spirit, lays out for us a blueprint for growing in fruitfulness and increasing our effectiveness. We are to make every effort to supplement our faith. In Greek, that term supplement means to “supply at your own expense.” One commentator noted, “we do not automatically become more virtuous as if God infused virtue into us intravenously; we need to make plans and expend effort.” Today in our lesson from the Gospel of John, Jesus will exhort His disciples using the parable of a vine that, when they produce fruit by abiding in the vine, they glorify the Father.
My question this morning is what kind of fruit is your life producing? Or, as Peter puts it: are these qualities yours and are they increasing? When was the last time you took a spiritual inventory, using one of these lists from Scripture? This morning, as we come to confess our sins first, privately and then corporately, are you supplementing your “faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.” If you are deficient in any of these areas, take some time to confess that to the Lord, and then with new strength, press forward and endeavor to supplement your faith, “for if you practice these qualities you will never fall. For in the way there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” (2 Pe. 1:10-11) Let us confess our sins silently together.

Abide in the Vine

Intro

There seems to be no end to the amount of different influencers on social media peddling “wisdom” on how to achieve the good life. Self-help is a cottage industry, and every year there is at least one that makes the top lists on the New York Times bestsellers. People will pay lots of money and time and attention to people who seem successful to tell them how to achieve that themselves. People push themselves harder and harder every year to try to be more productive. The cult of productivity. But what are we producing? Often around the new year, people will ask how can I be more productive this year?
Scripture doesn’t use the term productivity, but the concept behind that is found all over scripture. Instead, it uses the imagery of a plant and fruitfulness. A productive plant produces copious amounts of good fruit. The prophets often condemned Israel for not bearing fruit using the metaphor of a vineyard. God was the Gardner who planted a vineyard and Israel was the vine. After God planted her in His vineyard (the promised land) He came looked for fruit. It turns out Israel had her own ideas of how to live the good life, she had her own plans for how be fruitful, only when the time came for God to examine the fruit He didn’t like what he found. He planted a cultivated vine, but what he found was wild grapes, what he found was rotten and worthless.
We can’t be sure what prompts Jesus to take up that common metaphor of a vine. Perhaps it was the many vines around Jerusalem both cultivated and growing wild. Or maybe it was the golden vine that was hung on the to describe to His disciples how you can be fruitful. But he changes the story a bit. Israel is not the vine He is, and fruitfulness is remaining connected to Him. As we consider this little parable this morning I want you to see that Since Jesus is the vine, if you are to bear fruit, you must abide in Him.

Abide in the vine

This is seventh and last “I Am” statement in John’s gospel. “I am the true vine.” Jesus might as well said, I am the true Israel, for Israel was so accustomed to hearing that she was the vine. However, this “I Am” statement is followed up with a statement about the Father–he is the farmer. Vinedresser fits the context fine, so long as you get that it’s His farm, in His field, that He planted, and He cultivates. We’ll talk more about the Father’s role in cultivating fruitfulness in a moment. But I want to tease out the implications of Jesus’ claim to be the “true vine.”
When you consider all the unfavorable ways Israel is likened to a vine, often for their failure to bear fruit, Jesus identification as the true vine, reframes the metaphor. Jesus is not a failed fruitless vine, instead only by being in Him, as the vine, can the branches bear fruit. Now the imagery is not just about what God had done to take Israel and plant her in a vineyard and cultivate her, only to watch her fail to produce fruit, but it becomes about being in the vine, who is Jesus, the true Israel, who cannot fail to bring forth fruit. There is a surety to the fruitfulness of those who abide in the vine.
Here we need to consider that word abide. It’s not one we use commonly. I don’t have someone ask me to abide with them at their house after church for hospitality. Although now that I’ve said that, I can see the meme-lords of Hope coming up with creative uses of that word. Yet, as Jesus uses it here it means simply to stay, or remain. But what does it mean to stay in the vine, to remain in the vine? And how does this relate to bearing fruit.
With any illustration or metaphor, there is a risk in pressing too far into the details. How, for instance, would a branch remain connected to the vine? Is the branch really responsible for that? Certainly that is not the point of Jesus’ comparison. For he has already taught clearly the perseverance of the saints when he said:
John 6:39 ESV
And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.
We are not meant to pit the fact that some branches will be broken off against the clear teaching that God will cause the elect to persevere in their faith until the end.
Rather, Jesus is keen to show that if His disciples are to bear fruit, they must remain connected to Him. It is through Him that fruit is a produced, almost as if the disciples were conduits from root to fruit. Apart from that union, the branch will not only be fruitless, it will die.
Here we see clearly the first thing needed for us to be fruitful in the Christian life, you must abide in the vine. You must remain with Christ. You must be in Him and He must be in you. Jesus is here teaching what Paul will later champion as union with Christ. As Calvin said:
Institutes of the Christian Religion 1. The Holy Spirit as the Bond that Unites Us to Christ

we must understand that as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us.

Unless you are in the vine, you cannot bear fruit. But how do you get in Christ, how do become connected to the vine? Jesus alludes to how in v. 3 when he cryptically said, “Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you.” The word could really be translated message. The messages is the message of the Gospel, possibly alluding back to His earlier statement to Peter in Jn 13:10 when he said Peter only needed his feet washed since he was already clean. So it is receiving the message of the gospel by faith that unites you to Christ, to stretch the metaphor a bit, that places you, a branch, in the vine.
Next week, we will consider how Jesus encourages us to remain in the vine by allowing his word to remain in us. That is, we remain in Christ by the same faith that united us to Him in the first place. We get in by faith; we continue by faith, and we will be brought safely to the end by faith. From beginning to end, all of salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, all to the glory of God alone, and faith comes by hearing the word of God, which means it also through scripture alone. Thus the five Solas of the reformation.
How do you bear fruit in the Christian life? Only by being connected to the vine, only by being and remaining in Christ. But there is more to this parable then abiding in the vine. For every branch that abides the Father prunes. Fruitfulness is cultivated by the Father.

Allow the vinedresser to prune you

The lived reality of life in Christ, genuine life in union with Christ is God the Father is cultivating you to be more and more fruitful. But like many projects this is painful work that involves cutting. Again, we don’t want to press the metaphor to far, but Jesus clearly teaches that there are no fruitless branches in the vine, either they are cut off, or they are pruned. You can’t be just along for the ride. Let’s consider these two different kinds of branches and what they might look like in the life of the church.

Branches Cut off

The sad reality is that there are some who are in the vine who don’t bear any fruit, and they are taken away, which he later shows are gathered and thrown into the fire (v. 6). Now a problem comes up immediately when we try to turn this parable into systematic theology. If this abiding in the vine is a figure for union with Christ, does that mean that there are some people united to Christ who will not persevere until the end? The answer is not as straightforward as some might like. Yes and no. Yes they are united to Christ, for when they are taken away they are taken away from the vine. Apostasy is not a fiction, not a hypothetical situation.
But that union with Christ does not mean they were elect, and Jesus died and rose to justify them, but because of the hardness of their heart they lost their election and fell away becoming apostate. That would be absurd, and much closer to an Arminian position. The elect are those that the Son covenanted with the father, before the foundation of the world to save from their sin. This he did by dying in their place imputing to them his righteousness. He did not die for the possibility of their salvation, but to make it sure. Here we need to be careful not to undermine our systematic theology by being imprecise in our descriptions of our experience in the Christian life. John tells us in his first epistle that,
1 John 2:19 ESV
They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.
But just because it is impossible for the elect to fall away, does not mean apostasy is hypothetical. When someone is baptized and brought into the visible church, they have the privilege of partaking in the ordinary means of grace and what the confession calls “the common operations of the Spirit.” When such a person falls a way they lose real grace, not the same efficacious grace that the elect receive, but a common grace for those within the covenant community.
Sometimes this apostasy is evident. Someone who once professed faith in Christ and for some reason or other leaves the church and begins to repudiate the gospel rejecting Jesus and the salvation he offers. But other times this is not so clear, as when someone sits in the church their whole life, and never speaks out against the gospel or Christ, but their life is fruitless. This person will eventually be take out and gathered with all the other fruitless branches to be burned.

Others are pruned

The difference between the elect and nonelect is the presence of fruit. All those who are in the vine and bearing some fruit, these the Father as the farmer, prunes to make more fruitful. Interestingly John uses a strange word for prune, one that can fit an agricultural context but is not typical, in fact its the same root word as is found in v. 3, which means to cleanse. The cutting the Father does is a cleansing away of all that is unfruitful in you, so that what remains will grow and produce even more fruit.
If you’ve lived for more than a day as a Christian you know that this process can often be painful. As much as we may cry out to the Lord for him to cleanse us from sin, to cut off what remains of the old man, when He actually does it, we often groan and complain because it hurts. The author of Hebrews teaches us that:
Hebrews 12:7–11 ESV
It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.
Pruning/cleansing is just discipline, which God uses to perfect you and make you more like the Son, that is of course the goal of God’s whole project. To conform you to the image of the son. To mix metaphors a bit, to make every branch like the vine. J. C. Ryle put it so well:
Expository Thoughts on John, Vol. 3 John 15:1–6: Close Union of Christ and Believers,—False Christians,—Fruit Only Safe Evidence of Life,—God Increases Holiness by Providential Chastisement

Trial, to speak plainly, is the instrument by which our Father in heaven makes Christians more holy. By trial He calls out their passive graces, and proves whether they can suffer His will as well as do it. By trial He weans them from the world, draws them to Christ, drives them to the Bible and prayer, shows them their own hearts, and makes them humble. This is the process by which He “purges” them, and makes them more fruitful. The lives of the saints in every age, are the best and truest comment on the text. Never, hardly, do we find an eminent saint, either in the Old Testament or the New, who was not purified by suffering, and, like His Master, a “man of sorrows.”

The first diagnostic question you must ask is am I bearing fruit?
Now you may be asking yourself at this point, what fruit is he talking about? Scripture answers simply that it is repentance towards God, and faith in Jesus Christ, and the holiness such faith and repentance produce. You may think of this as love for God and love for neighbor, or in terms of the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control (Gal. 5:22-23). If your life is increasing in faith, as you walk in repentance, with a growing evidence of the fruit of the Spirit, then you can be assured that you are abiding in the vine. When in the course of time you experience trial and hardship, this need not damage your faith, for you can be sure that it is only the father pruning you so that you will be even more fruitful for Him.
How can you bear fruit? Abide in the vine and allow the vinedresser to prune you, so that you may be even more fruitful.

Ask for what you need

Finally, all this abiding and persevering in the trials of God’s pruning can only be done in reliance upon Him in prayer. For “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” (Jn. 15:7). Remaining in Christ, by holding fast to His trustworthy word, gives you access to resources beyond your conception. We have noted already in such broad statements of Jesus that these are qualified by your position in Christ. Here presumably are those branches that are abiding in the vine which the vinedresser prunes to make more fruitful. Those fruitless branches that have been taken away have no assurance that whatever they ask will be done, since they are have not remained in the vine.
But for all who are in Christ we may come, with boldness in prayer to claim the resources God has promised to those who ask. But let us think in terms of the context here in John 15:1-8. What should we be asking for? We should ask that God would allow us to abide (remain) in Christ, that we may have an ever increasing love and appreciation for His word, and that we may bear much fruit and so glorify the Father.
We sing in the well known hymn Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, “O to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be; let that grace now like a fetter bind my wandering heart to thee. Prone to wander Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love, here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.” If we can’t bear fruit apart from a living, vital connections with the vine, which is Christ, then we must pray that God would continue to grant that we may abide in Him. Since you know that it is God’s grace that causes you to remain in Him, you must pray that God would cause you to persevere. Saying, O Lord I know my tendency, I know how easy it would be for my grip to slip, and though it doesn’t depend on me, I know that you have also called me to commit to persevere with you. To not give up or give in even under the fiercest trials or greatest temptation. but Lord, I can only remain in the vine, if you enable me to stay with Him. I can only abide in Him, if you cause me to remain. So grant Father that I may not wander, not for one moment fall away from Him—for where would I go, you have the words of eternal life.
One practical way we may abide in Him is to allow His word to dwell in us richly (Col. 3:16). That kind of reading, is meditative, one that doesn’t just skim over the surface of the text but lives in it, inhabits it, and more importantly puts it in to practice. Abiding in Christ means allowing His word to abide in you which means you are prayerfully considering His word. We are still close enough to the beginning of the year that if you have not committed yourself to a regular systematic reading of the scriptures for this year let me encourage you to do so. You live in a time rich in resources to equip the saints to allow the words of Christ to dwell in you. From bible reading plans to audio bibles, from the printed word in your hands to apps on your phone, along with podcasts and sermons to supplement, there really is no excuse to not hide God’s word in your heart. But I’m telling you, if you don’t commit to some kind of plan, than you will not build this discipline. I don’t mean just as individuals, but also as families. Family worship is one of the most vital disciplines you can develop as a family. That is your families spiritual fitness program. Some of you know from experience that if you don’t foster that discipline your family will struggle to abide in Christ. Fathers if you are not daily taking your family to see and savor the vine, why would you expect your family to bear much fruit. Abiding in the vine involves abiding in His word. That life-long habit takes discipline. And when Facebook and Netflix have captured their imaginations you have your work cut out for you. But if they are to resist the siren call of the world they must be daily connected to the vine, they must abide in Christ.
Only then can we bear much fruit and so glorify the Father. Here our prayer follows the Psalmist in Psalm 139:23 “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts!” Without the penetrating gaze of the Holy Spirit illuminating the inner recesses of our hearts we are experts at disguising and lying to ourselves. We need to come in prayer to God and ask him to show us where we are not bearing fruit. To show us those areas that are dead and lifeless, and plead with him to trim away what is fruitless and produces through us the fruit of the Spirit. It’s this kind of searching prayer the puritans encouraged when they call us to keep the heart. As John Flavel once said,

O study your hearts, watch your hearts, keep your hearts! away with fruitless controversies, and all idle questions; away with empty names and vain shews; away with unprofitable discourse and bold censures of others; turn in upon yourselves; get into your closets, and now resolve to dwell there. You have been strangers to this work too long; you have kept others vineyards too long; you have trifled about the borders of religion too long; this world hath detained you from your great work too long; will you now resolve to look better to your hearts? Will you haste and come out of the crowds of business, and clamours of the world, and retire yourselves more than you have done? O that this day you would resolve upon it!

Conclusion

Jesus, using the figure of a vine and a vinedresser calls His disciples to a life of fruitfulness. Unlike Israel who had failed to bear fruit, whose only productivity was sin and idolatry, Jesus is the true vine. Only by being in Him, the true vine, can you hope to be fruitful. It is these that the Father, as the vinedresser prunes. We must learn to accept His pruning, as we learn to see His discipline as a blessing which causes us to be even more fruitful. We know that we have all the resources we need to bear fruit because we can come to the Lord and prayer, asking for things agreeable to His will, in the name of Jesus, and we have this assurance that they are ours. But we have also this warning. There are those among us who claim to be in the vine, but are really already dead. They may fool us outwardly with their professions but they will be known by their fruits. Those in the vine of Christ bring forth the fruits of righteous, whilst all other pretenders continue to bear the fruit of the flesh.
1 Corinthians 6:9–11 ESV
Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
To put it in terms of this parable of the vine. Such were some of you, but you were cleansed by your faith in the message of the Gospel, and you were grafted into the true vine, which is Christ, and you will bear the fruits of righteousness all those who abide in Him are promised to produce. Do you want to bear fruit, abide in Christ, and let his words abide in You. Amen. Let’s pray.
O Holy Father, you are the vinedresser, prune away all that is dead and fruitless and produce in us today a harvest of righteousness. Prone as we are O Lord, each one of us, to wander from Christ, cause us to persevere and remain in Him. As we lift up our hearts to you now, prepare them to receive Christ, both as we treasure His words, and as we come this morning to receive these visible words when we feast around His table. Open our eyes to see the unfruitful works of the flesh, and cleanse us through confession and repentance through the mercy and merit of Christ. May we remain in Him, until he comes again or you call us home. In His name, and for His sake, we ask this. Amen.

Lord’s Supper Meditation

Do you want to be fruitful, then above abide with Christ. This meal is testament to both your need to remain in Christ, your pledge to do so, and His promise that he will keep you there. If by faith you have received the message of the gosple and trusted in Christ alone for your salvation, and if you have been cleansed of your sins and are clean through your baptism into Christ, then this is a table that signifies your union with Him, It’s a seal that you have been ingrafted into the true vine, Jesus Christ. That fruit he produced which he offers to you today are His righteous deeds. Both His perfect life, and His sacrificial death. These he gives you in fitting emblems of bread and wine which signify His broken body and shed blood. If you have not recieved the words of Christ, and they don’t abide in you, then you have not been ingrafted into the vine, and you are a dead branch destined for the flames of hell. I tell you, most emphatically, that if you are not in Christ, then you have no hope. If you are in that state right now, then please do not eat and drink this bread and wine. First you must receive the words Christ spoke—you must believe the gospel, and be washed in the waters of baptism. Only then can you partake of this communion meal, for only then can you say with certainty I am in Christ. If however you are in Christ, because you have recieved His words and have believed that he is the Christ, the Son of God, then if you are to grow in fruitfulness you must abide in Christ, so come taste of His fruit and drink to your continued growth in fruitfulness, come to the vine and abide in Him.

Charge

Since Jesus is the vine, if you are to bear fruit, you must abide in Him.

Discussion Questions

How does the metaphor of Jesus as the true vine reframe the understanding of fruitfulness in relation to Israel?
In what ways can individuals assess whether they are bearing fruit in their Christian lives?
What practical steps can one take to ensure they are abiding in Christ daily?
What are the consequences mentioned for branches that do not bear fruit?
How can prayer support one's effort to remain connected to the vine?
What biblical practices can help clarify areas in one’s life that may need pruning?
What does the sermon suggest about the relationship between apostasy and fruitlessness in the life of a believer?
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