Living Stones – Monday, October 30, 2017
Fruitfulness in design
John 15:5
“I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.”
In the Genesis account of creation, God is recorded as addressing mankind He had made saying “Be fruitful and multiply;”
Fruitfulness is built into our design. The context in Genesis tells us that God was there addressing the issue of procreation to fill the earth with people. Nevertheless, we could legitimately stretch the concept beyond biology by embracing the idea of reproducing after our own kind, in terms of faith, character and conduct.
God always and often speaks of fruitfulness and multiplication outside of the context of childbearing. The passage we are beginning to explore today, John 15:1-8, is one such example of the concept of fruitfulness being used to describe the child of God who is abiding in Christ.
The vine imagery, used to describe the people of God, is another concept that is used all over the scriptures. As you know, Jesus used the imagery of the vineyard in many of His stories and parables as He taught.
Jesus here, in John 15, uses the vine imagery to both challenge the Jews in his audience, and to give clear commands to the Christians.
The vine grows all over Palestine and was a critical part of life and living. The vineyards were a major economic activity for that agricultural community. But many persons also had their own vines growing on the front porch or in the backyard – the way some of us, in Guyana today, have a pumpkin vine or corilla vine running on the fence.
The growing of the vine in that time was not easy, those of us who live on more fertile lands know that we drop a pumpkin seed and sometimes forget it, only to come back some time after to be pleasantly surprised to see a pumpkin vine running on the ground or fence.
For those in Palestine, once the slip was planted it had to be nurtured and cared for. They had to take care of where it ran, and they had to prune it regularly to control its growth and viability. And they never allowed a vine to fruit until it was 3 years old and mature. We just run off and cook the first pumpkin we pick.
Once their vine got to the fruiting stage there were two kinds of branches, ones that were fruitful and ones that were not. They quickly cut off the ones that were not so that they did not rob the vine of vital sap.
In the context, Jesus was referring to the Jews as the fruitless branches and the church He was birthing as the fruitful branches. The Jews were resisting the message that Jesus brought at every step of the way as John recorded in chapter 1 verse 11, “He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him.”
Matthew gives us further insight, and in chapter 21, verses 33 to 46 of his Gospel account he demonstrates how these parables and vineyard stories were told about or against the Jews.
So we have to look here for the message to the Jews and then the message to us Christians.
The message to the Jews was simple and obvious. Jews rejected Jesus and as a result Jesus said they would be cut off and cast into the bonfire used for destroying waste.
The message to the Christians is simple and obvious too. The Christian is called to be fruitful. Fruitfulness is not optional, it was built into our design.
To be unfruitful, therefore, is to not operate in keeping with our design and not please our designer. Fruitfulness must be one of the main characteristics of our life. Fruitfulness in all of its dimensions – reproduction, multiplication, and replication.
Many people come to the church today because they want healing, financial blessing, or success (however defined), but Jesus calls us first to be fruitful.
If we focus on being fruitful we would receive blessing and favour since we have the life-giving sap flowing through us. But when we lose sight of fruitfulness there is no longer a purpose to keeping the branch alive and fed.
Think on these things:
- Would you consider yourself to be a fruitful branch?
- Are you connected to the vine in a way that allows the life of the vine to be shared by you?
- What would you need to do to be fruitful or more fruitful?
Prayer focus:
Let us pray today that we would be fruitful (or more fruitful) branches.
In His Grace
Pastor Alex
