Dazed and Confused: John 15 and Bearing Fruit | Theocast

Hi, this is Justin. Today on Theocast, we are talking about one of those passages of Scripture that is very often misunderstood and misapplied.

We're discussing none other than John chapter 15, where Jesus tells us that if we abide in Him, we will produce much fruit.

What does it mean to abide in Jesus, and what does He mean when He tells us that we will produce much fruit?

We will discuss that and much more on the regular episode, and then when we head into the members podcast, we're going to talk about various issues related to John 15, including lordship salvation, total depravity, and sanctification.

We hope this conversation is helpful to you. Stay tuned. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

Conversations about the Christian life from a reformed perspective. Our hosts today are

John Moffitt, pastor of Community Bible Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and myself,

Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. Our brother, our friend,

Jimmy Buehler is not able to join us this morning. He is a church planner, friends, so what can we say?

He's a busy man. And a pastor, and a pastor and a dad of three children, young children.

So, in other words, he's got some stuff going on. So, we'll miss having Jimmy on the podcast today, but we're excited for the conversation that we are about to have.

John, there's only me and you, bro. So, it seems like it only makes sense that you're going to give us the cultural update.

Yeah, yeah, most likely, most likely. Yeah, well, you know, we're still, we've been chatting about this, so I'm going to mention it again.

We're still, you know, making our plans to go to San Diego. So, for those of you, I'm not sure when this podcast is coming out, but when it does come out, hopefully it will be before we go to San Diego.

But the three of us are really excited. We're hopefully going to get a house. So, while we're in San Diego, we might be able to have some listeners who want to come and, you know, grab a drink and just fellowship and laugh and get to know each other.

We're hoping to do that. And then we're going to go up to L .A. And for those, we'll be in L .A. for two days. So, we're excited about that.

We're trying to, you know, we found a great house and then went back to get it and someone already took it.

Yeah. I mean, men make plans and the Lord establishes our steps. I think I've read that somewhere. So, yeah.

Something like that. But yeah, excited about that. You know what? By the time this comes out, we are in the process of changing our name.

So, our next intro for me will be a different name. Yeah, me.

So, not Theocast, but my church is changing our name. People were freaking out for a second. Yeah, we're going to change it.

I can't think of a better name than Theocast right now. But there are, yeah, we're changing our name to Grace Reformed Church.

So, Grace Reformed Church, gracereformed .org. Yeah, gracereformed .org. That's a great. And gracereformed .org

was not taken. We had to pay $800 for it. So, which was what we thought was worth it.

Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say, how much does it matter to you? A lot. Yeah. Apparently $800 worth.

Yeah. It's a great, it's a great, it's a great website. Anyways, it's been good.

Our church, you know, we live in, we live in the South and there literally are no churches in Spring Hill that have the word reformed in it or that technically claim to be reformed.

We have a PCA church here, but they openly kind of confess themselves to be liberal. So, when we say reformed people, it's been fun because people,

I've been testing the name out on different people, new people that I meet, and they're like, what do you mean by reformed? Is that like Baptist?

It's like, great. That's a great question. So, I give them an explanation. It starts a conversation. So, what you're saying,

John, is that, what you're saying then is that you're hopeful that this new name will bear much fruit.

Oh, oh, ouch. Yes. Yeah. That was well, well transitioned there, my friend. Whoa. So, John, why don't, you're already, you're already on the mic, man.

Like let's give, let's give everybody a, an idea of what we're going to talk about today. We are going to be looking at a really famous passage, probably one of my favorite passages in all of John and in all of the

Bible, which is John 15, and for those of you that are like myself, that I don't always remember passages very well,

John 15 is that section of scripture where Jesus is using the illustration of,

I am the vine, you are the branches, and abiding in Christ and producing fruit. So, specifically, we're going to really look at the first six verses.

This isn't an exegesis of the passage, but once in a while, we'd like to go and take what we'd say hard passages or confused passages, where pietism has come in.

Or passages that are often misunderstood or misapplied. Right, exactly. And so,

I recently preached John 15 in my church and I was talking to Justin about it and I thought, man, this might be a great podcast to, as an illustration of sometimes where we allow pietism to come in and change the meaning of the text.

So, verse one, John 15, one says, I am the true vine, and my father is the vine dresser.

Every branch in me that does not bear fruit, he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.

And later on in verse five, he says, I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit.

For apart from me, you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me, he is thrown away like a branch.

And withers, and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned. So, this is pretty bold statements by Christ.

And what we're going to do this morning is maybe talk about some of the applications that we've heard, either growing up or in our own context, and then try and give you a helpful explanation of what this passage actually means.

So, Justin, I'll start us off and you can kind of add to this. The normal application that you hear, and what

I would say a conservative evangelical world, even maybe possibly Calvinistic evangelical world, is you hear this passage read and the warning to the believer is, you better be producing fruit, you better be producing fruit.

Because if you're not, or if you stop, or if you aren't producing enough fruit, then you've already read

Jesus' warnings. He's going to throw you away and you'll be burned, is an illustration of. Basically, you're not going to be a true disciple of Jesus Christ.

The interesting thing is that so often the way this passage is preached, like you just said,

John, it's preached with a threatening tone or at least an exacting tone, and we're going to get to this more later.

The irony in that is that this passage is situated in the context of Christ's last night on earth with his disciples.

His objective quite clearly, the night before he's going to die, is to comfort them and to prepare them for what is going to be a difficult season as he's going to be executed, he's going to be buried in a tomb, and all kinds of things are going to be going on in the disciples' worlds, respectively.

He's preparing them for that. He's loving them and comforting them, and yet we'll come into this text,

John 15, a passage about abiding in and resting and trusting and hoping in Christ, and then turn it into a passage that speaks to us about everything that we need to be doing, and you're exactly right.

The implication is if you're not doing enough—now, I'm not sure who defines that standard—but if you're not doing enough, then you should be afraid.

You should be concerned about your standing, and you may very well find yourself to be one of those people who, while believing in Jesus, is going to then be thrown away into the fire.

So, I think it's helpful to lay some ground rules here. This might even also be what I'd call a small class on how to interpret the

Bible. I did this on Sunday. When you're dealing with an illustration or a parable or a word picture, there's a couple of rules that you have to put in play, and Jesus does this a lot.

He has a lot of parables, which we should do a podcast very soon on the parables. One of the rules is be careful not to take parables, word pictures, and illustrations too literally.

Now, no one here would ever say Jesus is a literal vine. We understand that word picture. But when it comes to the understanding of fruit, we can get literal here, and we don't allow the context, which is kind of rule two.

You have to allow the immediate context to set the ground rules of the illustration. So, who is the message directed towards?

Well, this message is directed towards the disciples alone. There's no other listeners at the moment. Why is the message relevant?

Why is this message relevant to its recipients? Well, as Justin just said, Jesus is about to leave, and He is going to leave the guys in a moment of despair because they're going to see their entire hope destroyed on a cross on their behalf.

And so this is why this message is relevant to them. And then thirdly, what is the original author's intent to the writing of this message, or why is

John writing this? Well, we learn in John 17 that he says, I write these things that you might believe. And then the last point is use all of Scripture to interpret

Scripture. This is the danger of biblicism, where you take one passage of Scripture and you pull it out of its context.

And you introduce a mystery or attention that's not even there. Exactly. By being a biblicist, yeah.

So if we were to sit in the shoes of Peter and John and these disciples, we would realize

Jesus is not dealing with people who are nominal or the name it and claim it, well,

I said a prayer, but I don't act like it. Normally when this passage is preached, it's going after the people who are lacking fruit.

It's like, well, you know, those of you who have not been attending church and tithing and have not been reading your Bible and haven't been faithful and you've been sinning, you haven't been showing that you're claiming to be a

Christian, but you haven't been showing the evidence. This is a warning for you. See, Jesus says right here, if you're not producing fruit, you should be warned.

You're going to be thrown in the fire. And the listener on the podcast is going, but that's exactly what he said.

So how is it that you guys are counteracting that? Well, I would come in and say, in context, if you go back to chapter 14,

Jesus is specifically talking to people who have the Spirit or about to have the Spirit indwell them.

He's not talking to a crowd of pagans. Am I right? No, you're exactly right. I mean, he's talking to guys.

He says, the Spirit has been with you and he will be in you.

So exactly. Yes. He's talking to men who are going to be indwelt by the

Spirit of Christ. I mean, by the Holy Spirit. So he's talking to men who are in him. Yes.

Right. I think a helpful phrase, I mentioned this to Justin beforehand, is that when Jesus starts this entire discourse, so they've left the upper room, they're on their way to Gethsemane, most likely, you know, commentators say, he's probably walking by a vineyard.

It's why he uses this illustration, which would have been common in the area. And Jesus says, I am the true vine, or another way of translating that is genuine.

I am the real, I'm not the shadow. Israel's the shadow. It's the picture of what

I am. And so Jesus says, I am the true vine and my father is the vine dresser. So the whole section is starting out with, just to go back in Psalms and in Jeremiah, God often refers to Israel as the vine or the vineyard and as a shadow, foreshadowing of Jesus.

Even in Isaiah, he does. So when Jesus is talking about being in him and not bearing fruit, what he means is this physical aspect.

You can have people who are part of the physical vine, which is the part of Israel, and going to Hebrews is the same thing, those people who are part of the physical church, but they aren't indwelt by the spirit.

They've tasted it. They've seen it, right? So Jesus is giving comfort to disciples who are about to abandon him, who are about to feel pressures they've never felt before, and what has been the entire ministry of Jesus in the ministry of, what is his entire purpose in John is to prove that he is the

Messiah. Justin, earlier in John, he says, if you believe in God, believe also in me.

So the question now comes down to is in this context, when Jesus is talking about fruit,

Justin, what is he getting at? What kind of fruit is he looking for here? So before we go there,

I just want to jump on a little bit of what you're saying to reiterate it or say it in a different way. So you're exactly right.

In the context of even this last night of Christ on earth, you referenced already John chapter 14, we've talked about the coming of the

Holy Spirit and all of those things. I mean, Jesus has looked at these men and he has told them not to be troubled because a lot of hard stuff is about to happen, and in part, what we need to see is that there are going to be many people who have been following Jesus in one sense or another during his earthly ministry who really are going to abandon him and who really are going to go their own way and demonstrate that they never really believed in him.

I mean, that is actually going to happen. But he's talking to these men and he's saying, don't be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.

In my Father's house are many rooms and I'm going to prepare a place for you. Would I tell you that that's what

I'm going to do if it weren't so? In other words, he is saying to these men, you are safe.

Things are going to get really hard and things are going to get tough. He's even going to tell them in chapter 16, in the world, you're going to have tribulation, but take heart.

I have overcome the world. And so we can't divorce John 15 from that context. One more comment on that true vine piece in verse one of John chapter 15.

You've already, I think, explained this well. I might just want to add one thing. When Jesus talks about himself being the true vine, he is helping us understand things that the rest of the

Bible says. So when Paul will talk about not all Israel is Israel, or when we understand that there are children of promise and then there are children according to the flesh, there is physical

Israel, but then there are the elect. There are those who are the children of promise and God's, like Abraham's spiritual seed and the like.

What Jesus is saying is those people who are really Israel, the people who are a part of the true vine are the people who are attached to me.

And so in order to be legitimately a part of the vine, you must be attached to Christ.

You must be trusting, resting, hoping in Jesus. Now to your question directly. Sorry for that digression.

What kind of fruit is Jesus talking about when he says, you know, all this stuff about bearing fruit?

You and I agree that in the immediate context of this discourse, what is it that Jesus has been saying?

Think about chapter 13, verses 33 and 34, where he tells his disciples a new commandment

I give to you. He tells them that you are to love one another, just as I have loved you.

You also are to love one another. And then he goes on in verse 35, by this, all people will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.

So I would say, if we're going to really boil down the fruit piece that you're going to bear, I mean, love God, love neighbor, but in particular, what does that look like in the context of what

Jesus is saying, loving God looks like believe in God, believe also in me. All right, so it's fundamental.

Second piece, love one another. So the kind of fruit that he's talking about in the most immediate sense are those two things.

You're going to believe and trust in me, and you're going to be loving one another in a way that's obvious.

That's right. Yeah. And in the immediate context, Jesus is dealing with an issue of the disciples believing in him.

I mean, you have doubting Thomas who says, you know, Jesus, can you just make this clear for us? You go back to chapter 12 and the

Pharisees are going to ask him, can you make it plain that I am the Christ? He says, I have made it plainly. So what he is battling for here, he's not battling lazy

Christians. He's not battling people who are wrapped up in sin. He's battling for belief.

I mean, this is what this is for. Just a quick interjection, John. This is an illustration of how so many people in our current evangelical moment read nominalism into the

Bible. That's right. That's good. Because guys so often, it's the front burner concern for so many pastors in particular in the evangelical world because of easy -believism and nominalism.

We would agree that's a problem, but we would disagree with the methodology of reading that into every verse of scripture and then seeking to therefore smoke out the nominal and unsettle everybody that's sitting there.

Right. And scripture does speak to that though. And the Bible does speak to the nominal

Christian. Absolutely. Just not here. Absolutely. It's just not here. Just not, exactly. That's what we're saying.

Exactly. Just not in this sense. Right. Continue, brother. Yeah. Yeah, no, I hear you. So when you're dealing with this particular passage, you have to understand the heart of Jesus.

Jesus is not angry at his disciples. Not at all. He's not at all. As a matter of fact, when he says they will be cast out and burned, he is trying to give his disciples the same amount of heat that the writer of Hebrews is, but listen, there is no hope.

If you see and taste the spirit and hear the gospel and tread it under foot and walk away, there's no hope for you.

Jesus is saying the same thing. If you look at me and you do not abide in me, your hope is that you're worthless.

And he uses a lot of, you know, the agricultural, you don't want all of these dead branches around the vines because one, that could pick up some kind of a fungus or they could choke out the vines.

So they would have understood there is no use for dead branches in a vineyard.

And Jesus is saying, for those people who aren't glorifying me by producing this fruit that comes from me, they are of no value to the glory of God.

Not only are they not no value, they are a hindrance to the glory of God. And therefore the only use for them is to be demolished.

So what's interesting to me too, in this whole conversation is that the way this passage is often preached or applied, we've already touched on that.

The emphasis and the focus is completely on the believer. That's right. Unashamedly so.

This is about you and this is about your effort. This is about your performance, your obedience, your diligence, your vigilance, your sincerity,

I could go on all day, right? That's what it's about. Whereas like, read the text. I mean, when

Jesus says in verse four, as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.

And then in verse five, as we've already read, for apart from me, you can do nothing. That's right.

It's like, where is that in so many of the messages that we hear on John 15? That's the grounding of this.

The grounding is not in the believer. The grounding is not in our effort or sincerity or any of those things.

Though we trust that for the Christian, there will be sincere effort and there will be a sincere striving and desire after obedience, we're not disputing that at all, but the ground of this whole thing is

Jesus, like faith in Christ, hoping in Christ, resting in Christ, trusting in Christ is what produces fruit and it's what propels people forward in the

Christian life and it's actually what produces obedience. It seems so counterintuitive to us that to say,

Oh, take your eyes off of yourself and fix them on Christ is actually what is going to bear fruit in your life seems backwards because it's like, well, no, shouldn't we be talking about us if we need to be bearing fruit or whatever, that's the common misconception.

We're excited to announce that we have a new free ebook available at our website called faith versus faithfulness, a primer on rest and we, the hosts, put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ and how one leads to rest and how the other often to a lack of assurance and you can get this at theocast .org

slash primer and if you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us.

You can do that by joining our total access membership. That's our monthly membership that gives you access to all of our material that we've produced over the last four years or simply by donating to our ministry.

And you can do that by going to our website, theocast .org. We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.

Going back to verse five, it says, whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears, then he uses the word much fruit, right?

Much fruit. So he intensifies it. But then to clarify where that fruit is coming from and why it says for apart from me, you can do nothing.

The question then becomes, and this is where the application I think gets sideways, is that abiding, right?

Because it's now equated abiding equals fruit. So then it is what is to abide and the application you hear is, well, your

Bible reading, your prayer time, your devotion, your dedication to church, your tithing, all of that is abiding in Jesus.

In other words, it's performance. Abiding equals performance. And if you're not producing fruit, it's an issue with your discipline.

So spiritual disciplines becomes the way in which equals abiding. And JP, what would you say to that?

I mean, I have a hard time thinking that's what Jesus is going after. I don't think that's what he's going after.

The word there means to remain, to dwell in one sense in Jesus.

And so, well, most fundamentally, I think what he's pointing to is faith. He's pointing to that trusting, that resting, that hoping in him piece, confidence in him.

I'm looking to him always. That's what we would understand it to mean to abide in Jesus. I referenced this in the members podcast,

I think in the most recent episode that we did, the other elder of our church, he won't mind me saying this, the other he has for years.

And so he too has made this shift from Calvinistic pietism into a more confessional reformed place.

He and I have had a number of conversations over the last two to three years, let's say, about even

John 15. And he's like, brother, I have always loved this passage and I love it even more now because at one time in my life,

I would read this passage and I saw all this wonderful stuff that Jesus is saying. And I was comforted in some ways, but I could not escape the fact that I understood abiding in Jesus to be something that I had to do.

Like it meant it required all this effort and doing and working from me in order to make sure that I was appropriately abiding in Jesus and all the glory of being set free from all of that and realizing that the point of the text is trust

Christ. Trust Christ and you will bear fruit. And we've said this so many times,

John, but we'll say it again. The great irony in all of this when people are like, well, but brothers, isn't it good to read the

Bible and pray and do all these things? And we're going to say, of course it's good. And you're going to do a lot of that stuff, but you're going to be doing it from a completely different heart posture.

The motivation is going to be different. You're going to be doing it from a place of peace and security and comfort and hope rather than this slavish thing where you're always chasing after your standing in the

Lord Jesus and always trying to prove something as though, man, I've got to do enough to prove that I'm legit.

That kind of thing, you take a passage that is meant to instill hope in the Christian and it ends up robbing us of any hope that we could ever have.

Lord, I believe, help my unbelief is what those means are for. John 15, 15 later on, he says, no longer do

I call you servants for the servant does not know what his master is doing, but I have called you friends for all that I have heard from my father

I have made known to you, which is fascinating in itself that Jesus calls us his friend. I mean, wow.

Then it says this, you did not choose me. Just look at the whole clarification of abiding.

You didn't come up and say, yep, I think I'm going to abide in Jesus. No, Jesus says, you didn't choose me. I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide.

So whatever you ask in the father's name, he may give it to you. It's like Jesus is going to do it. Yeah. If you're abiding in Jesus, it's because, yeah.

It's like, if you're abiding in Jesus, it's not because you're abiding in Jesus is that he chose you and then he says,

I am in you and you are in me. So it's this kind of this whirlwind of where the love of the father is in us.

And then we have a love for the father and then there's more love for us. It's this weird kind of whirlwind that kind of keeps going up.

The love for the father and the, and the believing in Jesus produces love for the brothers. That's right.

That's quite clear in the context because not only we referenced John 13 earlier, but in John 15 itself, you have in verse 12,

Jesus says, this is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. So he says that again.

And then verse 17, right after the verse that you just read, John, about how I, I chose you, you didn't choose me and I appointed you to bear fruit and that it would abide and all that.

He says, these things I command you so that you'll love one another. He continues to drive at that reality of love for one another as being this most obvious evidence of the fact that you belong to him and that you abide in him.

So what are the things of exegeting a passage or go ahead. I was just going to, and that's just not when you hear guys, this, this is just to point out the inconsistencies that exist when you hear guys preach this text or apply this text at the believer.

Like you need to be doing all of these things. It's very interesting to me that love for one another doesn't show up very high on that list of stuff that you need to be doing.

It's often just very, like, I don't know, conspicuously missing, you know, like where is that?

Because you, like you said, so often we go immediately to spiritual disciplines and the like. Well, if we're going to say anything about what should be manifesting itself in our lives, would it not be love for the brethren?

Well, it's interesting you say that. No, it's interesting you say that because when someone evaluates how well they're doing as far as producing fruit, they go to their own personal actions.

And what does Jesus say? How will they know that you are my disciples? By the love you have for one another.

I mean, that is fascinating. And then in first John, he says it again. He says, listen, if you say you have love for God and you don't have love for one another, you're a liar and the truth is not in you.

That's right. It's like the Christian life is outwardly oriented.

Love God, trust Christ, love others. But yet we, in pietism, and we say it a lot, but it's worth repeating.

In pietism, the focus is taken off of Christ, off of love for God, off of love for neighbor directly, and the center of the focus is always placed on you and the interior of your life, your feelings and your devotion and all that kind of stuff.

Not that those things are irrelevant. It's like the Christian life is outwardly oriented.

Love God, trust in Christ, love one another. And the problem in a pietistic context is that the primary emphasis is taken off of those things, trust

Christ, love one another. And the center of the focus is put on the interior of the individual believer's life, his or her devotion, his or her feelings about God, his or her affections, his or her sincerity, and all that kind of stuff.

And what we're saying is, let's keep the main emphasis of what Christ is saying as the main emphasis.

That's right. You know, I think that's super helpful, Justin. And to go back a little bit, I think what

Jesus is battling here, if you want to know what he's going after, is two things. He's going after those who want to achieve righteousness by the law and exposing total depravity.

Those are the two things that he's doing. And how do we know this? Well, this is why you have to interpret or read scripture within the context of the entire book and the

Bible. For instance, the entire book, already Jesus has said that in John 3, no one is saved unless the spirit moves like the wind, moves upon them.

And then in John 6, it says no one, 644, no one can come to the Father unless the Father draws them.

So he's exposing the dead spiritual side of humanity. John 10, 1024, so the

Jews gathered around him and said to him, how long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the

Christ, tell us plainly. Jesus answered them, I've told you and you do not believe. The works that I do in my

Father's name bear witness about me, but you do not believe because you are not my sheep.

My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me. And then you finally get to John 15, 16, where it says

I chose you. So he's constantly pointing out to his disciples, gentlemen, if you are trusting in me and you are following me as Messiah, then you have eternal life and fruit will come from you.

So do not trust in anything else. Do not abide in anything else. Abide in me and my words abide in you and you will bring forth much fruit.

The point of it is, gentlemen, if you believe in me, great things will come through my power.

Not through your power, through my power. That I think is the emphasis and the encouragement to the believer. Yeah, absolutely.

Throughout John's gospel, even in the end of John 6, he tells his disciples that it is the

Spirit who gives life and the flesh is of no avail. So continually, you're right.

He continues to point people to the reality that in and of themselves, and in particular, he's talking to his disciples, in and of yourselves, you could never do this.

You could never trust in me. In and of yourselves, you are unable, John 15, to produce this kind of fruit.

And again, the irony is that so often we just unhitch the wagon from the horse.

I mean, we act like if we focus on the fruit and if we focus on bearing fruit, then that's really what's going to produce the fruit and that is not at all what

Christ is saying. Justin, there's one other aspect of this that I think is going to be helpful for our listener. To go back to verse 2, it says, every branch in me that does not bear fruit, he takes away.

And every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.

Well, if you know anything, even the smallest thing about pruning trees or bushes or vines, you're trying to remove anything that would pull energy or pull growth from the fruit, right?

So any kind of dead branches or any kind of little buds that are coming up.

And so Jesus ends up using this concept for his own. And this is, I don't think it's a foreign concept, but pruning, would we equate this to discipline or is this different?

What does he mean by pruning? Sure. I think pruning implies a cleansing, a purifying.

It also would include with it that notion of God's loving fatherly discipline, absolutely.

I think a couple of things come to my mind in thinking about this pruning that God does for those who are in Christ.

That's what he's saying. For those of you who are in me, you will be pruned by my father, who is the vine dresser.

So this is not a scary thing. This is not a bad thing. If you think about another agricultural parable that Jesus tells, the parable of the sower, we're talking about people who are good soil.

We're talking about people who are bearing fruit because they are in Christ. And now God is just going to work in their lives for the good.

So then immediately my mind goes to Hebrews 12, where the writer of the Hebrews tells us in the beginning of that great chapter, he tells us, let us also lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

So even as the writer of the Hebrews is about to talk about fatherly discipline, he's talking about it in that context. Let's set aside everything that hinders and let's look to Jesus, which is what you just said about the fruit bearing piece.

Why do you prune? It's like, well, you get all this other peripheral stuff that's going to suck the energy out of the plant that's bearing fruit.

You're going to get rid of that stuff. So that's what God is doing in the way that he disciplines us. And then

Hebrews 12, we could do a podcast on that sometime because talk about a text that is absolutely just abused like crazy, at least in the context that I know many of us have come from, that's one of them.

Where the writer is encouraging them, when you encounter the discipline of God, bear up under it because he's a loving father.

He's doing good things in your life. Strengthen your weak knees and your feeble hands. Bear up under discipline because he is transforming you.

And that's where the whole verse 14, there's a holiness without which no one will see the Lord. That's the context that it's in.

He is working on you because you're his. That text does not mean, oh, you better be holy or you're never going to see

God. That's not what the writer means at all. And so I think I just want to clarify that whenever we talk about pruning and discipline, it's being done by a loving father towards his children who are safe and secure in his son, and he's doing it so that he might remove all this other peripheral stuff and that we might look to Christ and thereby bear fruit and run the race.

Yeah, I think cleansing is the best way to understand that. He's washing away that which prevents us because sin is what prevents us from producing fruit.

I mean, if you're trusting in something other than Jesus for anything, then it is sin.

So putting faith in Christ is the primary focus of the believer. And I think

Paul is helpful here. He uses this illustration with husbands and wives, but then he says something that is,

I think, profound in Ephesians 5 .25, says, So I think the same illustration of being when it says pruning,

I believe that it's Christ's words or the word of God that is used. And Justin, you and I had talked about this.

I think it is if you take Jesus's words from John 15 and then continue to use the rest of the context of the

New Testament, that pruning process, I believe, is the preaching and teaching and the context of the church.

That's where it's applied. I do not believe that pruning or the cleansing process, as some would say, is primarily our own personal devotional time where we take in the word and that's when

God comes in and cleanses us. I actually think that he uses his means by the preaching and teaching and confrontation,

Galatians 5 and 6, consider how to build one another up and love good works, Ephesians, where that's the pruning process.

So to remove yourself from, I think, the pruning process, the cleansing process that God has ordained, will affect you in ultimately the way in which you are abiding and trusting in Jesus Christ instead of trusting in your own means.

Yeah. He cleanses us by and through the means that he has given and those take place in the context of the local church.

Yeah, absolutely. So we talk about ordinary means a lot, the ministry of the word, the

Lord's table, baptism, but then the fellowship of the saints, life in the community of the church, we could add in their prayer and song.

So yeah, that's what he's doing is he's using those means that he has ordained and he is using them in the context of the church.

The entire New Testament, it needs to be said, the entire New Testament, all these epistles that we love to read and we glean from them, all these wonderful things that God has told us, they are written to churches.

I mean, with the exception that we may throw in there, the pastoral epistles, yeah, okay, they're mainly aimed at a pastor, looking through the pastor to the church, that's fine, but they're written to churches.

And so when we take the exhortations and the imperatives and all those kinds of things that exist in the epistles and we want to immediately, like first tier, we want to immediately apply those to the individual devotional life of the believer,

I think we're missing something. And so exactly right. Like, okay, well, how can

I put myself in a position where God is going to do this really good pruning, purifying work in my life?

It's like, well, he's going to do it. First of all, trust him. He has promised to sanctify all of those whom he's justified.

He's going to conform us to the image of Christ, Romans 8, 29. Jesus has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified,

Hebrews 10, 14. He's going to complete the good work he's begun in us, Philippians 1, 6. We could cite many other verses here.

So trust God first. Second, be in a local church where the ordinary means are applied and God is going to do this work in your life.

People hear us, JP, and a lot of them are listeners that are in an area where they started listening to theocast and now they've gone from a pietistic view of understanding scripture to a reformed.

You know, confessional understanding. And, you know, we get messages from you all the time, you listeners, and we are grateful that you continue to reach out to us because it helps us in knowing what to say and what to write.

But one of the feedback we get is we hear what you guys are saying about the church, but when I go to church, it is not a place of rest.

I don't hear the gospel. I'm not given Christ. I'm given law. I'm given pietism.

And I've said this before, and I'm becoming stronger in my belief in this.

If your family was in a town where you could not get a job, you couldn't provide, you can't feed, or you couldn't provide well, it wasn't enough money to where your family was living healthy, what do you do?

You move, right? You move or you start a home business, one of the two. And my encouragement to you is if your soul is that thirsty and you legitimately cannot find a church that will give you

Christ, you've got two options, find a church that will legitimately plant with you or move to find a church where you can rest in Christ.

And people just don't think about, they think about their career that way, but they don't think about their soul that way. And my challenge to you is

I think you should think that way. I could talk about this for a long time. I agree with everything you're saying.

The one caveat I'll make is we do not, I know I can speak for you, John and Jimmy as well, for the three of us in the churches that we're a part of and the churches we pastor, we are very aware of the imperfections that exist in our churches, and by no means do we think that we have the corner on the market when it comes to church.

We don't think that. And at the same time, what John says stands in that the most important thing,

I'm going to make this statement, I'm going to stand on it, the most important thing for the believer or for your family as a believing person is that you would be in a church that is healthy, where you're going to be given

Christ every Sunday. And where these ordinary means are going to be applied, like the right preaching of the word of God, the right administration of the sacraments.

It is the most important thing that could be in your life. And so wisdom says, common sense says that I want to make decisions for myself and my family based on what's most primary.

So of course you need to consider your job. Of course you need to consider cost of living.

Of course you need to consider schools and the like. We're not saying disregard those things. What we're saying is understand the primacy of the local church in the plan of God to convert, sanctify, keep, and glorify sinners.

Well, it's clear that Justin and I have plenty more to say. I've got a couple of subjects to cover like lordship, salvation, and total depravity that relate to this passage.

And I'm sure JP you've got some stuff as well. Maybe sanctification, I don't know, something like that.

So we'll continue our conversation over in the members podcast. For those of you that don't know what this is, we have a members podcast, it's called

Total Access. It's a way that you can support Theocast where we can continue to do this work, produce more books, more articles, and more podcasts.

So it's a monthly membership. You can get a 14 day free trial at our website, theocast .org. And for you members, we'll see you over there.

We've got some exciting information for you. We'll see you next week. Thank you for listening to Theocast. If you'd like to contact us or find out additional information about our membership, you can do so at theocast .org.