Nov. 5, 2017 PM Service The True Vine Produces True Fruit by Pastor Josh Sheldon

The Night Before the Cross in John 15

To several weeks in the Lord's discourse with his disciples on the night before he was crucified, the night before he went to the cross and died for our sins. And this particular discourse from the book of John, which we will pick up this afternoon beginning in chapter 15.

And we'll go through this sequentially through the end of chapter 17. And this afternoon, I would have us begin with the first 11 verses of chapter 15 here. This is the word of our Lord Jesus Christ to his disciples by the scripture to us.

I am the true vine and my father the vinedresser. 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. Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you.

Abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in a vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. 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. If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you.

By this my father is glorified that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. As the father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love just as I have kept my father's commandments and abide in his love.

These things I have spoken to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full. This is the word of the Lord. You know, the analogy of Christ as the true vine and the church as the branches is not meant to make us wonder whether our salvation is secure, whether we are certain that Christ has indeed saved us and we are indeed saved.

Our Lord's intent here is not to scare us. There are warnings here to be sure, but the warnings are there as a motive to strive for us to strive for what is ahead, not to make us look back with fear and trembling, wonder if yesterday's failure was enough to consign us to a fiery ash heap.

In Romans 11 .21, for example, Paul warns the Gentiles in that church to look upon the judgment that had come upon Israel as a motive to divest themselves of any pride in their own salvation. And so also here, the fate of the branches that were not in him, it tells us to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.

Confidence. Confidence that your place in Christ is secure and permanent is no further away than Romans 8, especially verse 31 to the end of that chapter. I rather take the Lord's thrust here to be the encouragement to abide, to abide in him.

Rather than worry if the father is looking down with a frowning providence, searching for branches to be violently removed, let the believer be concerned to know what fruit it is that when produced, he or she can know that it is from the life-giving sustenance of the true vine, that it comes from Christ.

Let us look to ourselves and ask whether God, by his perfect husbandry, which is what is meant by him trimming the branches, by his perfect husbandry, that we are producing evermore God-intended, Christ-honoring, and spirit-enlivened fruit, which fruit we will discuss as we go through these 11 verses.

God likens his people to this particular plant in several places. And the Lord used that figure in many of his parables. And most of the references to a vineyard, if you look in scripture, are actually negative.

They're actually negative references with God planting and caring for his vineyard and going to find fruit in it and always finding it devoid of the fruit that he intended. And Jesus takes over that whole analogy of the vineyard.

He takes it completely over and he says what? That he is the true vine and that he is the one by whom, through whom, because of whom we are able to produce God-glorifying fruit. In other words, as we abide in Christ and produce this fruit that Christ explains here, and Lord willing, I'll be able to explain to you, as we produce this fruit, we are producing the fruit that God intended, in Christ, the true vine, and fruit which brings glory to him, God the Father.

The lesson of this analogy here, where Jesus says he is the true vine, we are the branches in him, the lesson is our absolute dependence upon the vine for our spiritual life. Indeed, our dependence on Jesus for our life, physically as well.

In him, all things consist. In the verses that we read for Conley's message this morning, all things hold together in him, your next breath and mine. But the lesson here, without me you can do nothing.

Abide in me and I in you. If you abide in me, you will produce much fruit. And by this, you will bring glory to God. These sorts of words, these sorts of statements by Jesus tell us absolute, complete dependence on him.

That pushes us towards this particular product. We don't get to go to God and say, well, I produced this and that and the other, and these things came from our own desires, our own agenda, and we force fit them into the scripture.

No, Jesus tells us plainly, this fruit, which of course is love, is what brings glory to God the Father. We also see in these short verses that if you are in Christ, if you are indeed a branch, indeed in the true vine of Jesus, you are indeed producing fruit.

Even those of us who are not gardeners can understand this analogy. A literal vine has some limitations. A tree or a vine that is not pruned can get sort of clogged up, and then all the fruit on that vine or that tree will suffer.

They don't do as well. We have an orange tree in our backyard, and it produces wonderful fruit. Recently, we hired some people to kind of clean up our backyard, and part of the cleanup, they prune the tree.

They cut off, I think you call them sappers. Those small twigs, they're bigger than twigs, they're smaller than branches, but they don't produce anything. They sap energy from the tree. Well, he gets rid of all that.

He made the tree actually, in that sense, smaller, but it produced more and better fruit after he was done. You don't have to be a gardener, which I am certainly not, to understand Christ's analogy here.

We can ask, what is it that God the vinedresser prunes? God trims this tree. God the Father, he's the vinedresser. He's trimming, he's pruning this tree. What is it that he prunes? Well, he's pruning everything that gets in the way of more and more fruit, more and more fruit, more and more production from us.

His children who he's placed as branches in the vine, he's getting rid of those things that slow down our production of what he would have us to produce. Anything that impedes that production, he cuts away.

In verse eight of what I just read to you from John 15, Jesus says that God is glorified when we produce much of this one fruit, which is love. Verse nine directly correlates the Father's love for him, for Christ, to his love for us, the branches, his people.

So it's not enough to say, I love my Jesus, but I'm not too fond of this other person who's in the body of Christ, who's also a branch in him. A pastor I know once said that he loves all the saints, he just loves some of them better than others.

What do I hear when I hear a statement like that? I hear the snip of the pruning shears. Another pastor friend told me, of course I love my people, God commands it. So I hear a saw trimming away a vitality-sapping shooter, a sort of a tendril that feeds from what is meant for the branch, but produces nothing.

If we can convince ourselves that so long as we don't call him or her a fool, as Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, well then we have violated the Lord's precept here. But Jesus is talking about producing a true and a pure and a godly kind of love for one another.

This is the simple lesson of this parable, this metaphor of Jesus as a vine and we as branches in him producing this one thing. It's very simple, love. I think of 1 Corinthians 13 then, which gives us a sort of a litmus test, a way to look and say, am I producing this love?

Do I have this kind of love? Do I even understand it? 1 Corinthians 13, I wanna read it to you and when I read it to you, I want you to think of it as a rebuke. It's often read at weddings and it's very encouraging, but it was really meant as a rebuke to the Corinthian church, that divisive place that has so many odd practices that here today, 2 ,000 years later are so hard for us to figure out just what was the context of this, what were they doing and how does that relate to us today?

One of the more difficult books to understand in the Bible. And when we get to 1 Corinthians 13, we have these verses all about love and what love is and what love does. We can almost hear the Holy Spirit at each point saying to us, saying to you and to me individually, what about you?

What are you doing in this particular regard? Let me just read these to you. Remember that this is love, this one subject here in 1 Corinthians 13 is the one fruit that Jesus insists upon in John 15. So Paul writes, if I give away all I have and I deliver, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast. It is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. If God were not all these towards us. This is why I think we need to look at these. If God were not these things towards us, if each of these were not true of God's nature and his actions toward you or me as individuals, most especially, for example, his patience with us, where would we be?

How much of our rudeness, love is not rude, how much of our rudeness did God bear? And at each point, we're given no leeway except to be what? Direct imitators of God himself. Ephesians 4 .32 says, Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

1 Thessalonians 1 .6,. And you became imitators of us and of the Lord. For you received the word much affliction with the joy of the Holy Spirit. 1 Corinthians 11 .1, Be imitators of me as I am of Christ.

And then Ephesians 5 .1 -2,. Therefore be imitators of God as beloved children and walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. Back to John 15, there's sort of a progression there in what Jesus says that I think is worth taking note of.

See, verses one through seven there are about Jesus the vine and we as the branches. We're totally dependent upon him for anything we do that's of any lasting or true value. And then verses eight through 10, they tell us that God is glorified by what Christ his son produces in us.

Which would make sense, would it not? That God the father is pleased when God his son produces in us the fruit that God the father intended for God the son to produce in us. It sounds sort of circular, but it's true.

That's what verses eight to 10 say. That God is glorified when we produce what Christ intends to produce in and through us. If you look at verse 10 there in John 15, what does it say? It says, keeping Christ's commands will keep us in him.

This is how we stay in him, by keeping his commands. And it also says that when we keep his commandments, we do what he did when he kept his father's. The correlation's direct. When we keep Christ's commandments, we're doing only what Jesus Christ himself did when he kept his father's commandments.

Now just as a quick aside, it doesn't mean that the father gave Jesus commandments in that sense. Like discreet things, be able to do this, now do that. Jesus didn't need to be told to obey the law, for example.

He did it by nature, he did it by love for his father. What commandments did he keep? He kept the commandments that were given to us. He kept the law, which was meant for us. That's his act of obedience by which, by faith is imputed to us.

So he says he kept the commands. Don't think of that as God, point by point, commanding Jesus to do this, now do that, as he does us. Think of it as Jesus keeping the whole body of commandments that were intended for us, and by satisfying that law, becoming the perfect sacrifice for our sins.

Keeping the commands will keep us abiding in Christ's love, just as he abides in his father's love. And then verse 12 makes it very explicit. Here is the command that keeps us in him. It's very simple, at least to understand, to ascertain what Jesus is saying here.

How do we stay in him? What is that one command? That you love one another as I have loved you. That we, as a body, as individuals interacting with one another, that we as a body towards the individual, the individual towards the rest of us, in every way you can imagine, this relationship as a body of believers bound together by our common faith in and love for our savior.

That's his command. How do we stay in him? By loving one another. This one God-glorifying fruit, which is love. By this, you glorify the Father, that you love one another. And then verse 13 anticipates the ultimate demonstration of Christ's love for us.

That someone lays down his life for his friends. Someone lays down his life for his friends, which Christ would do the very next day from the time he gave this discourse. Lays down comes from a word that has more of the sense of setting aside.

He set aside his life for his friends, a deliberate, unintentional act of self-sacrificial love. And he did this because of his love for the Father. And again, we're given no leeway. There's no wiggle room in how we are to imitate this and the fact that he is the example.

And I'm gonna read to you a very well-known part of a verse. And when I read this to you, notice that there's no parenthetical that says, oh, and by the way, I know that you're only human. So don't worry about this, doing this fully.

Nor does it say, well, you're sinners and you're gonna have to repent for what you've done. I'm sorry for not doing this fully tomorrow and I'll forgive you for it, but just do your best. There's no parenthetical like that here.

For example, in Ephesians 5 .22, husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. It says it was also love for us that led him to the cross. And in verse 17 here brings it all together.

It says, these things I command you in order that you will love one another. In order that you will love one another. That's the purpose of the commands. The whole reason for this is mutual and self-sacrificial love for one another.

It's what Paul writes to the Ephesians in 1 Timothy 1 .5. And I don't mean to mix that up. I'm not talking about the book of Ephesians. The book of Timothy was written to Timothy while he was ministering in Ephesus.

So in that book, in 1 Timothy 1 .5, the Ephesian church there, Paul tells Timothy the purpose of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. So what's the upshot of all this?

It's simply this, if you are in the vine, you're producing this fruit, which is love. There are entanglements. There are weeds that grow up and choke us. If we go to the parable of the sower and the different weeds that come up, there are those weeds that come and choke the life out of the good grain.

And that's the troubles and the cares of this world, of course. They grow up around us. They sap the nutrients that are meant to enrich us in our own production. And this is the Father's part. According to verse two, he's looking with an expert eye, the expert eye of the omniscient God at any and everything that's in the way of his son's branches.

In verse 12 of the passage in John is over-daunting for us. Love one another as I have loved you. It makes an equal sign there. My love, that's Christ's love for you, equals your love for one another.

Maybe 1 Corinthians 13's a little bit more accessible for us. Those tell us what love is. It's patient and kind, for example. They tell us what love does. It bears and it believes and it hopes and it endures.

And the context there, of course, is our relationship with each other in the church. But then Jesus' words have to come crashing through again. If we're trying to make this easy on ourselves, it says, greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends.

Which, of course, he would do the very next day. So we have to ask ourselves, we all have to ask ourselves, what is it that God is clearing away from my branch? What is it in my life that's gotten in the way of the production of this one God-glorifying, Christ-intended, Holy Spirit-empowered fruit?

Mutual love for one another. What gets in the way of this? Well, that's where I think 1 Corinthians is helpful to us. It takes it from this equal sign, God's love for his Son equals the Son's love for us, and therefore that's the love we have for one another.

And that's so terribly difficult. We fail at it so often. 1 Corinthians 13, at least, will give us some of the day-to-day practicalities of it. What's getting in the way of the production of this? What's that sapper that's drawing away the nutrient that's meant for this production of love, but takes the strength and the vitality from it before it even gets to that part of the branch, the branch being me?

And those things getting in the way are the things in my life that I allow to get in the way. What do I allow to make me rude or impatient, unwilling to endure with you? As we was talking about in Sunday school in the Peacemaker series, what is it that makes me unable to let love cover a multitude of sins?

To show love for you in that way, or you for me, or for each other. Do you hear the vinedressers' pruning shears coming? What slows down, what halts the blossoming of this greatest fruit, the one that endures forever, if we read the rest of 1 Corinthians there?

The one that brings God the Father of all people. God the Father gets glory from this. There's a good deal of controversy over what is meant, or what it means that God removes and burns branches. It's clearly the language of judgment.

God looks to his vineyard and expecting to see good fruit, he finds something else, and that's usually how this metaphor plays out, where it's in the prophets or in Jesus' parables. If he only removed the branch, we might say that it's his loving hand chastising his child to get him back in line, but the language of fire is almost always the language of judgment.

And here it sounds very final. So how do we sort this out? Remain confident in the security of our salvation. I think first we can note in verse three, Jesus makes an indicative statement. He says things as they are.

He declares the current state of the matter. What does he say? Already you are clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Now clean is the word catharsis, and that's where we get catharsis, as used in the scriptures of ritual purity.

The cleansing Israel had sought for all his history is made actual, it's made final in Jesus Christ. Of course, the next day is when that is actualized at the cross, when our sins are answered. The word spoken by Jesus, the word is the agent of that cleansing.

The word is what exposes our sin. It was presents the answer in Christ. This word, this catharsis, this catharsis word, if you will, is in 2 Peter 1, verse nine, for whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins.

Hebrews 10, verse two, otherwise they would not have ceased to be offered since the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sin. It's the cleansing, for example, that John the Baptist could only anticipate.

And I think this thought is finished off in Hebrews chapter 10, verse 22. Let us draw near, meaning to God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water, all this being the fulfillment of Ezekiel 36, 25.

I will sprinkle you with clean water and you shall be clean from all your uncleanness and from all your idols I will cleanse you. It's difficult to believe that God the Father would revoke his word and cut off a branch that by faith was grafted into Jesus Christ.

It would be as if God had said, I chose you to be in my son and I've covered you with his blood, but because of your bad behavior, I've removed his blood from you and you from him. I've changed my mind.

Now you have to answer for your sins. It would be as if God said that. Romans 11, 29 says, the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. So the immediate example of a branch cut off and tossed in the fire is right there in the history that led to this evening with the disciples.

It's Judas, it's Judas. He was chosen as much as were the other 11. When the Lord washed their feet, he said, and you are clean, there's my word, catharsis, he said, you are clean, but not every one of you.

You can be a branch in him, but not be a true branch. You might be on the outer edge of church life. You might be involved just enough to convince yourself that you are a Christian and not be truly in Christ by faith in him, his work on the cross, his sacrificial death, his vicarious suffering, vicarious simply meaning he suffered for others.

He did this for someone other than himself because he was tempted as we are, yet without sin. So when he suffered for sin, it was not for his sin. He had no part in the sin for which he suffered. All of his suffering could be attributed, imputed, if you will, to others.

You could be very close to this idea of believing in Jesus. You could be skirting around the edges and be ever so involved in church life, serving and working hard and busy all the time, going to Bible studies and memorizing scripture and all these many activities that are in and of themselves good.

And you can ask yourself, do I produce this fruit, this love for the brethren, that's a love for the brethren that is the same as Christ has love for me, that is the same as God the Father has for him, for Christ.

Perhaps the profession falters on the facts. If there's no fruit, then certainly the profession does falter. Christians, branches that are in Christ do produce fruit. Galatians 5 .22 is unequivocal. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

The first of these is love, exactly what Jesus is talking about in John 15. There's some wordplay in verse two that leads away from the thought that a true believer is at risk from being cut off and burned in the fire.

Again, every branch of mine that does not bear fruit, he takes away, excuse me, and every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes that it may bear more fruit. Now takes away, I don't have a lot of words here for you, just a couple I want you to hear because of these wordplays, takes away is the word airo, the Greek word airo.

And prunes is kathairo, kathairo, which means to make something clean, to make something pure. And that word, kathairo, prunes, it reminds us of katharos, which we studied just a moment ago, the one that means to be clean in the sense of ritual purity.

So anyone who's a true branch in the true vine is producing the fruit of Christ-imitating, God-glorifying, mutual, and sacrificial love. Great command of the faith, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

The second, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. The list in Galatians 5 .22 starts with love. And in John 15, Jesus says, what fruit glorifies God? What is God the vine dresser looking for? What is he trimming out of the way in our lives in order to produce more of this one thing?

Love. The branches, I would say, that are not producing this are not true branches. They're not pruned, they're just disposed of. It's like Jesus' parable in Luke 13. A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard and he came seeking fruit on it and found none.

And he said to the vine dresser, look, for three years now I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree and I find none. Cut it down. Why should it use up the ground? And he answered him, sir, let it alone this year also until I dig around it and put on manure.

Then if it should bear fruit next year, well and good, but if not, you can cut it down. The other branches, the other branches are pruned, they're cleansed by the Father. He's trimming away from us in our lives all the interference to this one goal.

And by clearing away the interference in our lives from this one thing, by his providential hand, he is producing more fruit as he cleanses us more and more and gets all the things that are in the way out of the way.

And that's what this pruning process really is. All of us need this pruning that comes from God the Father. It's his chastising hand that shows us our shortcomings and by his providential rebuke, he trims away the sin which clings so closely to us and limits or even halts the outpouring of love.

Now here's the place where we need to be introspective, especially as we come before the Lord at his supper. As we remember what is going to happen the very next day in the narrative of John's gospel, the day after this discourse which we're now going through.

He's going to give himself for our sins on the cross. We need to be introspective about this. We need to ask ourselves where God is carefully and lovingly trimming our branch, what he's getting out of the way that interferes with our production of love for one another.

A love that is God the Father to God the Son and Jesus says that's the same love that he has for us and that we are to have for one another. Jesus says you did not choose me but I chose you, Father, Son, working together in the vine in perfect harmony, the Father tending to the vine and Jesus constantly infusing life to all who are in him.

I think it's fair of us to, as we approach this table, a time to examine ourselves and ask ourselves what is it in me that slows this down? Ask ourselves do I even really have this? Is my love for, just in your own mind, pick the individual.

Is that the same love that Christ has for me? The same love that God the Father had for him, for Christ? It's a hard question but I think this insists upon it and then if you believe in Jesus Christ, if your faith, your hope, your trust are in him, then you'd be asking yourself what is it that God is providentially doing in me, in my life?

What is he putting in my way? What is he taking out of my way in order to stop the sappers? Those things that are bigger than twigs and smaller than branches, they're sucking the life out of my production of this one thing.

I think it's a question all of us can validly ask ourselves as we even think about approaching the Lord's table here this afternoon. Because there's one thing, it's love. It's just that simple and may that be how we all, as we tend for one another the way God tends for us, may we be those who glorify God by producing this for each other, amen?

Well, let's prepare ourselves for.