The Cost of Discipleship
“Every branch in Me not bearing fruit He takes it away; and each one bearing fruit He prunes so that it may bear more fruit” John 15:2
Takes Away – If it weren’t for the promise of the help of the Spirit, following the Lord would be unavoidably discouraging. Just think about what Yeshua says in this verse. If we don’t bear fruit, the Father will take us away. That’s harsh. There’s no slippage in this statement. There’s no “carnal” Christian waffling where we sort of do what God wants and sort of do our own thing. If we don’t bear fruit, we’re gone. I don’t know about you, but I find this verse terrifying in its simplicity. It’s a very good thing that God demonstrates incredible patience with us; otherwise I just don’t see how we could make it.
When John uses the verb airo, meaning to carry off. We understand the meaning easily enough but we often ignore the implications. Notice that Jesus says that these are branches “in Me.” That certainly seems to indicate that there was at one time a vital connection between the stalk and the branch. When John uses the phrase “in Me” or “in Christ,” we are hardly justified to claim that this branch was never really a believer. The branch was in Christ, but something happened. The normal process of growth did not occur and the branch did not produce fruit. What does that mean? Well, Paul gives us a pretty clear description of “fruit” when he lists the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians. If we are abiding in Christ, we should expect to see love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, meekness and self-control. These are the normal and expected results of being attached to the vine. Where they are absent, the branch is grossly deficient, in fact, so deficient that it is cut off and taken away.
So, the first rather harsh implication of Jesus’ remark is this: if your life isn’t progressively showing more and more of the fruits of the Spirit, you are in terrible danger. What is cut off is consigned to the fire. Wake up! Take a serious look at your attitudes and actions. Do you see obvious signs of the Spirit (there is a lot more to these words than we first imagine but we’ll get to that)? If you don’t, it’s certainly time to pray for the tree surgeon to graft you back in.
Of course, the active branches don’t escape corrective action either. The second implication here is that even if you are producing fruit, you can expect to be pruned. God will remove from all the branches anything that interferes with maximum production. Do you wonder why “bad” things happen to good people. Well, if you are vitally connected to the vine, pruning is the normal means of improving your productivity, and often pruning appears to be a very bad thing. You might lose a job that you thought was the answer to your security needs. You might experience a natural disaster or the loss of a loved one. You might go through times of real heartache and trial. It’s pruning. If God is sovereign (and He is), then the attitude we discover along the rocky road of life is found in James. “Count it all joy when” is the confident declaration that God knows how to prune better than anyone else.
Today there are only two lessons. If you don’t see fruit, do something about it right now! If you do see fruit, rest assured that God will prune, so relax, He knows what He is doing.
Topical Index: Christian Living
