The Good Fruit of Following Christ

We have the great privilege now to hear God speak to us. He's already begun this morning. He's spoken the words of his grace again to us, his great love that he's shown us in Jesus Christ. And now he wants to teach us what it means to live in that love. And so I'll get us to turn to John chapter 15 this morning.

The past few weeks, you might realise we've been in the gospel of John. We started there in our look at Easter, the passion narrative. We look at John 15 this morning, which takes place the night before Jesus goes to the cross. Before we read that, I'll begin by sort of regaling the story of Desi and I two years ago going to South Australia for our honeymoon to the best wine region in Australia, the Barossa Valley. I don't know if you've been there.

It is a beautiful place in Australia to go and visit. While we were there, we visited, naturally, a few of the most beautiful vineyards you'll find on earth. And while we were there, we learned about the beautiful art of making wine. At one place, one of the very passionate staff members explained to us about the very subtle changes that the exact location of a vineyard can have in producing nice tasting wine. Amazingly, the angle of the sun itself, how it comes at the grapes, the breeze from the ocean, the type of soil that the grapes are grown in, all of that has an impact on the taste of the grape.

Each of those variables causes the grape to have a unique taste. It was amazing to hear about the very fickle business of producing wine grapes. Do you know that when God talks to us about the Christian life, he talks to us in similar terms? He tells us about a good vine. In terms of discipleship, he talks to us about tending a vine and how to produce good wine grapes.

This morning, looking at John 15, we see Jesus giving us one of the most enduring pictures of discipleship, and that is the allegory of God as the gardener, Jesus as the vine, and we as the branches. Like the good vineyards in the Barossa, God is concerned about making good wine from our lives. Let's read together John 15 verses 1 through to verse 8. Jesus said, I am the true vine, and my father is 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 the 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.

This is the word of the Lord. In these eight verses, we are given three images when it comes to discipleship. How we live as Christians are broken down into these three pictures. Firstly, we begin by seeing a new vine. This takes place, this discussion, this teaching of Jesus takes place, remember, the night before going to the cross.

What happens the night before going to the cross? Well, Luke 22 tells us that Jesus has the Passover meal with his disciples. And Jesus in that moment begins with this allegory. He says to them verse 1, I am the true vine. My Father is the vinedresser.

Other translations say vine keeper or the gardener. My Father is the gardener. But Jesus begins by a picture of himself as a vine, but not just a vine, the vine. And not just the vine, the true vine. Why is Jesus not just a vine, but the true vine?

Well, as usual, we need to go back to the Old Testament to understand the language. In the Old Testament, God's people, Israel, was often referred to as a grapevine. In Psalm 80 verses 8 to 9, we see the beginning of Israel's story being told in this way. Psalm 80 verse 8, you, God, brought a vine out of Egypt. You drove out the nations and planted it in the promised land.

You cleared the ground for it, and it took deep root and filled the land. Israel is like a repotted grapevine. So common was Israel's self understanding of itself as a vine that archaeologists have found coins and ceramics from the Maccabean period, the intertestamental times of Israelite coins having grapevines on it, pottery with grapevines on it to talk about Israel as it's understood itself. Then we get to the prophet Isaiah, and we see how God's heart is heavy as he explains that this repotted grapevine, this vine, Israel, although it was a well-gardened vineyard, he says, it has gone wild. It went feral.

Although Israel had good soil, good water, good protection, yet when they needed to bear good fruit, they produced sour grapes instead. Grapes that can't be used for anything. Isaiah 5:7, For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are his pleasant planting. And he looked for justice, but behold, he found bloodshed. For righteousness, but behold, an outcry.

Now in John 15, Jesus says, I am the true vine. That word true doesn't simply relate to Jesus being the genuine vine, although he is. He is the true Israel. But that word true also means faithful. He is the faithful vine.

In other words, he is the perfect summary of obedience to God. He is in himself the new Israel. And Jesus here is saying that he is going to be leading a renewed nation. Remember, Luke tells us about the new covenant, the cup that represents his blood. He is leading a new covenant with God, a covenant where God's law is written on his people's hearts, where people will always trust in God and they will always bear good fruit in keeping with God.

Just like in the Old Testament, Jesus reiterates that God the Father is the gardener of the vine. He is the one to which even the true vine entrusts himself. And so when Jesus says, I am the true vine, he also says, I am doing the will of the gardener. So here in verse 1, which is incidentally the last of the I am statements of the gospel of John, I am the vine.

Here Jesus is introducing a new nation that is founded in him in which God is finally going to have a people living in obedience to him. And it starts in Jesus. He is the new vine that's been planted where Israel once was. And where Israel failed, Jesus will succeed. He is the new vine.

But that's not where the allegory finishes. And he fleshes out the metaphor a bit more. He says that the true vine is going to produce little sprouts, little branches coming off the vine. And these branches in turn will bear fruit. Now when Jesus says this, remember, he's probably sitting next to a jug of wine, or he's holding a cup of wine in his hand.

The immediate connection is wine grapes. And Jesus says in verse 4 that those who are his disciples, they are the ones that will be bearing the fruit, not him as the vine. That's an interesting thought. We've probably read this a hundred times. But Jesus doesn't bear the fruit.

Even though he is the true vine, we, his disciples, bear the fruit. God the Father, in His role as the gardener, is now further explained. As the gardener, God doesn't simply plant the vine and then let it grow. The gardener is actively involved in the life of the branches. He trims back the dead leaves.

He pulls off the insects and the pests. He scrapes off the fungus and the mold. Many years ago, I was able to travel through Israel and Jordan. And at one point in Jordan, we came across a farmer who was growing grapes. And it was fascinating to see how he was growing grapes.

He was growing it in the traditional Middle Eastern way, which is not along the wooden trellises that we see in the Barossa Valley vineyards. A grapevine grows along the ground. It is a creeping plant. And so he plants it, this farmer, and then under every branch, under every branch that bears fruit, he would take a rock and just place it underneath that branch to keep it off the ground. Carefully, with each branch, the farmer goes and inspects it, finds the grapes, and lifts it up.

This is something of the image of what Jesus is getting at when he says that God the Father is our gardener. Individually, intentionally, carefully, he inspects us. He protects us from the things that may cause us to not successfully bear fruit. And he even, Jesus says, lovingly prunes us of the things that may cause us to become sickly. In Greek, the word kathairo translated here as prune in verse 2 literally means to clean.

God cleans the branches so that it may bear more fruit. Do you notice that this pruning, however, is associated with the word. Jesus says in the next verse, verse 3, already you are clean because of the word I have spoken to you. The Greek word there for word is logos. Now that is a very significant word in the gospel of John.

In John chapter 1, famously, Jesus is the word made flesh. But then in other places, in chapter 2 and chapter 4 and so on, the word logos refers to the message of the gospel, so that Jesus would preach the word as he went, and people believed in the word. So on the one hand, the word is the content of the good news of the kingdom being proclaimed. But on the other hand, Jesus is the word. He is the embodiment of the gospel.

Taken together, you can say that Jesus is both the message and the messenger. But here in verse 3, Jesus says that the disciples are already clean by the logos, the gospel that they have heard. Yet ongoing cleaning happens by the Father's involvement. It's significant to point out that the word clean is translated clean here in verse 3, but pruning is the same word. So God cleans the branches, and then Jesus says, but by the gospel, you are clean.

So we have a clean state. The disciples are clean and yet they will continue being cleansed. What does that mean? Well, it means that the Christian life doesn't end when you come to believe in the gospel. It doesn't end when you start saying that you are a follower of Jesus.

The gospel itself, the content of Jesus Christ is the ongoing pruning tool of God. We need to be reminded of the gospel, in other words, daily, weekly, monthly, because through the gospel, the cleansing happens. On the one hand, cleaned by the gospel. On the other hand, continually cleansed by the gospel. The gospel not only saves us from our abandonment by God, it continues to draw us into the new world order of his kingdom, into the new way of thinking about life.

The gospel has cleansed us once and for all through justification, and yet it continues to cleanse us by making us holy, sanctified through him. Justified once and for all, sanctified as a continual process. And so what's the result of this pruning, of this cleansing that the gardener does to the vines and to the branches rather of the vine? The result is so that the branches will bear more fruit. And that is the last image, the fertile fruit.

Jesus explicitly states in verse 5 that the disciples are the branches. And it's the disciples who are the ones that should be bearing the fruit, not the vine. A very good question to ask is, what's the fruit? What is Jesus actually referring to when we are to bear these things? Well, one of the most natural assumptions that most Christians make is to think of the fruit of the Spirit that we read this morning from Galatians 5, where Paul says that the outworking of the Christian sanctification process is to show the inner qualities of the heart.

We read this morning, Galatians 5 verses 22 and 23, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. So the word fruit used here by Paul is the same Greek word used by John, karpos. It's the same word. So the fruit that the disciples of Jesus should bear, we could potentially say is the godly character of these things. Godly right behaviour.

And that's a fair conclusion to make if we want to sort of take biblical theology and we want to put it together. However, in the more immediate context of the gospel of John, it might be something slightly different, this word fruit. You could also be making a case that the fruit being spoken of here in John 15 is the fruit of making new disciples. That the fruit that the disciples bear is that they produce other disciples. And the reason for this is, you can turn to John 12, only a few chapters earlier where Jesus talks about fruit again.

John 12 verses 23 to 24, Jesus says, the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. Jesus is giving a prophecy here that he must die. But the reason he has to die is so that there may be more disciples, more fruit that will come from him as the wheat that must die and fall to the earth.

So John's understanding, you can argue, of the fruit of the disciples is to do with the mission of the church. The mission that each of us are involved with in bringing others to Christ. And this makes sense if we understand that the purpose of Israel as God's vine was to be the blessing to the nations. Right? They were to be the ones through which God would reach the world.

Israel, the vine, is supposed to be a blessing, and so the fruit that the branches are to produce could be more disciples. And then there's a third option. So on the one hand, it's the fruit of the Spirit. On the other hand is the fruit of more disciples. And as the third option, the fruit Jesus is talking about here could be referring to love.

A love for the church, a love for one another and this comes from the most immediate context of the passage. Immediately following our passage verses 9 to 12 reads in this way, 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 your joy may be full. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. So following this, immediately following our passage, following the logic here, then you could argue, as branches, we are to abide, Jesus says, in him. You know, remain in me so that you may bear good fruit.

But now in verse 9, Jesus uses the same language and says, abide in my love. Verse 10 says, we abide in that love by keeping his commandments. What is his commandment? Verse 12, to love one another as I have loved you. So the third understanding, and I think perhaps the best, is that the fruit is the fruit of loving each other.

The fruit of loving each other. We show that we are truly abiding in the vine by our willingness to love God's church. Now the reason I like the third option here isn't simply because it fits most neatly into the context of the passage, but if you think about it, it actually allows you to incorporate the other two options as well. How do we truly love others in the church? It's through those inequalities of the Spirit in us.

Right? It's only through peace, only by resisting strife and enmity and jealousy. It's only through kindness and gentleness and self-control that we love the church. Additionally, we show love for God's elect by being concerned for the lost. Somewhere in the sea of lost souls out there are those who God has called eternally.

And we show love for God's eternal church by bringing the gospel to them. To tell them that Jesus is the wheat who had to die so that he could bear more fruit, and they are the fruit. So both the fruit of the Spirit and the fruit of disciple making comes from ultimately this fruit of love. Now ultimately, the idea of Christian discipleship centred on this love shows us this ongoing concern of God for us as His children to grow in love. And we are told this morning that he is in the process of pruning us.

God is intentionally busy with us. You know, on the one hand, cleansed by faith in Jesus, and on the other hand, continuously cleansed by God's interaction with us. God wants us fertile, and he is an active worker in that pursuit. But there's a strong warning here for us as well, that God won't allow people in his church who don't love his church. God won't allow people in his church who don't love his church.

Jesus says, sooner or later, they will be chucked out. Verse 6. In fact, they will be thrown into the same fire where all the weeds, the thorns, and the thistles of godlessness are burnt up. If you don't love each other in this church, you prove yourselves not to belong to Christ. But those who are true disciples, God prunes back causing them to suffer pain even in that process in order that we grow deeper and more intentionally in our love for God's people.

So that's the fruit that God is producing. Now the question is, how is all of this accomplished in us? We might hear these words and become fearful, and we might feel really guilty that we aren't as loving as we ought to be. Is it possible for us to hear these words and just to create a love for us or a love rather for the stranger who's sitting in the pew next to us? Is it possible to love the person you've been in the church with for years, but you're not even sure you like them?

How is all of this accomplished? Well, you could say that the main purpose of the vine allegory that Jesus gives is actually not focusing on the fruit at all. It's talking about our dependence on Jesus. It's not on the fruit. It's on the dependence on Jesus.

Bearing fruit, Jesus says, is only possible by remaining or abiding in the vine. Those words in verse 5 hit really hard, don't they? Apart from me, you can do nothing. Fruitless is all you'll ever be if you are not in Jesus Christ. So your disregard for the church, your lackluster love, attention, affection for the people of his church comes as a result, we're told, of our fallenness, of our apartness from God.

It comes because of the area of your life that hasn't been faithful to God. And yet Jesus is the faithful one. He is the true vine, and we are grafted into him as the true vine. It's only through him that unfaithful people like us have been reconciled back to God. But if you choose to remove yourself from Jesus by choosing not to bear the fruit of love, you achieve nothing.

You only secure your own destruction. So remain in Jesus. Go back to God for continuous pruning through his gospel. And if you do, you have the power of his life that courses through your veins. So brothers, sisters, remain in his love.

Please. That's how we bear fruit. Fruit that will last. And there's a wonderful reward for us, verse 8 says, in doing this. Jesus says, verse 8, by this my Father is glorified that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.

This morning, the Bible tells us that everything we do somehow glorifies God. Everything we do somehow glorifies God, but perhaps God is glorified in no clearer way than a church that is unified in its love for one another. The church glorifies God in no better way and is no clearer a witness than our love for each other. So friends, we pursue that with all the strength that we have, trusting that our strength comes from Christ who is the true vine, the genuine faithful vine of God, and we belong to him. Let's pray.

Lord Jesus, we pray for the strength, the ability, the determination to abide in you, to remain in you, to live in you. And we pray that as we entrust ourselves into that position, as we draw our hearts and our minds continuously back to the gospel that has at once cleansed us and is still cleansing us, help us to see in effect as our Elder Rick prayed this morning, to see the effect of this working in our lives, that we can experience this fruit coming out of our hearts. And so through that, both testify to the world that watches, brothers and sisters that watch us, and even testify to our own hearts that we belong to Jesus Christ. Help us to realise the futility of not being in Jesus.

Apart from you, Lord, we can do nothing. And so help us to remember that we can only bear fruit that will last by returning to the vine. Help us, Lord, to do that, help Open House Church to be a church that loves one another, help us to serve therefore intentionally, thoughtfully, continuously one another to love each other as you have loved us. In Jesus Christ's name we pray. Amen.