The Life-Blood of Discipleship

This morning, we're continuing our look at Jesus' understanding of discipleship. As you'll be aware, we've been looking at that for the past few weeks. And at the risk of being judged, I am gonna admit to you this morning that I like wine. I like a good drop of red. I don't mind it.

And I was in South Africa, the home of some really good wine, a few years ago with my dad, who's here this morning. And we were fortunate enough to go to tour one of the many beautiful vineyards in Cape Town while we were there. And this particular vineyard claimed to produce a very good wine grape used to produce Pinot Noir, I think, if I remember it correctly. And my dad gives me the notes. And one very passionate staff member there gave us a bit of an explanation, obviously trying to sell his wine, but explaining to us just the intricacies of producing wine and of this particular grape.

He explained to us the very subtle changes that the exact location of the vineyard meant in producing this very good grape. The angle of the sun, the ocean breeze that came through, not directly on the coast, but far enough away to change the flavour of the grape. So the breeze, the wind, the type of soil that the wine grape or the vine was planted in. All of it meant that this award winning grape was unique, was delicious, was world renowned. It was fascinating.

It was fascinating to understand and to hear about the very fickle business of producing wine grapes, of producing good wine. You have to know your stuff. You have to almost have a PhD in growing these things to do it well. Do you know that God sees you as a Pinot Noir grape? Or at least, the branch that will produce these grapes.

This morning, we're going to continue looking at some of the big statements Jesus made about discipleship. What it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ. What is discipleship? Who are his disciples? What do they look like?

This morning, come to John 15, and I'd like you to open up to that with me. And we're going to be reading the first eight verses. This is part of Jesus' upper room discourse, which starts from John 13 and finishes at the end of John 17. So four chapters of this, a big sermon almost. And in John 15 verse one, we read Jesus saying, I am the true vine and my father is the gardener.

He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Now, remain in me and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself. It must remain in the vine.

Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing. If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers.

Such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be given to you. This is to my father's glory that you bear much fruit showing yourselves to be my disciples. So far the reading. So we come to this statement that Jesus makes.

And it's new, it's something that he hasn't talked about before. But remember the context again where Jesus was saying this. This was the night before Jesus was going to go to the cross. This was part of the Passover feast that would eventually become the Lord's Supper celebration. And Jesus and his disciples were sitting around a big table with probably a Passover lamb decked out on the table, bread lying, you know, near it, and wine.

And so Jesus might be telling this story even as he's holding a glass of wine in his hand. You see, when we think of this vine, we don't really think of what the fruit was. When Jesus spoke about the vine, everyone knew that it was a grape. There was no doubt about it. And grapes weren't sort of the grapes we grow on vines now that we can eat.

Grapes were always, most of the time, used for making wine. So Jesus is talking here about a very specific, very specific thing. These grapes are good grapes that are going to be made into good wine. Jesus says, while the disciples are looking at this wine, he says, I am the real vine. The Greek can be translated as I am the genuine wine.

I am the real deal. And this is very significant when we think of the Lord's Supper where Jesus says, I will not drink of the fruit of this vine until that day when I am with you in my father's kingdom. Jesus looks at his disciples and he says, I am the true vine. Why does Jesus talk about a vine? Well, we'll have to go back to the Old Testament to see that Israel, God's people, are talked about as being a vine.

God's people of Israel are said to be vines in a vineyard that God cultivates and grows. And Israel's purpose as a people of God is closely linked to being this metaphor. In Isaiah 5, God's heart is heavy as he explained to them why Israel will go into exile. Because God is a gardener that has cultivated this vine, who has protected it, who has put up a watchtower to prevent scavengers from coming in and robbers from stealing their very precious fruit. God has tilled the soil.

He has looked after this vineyard. They have good soil and good water, and they are they should be producing good grapes, but instead, they are producing wild grapes, sour grapes, grapes that are useless for making good wine. And that is why they're going to go into exile because God has given them all that they need, and yet they have turned away and they have produced sour grapes. So that is the idea that the disciples have when they hear Jesus saying, I am the true vine. I am the true vine, the genuine deal.

He is the obedient son of God who is beginning a new thing, a new nation, a new people committed to bearing good fruit. That is what Jesus is saying. Just like in the Old Testament, God the Father, we see in verse one, is the gardener. He is the one to which even the true vine entrusts himself. Isn't that interesting?

Jesus, the son of God, entrusts himself to God the Father. And so here we see the interplay between the two persons of the trinity, God the Father and God the Son. Although other passages in Scripture will tell us about the equality of the persons in the trinity, we come to this passage that shows us a subordination, a submissiveness between the son to the father. Now, in theological language and theology books, this will be the distinction or this is what they will call a functional subordination, not an ontological subordination. K.

What does that mean? In essence, it means that the son of God in the trinity will do the father's will. Like a servant to their master, he will do the father's will. That is why the son of God would take up the lowly position of becoming a man to accomplish the mission that God had intended. In the trinity, God the son Jesus Christ became the doer or the accomplisher of God the father's will on earth.

And in becoming the doer of God the father's will, he serves the father. Does that make sense? So it doesn't mean that in essence, Jesus Christ is of less standard or quality, but he serves the father in this way. So when Jesus says, I am the true vine, he also says, I am doing the will of the gardener, who is God the Father. Jesus is introducing a new world order.

He's explaining that we know that Israel was a vine, but it was a bad vine. Now I am the good vine. I am the real vine that God has intended. Where Israel failed, Jesus will succeed. But Jesus isn't finished with painting this allegory.

He isn't finished with explaining this metaphor. He goes on. The vine is going to produce little sprouts, branches. These little branches in turn will bear fruit. Now when Jesus is saying this, remember, he's next to this jug of wine or he's holding a cup of wine in his hand.

The immediate connection is the fruit which will produce delicious wine grapes. The gardener, Jesus says, is still involved in this process. The gardener doesn't just plant the vine and let the vine do the rest. The gardener is involved in this process. The gardener is actively pruning the vines, Jesus says.

He's actively cleaning the vines, trimming back the leaves, picking off the pests, slicing off mould or growths. While I was in Jordan a few years ago, touring Israel, we were able to stop on the side of a road next to a farm. And this farmer wasn't a huge farm, it was pretty much just subsistence farming, just looking after his own needs and the needs of his family, but this farmer had a little vineyard growing wine grapes. And the amazing thing was to see how he was growing these grapes. This was the same way that people had been growing it for hundreds of years, probably from the time of Jesus.

The vine was growing not on the trellises that we're used to when you go to a vineyard, not on those wooden trellises. It was growing along the ground like they normally traditionally would. But in order to protect these beautiful grapes that he was going to use, the gardener, the farmer there, actually would go to the bunch of grapes and, you know, check it, every single one, and then place a stone underneath them, lifting them up above the dirt, away from bugs, away from, you know, scavengers or whatever, and protect it from mould and disease and so on. Every single bunch of grapes. So purposefully, so carefully, so beautifully caring about these grapes.

So these gardeners were so involved with the fruit. Each bunch of fruit is protected. Each one is assessed. Each one is nurtured. Isn't that a beautiful image?

Carefully, God inspects us, the branches that will produce fruit. Lifts us out of the dirt, prunes us of the things that will cause us to become sickly. In Greek, the word that is used here is clean. So we've translated it as prune. But in verse two, it should say, the branch that does bear fruit, he, God, cleans so that it will be even more fruitful.

That is why Jesus goes on to say in verse three, but you are already clean. You have already been pruned, Jesus says to his disciples, because of the word I have spoken to you. Now here Jesus is probably not speaking to us, but to his disciples. What does it mean necessarily when Jesus says that they are clean, they have been pruned? Well, it probably means that they have come to understand that he is the Messiah.

They have come to understand the good news of Jesus Christ. Words, through that teaching, through the gospel, they have come to be clean. They got it. They accepted the teachings of Jesus, and so they had been cleaned and had become grafted into this vine, which is Jesus. Yet, at the same time, it seems that Jesus is also talking about a continual cleaning, a process of pruning that happens even after this moment.

Because God the gardener prunes or cleanses the branches over and over again to produce more fruit, it says here. This is true for us as Christians. This is true for us as Christians. It's interesting that the pruning is associated with the word. Do you see that?

You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. In other places in the Bible, this pruning process is more associated with God's disciplining us, allowing things to happen to us to strengthen our faith, to grow us as believers. But Jesus is associating the word with pruning, the word with cleansing. What does it mean? Well, Jesus used the word logos to describe the word.

And this is a very, very important word for the gospel of John because in the beginning of John's gospel, he says that Jesus is the word of God. And in that word, he uses the word, sorry to use that word so often, logos. Jesus is logos. And so what Jesus is saying here is you have already heard the logos. You have already seen the message.

It is me. I am the message. In the gospel of John, Jesus is not just the message bearer. He is the message. He is God's word to the nations.

He is God's word to the world. So when Jesus spoke the logos, the word to his disciples, they became cleansed because it was the moment they understood the gospel. It is the moment they understood the reason Jesus Christ had to come to earth. So in this context, therefore, we can understand, we should understand, or assume at least that when God talks about us being pruned, being cleansed, it's associated with the gospel. It's associated with the message that Jesus was all about.

It's that moment where we, as the branches, come to understand the good news of Jesus. We come to realise our need of a saviour. Our need of forgiveness under his authority, and to live under his kingship as the son of God. The gospel becomes, in that moment, precious to us. And yet, this pruning happens not just once.

This pruning, even in the Greek grammar, is a continual process. Isn't that interesting? We need, as Christians, to be reminded of the good news of Jesus. It's not just a once off thing, ah, I get it. In order for us to become clean, to be cleansed, we need to hear this word over and over and over again.

Because the gospel not only saves us from abandonment by God, but it draws us into this new world order that Jesus was talking about. The new way of doing things, the new way of thinking about life. The gospel cleanses us continually and keeps us rooted in that vine. So there's this once off cleansing, but then a habitual continuous renewal. But what's the end result of this cleansing?

What's the end result of this pruning? Well, we see that we are to be cleansed in order to be even more fruitful, to bear fruit. Jesus explicitly states in verse five that the disciples are the branches. It's the disciples who will be bearing the fruit. Now remember what we said last week when we were looking at John 12 when Jesus spoke about the fruit.

It's not the exact same fruit of Paul, and we read Galatians 5 just before, the fruit of the spirit. When John talks about fruit, there's a different nuance to it. In John 12, Jesus talks about having to die as like a seed that must fall to the ground and die so that it will produce much fruit. Jesus said, I have to die. I have to go away so that there will be more disciples to come.

The disciples are the fruit. The idea is more about the creation of other disciples than it is to create or to have certain characteristics. So those fruit of the spirit characteristics of love, joy, peace, goodness, kindness. It's not less than that. It's definitely not not exhibiting those characteristics, but it's more than that.

Of course, being engrafted into this vine means that we are going to be like the vine. And Jesus had the fruit of the spirit and exhibited that fruit. But for John, for what Jesus is saying here, he's talking about disciple making. Jesus is talking here about the numerical growth of the kingdom of God when his disciples make other disciples. Why can I say this?

Well, we'll have to go back to the Old Testament to hear again what God's intention was for Israel to be this vine. In the Old Testament, the vine, which was Israel, was to be a blessing to the nations. It was to grow and expand so much that the birds could live in the vine, and animals could come under the shade of this vine. It was to be a blessing. It was to increase so far as to cover the whole earth.

That is what God's intention was for Israel. That is the metaphor of the vine. It was to spread and increase. So now when Jesus talks about this new world order, this new nation that was to start with him, the same applies. This vine is going to grow and it's going to bear much fruit.

And this fruit is going to bear more fruit and it's going to expand. What this means is that Jesus' disciples are naturally disciple makers. Being connected to the vine that is Jesus means that we will be missional. Now, there's three important things that Jesus mentions in our passage here about this fruitful discipleship. The first thing that's very important for us to remember is how missional discipleship is possible in the first place.

Verse four says, remain in me and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself. It must remain in the vine. Remain in me. No branch can bear fruit of itself.

The main purpose of the allegory of the vine is to stress the dependence of Jesus' disciples to be with him. To be grafted into him, to be rooted into him, to have a dependence on him. Bearing fruit, in other words, growing the kingdom numerically through other disciples is only possible when his disciples are grafted into the vine, are with Jesus. No random or Rambo evangelists.

No solo pastors. No people wanting to start their own thing is going to work. That's not going to bear fruit. We must remain engrafted in Jesus. Your charisma can only take you that far.

Your eloquence in speaking can only take you that far. Your understanding of theology can only take you that far. How disciples make disciples is being in Jesus. That's how it's possible in the first place. The second thing we see is how to be effective at doing mission.

In verse five, we see Jesus saying, I am the vine, you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit. So the first thing is we must remain in Jesus to be disciple makers. The second thing is how are we going to be effective disciple makers? How are we going to bear much fruit again by being in the vine?

Branches bear fruit when they are in the vine. If anyone does not produce fruit by not remaining in Jesus, he says those branches are cut down and thrown into the fire. As a scary thought, is it possible to be a disciple without drawing people to God? Is it possible to be a disciple of Jesus Christ without drawing people to him? The scary thing is Jesus says, it's not.

If we are true disciples of Jesus, engrafted into him, it's in our nature to draw people towards God. Now, it's got nothing to do with numbers. It's got nothing to do with, listen, I got 50 this year or got a 100 or whatever. It's about the outwardness of our life. It's about the transparency of our faith.

But Jesus says, if you are a disciple, if you are grafted into that vine, you are going to bear fruit. And then the third thing, the last thing we see is how we can be effective, how effective disciples, or sorry, what the end result of effective discipleship is in verse eight. What is the purpose? This, Jesus says, is to my father's glory that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.

You can see the circular nature of this pattern. Ultimately, the purpose of discipleship is to bring glory to God because he deserves it. But it happens by bearing much fruit. We bring glory to God by bearing much fruit. Bearing much fruit means showing that you're my disciples.

So we bear fruit to give glory to God and we show that we are disciples of Jesus. And this pattern just continues. Bearing much fruit means glorifying the gardener, means we are disciples of Jesus. Being disciples of Jesus means we will bear much fruit, give glory to God. And so the cycle continues.

The allegory of the vine and the branches Jesus used is a powerful image of what is expected for the church, of the church. A church full of disciples. On the one hand, it shows us the reality that a healthy church is a growing church.

A healthy church is a growing church numerically as well. A church on mission with Christ is a church that gives glory to God. This is the image that challenges us on the one hand. It challenges us on the one hand. But on the other hand, it gives us the great comfort that we are never alone in this process.

That we are never dependent upon how guilty we feel about this, or how inadequate we feel about this. It is not dependent on our feelings. It is dependent on the lifeblood of that vine, of the energy in that vine, of the capability of that vine. We will not bear the type of fruit that the vine doesn't want us to bear. Sure, we can become less fruitful, but with pruning and cleansing, we will become more fruitful again.

Hearing the gospel, hearing coming to church, reflecting on God's word, remind us of the great truth of God's grace and his favour and his love. And it will grow us and it will challenge us. It will comfort us. It will convict us. In that moment, it will create new buds of life branching out from us.

In that moment where we reflect on God's word, it will trim away the dead leaves of pride, of self righteousness. It will slice out the growths. It will pick off the bugs of complacency, of self interest. It will create in us an urgency to bear much fruit. Whether you believe you have the gift of evangelism or mission, you will at least want to be involved somehow in the process of growing God's kingdom here on earth.

The great message is this. Just like we heard in John 12 last week, wherever we are busy serving Jesus, there we will find him. Jesus said, whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, they will be also. Bearing fruit means we are connected to the vine forever. We are grafted in him.

Being connected to the vine means we bear fruit. Let's entrust ourselves to God, the great gardener. The one who cares about each single branch, lifts it up out of the dirt, out of the mud, picks off the bugs. Let's entrust ourselves to God, the pruner, to be cleansed by the good news of Jesus, so that we can be fruitful and bear beautiful, delicious wine grapes to the glory of the gardener and of the good vine.