All right, would you open your
Bibles to the 15th chapter of John, John chapter 15. Let's read the first eight verses. 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. 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."
Now, this story is a mixture of direct instruction and illustration
of that instruction. Of course, we're talking about
only eight verses. but it's talking about a very
important aspect of the life of faith, of the life of a sinner
saved by the grace of God in this world. Now, John said at
the end of his, or near the end of his gospel here, that our
Lord did many other wonderful works. And while John didn't
write it, add to it, and said many other wonderful words. And then he went on to say, which
if all of them were written down, well not even the whole world
could contain all the books. And so when we read something
like these first eight verses, even if a translation like ours
puts quotation marks around it, this is a summary of something
the Lord said. It's not the entirety of the
lesson given at that moment. But it is what the Holy Spirit
was considered sufficient to be written down so that you and
I, some 2,000 years later, could open it up and understand what
was meant and then expand it. Now, I'm old enough to remember
when instant food became, you know, it was getting popular.
That was kind of a post-World War II thing. And, you know,
the just add water type of food. And sometimes it would be just
a collection of spices and stuff. They knew you'd have the flour
on hand or whatever, you know, made up the bulk of the meal.
And that's kind of what many of these accounts of the Lord's
works and the summaries of his instructions. It is the instant
version. In other words, it gives you
what you would never come up with on your own. And yet, having been instructed
somewhat, we have on hand the things that need to be put in
here in order to make, shall we say, a full meal out of it.
Now, to understand some of the Lord's exhortations,
such as when he says, remain in me and I will remain in you,
you can't understand them apart from the symbol he used to illustrate. And that symbol is a vine and
its branches. And he says at the beginning,
and I like it, the Lord said, okay, here's the illustration
I'm going to use. I'm the vine, you're the branches. And everything
he says after that, if we are going to understand it, we need
to keep that image in our mind. He's the vine. He's the part
connected to the ground. He's the part that can draw what
is necessary from the ground in order to grow and supply the
whole plant. And our ability to survive, our
ability to live and bear fruit, exists only because we are branches
connected to the vine. So I am the vine. I'm the true
vine. My father is the gardener. He
is the one that goes into his vineyard. And it says in verse
two, 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.
Now, my wife is the gardener in our family. My entire contribution
to that effort is to do some of the rototilling, you know,
and occasionally I go out and pull weeds, and if she catches me in the right
mood, I'll help her do some of the harvest. But the only part
of it in which I am actively and passionately involved is
the eating part of it. So it's not like I can draw from
a wealth of experience here, but I do know some things. It
works for tomatoes. I knew that because my dad liked
to grow tomatoes, and he told me some things about it. But
the vine does not bear fruit. The branches do. And if you want your tomato plant,
and I suppose it works just as well, This is probably a grapevine
he's speaking of. You go out and he says, and you've
got to break off what he called the suckers. And essentially
he said this, one branch off of the vine. Any branch comes off of
that branch, get rid of it. Because all it's going to do
is require energy from the plant that this branch could use to
make fruit. And then there's other little
places that little branches will come off the tomato plant and
you get rid of them because they aren't going to bear fruit. They're
just going to take up some of the energy from the vine. And so it says, my father is
the gardener. He's the one that understands
the plant, the whole plant. He's the one that knows what's
needed He's the one that knows what branches are dead and which
ones are alive. He knows which ones will bear
fruit and which ones won't. And so he said, he cuts off every
branch in me that bears no fruit. Now, why would a branch bear
no fruit? Maybe a bug got to it. But for some reason it's dead. It's still hanging on to the
vine. It's still attached. But there is no living union
between that branch and the vine. This is your religious person. They're a part of the Lord's
church. Maybe I shouldn't say it that way. They're a part of
the visible church. Maybe they were born in a church. They grew
up in a church. They learned all the right answers.
They learned the doctrine. They know how to spit it back
out. They go to church, they act the way they were taught
to act, they say the things they were taught to say. But like
a trained animal, even though you can give them commands and
they follow, they really don't understand, they don't perceive,
they don't know the sense of what's being taught. You can
teach a parrot to say words, he doesn't have a clue what he's
saying. You can teach a dog, they'll
recognize certain words and they don't know what the word means,
they just know what they're supposed to do when they hear that word.
And that's the way religious people are. By that I mean merely
religious people. Fetch. You know, sound like a paraphrase,
free and sovereign grace, you know. They can say it, but there's
no life in them. They bear no fruit. All they are is a burden to the
vine. And then there are those that
are like the suckers my father would speak of. They're branches,
but they're never going to bear fruit because it's not in them
to bear fruit. All they do is suck up the energy.
And there are people that join themselves to the church, and
they may even look more alive than the trained animal type
of professing Christian. But they do not produce anything.
Now this fruit, we'll get to later, maybe. That's not really
the important issue of this thing. The Lord knows what the fruit
is. The Father knows what the fruit is. And he knows whether
a branch is bearing it or not. And so those little suckers that
come out on plants, and never would there be a tomato or a
cluster of grapes on it. The Father knows. There are people that are attached
to Christ only in the sense they see some things in Him or from
Him that they want. And there's a lot of preachers
willing to feed them that. If you trust God, all your financial
worries go away. You will be blessed, because
God wants you to be rich. Now, they rarely say it so boldly
as that, or that's what it comes down to. They go to church, and
they participate in all that's going on, but their real interest
is that, you know, this church advertises itself, you know,
we're going to do a series on the family. Maybe they got some
family problems, and they want to figure out how to solve them.
Well, that's some serious stuff, isn't it? Family is important.
Raising kids isn't easy. And the hardest part of it is
most of the time you really don't know what to do. You're giving
it your best guess and hoping it works. But here's a church
that says, oh, the Bible gives us instructions on raising children.
If you do this, your children will grow up to be good people,
probably Christians. And so they will flock to the
church, and they are part of the church, and it looks like
they're connected to the vine, but all that they are there for
is because their children are giving them problems, and they
want to remedy that. Or they're sick. You know, one way that you can
at least partially perceive whether or not someone is truly interested
in the Lord Jesus Christ. Find out what it is they want
from him. Our Lord fed 5,000. 5,000 men plus their wives and children.
That's a lot of people. Miraculously, he fed them five
loaves and two fishes. And then he got on a boat and
went across, I guess it was the Sea of Galilee. Got to the other
side. When the people noticed he was
gone, they spent all night walking around the Sea of Galilee. That
was no short walk. They wanted to get to him. You
know what he said to them? You followed me because you got
your bellies full of the loaves and fishes. That's not what I'm
here for. And after he went on to tell
them why he was there, And what they ought to be seeking from
him, it says, and many of his disciples no longer followed
him. Suckers. They don't bear fruit. They're following Christ, or
so they think they are, because of the fleshly and worldly things
they hope to gain by it. Now, there's nothing wrong with
wanting food. And we do pray to our God, give
us this day our daily bread. Nothing wrong with wanting some
wisdom on how to raise children. But there is no magical formula
to that. Nothing wrong with praying and asking God, Lord, help me
with my child. Help me with my children. Lord,
show them mercy. Give them grace. You're going
on a wrong path, and I really don't know what to do about it.
I don't think I can do anything about it, but that's all well
and good for the one who has come to Christ for the thing
he can't get anywhere else. And that is his salvation. If you do not perceive yourself
as a sinner in desperate need of a savior, Christ has nothing
else for you. He didn't come to fill your belly. He didn't come to straighten
out your household. He didn't come to make you, as
they say, healthy, wealthy, and wise by the world's standards. He came to save His people from
their sin. And until that issue is taken
care of, until you enter into union with Him on that issue,
any other attempt to be united to him, any other issue you seek
to resolve with him just connects you to him as a sucker. And I'm
not using sucker here in the way of somebody who's been fooled,
though probably you have been. But I'm just talking like those
little branches that they grow on, they never bear fruit because
they are not the fruit-bearing type of branch. And it says,
he cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit." And I've
seen that happen. People that united themselves
to the church, claimed to believe the gospel, maybe were baptized
as well, followed for a long time with believers, and then
something comes up, and suddenly they're not connected
to the branch anymore. And you say, what happened? Well, what
may have happened is the father knew what they were and he pruned
them, that they not be a needless burden to the vine or to the
other branches. Sometimes he may prune them just
to leave them to dry and be burned up. Sometimes he may prune them
so that they will come to the realization they're really not
connected to Christ, and they will seek him in the proper way
later on, and be united to him the way they should have been
at the first. You know, we see the Lord's works,
but we don't know the Lord's purposes in any individual case. That's why we never give up hope
for anybody. Are they drawing breath? There's
hope. Oh yeah, but you know, they professed
the gospel one time and now they don't. I know a guy that preaches
the gospel, preaches it faithfully, left the church twice. One time
for 12 or more years, just disappeared. Acted like he wasn't a believer,
anything like that. We leave those matters up to
the Father, to the gardener. He knows what's going on. What
do we do? We remain. Christ. Now he goes on here in verse
2, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that
it will be even more fruitful. So here comes a branch off the
vine, and I can't help but think of it in terms of tomatoes because
we never grew grapes, but you know there is a wisdom in going
out there and as my dad said once it branches off of the vine,
don't let any branches branch off of that branch. Why? So that
everything that comes through the vine and into that branch
goes out there to the end where the fruit is. And my dad didn't
put a whole lot of effort into his tomato plants. He'd go out
there, dig a hole in the spring, and put them in there, water
them once in a while. And he figured that was enough.
Well, and then prune them like this. And they would produce
great big tomatoes. My dad said, he likes those tomatoes.
You can take a slice and cover your whole hamburger with it.
That's what he was looking for. And he'd get it. He'd see to it that the vine
was in the kind of dirt that it needed to be in. See to it
that it had water. He would pinch off the needless
branches coming off the vine. And he would pinch off those
branches coming off of a branch, and they were never going to
bear fruit. They're just going to waste the plant's energy. And he got
some good tomatoes out of that. And that's what the father does. Now, verse 3, you are already
clean. Now, that's misleading. The word that's translated prunes, not the prunes you eat, the action
of pruning a plant. And this word clean, same word. He says, you are already pruned because of the word I have spoken
to you. Okay, then what's he pruning
off the branches? What is it that comes off of
these branches that burdens them down and prevents them from bearing
as much fruit as they might otherwise. Well, all the old traditions
and religion we had beforehand, and all of our, you know, this
love of the world that keeps us distracted. Now, this is not something that
happens all at once. And one reason it doesn't happen
all at once is you can go out one day and you can clean off
every one of those branches coming off of other branches. And you
go out there the next day and here's some more. See, that's
the way we are. We are a branch that has a divided
interest. Yeah, we know we're supposed
to produce some tomatoes. Let's put a branch out over here and
a branch out over here. Here's pleasure. Here's riches.
Here's worldly influence. Sometimes the Lord will let that
branch grow a while, that side branch, but he'll eventually
get rid of it. Why? All it was doing was burdening
the fruit bearing branch. All it was doing was taking away.
It wasn't giving anything back. I was on Facebook for 10 years
before I finally for the most part, shut it down. If I could
have back all the hours I spent on Facebook trying to fix the
world, I'd add a year to my life anyway,
I'm sure. Lord pruned it off. And I mean, I would go on there
thinking, well, there's nothing wrong with this. And truly, there
was nothing immoral about what I was doing. It was just a total
waste of time. It wasn't accomplishing anything.
It bore no fruit for the kingdom of God or any benefit to me.
And if I was going to get rid of that. Riches. Riches can be a blessing,
but more often they're a curse. Have you ever noticed that you
don't worry about your money until you have enough of it? then you
get worried you'll lose it. At least it's that way with me.
When I don't think I can pay my bills, I don't worry about
it so much as when I, you know, came to the point that, yeah,
I am making enough money, I can keep my bills up. And that's
where I think, oh, man, but what if this? What if that? When you're
in the midst of one of those what ifs, you don't worry about
it so much. And if we ever allow our pursuit
of riches to become a burden to the fruit-bearing
aspect of our being, the Father is going to prune it off. Why? Because He loves the branch. One of the greatest blessings
that some Christians have gone through was the loss of everything. Because things are so distracting. Take up so much of our energy
trying to get them and then trying to preserve them and then finding
time to use them. And we have to build a building,
you know, another addition to put them in. I leave, you know, I was in Africa
and in India, you know, and I saw how they left. I'm almost ashamed
to show them pictures of where I live. Now, I'm not ashamed
as an American, and I understand if God, he's been pleased to
let me have it. But we Americans have no right
to complain, none of us. We have so much, and yet I find
that we Americans are less satisfied than many people in the world
who have barely anything. Because no matter how much we
get, we always want more. And one of the things I've noticed
in the last, well, probably in the 30 years, 35 years since
I've been here, but when my parents bought the house that they lived
the rest of their lives in, you know, that was this typical middle
class house in a subdivision. It was nice. I thought it was
absolutely wonderful. Single garage. To my knowledge, there
never was a car in it. Before long, they built part
of it into a room for my granddad to come live in for a while.
Single garage. Well, by the time I was out of
the house and we started building, most people wanted a double garage
because people had two cars and they needed to get both of them
in there. And then here about 15 years ago, I guess it was,
maybe 20, I started noticing these houses, you know, and they'd
have this double garage and then next to it, usually set back
a little bit, a third one. Why do you need a third car?
Because I've rarely ever seen three cars in them. It's the
toys. Now, I'm not saying it's wrong.
I'm just saying, recognize. Recognize that we as Americans
are very consumer-oriented. And that can become a big distraction
from the things of God if we are not very careful. If God's
pleased to let you have it and you can enjoy it without it being
an interference, fine. But be careful, because it's
in us. Well, I got this. Ooh, there's
that, and that, and that. But I don't have enough room
for all them. Better call the builders, build
some more room to put in the stuff that I'm buying. And if that ever becomes a hindrance
to our pursuit of Christ, the Father's going to come and be
gone. But he says you've been pruned,
and you'll need to be pruned again, but it's the Word that
does that pruning. What was the Word he gave them?
The Word concerning who he is and what he would do. that he is the son of God, the
perfect man, and the substitute to suffer in the place of his
people to save them from their sins. He said, now that word
has cleansed you, has pruned you. How? Have you noticed the
power of the gospel? to relieve you of the burden
of useless human religious traditions. And not all at once. Well, some
people, you know, God doesn't work with his people at the same
speed. He'll save them. He'll perform the new birth on
them. They got spiritual life. They look to Christ. They're
saved. But some people, it just seems like all at once. They
understand almost the fullness of it. And immediately, the grave
clothes are off. And some of us, and I think this
is more often the case, we're like Lazarus, we come out of
the tomb wrapped in grave clothes, and the Lord said to the disciples,
you know, unwrapping, and it will take the rest of our lives
as little bit by bit gets pulled off. But it's the gospel that
does it. Early on here, people would come
and listen to us. I already knew that you have
to be very cautious about answering people's questions because they
generally speaking ask the wrong questions. You ever noticed our
Lord would do that? They'd ask a question and he'd
give an answer that didn't seem to have anything to do with what
they just asked him. And the reason was what they
just asked him wasn't worth asking. And one of the things that was
known rather quickly about us is that we were not Sabbath keepers.
We didn't believe that there was a Sabbath day in the Old
Covenant. In fact, what our brother read
from Hebrews 4 is our Sabbath, Christ is our Sabbath. It says
that the seventh day was not the rest. And the promised land
was not the rest, otherwise Joshua would have given them rest, but
they didn't have rest. And God said of them, they'll never enter
my rest. And yet they were observing the Sabbath day as they went
across there, but they never entered the land. But it says,
therefore, it remains essentially another Sabbath rest
to the people of God. And what is that? That's rest
in Christ. And it's a rest that comes not
merely because it's the right time on the calendar. It's a
rest we enter because Christ has completed the work. We rest. But boy, it can take us a long
time to learn to do that. And maybe we never fully comprehend
that in our lives. But the Father, he prunes. He prunes. And little by little, those useless, fruitless branches
drop off. Remain in me, and I will remain
in you. This word, our translation says
remain. It can mean remain, stay, dwell,
live. I live in a house over there.
I dwell in a house over there. I remain there. And he says, and I will remain
in you. Now actually, if you just translated it very strictly
from the Greek, it would say, remain in me and I in you. But
that word remain, the verb, is in what they call the imperative
mood. It means it's a command. Well,
you don't command yourself. So when he says, remain in me
and I in you, What he meant was, what our translations say, you
remain in me and I will remain in you. Now, what does that mean? I remember
listening to a fellow first year of Bible school, and he went
on and on, preached several nights on us being in Christ and Christ
being in us, and he made something mysterious and spiritual out
of it. In other words, it was an experience
for us to look for. We could sense his presence in
us, that kind of thing. Go back to the illustration.
Vine branches. Remain in me. Stay connected
to me. Remain in me. And I will remain
in you. So you look at that branch coming
off the vine. What does he say next? No branch
can bear fruit by itself, it must remain in the vine. What good is a branch that's
not connected to the vine? It's good for nothing. Because
the branch has nothing of its own. Everything it gets, it gets
from the vine. You cut it off from the vine,
it withers up, and get thrown in the burn pile
and it's gone. But if it is connected in a living
union to the vine, everything in the vine goes into the branch
and provides it with everything it needs. That's what he means by remain
in me. As a branch, stay connected to
me. I will be in you. All that I
am as the true vine will flow into you and provide you with
everything you need for life and for bearing fruit. It's not some kind of spooky
otherworldly thing, it's a very simple thing. Just as a branch must stay attached
to the vine in order to live and bear fruit, so must we stay
attached to Christ. You say, well, don't we believe,
you know, once saved, always saved? Yes, we believe that.
In fact, we believe somewhat of a different form of it, which
among theologians is called the perseverance of the saints. It's
not just that once you make a decision for Jesus, there's no way to
get out of it. What we mean is, is that those who truly have
that faith, which is given by God, they never lose that faith. That faith is a living thing
and it is united to Christ and will always be fed by Christ. And we know that because the
scriptures teach that. But sometimes the scriptures
address us simply as those who are going through life, going
through all the phases of time and the experiences of life.
And it doesn't address us as the, you know, from God's eternal
view that sees the whole thing. And I say, you know, I tell you,
I believe Christ. I believe the gospel of his grace.
I've trusted Christ for so many years. I'm saying all that. You don't know it, do you? And in some sense, I don't know
it. You say, wait a minute, wouldn't
you know if you have true faith? Well, people with false faith think
they have true faith. Do you know what the only proof
of saving faith is, or the best proof of this? You die with it. That's how you know that the
faith you had was the faith that is the gift of God. You die with
it. It says in Hebrews 11, by faith this person did this, by
faith this person did that, this, that, and the other. All this
happened. These all died in faith. You say, I want a faith I can
live by. You need a faith you can die with and die by. That's
the faith you need. And so he says, remain in me.
He said, don't go off on your own. You say you're attached
to me. You believe that you have put your confidence in me. You
make sure that's what the truth is, and don't you ever change
that. Now, again, if you're one of the chosen, one of the redeemed,
one of the called, you will. But the scriptures do not always
address us from that the aspect of a salvation fully completed
in Christ. It addresses us as those who
are going through the passages of time. And what we say now, what we
claim now, means nothing if later on we cut ourselves off from the
vine. They say, can we? Again, we're
back to theoretical theology. Let's just live in the present
moment for a minute. You say you believe. And you
know, if you tell me you believe, I'm going to take your word for
it. Because I've got nothing else to go on. And the fact that you
all hung around for a long time to listen to this, I assume you
must believe what I'm saying or you wouldn't stay here. But there's some life left to
go. What will you believe next week, next year, 10 years from
now? Well, and we'll wrap it up here.
Let me find the particular verse
I wanted to. I remember it in the King James,
and it must be they changed it enough that, in this more modern
translation, that I don't recognize it. Maybe it's that last line
of verse 4, neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. King James says it a little bit
more tersely and powerfully, I think he said, the Lord told
him, apart from me you can do nothing. How much can you do apart from
nothing? Not a little bit, not 20%, nothing. Of the things pertaining
to spiritual life and eternal life, what can you do apart from
him? Absolutely nothing. And what
does he mean by apart? You aren't connected to the vine.
And why is it you can do nothing if you're not connected to the
vine? Because everything you need in order to do something
is in the vine and comes to only those branches that are connected
to it. After all, if some vine on a tomato plant says, I'd like
to be a vine. I've got some gifts. Sure, I don't have any fruit
yet, but I'm a bigger branch than the guy up, that branch
up above me. So I just think I'll go on my own. I can do this. And they disconnect themselves
from the vine. Try to be a vine, and what happens? They die and wither up. And somebody picks them up and
throws them in a pile and sets a match to it. All the rest that comes from
the realization that apart from Him, we can do nothing. But attached to Him, we can do
everything that needs to be done. Not necessarily everything we
want to do, but everything that needs to be done. I often worry about preparing
messages. Is it going to be good? Are they
going to like it? All that kind of stuff. You know, it doesn't matter,
really, whether you like it. I mean, that's not the issue.
And now, this is what I always got to come back to, but I got
to wrestle to get back to this. Do it as a branch. Preach as
a branch connected to the vine. The message will handle itself. And time and again the Lord has
proved that to me because I've come up here and, you know, it
was one of those days I was feeling pretty good and like I had a
handle on it and I preached a message that I thought was a grand slam
home run and nobody said a thing. Maybe you went away thinking,
well, I'll give him another shot at it next week, you know, before
I decide what to do. And then I preached messages
that I thought I hope, I hope they don't have a meeting and
fire me. There was nothing in that. I struggled from beginning
to end. And lo and behold, several would
say, what a tremendous blessing they received. Why? Well, because it was a message
preached in the grace of God, not preached in the wisdom of
Joe. Remain in me, says the Lord.
Well, then that's all we need to do. Stay attached. Don't look for anything that
doesn't come through that vine. And if you do, you will bear
fruit. What's a fruit? Let the vine figure that out. You just stay attached. You will
bear the fruit you were sent to bear. Is that good enough? Oh, but I want to preach. Maybe
that's not the fruit you were sent to bear. But if you'll just stay attached
to the vine, you will bear much fruit to the glory of the Father. And you'll probably go away from
this world thinking, I didn't accomplish a thing. And you will
be right. You didn't. But the vine did. And you'll appear in the presence
of God without fault, full of joy. And the Lord will say, here's
what I did through you. Really? Yeah. How'd you do that? Well, you were connected to the
vine. And you'll rejoice, not in what
you accomplished, but what God accomplished through you. Heavenly
Father, bless this message. Thank you so much that you've
made things so simple for us. May we forever stay united to
Christ and receive from him all we need for life and godliness.
In the name of Christ, we pray it. Amen. I will observe the
Lord's Table, it's open to anyone who professes to be a believer
in the Lord Jesus Christ, for it is the Lord's Table.