Tag Archives: faithfulness

Staying on the Vine

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“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.”
(John 15:5)

I have a knee jerk reaction whenever I hear someone try to succinctly state what the Christian life is all about.  Because we are talking about life, any description cannot be succinct.  Any attempt to summarize the Christian faith and life will inevitably leave something out.  Given the nature of this brief, hastily written, belated midweek message, I know I will omit a thing or two as well, that’s why I keep writing week after week.

Still, in preparation for my sermon this week on Matthew 21:18-22, the story of Jesus cursing the barren fig tree, my mind has been racing around the idea of how the Christian life is about being fruitful.  The fig tree represented Israel.  The tree’s show of fullness and health only masked it’s emptiness; there was no fruit to be found.  Israel’s pomp and hyper-religious production only masked it’s emptiness; they failed to recognize their King, they had turned a house of prayer into a marketplace and den of thieves.  What had been meant to be a light for the world had become a Sun-Tan salon for the spiritually superior, with the ensuing cancer eating away at the soul of the nation.

Those who are called God’s people are meant to be fruitful; to be a blessing to the nations, to be the light of world, the salt of the earth.  This was Israel’s calling, and the fig tree stood as a symbol, a parable, of the curse that would come because of their fruitlessness.

The message serves as a warning to the Church today.  Are we fruitful?  Is the evidence of God’s Spirit working among us showing forth in a growing love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control – showing in the fellowship of the congregation and in the individual lives of its members?

This isn’t a call to work harder at being a better Christian.  The Pharisees and Priests in Israel, the “religiously serious” had a pretty good handle on how to work harder at doing right by God – and Jesus called them whitewashed tombs.

No, the answer to fruitfulness in the Christian life is not doing more stuff.  And here’s where I might narrow the focus a bit:

The purpose of the Christian life is not in the doing, it is in the being.  Christ did not come so that we could be better people, so that we could have the encouragement to try harder, or so that we could have a better example of how to live.

No.  Christ came to make us a new creation, to cover our brokenness with his perfection, so that our lives would become lives of thanksgiving and praise to God for such a gift of salvation.  The fruitfulness that Christ is looking for in the life of His church, in the lives of His disciples, is not the product of harder effort, but of true fellowship with him.

This is what Jesus is getting at in our reading from John.   We are branches grafted into the vine.  Our strength, our fruitfulness, does not come from the branch, from ourselves, but from the vine which is our source of life.  When we are connected, fellowshipping, in union with Christ, our lives will bear the natural consequence of that union: fruitfulness.  When we are absent from Christ, when we fail to listen and obey His word, when prayer and fellowship with Christ is forsaken, then we will cease to bear fruit.

Fruitfulness is the natural consequence of faithfulness to Christ.

We have some friends who like to burn scented candles in their homes.  When you go to visit, the aroma of their candles permeate and saturate your being.  When you leave, you carry that aroma with you.

So it is with Christ.  The beautiful aroma of sweet fellowship with Christ permeate and saturates your life, until everything you do is an overflowing of that fellowship, and comes forth like fruit from the vine.

May your fellowship with Christ be seen in the fruitfulness of your life.

SDG

Nevertheless…

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“Nevertheless, the high places were not taken away.
The people still sacrificed and made offerings on the high places.”
(2 Kings 15:4)

My Bible reading plan (I am using M’Cheyne’s plan, which has you read all of the OT once and the NT and Psalms twice over the course of one year) has me reading through the book of 2 Kings right now.  I am always fascinated by the records of the kings, and there is always something new to discover there.  Be it the succession of notoriously bad kings in the Northern kingdom of Israel, who continually led their people astray by requiring they worship the golden calves at Bethel, or the turmoil of inconsistent leadership in the Southern kingdom of Judah, the stories of the kings hold so much wisdom and truth for us today.  The only thing that each king had in common with the kings that went before: they all died and someone else reigned in their place.

One of the things that caught my attention in this reading of the kings was the heritage that was left from one king to the next.  With every king from the north we are told that “So-and-so did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, as his fathers had done…”  Sometimes the indictment is even worse, as with Ahab, of whom it is said, “as if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, he took for his wife Jezebel the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and went and served Baal and worshiped him.  He erected an altar for Baal in the house of Ball, which he built in Samaria.  And Ahab made an Asherah.  Ahab did more to provoke the Lord, the God of Israel, to anger than all the kings of Israel who were before him” (1 Kings 16:31-33).  No matter how strong the economy might have been under the reign of the king, no matter the what his public opinion poll might have said, because the kings of Israel continued in the sin of Jeroboam – worshiping the golden calves – the legacy they left to the next generation was one of sin and corruption.

But that’s not to say that the southern kings did a whole lot better.  True, a majority of the southern kings, we are told, “did what was right in the eyes of the Lord” (2 Kings 14:3).  Some kings made foolish allegiances with surrounding nations, leading the people of Judah astray and into oppression.  But the kings of the south had a heritage of worship in the Temple of the Lord and they ushered in periods of religious and political reform according to the word of God.

And yet…

With just about every king of Judah, even though we read that they did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, there always seems to be a caveat.  We keep coming back to the word “Nevertheless.”  Nevertheless, the high places were not taken away…  While the national religion was still practiced in the Jerusalem Temple, the people still had their own private altars, and the faith of the nation was not kept pure.  The legacy of the southern kings was one of obedience and walking with the Lord, yet not in a wholehearted way.

And do you know what happened to both the northern and southern kingdoms?  They were both destroyed, carried away by conquering kingdoms, and the people were scattered.  The legacy of the kings, while greatly different, each led to the same end.

So here’s something to think about:  What legacy are you leaving the next generation?  Have you lived a life of wholehearted faithfulness to the Lord, or are there things in your life that you know don’t belong, but you lack the strength to remove them.  What are the high places that need to come down, so that your worship of God may be pure, and your heart undivided before the Lord.  What are the pressures and powers of this world to which you still bow down, when there is only one name in heaven and on earth for which our heads should bow?

When your life is gone and your story is told, will there be a “nevertheless”?  He was a really nice guy, but…

My hope and prayer is that the stories of the kings, if nothing else, will remind us of our need to cast out the idols that this world offers, and to cling wholeheartedly to our savior Jesus Christ!

Now that’s a legacy worth leaving.

SDG