Good morning, brothers and sisters.
I have a couple of Scriptures I’d like to turn to before we begin.
Let’s look at Isaiah 5, starting with verse 1:
Now let me sing to my Well-beloved
A song of my Beloved regarding His vineyard:
My Well-beloved has a vineyard
On a very fruitful hill.
He dug it up and cleared out its stones,
And planted it with the choicest vine.
He built a tower in its midst,
And also made a winepress in it;
So He expected it to bring forth good grapes,
But it brought forth wild grapes.
Then in Jeremiah 2:21:
Yet I had planted you a noble vine,
A seed of highest quality.
How then have you turned before Me
Into the degenerate plant of an alien vine?
Going back to Isaiah, in Isaiah 53:1–2:
Who has believed our report?
And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant,
And as a root out of dry ground.
Then in John 15:1, Jesus says:
I am the true vine.
I would also like to read a verse from number 208 in the hymnal, a song by John Wesley or Charles Wesley:
Jesus, Thine all-victorious love,
Shed in my soul abroad;
Then shall my heart no longer rove,
Rooted and fixed in God,
Rooted and fixed in God.
Father, we want to thank You this morning for letting us remember the love that You have for us in Jesus Christ. Thank You, Lord, for reminding us afresh of that love and how great it is.
And Lord, we ask that today, as we come to Your Word, we could see how that is even in this Scripture we are reading today. We see the love of God for us in giving us, Lord, our Savior, Jesus Christ.
We ask that You, by Your Holy Spirit, would open the Word to us and show us Jesus Christ, that we might, Lord, be captured by Him and all that He is for us, and that we might be rooted in Him and fixed in Him forever. Open the Word to us, we pray, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
This morning, as we are continuing in the Gospel of John, we are in John 15. Again, I am not doing a verse-by-verse exposition of this. I am just sharing the things that the Lord has touched me with in reading these Scriptures.
There is so much in the Gospel of John that people write about, and you can find wonderful things. I suggest you read some of those, especially from John 15. You should read The True Vine or Abide in Christ by Andrew Murray. They have a lot to do with this chapter itself.
This morning, I would like to touch on this one point: Christ as the vine, the true vine. Every time I have read this chapter before, I never think of Jesus being the true vine. I always think of the verses, “Abide in Me,” and, “I in you.” But I have never really considered Christ as being the vine.
Why did He even tell us this? Why did He make this allegory? Why did He say these things about Himself to His disciples?
Before we talk about this, let us read a few verses from John 15.
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 bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit.
You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you.
Abide in Me, and I in you.
As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine,
Neither can you, unless you abide in Me.
I am the vine, you are the branches.
He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit;
For without Me you can do nothing.
If anyone does not abide in Me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered;
And they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they are burned.
If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you,
You will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you.
By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit;
So you will be My disciples.
As the Father loved Me, I also have 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 remain in you,
And that your joy may be full.
And just one more verse, John 15:16:
You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask the Father in My name He may give you.
There are a lot of things said here. As I said, I usually go right to, “Abide in Me, and I in you,” and, “My command is to love one another.” But the thing that really arrested me this time was this idea of the vine. What does that mean?
Israel, nationally, started to look at itself as the vine. I think G. Campbell Morgan said it was after the time of the Maccabees that they started looking at themselves as the vine.
But what is the vine? What does it represent? What is it supposed to be, so that we get this picture of what Christ is saying about Himself when He says, “I am the true vine”?
In thinking about it, the vine is God’s purpose for man. This is what man was supposed to be when God created him. He was to be rooted in God. In other words, he was supposed to draw his life from who God is, in his relationship with God. That is where he was supposed to draw all his life from.
If you look at a vine and look at a root, where does the vine get its nourishment? Where does it get its sustenance? It is from the roots, the root system. Man originally was supposed to be rooted in God. He was never supposed to be apart from Him.
But we know that man fell. He went apart from God.
T. Austin-Sparks says this about the vine: there is only one purpose for a vine. That is to bear fruit, to give forth fruit. But the vine is to express the nature of God.
That is why God planted the vine in Isaiah and Jeremiah. He planted the vine because He wanted it to produce His nature. He wanted people to see what He was like. The vine was to express God’s purpose for His creation. It was to express what the Father expected in His creation.
When man was created, this was what man was supposed to be. Man was supposed to be that expression of God for all the rest of creation to look at and see who God was—not that man was God, but that in man they would see their Creator. Through him, they would realize the purpose for their creation.
But we fell. We came to the place of saying, “I want my way. I want to do things the way I see fit.” Man was deceived in doing it. The serpent said, “You will be like God, knowing good from evil,” and the woman saw that it was good and desired it. It was the idea of being apart from God.
We, as people, as men, really want to be that expression that God wants us to be. But being lost, we do not know how to get back that expression. So God set out to redeem a people for Himself.
That is what we are studying in Genesis, is it not? We are learning how He starts with one man, Abraham. Then He gets a family, and He gets a body—He gets a whole people. They are supposed to be that picture of who God is.
After they were redeemed from Egypt, God gave them a law. The thinking was that, by having the law, they could exhibit what they were supposed to be. The thinking was that having the law would change them.
But the problem is not with the law; it is with me. Man is faulty.
God has given us a law, and it is right and good. It tells us how we should live and how we should be. But a law cannot give life. That is what Galatians 3:21 says. If there had been a law that could give life, that is all we would need. But law cannot give life.
Law can only set parameters of behavior for us—generally, what we consider acceptable behavior. We try to stay within those parameters, but unfortunately, we find ourselves always going outside them.
The law is good, just as Paul says in Romans. But we are not. There is no fault with the law; the fault is with the people it is governing. The law shows us that we are degenerate, and that is what it is meant to do. The law was never meant to give us life, but to lead us to Christ.
The prophets showed Israel how the law had been broken over and over again. They came and said, “You are people of blood. You do this and you do that when you are not supposed to.” And so they went into captivity.
When the people came back from captivity, they were somewhat changed. We do not find them going into idolatry again as they had in the times of the kings. But something else had come in.
At the time of Christ, what did we find in Israel? We found a system. This system was supposed to bring them into the place where they would be like the nation God intended, where they would be the vine, showing forth what God wanted.
But when the Lord came, this system fixed the outside of man, not the inside of man. Man had a nice, shiny exterior. He was given a nice buff job, so to speak.
You know what a veneer is. A veneer is just a thin covering. It makes something look really good, but you take it off and see what it is really like, and it is just a piece of wood.
The Lord Jesus said, “You are like whitewashed sepulchres. On the outside you look really good, but on the inside you are dead.”
This religious system was set up because they were saying, “We want to make sure we do not break the law, because last time that got us into a lot of trouble.” So they set up a system with all these little breaks along the line. They would trip those, but not really trip the big one. This was how they would keep their righteousness.
But in trying to be righteous, they did not figure in God’s righteousness. That is what Romans 10 says:
Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they may be saved.
For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.
For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness,
Have not submitted to the righteousness of God.
In this system, we have our own righteousness. But in having our own righteousness, we have excluded God from the equation. We are not even worried about God’s righteousness; we are worried about our own righteousness.
We set up a behavior system and say, “If we have these things going for us, we are okay, and everybody should have these things going for them.” If they do not, then they are messed up, and we have to fix them according to what we think has to be done.
That is what you found when Christ was here on earth. You found people with a system of righteousness, and those who did not live up to that righteousness were looked down upon.
God says, “I have done everything for you. I have given you the oracles of God. I have given you all these things, and you have borne wild fruit.” What does wild fruit mean? It means it is not what it is supposed to be.
You have replaced what God is really looking for with something you think He is looking for. You say, “As long as I am clean on the outside, that is what God is looking for.”
So we come on Sunday mornings, or Saturdays, or Friday nights, or whatever it is, and we put on our righteous suit. We come in and go about our business, then we go home, take off our righteous suit, and be ourselves.
But God sees through those things. That is not the vine God is after. That outer life is a picture of who you are and what you think righteousness is—what you think God wants. But God is after truth in the inward parts.
He is looking on the inside, not the outside. God does not see as man sees. Remember when Samuel was going through the sons of Jesse to choose a king? He saw Eliab and thought, “This is it. Look at the guy—big, strong, muscles, everything.” But God said, “He is not the one.”
God does not look as man looks. We see what seems to be the thing, and God says, “No, it does not pass My muster. I am looking for something different. I am looking for something on the inside, not something on the outside.”
The Pharisees and scribes had a righteousness you could see. Jesus said, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees…” But if righteousness is only on the outside, and there is nothing within, then it is nothing. If righteousness begins from the inside and works its way out, that is what God is looking for.
This kind of vine brings forth wild fruit. It is not true to God’s purpose.
Then you have the Lord Jesus, who comes and says, “I am the true vine.”
Consider the context. He does not say this at the beginning or middle of His ministry. This is after the last Passover He would have, after He instituted the table that we took part in today. He said, “This is the blood of the new covenant.”
Now He is going to leave, and the disciples do not understand. “What do You mean You are going to leave? What does this mean for me? Are You just leaving us? Do I just go back to the old Judaism and follow that way?”
But Christ is saying, “No. Judaism, or Israel, is not the vine. This is a new covenant. This is a new creation.”
The vine is not a system. The vine is not a law. The vine is a new humanity. Jesus is saying, “I am this new humanity. I am the very thing that pleases God.”
If you are going to plant a vine, you look for a good seed—a pure seed. Jesus is the very seed. In Him is everything needed to please God.
He said in John 12 that unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it abides alone. He knew that within Him was the very life of this vine, and He was dying so that this life could be reproduced.
He grew up as a tender plant, as a root out of dry ground. Here is a whole sinful world, and what comes out of the midst of it? Not death. God has a vine. It came forth from heaven but was buried in the earth, and it is a new humanity.
This new humanity is what God is after. So Jesus says, “I am the true vine.”
What does “true vine” mean? Some translators say, “I am the genuine vine. I am the real vine.” I like to look at it this way: if something is true, it has been proven.
Remember when David was going out to fight Goliath and Saul said, “Why do you not wear my armor?” David said, “I cannot, because I have not proved it.” He had not found out that it was true.
Jesus says, “I am the true vine.” The life, the new humanity, is seen in Him, and it has been proved. It has been shown to be true.
The Father proved the Son. Sometimes we feel that our Lord was something like magic, almost unreal. But we have to understand that the Lord Jesus, in His manhood, was very real—touchable, seeable.
He was proved. If I can say this in a reverent way, He had His wings clipped. He humbled Himself. He laid things aside. He only did those things which the Father showed Him. He did not go off on His own.
He remained true to God’s purpose for Him. When Satan tempted Him three times, He never stepped out and acted on His own initiative. He kept within the bounds God had for Him as the new man.
Some say, “Of course He did not sin because He was God.” But He laid those things aside, brothers and sisters. He became like us—like man was supposed to be. He put Himself under the authority of God, under the authority of His Father, and He did not move outside that authority.
When Satan said, “You are hungry. Go ahead and make some bread. Here is a rock; make a loaf of bread,” He did not step out. He said:
Man shall not live by bread alone,
But by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.
He put Himself under God. When Satan said, “Let everybody know You are the Son of God. Jump off here,” He said, “I am not going to presume on God. I am not going to tempt Him.”
The whole thing was that He proved Himself all the way through. That is why, at this point where He is going to death, He can say, “I am the vine. I am the true vine. I am the new humanity. I am the humanity that God is looking for.”
The biggest difference between the true vine and the other vines we saw in Jeremiah 2 and Isaiah 5 is that the true vine knew His Father. The others did not.
When the law was given, God called all the people to come, but they said, “Moses, it is too tough for us. You go.” Right there, they gave up their chance to know the Lord.
Jesus said to the Pharisees, “You search the Scriptures and think that in them you have life, but you do not come to Me.” He also said, “Go and find what this means: ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’”
They had righteousness on the outside and thought they knew what God wanted, but they did not know the heart of God. Their righteousness and their rules had cut them off from the heart of God because they did not know Him as a Person.
But Christ, the new man, knew the Father. How many times in the Gospels do you see the word Father? Think about how often Christ called God, “Father.”
“Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father.” “Father, You have hidden these things from the wise and revealed them to babes.” “Our Father.” “Father, forgive them.” “Father, into Your hands I commend My spirit.”
Christ knew His Father. Is that not the new covenant—that they shall know Me, from the least to the greatest? It is not merely knowing about Him; it is knowing Him, as though they have touched Him and know who He is and what He is.
Christ, the new man, knows the Father. Knowing the Father, He wants to do the Father’s will.
A body You have prepared for Me;
I delight to do Your will, O God.
The new man, the new humanity, knows the Father and delights to do His will.
The life of this new man is a dependent life. He knows the Father’s authority over Him, the Father’s provision for Him, and the Father’s covering for Him. There is complete trust in the Father for His life. That is the new man. “I am the vine.”
Jesus goes on to say, “My Father is the vinedresser.” He is the One who prunes. The Father’s method of pruning is generally with the Word of God. Remember the temptations: what did the Lord use? He used the Word of God.
The Word of God is His pruning shears. We also know that the circumstances of life and the other brothers and sisters are ways the Lord keeps us in line as we are in the vine.
Finally, He says about the branches, “You are the branches.” What is a branch? It is an extension of the life of the vine. That life is so full it cannot be held in one place; it extends out.
Those of us who are born again in Christ are extensions of the life of the vine. In order to be that extension and maintain that place, we have to be in a vital union with the vine. We have to be attached.
Have you ever seen a vine that is not attached? It dries up. Have you ever seen a branch that is not attached? It becomes firewood.
To be branches and extensions of the life, we have to be attached in a vital union. What does vital mean? What are your vital signs? Heartbeat, blood pressure, breathing. If those are going, you are in good shape. If something is not working, you had better see a doctor—soon.
If we are not in a vital union, we do not have vital signs. Something is wrong. The only way for you to be an extension of this life is for you to be in union, in fellowship, sharing that life of the vine. If not, you are in a bad situation.
So Jesus says, “You have to abide.”
I am not going to give a discourse on abiding, because I only have a few minutes left. But you have Andrew Murray’s Abide in Christ and The True Vine. Read those and look at those, and they will give you a bigger view of what I am going to give you.
Abiding is not a passive thing.
We have been hurt by some of the teaching of grace because it makes it seem like we do not do anything. Yes, we are saved by grace. There is nothing we can do to save ourselves as far as the atoning work of Christ is concerned.
But for the salvation of the soul, there is something we can do: we respond to the life that has been given to us. That is what these messages about spiritual exercises have been about. They have been about the salvation of our souls.
Why is Jesus teaching about Him being the vine if all salvation is merely making sure we do not go to hell? Why would He talk about this? Why would He say, “I am the vine”?
Salvation is more than the saving of our skins, so to speak, from hellfire. It is the saving of our very souls, where the soul is ruled no longer by our self-life but by the Spirit.
Abiding is not a passive thing. It is not simply, “Oh, I will just sit here.” No. First of all, we abide in Him. What does it mean that we abide in Him? It means we find our life in Him.
In Him, we are to find rest, because He is at rest. If we are in Him, we are at rest, because He sat down. Hebrews says that when He had finished His work, the propitiation of our sins, He sat down. Therefore, we should be at rest.
His work is finished. We are reconciled. We can rest in Him because in Him we have been reconciled.
We know the Father loves Jesus. Well, if we are in Christ, the Father loves us. We can rest in the Father’s love. How many of us do not have that rest and think we have to do something? No. We are loved in Christ.
We can also rest in this: He said, “I am going to send you a Helper.” For the rest of this life we are to live, He abides in us and gives us a Helper. We do not have to live by an instruction manual.
You know what it is like trying to follow an instruction manual. It never comes out the way it is supposed to look. I tried to put together a tricycle once. It did have three wheels, and we will say that. It had handlebars, but I will not say they were all in the right place.
The thing is, we have a Helper.
He abides in us. Because we are abiding in this vital union, this life is coming into us and is in us, and it wants to live. This life has its own will, its own mind, and its own appetites, and it wants those expressed in us.
We sense the Spirit moving us this way. We sense the Spirit saying, “I am hungry for the Word. I need to do something.” We sense the Spirit saying, “Do not go there.”
Because we are abiding in that life, in that vine, that is what He is after. He wants us to abide. He says, “I am the vine. I am that new man.” That new man has come to live in you, and you are now a new creation.
You are a new creation, not after the old creation, not degenerate, not one that gives wild fruit, but one who expresses what the Father is like and expresses the Father’s purpose.
This is what God is after. This is why Jesus Christ came. Jesus Christ came not only to die; once He died, He came to live. He came to live in us and through us, to the glory of God.
That is the gospel. The gospel does not put this outside of its realm. This is the gospel: not only are our sins forgiven, but Christ lives in us.
Some of us are going to say, “Well, gee whiz, Jim, that is really good, but I cannot do it.” I know you cannot. You know why I know you cannot? Because I cannot either.
How does this get done? It gets done because He has given us a Helper.
But going back to John 15:16, He chose you. He knows your name. By that I mean He knows your very character. He knows you inside and out, and yet He chose you.
He chose you not because you have something to offer Him. “I am a great athlete. That is why God chose me.” “I am a great speaker.” “I am a great giver. I have loads of money.” No. He did not choose you for any of those reasons.
Read 1 Corinthians 1 toward the end. It says, “Look at whom He has chosen: the weak, the debased, things that are not very great.” Why does He choose those people? Because they are the ones who know they have nothing to offer Him.
They are the ones who say, “I do not know how You are going to do this, Lord, but here I am.” And the Lord says, “Good. I will put My life in you. You be a branch. That is all I want you to be. Be a branch.”
If you are a branch and you maintain that vital union, you will bear fruit. You will bear the character of the vine—the very character.
The inner part of the vine will be borne out. That is what people will see, and that is what other people will pick.
In the vine that has wild fruit, people look at those people and say, “They are hypocrites.” But those who have a vital union with the true vine carry the character of Christ. In that character is healing, reconciliation, and love.
It is not a reaction to something; it is just there. That is what the vine is. We are called into fellowship with the vine. “I am the true vine. You are the branches.”
Do not think these things are automatically going to happen, because you have to respond.
Isaac is a great picture of abiding. To abide, you have to obey. There is an action. It is an act of will. Abiding is an act of will.
When Isaac was heading out of the land, saying, “This land is not going to support me,” God stopped him on his way out and said, “Stay here, and I will be everything you need Me to be.”
Isaac did not just stay there and say, “Well, I am looking for rain.” He started to look at what he had in the land. He started to cultivate it—cultivate the relationship.
You remember when you were dating your wife, cultivating the relationship. How did you cultivate it? You were pliable. You were soft toward that person, toward that person’s will, desires, and likes.
It is the same thing for us in abiding in Christ. We become pliable to Him, because He seeks to will and to do in us. We find ourselves being pliable.
When we find ourselves being pliable, we also find that there is fruit in the land. The land supports us. The land gives to us, and we find ourselves prospering because the land is prosperous.
The One in whom we are abiding is full of life. As we are pliable and let that life have its course in us, we find out how great that life is. In doing that, we find the joy that He talks about: “That My joy may be in you.”
Brothers and sisters, He is the vine. He is the new man. He is that new humanity that is seeking to surge into us, that we may be, as Peter says in 2 Peter, partakers of the divine nature.
That is the will of God for us. He has chosen us to be those partakers.
Lord, we want to thank You for Your goodness to us in providing us a Christ like You have provided us. Thank You for the new humanity that is after Him.
Lord, we want to be partakers of Him. We want to be partakers of Him in that way, and we ask for Your help. Give us this grace, we ask in Christ’s name. Amen.