Scripture Introduction
Jesus often began particularly memorable and poignant explanations about himself and our relationship with God with the phrase, “I am….” Seven are recorded in John:
• “I am the bread of life.”
• “I am the light of the world.”
• “I am the gate.”
• “I am the good shepherd.”
• “I am the resurrection and the life.”
• “I am the way and the truth and the life.”
• And in our text this morning, “I am the true vine.”
The vine or vineyard was familiar, not only from its common place in agriculture, but because God frequently symbolizes Old Testament Israel with this image. Psalm 80 sings of God’s favor to his people: “You brought a vine out of Egypt; you drove out the nations and planted it” (Psalm 80.8). And later, when his chosen people rebelled against him, God has Jeremiah remind them of the metaphor: “Yet I planted you a choice vine, wholly of pure seed. How then have you turned degenerate and become a wild vine?” (Jeremiah 2.21).
So when Jesus refers to himself as the “true vine,” he uses an analogy which everyone understood, and he claims the promises made to Israel as her Messiah. The people of God were once identified with a particular nation; now they are spiritually united to a unique man. Thus John 15 is a favorite and often studied section of the Bible. Please follow along as I read the first 11 verses.
[Read John 15.1-11. Pray.]
Introduction
Edmund Gravely died at the controls of his small airplane while flying to Georgia from North Carolina. His wife, Janice, kept the plane aloft for two hours, but did not know how to land. As she left North Carolina airspace, an air traffic controller heard her desperate plea on the radio: “Help, help, won’t someone help me. My pilot is unconscious.” But he could not reach her because after she cried for help, she changed the channel and call out in distress again. Eventually she crashed the airplane.
I wonder if that might be an apt illustration of prayer? From my reading and investigations and conversations, I get the sense that Christians easily lose enthusiasm and faith for prayer. We too quickly change channels, rather than sustain passionate, focused, confident, kingdom-centered communication with the Father.
George Muller lived in the 1800s and is known for establishing orphanages and relying on God. But at one point in the work, all the funds were exhausted, and they were selling whatever could be spared. It was not from lack of prayer, however. During the preceding four days they had asked God specifically for help with this dire need. Then on the afternoon of September 18, 1838, a woman who had been lodging next door, came to the orphanage and gave Muller the money she had brought from London four days earlier. So during the four days spent in prayer, the money was already there.
George Muller: “That the money had been so near the Orphan-Houses for several days without being given, is a plain proof that it was from the beginning in the heart of God to help us; but because He delights in the prayers of His children, He had allowed us to pray so long; also to try our faith, and to make the answer so much the sweeter. It is indeed a precious deliverance. I burst out into loud praises and thanks the first moment I was alone, after I had received the money. I met with my fellow-labourers again this evening for prayer and praise; their hearts were not a little cheered.”
Disciples of Jesus always find their hearts cheered by answered prayer. And yet, the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches, the paralysis of worry and the frenetic confusion of busyness – circumstances often tempt us to be prayerless Christians and, therefore, joyless believers.
John 15 is about productiveness in the kingdom. Just as every true Christian finds great joy in seeing the Father answer her prayers, so the faithful believer longs for effective and useful ministry. So when Jesus, here, connects prayer and fruitfulness as twin privileges available to all who remain spiritually united to him, he provides powerful encouragement for us to persevere in prayer and in working out our salvation by faith.
1. We Are Promised Wonderful Privileges
John 15.7-8: “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.” Notice, first, please…
1.1. The Promise of Answered Prayer
“Ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” To be sure, Jesus qualifies, “whatever you wish” – and we will think about that in a moment. But lest we kill the promise with a thousand limitations, first feast your soul on the magnitude of these words! This is a fabulous, even fantastical guarantee of success in prayer! Do you believe this? I would guess that few of us do.
Could it be, not that our hopes and vision for our church are too great, but that our prayers are too infrequent? Maybe it is not too much to ask for conversions and discipling among the people who live within a mile of this building, but rather that we do not really wish it. If we are united about what we really want and need God to provide, and if we committed as a congregation to passionate supplication for those things, would God refuse? I think not.
When I pastored in Omaha, our congregation had a specific and unique vision. And we worked hard to stay on task, remaining focused on doing what fulfilled that calling. And every few weeks, when I had occasion to drive downtown, I would pass Calvary Baptist Church, with its magnificent historic building at the crossroads of one of the neediest and most accessible parts of the city. When I looked at that building, my heart was drawn to it and I would pray: “God, this is where we need to be to do what you have set before us. Why don’t you give us this building?” I’m not even sure I believed God could do it. But one day a member of their congregation called and asked if we would take over their property.
That doesn’t just happen. Two different churches have asked to use our building when are not here, and we have said “No” to both. But God answered prayer.
Andrew Murray, The Believer’s School of Prayer, 126: “I say these things to encourage you to put together all Christ’s teaching about prayer and to believe the truth that when prayer is what it should be, or rather when we are what we should be – abiding in Christ – the answer must be expected. It will bring us out from those refuges where we have comforted ourselves with unanswered prayer. It will show us the place of power to which Christ has appointed his church, and which it so little occupies. It will reveal the terrible feebleness of our spiritual life as the cause of our not praying boldly in Christ’s name. It will urge us mightily to rise to a life of full union with Christ and fullness of the Spirit as the secret of effective prayer. It will lead us on to realize our destiny: ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you…. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full’ (John 16.23-24). Prayer that is spiritually in union with Jesus is always answered.”
Closely connected to prayer is…
1.2. The Promise of Bountiful Fruit
John 15.8: “By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit….”
I think it is unfortunate that effectiveness in God’s kingdom is often limited to evangelism – making new converts. Certainly, that is part of the fruit of faithful ministry. Jesus demands that his followers labor in the harvest field, seeking to save the lost and disciple them in the faith. But maybe that harvest is more of a result of what Jesus describes in John 15.
The foundational and essential fruit of abiding in Christ is godly character. After all, “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Galatians 5.22-23). Not everyone of us, at every time in our life, has opportunity or ability for evangelism. But each of us, regardless of our situation, can display the character of Christ. Young or old, working or retired, in school or staying at home – you are promised the opportunity of glorifying God. Your habits, your temper, your words, your attitude – the simplicity of a cheerful disposition fueled by a deep and abiding faith in the sovereignty of God over every circumstance – these are ways in which the child of God evidences their discipleship.
Let us labor to abide in Christ, and to learn passionate prayer for fruitfulness, so that in our lives the Father will be glorified, and we will be proved disciples of Jesus.
2. We Are Challenged by Holy Qualifications
With such grandiose promises, we must wonder if there is any limit. The “whatever,” in “ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you,” must not be absolute, because we could ask for things that do not glorify God. God will not grant the petty prayer to make me more important than he is, because such a request would dishonor him and destroy me.
And Jesus very specifically qualifies the promise: “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish….” So our prayers are answered and our lives show the fruit of discipleship to the extent that we remain in Christ and his words remain in us. So what does that mean?
• It means that we want what God wants for us. My passion can no longer be worldly attention or selfish ambition, because that is not God’s goal for me. Now I pray according to his will rather than my own.
• It means that the desires of my heart are formed and corrected by the promises of God. I begin to realize that a job promotion (whether God gives it to me or not is irrelevant) – but career success cannot satisfy my soul. Wisdom, humility, mercy, peacemaking – these I long for in the inner man.
• It means that fruitfulness in the Kingdom fills my thoughts and hopes. I care less whether my calling makes me president or janitor, but whether I use my influence to shine forth the light of the gospel of grace which God has placed in me.
• It means that I enjoy the commands of Christ and seek his approval more than anyone else’s. The old hymn, “Beneath the cross of Jesus” illustrates this wonderfully: “I take, O cross, thy shadow for my abiding place; I ask no other sunshine than the sunshine of His face; Content to let the world go by to know no gain or loss, My sinful self my only shame, my glory all the cross.”
• It means that I deepen my conviction that I am nothing apart from Christ. I sense my weakness, and am driven to prayer. I will feel the dependence of the branch upon the vine, and I strive to yield myself wholly to Jesus. Rather than proudly offer him my good deeds in return for his blessing, I offer myself in the Spirit, to be filled with his power and life for works which honor the Father.
Here is a potentially painful truth we must each grapple with: if we are prayerless and fruitless, is it because Christ’s word is not abiding in us? Are we content with small and external forms of religious conformity, while the vital work languishes: unthought-of, ignored, feared? Are we content with little of Christ, as long as we are not criticized for too much enthusiasm?
Having Christ’s words abide in us is more than Bible reading, or even study. We may have those without real fellowship with the Father. The qualification requires that we read the Word in the presence of God and under the leading of the Holy Spirit, so that the Word becomes in us alive and active, a power from God himself.
Andrew Murray, The Believer’s School of Prayer, 130: “Is it not more and more clear to us that while we have been excusing our unanswered prayers and our impotence in prayer with an imagined submission to God’s wisdom and will, the real reason is that our own feeble life is the cause of our feeble prayers? The word of Christ – loved, lived in, abiding in us, becoming through obedience and action part of our being – makes us one with Christ and fits us spiritually for touching, for taking hold of God. Let us yield heart and life to the words of Christ, the words in which he ever gives himself, the personal living Savior.”
3. We Are Motivated by the Result Guaranteed
Whenever I consider the topic of prayer, two questions I wonder about are: “Why should I pray?” and “Why should God answer?”
“By this my Father is glorified.”
I understand Jesus to mean: God’s power and grace are magnified (shown to be wonderful and desirable), when he answers prayer, and when he produces fruit from dry branches. In both, my dependence and submission is revealed; in both, God’s provision and generosity are displayed.
I am not honored by answered prayer; I have only admitted my weakness and called on his power. Nor am I thought well of for fruitfulness in the Kingdom – true fruit comes from Christ in me: he is the vine, and the branch cannot bear fruit by itself. But when we remain spiritually alive in Jesus, and his words remain in us, then we pray according to the will of God, and we bear much fruit for his glory. And for all true disciples of Jesus, there is no greater result.
4. Conclusion
In his commentary on Zechariah 13.9, John Calvin observes the spiritual danger of success and comfort and ease: “It is therefore necessary that we should be subject, from first to last, to the scourges of God, in order that we may from the heart call on him; for our hearts are enfeebled by prosperity, so that we cannot make the effort to pray.”
When John Piper preached the same text, he titled the sermon, “Put in the Fire for the Sake of Prayer.” When God places us in the fire in 2009, let us not despair, but resolve to abide in Christ, to pray, and to bear much fruit, so that he will have all the glory, and we the joy of proving our discipleship. Amen.
