“I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. 2 “Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit. 3 “You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. 4 “Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. 5 “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing. 6 “If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned. 7 “If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. 8 “My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples. 9 “Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love. 10 “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. 11 “These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full.”
We are coming now to a portion of the discourse that may be the most difficult and most frequently misunderstood words of Jesus in these chapters.
I think there is a tendency, especially within churches that do not teach or believe in the eternal security of the believer in Christ, to take the things Jesus says here as support for their belief that a Christian can either through neglect or sin lose their salvation. This cannot be the teaching of Jesus here and I hope to demonstrate to you today why it cannot.
So there are two points of focus we must keep sharply before us if we want to get on track and stay on track in these verses of our text. One of them is context. Keep the text in context. That is always the first rule that must be followed in studying a small portion or passage of Scripture.
The second point is Bible doctrine. What we say about these verses in this discourse of Jesus to His eleven disciples must line up with what we know of Bible doctrine or we will be derailed.
So let’s go into it, first reminding ourselves of the context, and talk about this title Jesus gives Himself in verse 1.
THE CONTEXT
First of all then, let’s be reminded of what has happened. Jesus and the 12 have gathered in the Upper Room for their Passover meal. Jesus, the only one in the room who isn’t thinking about Himself only, washes the feet of His friends and gives them an example of the love they ought to have for one another.
Then during the meal He announces that one of them will betray Him, and after dipping in the sop with Judas Jesus tells him to go quickly and do his dirty work, and Judas leaves.
So now it is just Jesus and the eleven and the things He is saying in chapter 13 verse 31 through 16:33 are for the ears of true believers only.
I wanted to bring these few details back to your remembrance because the illustration Jesus now employs of the Vine and the branches is all said on the heels of Judas detaching himself once and for all from the True Vine; something I have to think was keenly on the mind of Jesus as He taught.
That’s the context; now let’s talk about this title.
THE TRUE VINE
Jesus calls Himself the ‘True Vine’. Now what does that mean? Does He compare Himself to someone or something that is a false vine? Well, in a way but not exclusively.
Throughout the Old Testament the nation of Israel is referred to as God’s vine. They were the channel, as the branches of a vine are a channel, through which God blessed the world. They were rooted in the earth and the earth benefited from the fruit that God brought through the nation.
Unfortunately, every time the metaphor of a vine is used of Israel it is in the context of being a fruitless, empty vine and God having to cut its branches, uproot the vine, always metaphorically having to bring judgment for her disobedience and faithlessness.
Listen to Isaiah 5:1-5
“Let me sing now for my well-beloved A song of my beloved concerning His vineyard. My well-beloved had a vineyard on a fertile hill. 2 He dug it all around, removed its stones, And planted it with the choicest vine. And He built a tower in the middle of it And also hewed out a wine vat in it; Then He expected it to produce good grapes, But it produced only worthless ones. 3 “And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, Judge between Me and My vineyard. 4 “What more was there to do for My vineyard that I have not done in it? Why, when I expected it to produce good grapes did it produce worthless ones? 5 “So now let Me tell you what I am going to do to My vineyard: I will remove its hedge and it will be consumed; I will break down its wall and it will become trampled ground.’
Nevertheless Israel continued to think of herself as a vine of blessing and a vine through which God worked to bless the world.
But Jesus said, “I am the True Vine”. So in that sense, in comparison to Him, Israel was a false vine. They certainly had become a false and fruitless vine by this point, hadn’t they; in their total rejection of their Messiah?
But He meant more by the term than that. The word ‘true’, used in reference to Jesus has the connotation of being eternal. In John 1:9 He is referred to as the true Light. There are the lesser, created lights in the heavens, there is the limited and refracted ‘light’ of human knowledge and wisdom, but He is the true, eternal Light that gives the Light of life to the whole world.
In John 6:32 Jesus refers to Himself as the true Bread that has come down from the Father. This is an eternal Bread which satisfies forever. In verse 55 of that same chapter Jesus declares that His flesh is the true food and His blood the true drink, and He said, “He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me and I in him”. Of course we know He was speaking metaphorically, and He was talking of the everlasting life that comes with taking all of Christ and letting Him take all of us.
Jesus is the True Vine and His Father is the vine-dresser. Jesus is the Vine that gives eternal life to the branches abiding in Him and through them brings forth fruit.
Let’s talk about this word, ‘abide’. What does it mean to abide in Him and who are the branches who do not abide?
This is where if we aren’t careful we can get off in our thinking and come to some very wrong doctrinal conclusions.
ABIDING OR ATTACHING
In verses 4 through 10 Jesus uses this word 10 times. ‘Abide’ means to stay; to continue. In our modern vernacular we would ask someone we love to stay with us; to continue to be with us constantly. This is what Jesus is saying, but more, in that a branch abiding in a vine is vitally joined to that vine. It is more than a remaining with, it is a ‘being in’.
Jesus says ‘Abide in Me, and I in you’ and it almost sounds like a plea or an invitation. Then in verse 7 He says ‘If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you…’ and it sounds as though our abiding in Him is entirely a matter of our choice, and may even be taken to imply that we can abide one moment and not the next then come back and abide again. This is not what Jesus is teaching us here. If we were to accept that interpretation as a metaphor of the spiritual life then we would violate New Testament doctrine, and the Bible does not contradict itself; so let’s look deeper.
First, here is another example of what I’m saying. Verse 8 reads this way; “My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples”. Now we could take that to mean that Jesus is telling us to bear fruit so that the Father might be glorified, and that if we put forth this great effort to bear much fruit we will prove ourselves to be His disciples.
But we all know that a branch doesn’t put forth an effort to bear fruit, in fact the life and nutrients that produce the fruit come through the branch from the vine. Right?
Now listen to Hebrews 3:6
“…but Christ was faithful as a Son over His house whose house we are, if we hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope firm until the end”
Now is the writer to the Hebrews saying that if we don’t hold on by our own strength and determination to our confidence and our hope that we will cease to be of the household of God? No. He is saying that the ultimate proof that we are of God’s house is that at the end we’re still holding firm to our confidence in the hope we have. It is those who do not hold on but turn back, who prove by their leaving that they were not true disciples.
So when Jesus says “If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch”, the eleven, if they understood, would have thought about Judas going out the door.
There are those, and I would use the word ‘many’, who have attached themselves to the church who are not truly of the church. They do not abide, they attach. These are the ones who eventually leave for one reason or another – one excuse or another – because they never really belonged and were never truly of or abiding in the True Vine.
John the Apostle talked about them in his 1st letter to the church.
“Children, it is the last hour; and just as you heard that antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have appeared; from this we know that it is the last hour. 19 They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us; but they went out, so that it would be shown that they all are not of us.” 1 Jn 2:18-19
So these temporarily attached branches, these Judas branches, were around even then, from the beginning of the church.
Notice that in the passage I just read John said, ‘they went out, so that it would be shown that they are not of us’, and remember what we read in verse 8 of our text; ‘that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples’.
Hear the contrast? Those who abide to the end and through whom the fruit comes prove by their abiding to be disciples of Jesus, and those who go out, by their going out prove that they are not.
Now these people may be in the church for a very long time. Judas was with Jesus day and night for over three years, and he had everyone fooled except Jesus. They all thought he was one of the guys. He was such a good actor he had them trusting him with the money, and he was a thief!
But Judas was never truly of them, and eventually he went out from them showing that he was not.
We’re going to talk about the fruit and try to figure out what the fruit is. But first I want you to notice something else in the way Jesus words things here.
In no place in this analogy does Jesus speak of the false branches being cut off. In verse 2 the branch that does not bear fruit is ‘taken away’, and in verse 6 the branch simply ‘does not abide’ in Jesus, so it is thrown away and dries up and is gathered and burned.
There are two reasons Jesus does not say they are cut off. Do you know what they are?
One is that they were never ‘of’ the Vine; remember? They have attached themselves falsely, but they never abide in the Vine. You can’t cut off a branch that was never actually growing out of the trunk. The second reason is that they remove themselves. They ‘go out’ from us, showing themselves to be not of us.
Let me just point out one more thing in this comparison between ‘abiding’ or ‘attaching’.
The branch that is eventually cast away, taken away, cannot be a metaphor of a believer who loses his salvation as is sometimes taught. That would also be a violation of Bible doctrine since we know that Jesus said anyone who comes to Him will in no way be cast out or rejected.
Then there are all the other promises from the lips of our Lord pertaining to the security of the one who is ‘in’ Him. No one can snatch them out of His hand. No one can snatch them out of the Father’s hand, and so forth.
No, the cast away branch can only be representative of the one who has never received life from the True Vine, because although he or she has attached themselves to God’s church and God’s people for a time they have never been a true part of the Vine, never truly abiding, and therefore have no life, no fruit, and no permanent place.
So quickly, let me go down the list of evidences from these verses, between those who are abiding and those who are only attached.
The one who abides in Christ the True Vine, bears fruit (vs 2&8), is pruned by the Vinedresser (vs 2), Glorifies the Father (vs 8), proves to be a disciple (vs 8) and has the joy of the Lord (vs 11).
The Judas branch, who is only attached but not abiding, bears no fruit/can do nothing (vs 2&5), is taken away and burned (vs 6), has no joy (by implication of the wording of verse 11).
PROVING OR PRETENDING
Now what is this fruit that Jesus says will be borne by the one who abides in Him? Here again, we have the potential for some very off-the-wall interpretation; especially since the immediate natural tendency is to think of fruitfulness as worldly success or some product of our life and behavior that would constitute an immediate monetary or physical benefit to ourselves or others.
But we have to get around all that and find out what the Bible says.
In the fifth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Galatians the Apostle assures his readers that if they are led by the Spirit they are not under the Law. The implication of this is that the Law is carried out by the flesh, not by the spirit. So he immediately goes on to list the natural deeds of the flesh showing that there is no way the Law is going to be kept successfully in the power of the flesh. In fact, the flesh has no power at all to carry it out.
Notice also that he calls them ‘deeds’. These are the ‘deeds’ of the flesh, and he lists them; idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, and the list goes on, but everything on the list comes from the flesh and needs the flesh to commit the deed.
In contrast, says Paul, the fruit of the Spirit – and note that this list does not consist of ‘deeds’ but of fruit; and it is not the fruit of the believer it is the fruit of the Spirit – is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, against which there is no law.
Now are you realizing that there is nothing listed there indicating that the fruit God is looking for in the believer consists of worldly success or even personal accomplishment?
Is God looking for successful church-building with thousands of attendees? If that was the case the false teachers would be pleasing to God, wouldn’t they?
Is God looking for financial sacrifice to feed the poor? If that was the case many a Godless, hedonistic wealthy person giving large sums of money to charity for tax write-offs would be pleasing to God, wouldn’t they?
See, the fruit of the Spirit, borne of the Spirit through the true believer, is what results in the good deeds the believer does, whatever those deeds might be. But they are not the fruit; the fruit is from the True Vine through the abiding branch.
Listen also to Psalm 1:1-3
“How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, Nor stand in the path of sinners, Nor sit in the seat of scoffers! 2 But his delight is in the law of the LORD, And in His law he meditates day and night. 3 He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water, Which yields its fruit in its season And its leaf does not wither; And in whatever he does, he prospers.”
In this psalm is the man’s prosperity the fruit? No! Prosperity is a blessing from the Lord given freely to the one who is rooted in Him – planted in Him – through whom He brings fruit.
So the believer who abides in the True Vine is a prover by His continued abiding. The Vine brings spiritual fruit through the life of the branch and the branch is thus proven to be abiding in the Vine.
In sharp contrast is the pretender. He is not a prover; he is a pretender. He attaches himself to the Vine for a while but he does not abide, he does not stay, he does not continue, and his lack of fruit and his eventual detachment from the Vine and from the true branches proves him to be a pretender.
Now do you realize that we cannot always detect the pretender? They can be as good as Judas at playing the role and speaking the lingo and participating in all the ritual and seeming like one of the guys; one of the congregation. But Jesus knows who they are and in the end they will be taken away because they never belonged.
Let me put one more thought out there for you to mull over about pretenders.
Jesus was not surprised by Judas’ betrayal. It wasn’t something He learned about by over hearing Judas whispering to a Pharisee or talking in his sleep.
Jesus knew who Judas was when He chose him as a disciple. In fact we can get technical and say Jesus created Judas to be the betrayer; so He knew about him from eternity past.
But He did choose Judas, and He did love Judas. He washed Judas’ feet. He gave Judas every opportunity over the period of three-plus years, to recognize His love, to relent his plotting, to stop stealing and repent of his evil. Wouldn’t that have ruined God’s plan? No! He could have caused a rock in the road to rise up and lead the authorities to the Garden of Gethsemane.
Jesus also could have at any moment on any day called Judas aside and said, ‘You know, Judas, I am aware of your stealing, and I am aware of your secret thoughts, and I am aware of your plan to turn Me over to the Jews. So I think you should just get your stuff and go. Go home or go follow another Rabbi, or whatever, but just go.’
But He had a purpose for Judas and Judas did his evil with seeming impunity until the night Satan entered into him and then Judas fulfilled his destiny in God’s plan of redemption.
So we can never know what use God has for even pretenders attached to the church. They will be weeded out in due time – in God’s time. In the meantime though, not to their credit, they may have some role to play of which they themselves are entirely ignorant. It won’t be fruit though. It will only be deeds. And the difference between the fruit of the true branch and the deeds of the attached branch is that although God may in some way use them, the pretender will not have the joy or the peace that Jesus promised His true branches, and they won’t ever have the Father’s love, also promised by the True Vine.
PRUNED OR BURNED
Now here is the ultimate difference between the true branch and the Judas branch, and it is not a difference in the appearance of the branches but in the ultimate fate of the branches and it has to do with God’s working.
Jesus said of the true branch, ‘…every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit.’
Remember, He isn’t talking about rewarding some effort the branch makes. When Jesus says ‘every branch that bears fruit’ He means every true branch. Because every branch abiding in the True Vine bears fruit. It is the Spirit’s fruit. It is the fruit of the Spirit. Remember Galatians 5?
So Jesus is saying that every true branch gets pruned. Are you a true believer in Christ? Do you have the Holy Spirit in you and the new birth from above that He brings? Then God prunes you.
What is that?
The word translated ‘purges’ is ‘kathario’. It is the root word from which we get ‘catharsis’. It means to purge clean. That’s why in verse 3 Jesus continues with, ‘You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you”. And that word clean is ‘katharos’. It means the same thing, just a slightly different connotation.
Believers, you know you belong to Jesus if He continues to purge and purify you. You are already clean because of the Gospel which you heard and which came to you in life. We use the doctrinal term, sanctification.
And you already bear fruit. You can’t help but bear the fruit of the Spirit who lives in you and has sanctified you. But God wants you to bear more fruit, so He purges you; He prunes you. Sometimes the process is painful, but it tells you that you are His and the fruit you bear glorifies Him.
I attempted to locate an article I read many years ago so I could document the facts for you here, but I could not find it so I’ll just tell you generally what I remember.
The article had to do with parental practices in disciplining their children, and in a portion of the article it was stated that a large number of young adults surveyed, who as children were never spanked and were allowed to pretty much do as they pleased, said that they harbored some resentment for their parents because they had felt unloved as children. Some of them even said they occasionally deliberately did things wrong hoping their parents would become upset enough to spank them, and when they didn’t get the spanking they didn’t feel they had gotten away with anything; on the contrary, they felt ignored.
God loves you enough to spank you, believer.
“MY SON, DO NOT REGARD LIGHTLY THE DISCIPLINE OF THE LORD, NOR FAINT WHEN YOU ARE REPROVED BY HIM; 6 FOR THOSE WHOM THE LORD LOVES HE DISCIPLINES, AND HE SCOURGES EVERY SON WHOM HE RECEIVES.” 7 It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? 8 But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.’ Heb 12:5-8
And there is the difference between the true branch and the Judas branch. They are like illegitimate children and not sons. They are not purged, they are not pruned. How can you prune a dead branch? How can what is dead be made to bear any fruit at all; let alone much fruit?
Those branches exist to be burned. In the end they will be gathered and thrown into the fire.
But these things are not true of you, believer and follower of Christ – you true branch, abiding in the True Vine.
Just a quick glimpse at verses 9 and 10:
9 “Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love. 10 “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.
Once more, Jesus is not establishing a condition here by saying ‘if you do this, I will do that’. His teaching is that our keeping of His commandments is evidence of our love for Him and the fact that His love is in us.
He is talking about a mutual, love-based abiding that makes Him one with the Father and us, by His indwelling Spirit, one with the Father and the Son.
This is the life of the new creation, which we are in Christ; and beloved ones, it is all His doing. We are abiding, we are pruned, we bear fruit, we are blessed, we have His love and His kind of joy, because the True Vine has made it so.
Can you see the smile on His face as He looks around Him at these tired and confused disciples and says, “These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full.”
As we end, remember the context. Judas has gone out. Jesus is about to be arrested and tortured and crucified. The disciples are clueless. And the foremost thing on His mind and heart is that they might have the fullness of His joy, and the continued abiding in their hearts of His great eternal love.
These things, He says to you also.
