'I am the vine, ye are the branches: he that abideth in Me, and I in
him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without Me ye can do
nothing. If a man abide not in Me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is
withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they
are burned. If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye shall ask
what ye will, and it shall be done unto you. Herein is My Father
glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be My disciples.'--JOHN
xv. 5-8.
No wise teacher is ever afraid of repeating himself. The average mind
requires the reiteration of truth before it can make that truth its
own. One coat of paint is not enough, it soon rubs off. Especially is
this true in regard to lofty spiritual and religious truth, remote from
men's ordinary thinkings, and in some senses unwelcome to them. So our
Lord, the great Teacher, never shrank from repeating His lessons when
He saw that they were but partially apprehended. It was not grievous to
Him to 'say the same things,' because for them it was safe. He broke
the bread of life into small pieces, and fed them little and often.
So here, in the verses that we have to consider now, we have the
repetition, and yet not the mere repetition, of the great parable of
the vine, as teaching the union of Christians with Christ, and their
consequent fruitfulness. He saw, no doubt, that the truth was but
partially dawning upon His disciples' minds. Therefore He said it all
over again, with deepened meaning, following it out into new
applications, presenting further consequences, and, above all, giving
it a more sharp and definite personal application.
Are we any swifter scholars than these first ones were? Have we
absorbed into our own thinking this truth so thoroughly and constantly,
and wrought it out in our lives so completely, that we do not need to
be reminded of it any more? Shall we not be wise if we faithfully
listen to His repeated teachings?
The verses which I have read give us four aspects of this great truth
of union with Jesus Christ; or of its converse, separation from Him.
There is, first, the fruitfulness of union; second, the withering and
destruction of separation; third, the satisfaction of desire which
comes from abiding in Christ; and, lastly, the great, noble issue of
fruitfulness, in God's glory, and our own increasing discipleship. Now
let me touch upon these briefly.
I. First, then, our Lord sets forth, with no mere repetition, the same
broad idea which He has already been insisting upon--viz., that union
with Him is sure to issue in fruitfulness. He repeats the theme, 'I am
the Vine'; but He points its application by the next clause, 'Ye are
the branches.' That had been implied before, but it needed to be said
more definitely. For are we not all too apt to think of religious truth
as swinging _in vacuo_ as it were, with no personal application to
ourselves, and is not the one thing needful in regard to the truths
which are most familiar to us, to bring them into close connection with
our own personal life and experience?
'I am the Vine' is a general truth, with no clear personal application.
'Ye are the branches' brings each individual listener into connection
with it. How many of us there are, as there are in every so-called
Christian communion, that listen pleasedly, and, in a fitful sort of
languid way, interestedly, to the most glorious and most solemn words
that come from a preacher's lips, and never dream that what he has been
saying has any bearing upon themselves! And the one thing that is most
of all needed with people like some of you, who have been listening to
the truth all your days, is that it should be sharpened to a point, and
the conviction driven into you, that _you_ have some personal concern
in this great message. 'Ye are the branches' is the one side of that
sharpening and making definite of the truth in its personal
application, and the other side is, 'Thou art the man.' All preaching
and religious teaching is toothless generality, utterly useless, unless
we can manage somehow or other to force it through the wall of
indifference and vague assent to a general proposition, with which
'Gospel-hardened hearers' surround themselves, and make them feel that
the thing has got a point, and that the point is touching their own
consciousness. '_Ye_ are the branches.'
Note next the great promise of fruitfulness. 'He that abideth in Me,
and I in Him, the same bringeth forth much fruit.'
I need not repeat what I have said in former sermons as to the plain,
practical duties which are included in that abiding in Christ, and
Christ's consequent abiding in us. It means, on the part of professedly
Christian people, a temper and tone of mind very far remote from the
noisy, bustling distractions too common in our present Christianity. We
want quiet, patient waiting within the veil. We want stillness of
heart, brought about by our own distinct effort to put away from
ourselves the strife of tongues and the pride of life. We want
activity, no doubt, but we want a wise passiveness as its foundation.
'Think you, midst all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?'
Get away into the 'secret place of the Most High,' and rise into a
higher altitude and atmosphere than the region of work and effort; and
sitting still with Christ, let His love and His power pour themselves
into your hearts. 'Come, My people, enter thou into thy chambers and
shut thy doors about thee.' Get away from the jangling of politics, and
empty controversies and busy distractions of daily duty. The harder our
toil necessarily is, the more let us see to it that we keep a little
cell within the central life where in silence we hold communion with
the Master. 'Abide in Me and I in you.'
That is the way to be fruitful, rather than by efforts after individual
acts of conformity and obedience, howsoever needful and precious these
are. There is a deeper thing wanted than these. The best way to secure
Christian conduct is to cultivate communion with Christ. It is better
to work at the increase of the central force than at the improvement of
the circumferential manifestations of it. Get more of the sap into the
branch, and there will be more fruit. Have more of the life of Christ
in the soul, and the conduct and the speech will be more Christlike. We
may cultivate individual graces at the expense of the harmony and
beauty of the whole character. We may grow them artificially and they
will be of little worth--by imitation of others, by special efforts
after special excellence, rather than by general effort after the
central improvement of our nature and therefore of our life. But the
true way to influence conduct is to influence the springs of conduct;
and to make a man's life better, the true way is to make the man
better. First of all be, and then do; first of all receive, and then
give forth; first of all draw near to Christ, and then there will be
fruit to His praise. That is the Christian way of mending men, not
tinkering at this, that, and the other individual excellence, but
grasping the secret of total excellence in communion with Him.
Our Lord is here not merely laying down a law, but giving a promise,
and putting his veracity into pawn for the fulfilment of it. 'If a man
will keep near Me,' He says, 'he shall bear fruit.'
Notice that little word which now appears for the first time. 'He shall
bear _much_ fruit.' We are not to be content with a little fruit; a
poor shrivelled bunch of grapes that are more like marbles than grapes,
here and there, upon the half-nourished stem. The abiding in Him will
produce a character rich in manifold graces. 'A little fruit' is not
contemplated by Christ at all. God forbid that I should say that there
is no possibility of union with Christ and a little fruit. Little union
will have little fruit; but I would have you notice that the only two
alternatives which come into Christ's view here are, on the one hand,
'no fruit,' and on the other hand, 'much fruit.' And I would ask why it
is that the average Christian man of this generation bears only a berry
or two here and there, like such as are left upon the vines after the
vintage, when the promise is that if he will abide in Christ, he will
bear much fruit?
This verse, setting forth the fruitfulness of union with Jesus, ends
with the brief, solemn statement of the converse--the barrenness of
separation--'Apart from Me' (not merely 'without,' as the Authorised
Version has it) 'ye can do nothing.' _There_ is the condemnation of all
the busy life of men which is not lived in union with Jesus Christ. It
is a long row of figures which, like some other long rows of algebraic
symbols added up, amount just to _zero_. 'Without me, nothing.' All
your busy life, when you come to sum it up, is made up of plus and
minus quantities, which precisely balance each other, and the net
result, unless you are in Christ, is just nothing; and on your
gravestones the only right epitaph is a great round cypher. 'He did not
do anything. There is nothing left of his toil; the whole thing has
evaporated and disappeared.' That is life apart from Jesus Christ.
II. And so note, secondly, the withering and destruction following
separation from Him.
Commentators tell us, I think a little prosaically, that when our Lord
spoke, it was the time of pruning the vine in Palestine, and that,
perhaps, as they went from the upper room to the garden, they might see
in the valley, here and there, the fires that the labourers had kindled
in the vineyards to burn the loppings of the vines. That does not
matter. It is of more consequence to notice how the solemn thought of
withering and destruction forces itself, so to speak, into these
gracious words; and how, even at that moment, our Lord, in all His
tenderness and pity, could not but let words of warning--grave, solemn,
tragical--drop from His lips.
This generation does not like to hear them, for its conception of the
Gospel is a thing with no minor notes in it, with no threatenings, a
proclamation of a deliverance, and no proclamation of anything from
which deliverance is needed--which is a strange kind of Gospel! But
Jesus Christ could not speak about the blessedness of fruitfulness and
the joy of life in Himself without speaking about its necessary
converse, the awfulness of separation from Him, of barrenness, of
withering, and of destruction.
Separation is withering. Did you ever see a hawthorn bough that
children bring home from the woods, and stick in the grate; how in a
day or two the little fresh green leaves all shrivel up and the white
blossoms become brown and smell foul, and the only thing to be done
with it is to fling it into the fire and get rid of it? 'And so,' says
Jesus Christ, 'as long as a man holds on to Me and the sap comes into
him, he will flourish, and as soon as the connection is broken, all
that was so fair will begin to shrivel, and all that was green will
grow brown and turn to dust, and all that was blossom will droop, and
there will be no more fruit any more for ever.' Separate from Christ,
the individual shrivels, and the possibilities of fair buds wither and
set into no fruit, and no man is the man he might have been unless he
holds by Jesus Christ and lets His life come into him.
And as for individuals, so for communities. The Church or the body of
professing Christians that is separate from Jesus Christ dies to all
noble life, to all high activity, to all Christlike conduct, and, being
dead, rots.
Withering means destruction. The language of our text is a description
of what befalls the actual branches of the literal vine; but it is made
a representation of what befalls the individuals whom these branches
represent, by that added clause, 'like a branch.' Look at the
mysteriousness of the language. 'They gather them.' Who? 'They cast
them into the fire.' Who have the tragic task of flinging the withered
branches into some mysterious fire? All is left vague with unexplained
awfulness. The solemn fact that the withering of manhood by separation
from Jesus Christ requires, and ends in, the consuming of the withered,
is all that we have here. We have to speak of it pityingly, with
reticence, with terror, with tenderness, with awe lest it should be our
fate.
But O, dear brethren! be on your guard against the tendency of the
thinking of this generation, to paste a bit of blank paper over all the
threatenings of the Bible, and to blot out from its consciousness the
grave issues that it holds forth. One of two things must befall the
branch, either it is in the Vine or it gets into the fire. If we would
avoid the fire let us see to it that we are in the Vine.
III. Thirdly, we have here the union with Christ as the condition of
satisfied desires.
'If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye
will, and it shall be done unto you.' Notice how our Lord varies His
phraseology here, and instead of saying 'I in you,' says 'My words in
you.' He is speaking about prayers, consequently the variation is
natural. In fact, His abiding in us is largely the abiding of His words
in us; or, to speak more accurately, the abiding of His words in us is
largely the means of His abiding in us.
What is meant by Christ's words abiding in us? Something a great deal
more than the mere intellectual acceptance of them. Something very
different from reading a verse of the Gospels of a morning before we go
to our work, and forgetting all about it all the day long; something
very different from coming in contact with Christian truth on a Sunday,
when somebody else preaches to us what he has found in the Bible, and
we take in a little of it. It means the whole of the conscious nature
of a man being, so to speak, saturated with Christ's words; his
desires, his understanding, his affections, his will, all being steeped
in these great truths which the Master spoke. Put a little bit of
colouring matter into the fountain at its source, and you will have the
stream dyed down its course for ever so far. See that Christ's words be
lodged in your inmost selves, by patient meditation upon them, by
continual recurrence to them, and all your life will be glorified and
flash into richness of colouring and beauty by their presence.
The main effect of such abiding of the Lord's words in us which our
Lord touches upon here is, that in such a case, if our whole inward
nature is influenced by the continual operation upon it of the words of
the Lord, then our desires will be granted. Do not so vulgarise and
lower the nobleness and the loftiness of this great promise as to
suppose that it only means--If you remember His words you will get
anything you like. It means something a great deal better than that. It
means that if Christ's words are the substratum, so to speak, of your
wishes, then your wishes will harmonise with His will, and so 'ye shall
ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.'
Christ loves us a great deal too well to give to our own foolish and
selfish wills the keys of His treasure-house. The condition of our
getting what we will is our willing what He desires; and unless our
prayers are a great deal more the utterance of the submission of our
wills to His than they are the attempt to impose ours upon Him, they
will not be answered. We get our wishes when our wishes are moulded by
His word.
IV. The last thought that is here is that this union and fruitfulness
lead to the noble ends of glorifying God and increasing discipleship.
'Herein is My Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit.' Christ's life
was all for the glorifying of God. The lives which are ours in
name--but being drawn from Him, in their depths are much rather the
life of Christ in us than our lives--will have the same end and the
same issue.
Ah, dear brethren, we come here to a very sharp test for us all. I
wonder how many of us there are, on whom men looking think more loftily
of God and love Him better, and are drawn to Him by strange longings.
How many of us are there about whom people will say, 'There must be
something in the religion that makes a man like that'? How many of us
are there, to look upon whom suggests to men that God, who can make
such a man, must be infinitely sweet and lovely? And yet that is what
we should all be--mirrors of the divine radiance, on which some eyes,
that are too dim and sore to bear the light as it streams from the Sun,
may look, and, beholding the reflection, may learn to love. Does God so
shine in me that I lead men to magnify His name? If I am dwelling with
Christ it will be so.
I shall not know it. 'Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone';
but, in meek unconsciousness of the glory that rays from us, we may
walk the earth, reflecting the light and making God known to our
fellows.
And if thus we abide in Him and bear fruit we shall 'be' or (as the
word might more accurately be rendered), we shall '_become_ His
disciples.' The end of our discipleship is never reached on earth: we
never so much _are_ as we are in the process of _becoming_, His true
followers and servants.
If we bear fruit because we are knit to Him, the fruit itself will help
us to get nearer Him, and so to be more His disciples and more
fruitful. Character produces conduct, but conduct rests on character,
and strengthens the impulses from which it springs. And thus our action
as Christian men and women will tell upon our inward lives as
Christians, and the more our outward conduct is conformed to the
pattern of Jesus Christ, the more shall we love Him in our inmost
hearts. We ourselves shall eat of the fruit which we ourselves have
borne to Him.
The alternatives are before us--in Christ, living and fruitful; out of
Christ, barren, and destined to be burned. As the prophet says, 'Will
men take of the wood of the vine for any work?' Vine-wood is worthless,
its only use is to bear fruit; and if it does not do that, there is
only one thing to be done with it, and that is, 'They cast it into the
fire, and it is burned.'