Living for Jesus: John 15:5: The Vine and Its Branches

We ask: “How can my life enrich the lives of other people?” Jesus tells us how in his parable of the vine and its branches.

JOHN 15:5: THE VINE AND ITS BRANCHES

INTRODUCTION

A friend of mine at the University of Kansas was working his way through graduate school. He and his wife supported themselves by serving as live-in companions for an elderly retired botany professor.

The professor was an unhappy man because he kept asking himself and others whether his life had been worthwhile.
He wanted to believe that all the work he had done had benefited others besides himself and his family, but he wasn’t sure, and that made him think that maybe his life had been wasted.

As we come near the end of life, we all wonder what our life has counted for.
We wonder what we have done to make life better or happier for the people around us.
If we are believers we hope that our lives have blessed others.
We hope that some good we have tried to do will live on in the lives of others when we are gone.

Read John 15:1-11. In this passage Jesus tells his disciples the secret of how my life and your life may enrich other people. Let’s consider today, just verse 5:

“I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me and I in him,
he it is who bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.”

I. Just as the branch depends on the parent vine for its life, so we depend on Christ.

A. cut off from the parent vine, the branch soon withers and dies.

Severed from Christ, we die—not physically, but spiritually
We die to all that’s good.
We die to eternal life, because eternal life in only in union with Jesus Christ.
United with Christ, we live and thrive.

C. This is what it means to abide in Christ—or, as some translations put it, to remain in Christ.

To abide in Christ is to live in constant dependence on him. That is faith.
To abide in Christ is to make it our aim to please him. That is obedience.
To abide in Christ is to desire Christ above all others. That is love.

To abide in Christ means to live constantly in Christ’ presence.

In Lloyd C. Douglas’ novel The Robe, Marcellus asks Justus, “Where do you think Jesus went?”

Justus replied, “I don’t know, my friend, I only know that he is alive. And I am always expecting to see him. Sometimes I feel aware of him, as if he were close by.”

Justus smiled faintly, his eyes wet with tears. “It keeps you honest,” he went on. “You have no temptation to cheat anyone, or lie to anyone, or hurt anyone—when, for all you know, Jesus is standing beside you.”

I’m afraid I should feel very uncomfortable,” remarked Marcellus, “being perpetually watched by some invisible presence.”

“Not if that presence helped you defend yourself against yourself, Marcellus. It is a great satisfaction to have someone standing by—to keep you at your best.”

An alcoholic patient was placed in a room with three other patients who did nothing but scream. When night came, he prayed to be able to sleep, but the screams continued.

Then suddenly he changed his approach. He began to pray for his three roommates.
“May God give you peace,” he said quietly over and over.

Finally the screams stopped. “Not only that,” the alcoholic reported later, “it was as if something broke in me. Praying for them released my own tension. I was free.”

A short time later he was well enough to go home.

To abide in Christ, learn his ways and listen to his voice.
We learn his ways and listen to his voice by reading our Bible and by going to church.

To abide in Christ we need to seek fellowship with other believers, and when we are with other believers to converse about the things of God.
We need each other. If we separate ourselves from other Christian believers we soon fall out of fellowship with Jesus.
We are like branches cut off from the vine.

A minister was calling on a member of his church who was seldom present for worship. The man said he really didn’t feel the need of going to church and didn’t feel that it helped him much.

The minister went over to the hearth where a fire was blazing brightly. With the tongs he picked out a coal and set it aside away from the fire. As he watched the coal grow quickly dull and coal, the man realized as no words could have why he need to fellowship with other Christians.

II. The point of the parable is that if we abide in Christ we bear fruit.

A. “Fruit” means to the good qualities that come into our lives from God.

When we abide in Christ, when we dwell with him and he with us, we produce in our lives, what the Bible calls the “fruit of the Spirit” or the “harvest of the Spirit”—in other words, God changes us into Christlikeness.
The Bible says that the fruit of the Spirit is—
love, joy, peace,
patience, kindness, goodness (or generosity),
faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

B. “Fruit” also means usefulness.

Solitary Christians do no one any good.
God uses his people to convey his love to others.
Goodness that reaches out to serve others in service spreads God’s love to other people.
Our work as Christian believers is to spread God’s love around us wherever we are, wherever we go.

CONCLUSION

It is told of St. Catherine of Sienna that she was admired for her raptures and spiritual ecstasies, but St. Francis de Sales, who writes about her, says that what most impressed him about St. Catherine is that as she worked in her father’s kitchen—turning the spit, looking after the fire, cooking the meals, kneading the bread, and carrying out the most menial chores—is that she did everything with a heart full of burning love for God.

He writes that Catherine used to imagine, while cooking her father’s meals, that she was another Martha doing it for her Lord. She saw Our Lady in her mother and the twelve apostles in her brothers as she served them.
With thoughts like these, Francis says, she encouraged herself to serve in spirit the heavenly court and to carry out her lowly tasks with great delight, seeing them as the will of God.

A nursing school graduate took a job in a long-term care facility.

One of her first patients was a woman named Eileen. Eileen’s major health problem was that she had had an aneurysm burst in her brain, leaving her totally unconscious as far as anyone could see, and apparently unaware of anything that was going on around her. It was necessary to turn Eileen every hour to prevent bedsores, and she had to be fed through her stomach tube twice a day. Eileen never had visitors--there was apparently no one who cared about her.

One of the other nurses said, "When it's this bad you have to detach yourself emotionally from the whole situation…." As a result, more and more Eileen came to be treated as a thing, with people just going in and doing their work and then leaving again as quickly as they could.

But this young nurse decided that she, in living out her Christian faith, would treat this woman differently. She talked to Eileen, sang to her, said encouraging things to her, and even brought her little gifts.

On Thanksgiving Day, however, the young nurse came to work reluctantly, wanting to be home on the holiday. As she entered Eileen's room, she knew she would be doing the normal tasks with no thanks whatsoever. So she decided to talk to Eileen and said, "I was in a cruddy mood this morning, Eileen, because it was supposed to be a day off. But now that I'm here, I'm glad. I wouldn't have wanted to miss seeing you on Thanksgiving Day. Do you know that this is Thanksgiving Day?”
Just then the telephone rang and the nurse turned away from the bed to answer it. As she was talking, she turned to look back at Eileen.

“Suddenly,” she said, “Eileen was looking at me, crying. Big damp circles stained her pillow and she was shaking all over.”

That was the only emotion that Eileen ever showed, but it was enough to change the attitude of the entire staff toward her. Not much later she died.

The young nurse closed her story this way: "I keep thinking about her….It occurred to me that I owe her an awful lot. Except for Eileen, I might never have known what it's like to give myself to someone who can't give back.

That young nurse had learned the secret of abiding in Christ and her life was bearing fruit for God.