Calvary Road Baptist Church
“THE TRUE VINE”
John 15.1
Please turn to the Lord Jesus Christ’s allegory of the vine and the branches found in John 15.1-17. Although agreement is not unanimous among commentators, it seems clear to me that the Lord Jesus Christ led His remaining eleven apostles from the Upper Room to the Garden of Gethsemane, passing by the gates leading into the courtyard of Herod’s Temple, as can be seen on most Bible maps.
As well, agreement is not unanimous concerning the length of the Lord’s allegory that begins in John 15.1, though it likely extends through verse 17. That being the case, now that we have arrived at John chapter 15, I invite you to stand with me to read John 15.1-17:
1 I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.
2 Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.
3 Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.
4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.
5 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.
6 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.
7 If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.
8 Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples.
9 As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love.
10 If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love.
11 These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.
12 This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you.
13 Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
14 Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.
15 Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.
16 Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you.
17 These things I command you, that ye love one another.
Verses 12 and 17, the Savior’s directives that His eleven remaining apostles (and, by extension, those who profess Christ as our Savior from that day to this) love one another. It is a directive that is sadly ignored in our day. Some professing Christians pay no attention to this command because they are false professors, and have no concern to please the Master. Others, however, do not obey verses 12 and 17 because they do not grasp verses 1-11 and verses 13-16.
Do you find yourself challenged with respect to this matter of loving your brothers and sisters in Christ? Do you love them unreservedly, despite our inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies and sometimes willful sins? Do you hold grudges against Christians who have wronged you? Have you become embittered by their treatment of you? Perhaps you take offense for the way professing Christians have treated those you love. Maybe you disapprove of our flaws as compared to your perfections.
Let me suggest to you that whatever difficulties you have obeying John 15.12 and 17 are related to your grasp of the truths found in John 15.1-11 and 13-16. Operating on that hypothesis, my plan is to carefully preach from John 15.1-17 over the next few weeks, in the hopes that as you come to understand verses 1-11 and 13-16 better you will also begin to obey verses 12 and 17 more fully.
I will begin with John 15.1. Before we consider our text, may I prevail upon you to conduct a brief self-examination? I would suggest that you not divulge the results of your self-examination to anyone without being very cautious about that other person’s spiritual qualifications and grasp of Bible truth. This is a matter between you and God.
Are you ready for the self-examination? Here it is: Do you love other believers? Before you credit yourself, be mindful of what is entailed in loving other believers. You cannot love other believers unless you first love God, and you do not love God if you do not consciously and conscientiously obey Him. The basis for making this statement is First John 5.2-3:
2 By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep his commandments.
3 For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous.
Love for Christians is built upon the proper foundation of love for God. Yet love for God is revealed, not by emotion or sentiment, but by obedience to His commands. This fits right into the Apostle Paul’s comments to the new Christians in Thessalonica, in First Thessalonians 1.3-10, where he summarized for them the life and testimony of someone who knows and loves God:
3 Remembering without ceasing your work of faith, and labour of love, and patience of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, in the sight of God and our Father;
4 Knowing, brethren beloved, your election of God.
5 For our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance; as ye know what manner of men we were among you for your sake.
6 And ye became followers of us, and of the Lord, having received the word in much affliction, with joy of the Holy Ghost:
7 So that ye were ensamples to all that believe in Macedonia and Achaia.
8 For from you sounded out the word of the Lord not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but also in every place your faith to God-ward is spread abroad; so that we need not to speak any thing.
9 For they themselves shew of us what manner of entering in we had unto you, and how ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God;
10 And to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.
Believers who love God are characterized by their “work of faith, and labour of love, and patience of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ,” verse 3. And the labor that is produced by the believer’s love for God results in others coming to Christ, who are described by Paul in verse 9:
“For they themselves shew of us what manner of entering in we had unto you, and how ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God.”
Be mindful that this is just the love for God part of the self-examination. The love for Christians part comes after your love for God. You love Christians because you love God, as evidenced by the end of verse 9, “to serve the living and true God.” And remember, from First John 5.3, “his commandments are not grievous.”
Let’s pause for a moment. You don’t love other Christians by liking us, by not being angry at us for perceived wrongs we have done to you, or by not holding grudges against us for our failings. The first thing about loving other Christians has to do with whether you love God, as shown by serving Him in the evangelistic enterprise that results in others turning to God from idols to serve the living and true God.
As an important aside, can any Christian’s genuine love for God be separated, isolated, from his or her love for Christ? No. Remember, moments earlier, in John 14.15, the Savior said to these same men,
“If ye love me, keep my commandments.”
Does this not make perfect sense? Christians love Christians if they first love God and if they first love Christ. If you love God and love Christ, as can only be evidenced by obedience, then love for Christians is possible. The basis for loving other Christians? If you love God, and if you love Christ, you will become a channel used by God and by Christ to love other Christians.[1] That will not happen if you do not love God. That will not happen if you do not love Christ.
Is it a surprise that there is as direct a link between loving God and obeying God, as there is between loving Christ and obeying Christ? Perhaps we should rethink this whole matter of what it is to love God and to love Christ, and toss out any delusions that a person can love God without obeying Him or love Christ without obeying Him, or that a person can love God without loving Christ or love Christ without loving God.
Shall we reflect on the practical aspects of all this? After all, Biblical Christianity is the most practical lifestyle known to man. Can you love God or Christ without faithfully attending the gathered worship of the Church of Jesus Christ, the Church of God? Can you love God or Christ without living your life in such a way that you are somehow collaborating with others in your Church to reach others with the Gospel so that they turn to God from idols to serve the living and true God?
I am not referring to nuclear physics here. I am not advancing theological complexities. I am referring to simple faith, doing your part in Christian ministry, doing your part in outreach, doing your part in exhorting one another, and faithfully attending gathered worship to serve as an example to others. All of this to obey God, obey Christ, and thereby display your love for God.
I think we will stop with our self-evaluation at this first step. The self-evaluation is conducted for the purpose of determining if I love other believers. But before I can even consider if I love other believers, I must address the issue of whether or not I love God, as evidenced by my obedience to Him, my compliance to His wishes, His directives, His instructions. Do I do what God wants me to do? Or am I self-willed and unyielding to His will for my life?
I do not want to be like Lucifer, who infamously said in his heart as he rebelled against God,
“I will ascend into heaven,
I will exalt my throne above the stars of God:
I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;
I will be like the most High.”[2]
The operative declarations, of course, were the five “I wills” over against God’s will.
The goal to strive for is Christ-like obedience, as reflected in the Garden of Gethsemane, Matthew 26.39, where my Lord prayed,
“O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.”
It is the heart’s desire for every child of God to love God as we ought, to love Christ as we ought, and then to love our blood-bought and blood-washed brothers and sisters in Christ as we ought. We love our blood relatives, our family members. But sometimes we forget those natural family ties and relationships are mere shadows of spiritual bonds that will not end when we pass from this world to the next. The lasting, the enduring, are those eternal bonds forged by the Spirit of God and purchased by the blood of Christ. How can we not want to love those with whom we will spend eternity?
So that you and I might love one another, as our Savior directed, let us begin our journey toward loving one another by turning to John 15.1, where the Lord Jesus Christ said,
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.”
Interesting. To emphasize to His eleven apostles the principles that would lead to their loving one another, which is a restatement of what He had said to them in the Upper Room in John 13.34, where He said,
“A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another,”
the Lord begins by making two assertions, first about Himself and then about His Father:
First, THE LORD JESUS CHRIST’S ASSERTION ABOUT HIMSELF
“I am the true vine.”
If you will consider the possible route from the Upper Room where our Lord instituted the communion of the Lord’s Supper to the Garden of Gethsemane, those twelve men would have passed in front of the gates leading up to the Temple courtyard. Interestingly, there was a golden vine overhanging the main entrance to the Temple,[3] presumably because the Jewish people identified themselves as the vine God referred to in the Hebrew Scriptures. However, because they did not fulfill God’s calling for them, the Lord Jesus Christ came to do what Israel could not do, bear fruit unto God.
Two things to observe about this beginning of our Lord’s discourse about being the True Vine:
He starts off with the words “I am.” There is significance in this comment, á¼gá½½ eá¼°mi. As saturated with the Old Testament Hebrew Scriptures as most Jewish people were, this statement would immediately bring to the first century Jewish mind Exodus 3.14, and the encounter Moses had in the Midian desert. Herding sheep on the backside of the desert, Moses came upon the mountain of God and beheld a bush that was alight with fire, but not consumed by the fire. As he approached “God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses.” When Moses responded God then said to him,
5 ... Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.
6 Moreover he said, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God.
What figured prominently in the Jewish mind of our Lord’s day was God’s self-identification in Exodus 3.14 in response to Moses asking Him His name:
“And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.”
God’s declaration “I AM” appears in the Greek version of the Old Testament as á¼gá½½ eá¼°mi, the phrase the Lord Jesus Christ used repeatedly in reference to Himself in John’s Gospel account. What we read in our text is considered to be the last of the great “I am” statements in John’s Gospel, according to a number of well-known commentators.[4] However, I am not sure I agree with them in light of John 18.5, where the Lord Jesus Christ made the same declaration to those who came to arrest Him in the Garden of Gethsemane. Those á¼gá½½ eá¼°mi places are also in John 8.12; 10.7, 9, 11, 14; 11.25; 14.6; 15.1 and 5. The occasions recorded in John chapters 8, 10, and 11 took place in public settings, but those in John 14 and 15 had only the apostles as audiences. In the Garden of Gethsemane it was the apostles and the temple soldiers there to arrest Him who heard our Lord’s declaration. Reach your conclusion regardless of the opinions of the commentators.
The entire declaration reads, “I am the true vine.” How jarring it must have been to those eleven men, on top of everything else they had experienced that day, what with His washing of their feet, His institution of the communion of the Lord’s Supper, informing them that He would depart from them and they could not follow Him and that one of them was betraying Him. Then they left the Upper Room. They must have felt as though their belief system was being shaken. And then, as they walked past the doors to Herod’s Temple, with the vine branches and grape clusters engravings over it, their trusted Teacher said, “I am the true vine.” I guarantee that statement rolled them. Remember that
“Israel was God’s choice vine on which he lavished care and attention (Ps. 80.8; Isa. 5:1-7; Jer. 2:21; 6:9; Ezek. 15; 17:5-10; 19:10-14; Hosea 10:1; 14:8). He longed for fruit, but the vine (Israel) became degenerate and produced rotten fruit. Therefore, Jesus, as ‘the true Vine,” fulfills what God had intended for Israel.”[5]
The Lord Jesus Christ revealed Himself to them as the True Vine, not in contrast to Israel but in fulfillment on behalf of Israel. He is the giver of life. He is the sustainer. He is the one who makes fruitfulness for God possible. He is the One who pleases God the Father. Whatever association the vine has with life, and joy, and blessedness, finds its fulfillment in the Lord Jesus Christ. Truly did He say on another occasion,
“I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”[6]
Next, THE LORD JESUS CHRIST’S ASSERTION ABOUT HIS FATHER
As crucial as an understanding of the Lord Jesus Christ’s relationship to Israel, to life, to blessing, and to joy is, so is an understanding of our Lord’s Father:
“and my Father is the husbandman.”
Allow me an aside for just a moment, so you don’t miss the specific remark the Lord Jesus Christ said about “my Father.” It is important for Christians to recognize that in the Gospel accounts the Lord Jesus Christ is careful to distinguish between His references to God as His Father and His references to God as our Father. There is a reason for this. If you suggest that the Lord Jesus Christ breaks this pattern in Matthew 6.9,
“After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name,”
I would remind you that the Savior is not praying in that verse but demonstrating to His disciples how they ought to pray. The distinction He maintains was most apparent when He spoke to Mary following His resurrection:
“Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.”[7]
The reason why Christ’s relationship to the Father and our relationship to the Father is always distinguished in this way, and must always be distinguished? The relationships are not at all the same. Christ is the eternal Son of God, a relationship that has always existed between the Father and the Son. The believer, on the other hand, has a relationship with our heavenly Father by means of the new birth and by means of adoption into the family of God. Redemption is required for this relationship. Thus, God has not always been the believer’s Father, though He will always be the believer’s Father.
Now we turn to God, Christ’s Father, as the husbandman. We identify as vine dressers those moderns who tend to vineyards and grapes, but in our Lord’s day, they were simply husbandmen, or farmers. So it is here, with the Greek word for farmer translated husbandman.[8] The Lord Jesus Christ, just up and out the door from the Passover meal and having instituted the communion of the Lord’s Supper, with its elements of bread and wine, launches into a discussion of vines, branches, and fruit, with mention of Himself as the True Vine and His heavenly Father as the cultivator, the farmer, the vinedresser, the husbandman. Do you think that was a coincidence? Not at all. Some might call John 15.1-17 an allegory. Others might call it an extended metaphor. The label is not so important so long as we recognize that the Lord Jesus Christ, as He did so often with parables, is using word pictures to teach His apostles (and us) profound spiritual lessons, with this being one of the most important our Lord has ever taught about His and His Father’s expectations for His Own. Literary devices such as this are never in God’s Word used to conceal truth, or else the Lord would have remained silent and achieved that purpose.
This passage, like other passages similar to it, is used to communicate with word pictures something important about those men’s lives (and others’ lives, too) as they relate to the Lord Jesus Christ and God the Father. Leading up to this point, our Lord has spoken to His men about what He would do for them in His absence. From this point forward, He declares to them what their responsibilities were going to be to Him. With that in mind, He reveals that God the Father, is the husbandman. What is the husbandman? He is the owner, the planter, the cultivator, the pruner. What does the husbandman expect? What does the husbandman demand? What will the husbandman obtain? Fruit. One way or the other, He will see fruit from His works in His vineyard. What is the one tool every husbandman possesses? A knife. The husbandman cuts. He cuts off dead branches that bear no fruit. He cuts back fruitful branches so they will bear more fruit, called pruning. But it is always cutting, and the end is always fruit that remains. Christian? The Husbandman will cut you. That is what every husbandman does. If you are a believer, He will prune you to trim off what will interfere with your fruitfulness. There will be pain, but it will benefit you. The unbeliever will also be cut by the Husbandman. But the unbeliever will not be pruned. Rather, the unbeliever will be cut off and cast into the fire.
If you are a believer the Husbandman, God, will cut you. It is called pruning, and it is painful. But the result will be more fruit produced in your life. Will His pruning cause suffering? Yes. But the point of it all is fruitfulness, which is accomplished when you love other believers, John 15.12 and 17.
If you are not a believer the Husbandman, God, will cut you, as well. But His cutting of you will not be any pruning to improve your fruitfulness. It will be cutting you as in cutting you off before casting you into the fire.
What can be concluded from John 15.1? Two things, basically. First, the Lord Jesus Christ is the True Vine. All those passages in the Old Testament about God’s demands that Israel as the vine of God bear fruit? That will occur only in relation to Jesus Christ because He is the True Vine. He is the actual fulfillment of all the hopes and promises. You have nothing, and you are nothing without the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior.
With respect to God, the Husbandman is all about fruitfulness. In a way, there is a valuable parallel to be drawn between fruitfulness and glory, because God is glorified when His own are fruitful. God is also glorified when the dead branches are cast into the fire of judgment.
What will your eternal end be? When the Husbandman cuts you, and He will cut you, will His cutting be pruning to enable you to bear Him more fruit? Or will His cutting be cutting you off to then cast you into the fire?
Those questions are answered by your relationship with Christ. Do you know Him? Have you trusted Him? Does your life display a vital relationship with Jesus Christ? Not perfection, mind you but change. If you are a believer in Christ, you are called upon to abide in Christ. If you are not a believer in Christ, your only hope is to turn from your sins and come to Christ.
Come to Christ today.
Come to Christ now.
Some of you responded to a recent missionary’s message, affirming you are lost.
Isn’t it time you got serious about your sins, your soul, your salvation?
__________
[1] 2 Corinthians 5.14
[2] Isaiah 14.13-14
[3] Kostenberger, pages 446, 450.
[4] Walvoord & Zuck, page 325, D. A. Carson, page 513, and Andreas J. Kostenberger, page 450.
[5] Walvoord & Zuck, page 325.
[6] John 10.10
[7] John 20.17
[8] Bauer, page 196.
Would you like to contact Dr. Waldrip about this sermon? Please contact him by clicking on the link below. Please do not change the subject within your email message. Thank you.
Pastor@CalvaryRoadBaptist.Church