Phil Cox Phil Cox
Home Recent Previous Series Phil's background Creation and science Miscellaneous Links Contact Phil
Next Fruitfulness

Fruitfulness - Part 1

25th August 2012

Do you have ambitions? What's your personal agenda? What do you really want? I shared my top agenda item with you in a column I wrote on the last day of last year. You can find it at New Year 2012 31th. I quoted:

Philippians 3:10-11
I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.

I want to know Christ. I want to know Him as well as I can. I want to live as close to Christ as I can. I want to understand Him, I want to sense His presence. I want to be led by His Spirit.

And I want to know the power of His resurrection. I want to see the power of God at work in me and in those around me. I want to see lots of miracles in my church. I want to see many people healed.

And I want to share His sufferings, so that my old life may be put to death, so that I can live in newness of life. I know that I became a new creation the day I believed in Jesus, my sins were forgiven and the Holy Spirit came to live in me. But I also know that the man I was is still fighting against the man I'm becoming. And I want the new, resurrection me to be victorious. And I know that it's by sharing in Christ's sufferings that I can know victory.

That's still top of my agenda. Perhaps it's also top of yours?

Point two on my agenda is this: I want to be fruitful in my service for Him. And I expect you do.

Jesus has done so much for me, not only His amazing sacrifice on the cross to redeem me from my sins but every day he provides for me, and teaches me, and encourages me, and leads me on. And every day He forgives me. And I want to serve Him in gratitude. And this world desperately needs the love, joy and peace that only the kingdom of God can bring. I want my service to make a difference. And, I expect, so do you.

When we say we want to bear fruit for God, I think that includes:

I've always been struck by the parable of the sower in Matthew 13. You'll remember that some seed fell on good soil, and some didn't. And the good soil is "the man who hears the word and understands it". The seed that fell on good soil produced a crop - a hundred, sixty or thirty fold. And I always wanted to be a 100-fold sort of person. And I've always wondered why some produces 100 fold, some 60 and some only 30. I don't think I have the whole answer but I'd like to look at some parts of the answer, starting in John 15.

The first and most obvious key to fruitfulness is: ensure you're genuinely connected to the vine.

John 15:1-2a
"I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit..."

Jesus asks us to imagine him as a vine - the only true vine. As you know, a vine typically has many branches, and all the healthy branches produce grapes. And each Christian is one branch of this True Vine - Jesus Christ. All good fruit - all spiritual grapes, if you like - come from the one vine that is Jesus. There are many passages of scripture that teach that Christianity is totally different from all other religions - that it's the one and only true religion. And this is another. There is only one True Vine - Jesus.

There are some members of some churches who appear to be Christians, except that they bear no fruit. Jesus says that God the Father cuts all such people off and discards them. That's a hard saying, but the purpose of a vine branch is to bear fruit, and the purpose of a Christian is to bear spiritual fruit. The Holy Spirit will bear some fruit in everybody who is born again.

This is one way to check if we're genuine Christians: those who bear no spiritual fruit may look and sound like Christians, but they're not. Are you more kind, more patient, more generous, more self-controlled than you used to be? If not, please take time now to check that you have real faith in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus and a real experience of relationship with God. If not, this is the time to repent and believe, and be joined to the true vine.

The second key to fruitfulness is co-operate with God when he comes to prune you.

John 15:2b
... while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful."

Jesus says that, even if we do bear fruit, God will prune us. And being pruned by God can be a very uncomfortable business, when the Holy Spirit comes and takes away some unhealthy part of us: an attitude, or a habit, or a way of speaking to people, or a hobby that takes up too much time, or whatever He decides we'd be better off without. But if God is pruning us, He's got a good reason. It's so we can bear more fruit.

John 15:3
You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you.

In Greek, the verb to prune and the verb to clean are the same. Jesus says that when we receive the word of God and believe it and, in response, we repent and are born again as children of God, we're definitively pruned, or cleaned. God definitively sets us free from sin at that moment. But after we're born again, we still sin, although a true Christian sins much less than he used to.

This is a second test of whether we're genuine Christians. Do you sin less than you did?

Christians still need pruning. Not the major surgery we needed then, but still God's pruning shears come out to lop off bits of us that stop us being unfruitful. Is that OK? Does God have the right to do that to us? Yes! Christ Jesus paid for us with His own blood. We are no longer our own, we belong to Him:

1 Corinthians 6:19-20
... You are not your own; you were bought at a price...

God has the right to do with us whatever He wants. Fortunately for us, what He wants to do is make us more fruitful. And if we want to be fruitful for God, we'll gladly accept His pruning, because it'll make us more fruitful.

And I suspect that the pruning hurts much more, and takes much longer, when we struggle.

More on fruitfulness next week.

Next Fruitfulness