The Parable of the Vine: Understanding True Spiritual Growth

Good morning. It is our privilege and joy here at Dillingham Moravian Church to

be able to lead you in the study of God's Word.

My name is Pastor Simon. Here at DMC, our mission is to make disciples of Christ

as we shine the light of God's Word throughout Bristol Bay, Southwest Alaska, and beyond.

There is a story of a Canadian missionary who worked amongst a small tribe in

India for only a small number of years until the government kicked him out of

that country and sent him home.

The missionary believed for much of his later life that the ministry he did

in India was practically worthless.

Yet one of the handful of disciples that he made for Christ became chief of

all the villages in the hill country.

Years later, there were thousands upon thousands of Christ believers in those hills.

And the son of that chief traveled to Moody Bible College to go to seminary

and to learn to translate the Bible into their own language.

That son traveled to see the missionary in Canada who started it with his faithfulness

to Christ so that he could share to that missionary the fruit that came from

his faithful abiding to Christ.

I'm sharing this story with you because our understanding of what fruit is and

what true growth in Christ looks like is often skewed and influenced by the

world's understanding. Let's pray.

Father, help us to learn about you. Help us to learn your son's ways.

Help us to live in your love. Lord, I pray, Lord, that you would speak through

me this morning, that it be not me that is speaking and teaching, but you, Father.

May you be glorified on all that is said, and may you work in all those who

hear this message this morning.

In your precious Son's name, Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen.

Turn with me today to John chapter 15, verse 6 through 8.

John 15:6–8

John chapter 15, verse 6 through 8, where Jesus taught his disciples,

John 15:6–8

If anyone does not abide in me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up.

They gather them and cast them into the fire and they are burned.

If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish,

and it will be done for you.

My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be my disciples.

In John chapter 15, verse 1 through 5, our Lord Jesus taught that He is the

John 15:1–5

true vine, and our Father God is the vine grower.

Jesus also taught that the Father God lovingly cleans the sin of dirt off of

us, we who are the branches, so that we can produce fruit for His glory.

Lastly, disciples of Christ were called to abide in Christ, and as they abide

in Christ, they will bear fruit for the glory of God.

And today, we'll continue on and we will look at verses 6 through 8.

There are three crucial overarching truths in this passage that I want to bring to your attention.

The first truth that I want to show you is that those who do not abide in Christ

will be cast away and burned in the fire.

As I was writing this sermon from my kitchen table, I could see the kiwi plants

that my wife Abigail is growing in the hydroponic systems in our kitchen.

Kiwi plants are vines, and our vines are very quickly taking over that part of the kitchen.

In fact, one of the kiwi vines had reached the ceiling and was attempting to

grow across the ceiling towards the cabinets on the other side of the kitchen.

However, one of the kiwi vines had a branch that was dying.

The leaves were drying up, curling, and many of the leaves were falling off the vine.

And if that branch there was not pruned, the rot in that branch would spread

to the other branches, and the vine would die.

And this is very similar to what Jesus was teaching on in John chapter 15.

John 15 · chapter mention

Granted, Jesus, as the true vine, will never die.

But when branches of Christ's vine are spiritually rotten or dead,

they can have disastrous effects on the rest of the branches.

Jesus proclaimed in John 15, verse 2, Every branch in me that does not bear

John 15:2

fruit, he takes away, and every branch that bears fruit, he cleans it,

so that it may bear more fruit.

Jesus went on in John 15, verse 6, If anyone does not abide in me,

John 15:6

he is thrown away as a branch and dries up, and they gather them and cast them

into the fire, and they are burned.

There are two principles I'd like to point out to you in these verses.

The first principle is that the Father, who is the vine dresser,

takes away the branches that are not bearing fruit.

It's important that we take note that Jesus viewed not abiding in Christ and

not bearing fruit as evidence that a person is not saved from the wrath of God

in the first place and is not a Christ believer.

I want you to all see, and this is super important, that abiding in Christ and

producing fruit for the Father, our vine grower, is Christ's definition of what

it means to be a believing disciple of Christ.

The Father, as the vinedresser, removes the diseased, rotten,

or dead branches that are part of the physical, larger, universal church,

but do not actually abide in Christ and are not part of God's chosen elect.

They're not saved from the wrath of God.

These people could be those who have a variety of cultural and background reasons

for routinely attending church.

They even could be involved in the church. And yet they never truly surrendered

control of their life to Christ as their only Lord.

These dead branches definitely could also include false teachers,

false believers, who are intent on leading people astray.

The dead branches could also refer to those who, due to false teaching and influence,

believe that they are saved from God's wrath, and yet in reality are not yet

saved, and born again into the new life of the Spirit.

It is also possible that Jesus was referring to the vines or branches that are

not part of Christ's vine that have come from the outside and are strangling

and infecting the main vine.

I want to focus your attention back to John chapter 15 verse 6 where Jesus said,

John 15:6

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.

Jesus was talking about removing the dead or diseased branches so that they

dry out and then later burning those branches that do not abide in Christ.

Jesus definitely was making the analogy between throwing the dead or infected

branches that have dried out in the fire and the future judgment of throwing

the wicked into everlasting fires of hell,

Jesus implied that there was a time of waiting between when the dead branch

is pruned and then all the dead and dried branches will be gathered together and burned.

But I want you to notice that Jesus didn't tell us when the Father would remove

the dead and diseased branches that could or are infecting the other fruit-producing branches.

Why not get rid of the wicked from among the universal church community now?

Would definitely make the witness of the church and our ability to love each

other much easier, wouldn't it?

The church and the world, for that matter, would be a much more peaceful place.

And yet Jesus explained in Matthew chapter 13 part of God's reasoning for waiting

Matthew 13 · chapter mention

to remove the wicked and waiting to execute eternal judgment upon the wicked,

who are lurking amongst the people of God.

Let's look at Matthew chapter 13, verse 24 to 30.

Matthew 13:24–30

He, meaning Jesus, presented another parable to them, saying,

The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field.

But while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat and went away.

But when the wheat sprouted and bore grain, then the tares became evident also.

The slaves of the landowner came and said to him, Sir, did you not sow good

seed in your field? How then does it have tares?

And he said to them, An enemy has done this. The slave said to him,

Do you want us then to go and gather them up?

But he said, No, for while you are gathering up the tares, you may uproot the wheat with them.

Allow both to grow together until the harvest. And in the time of the harvest,

I will say to the reapers, First gather up the tares and bind them in bundles

to burn them up, but gather the wheat into my barn.

God, in his infinite wisdom, has decided that to pull up the weeds or diseased

or dead branches that have infiltrated and are choking some of the wheat or

the grapevine branches would end up causing damage to the crop that is bearing fruit.

Thus, God will patiently wait to the time of the harvest before he prunes or

takes away those branches and burns them.

Back in John 15, the second principle I want to bring your attention to is that

God prunes the branches of those who are bearing fruit for him.

Jesus, in John 15, verse 2, instructed, Every branch in me that does bear fruit,

John 15:2

he takes away. And every branch that bears fruit, he cleans it so that it may bear more fruit.

It's essential that we understand that when Jesus referred to the fruit-bearing

branches, they were in sharp distinction from those branches that did not bear fruit or were dead wood.

Those branches who bore fruit are the believing disciples of Jesus Christ.

However, there's two ways that the word clean can be translated.

First way is where the vine worker cleans and lifts the branches that have dirt

or mud on them so that the branch does not rot and infect the rest of the vine.

The vine worker cleans off the mud, the dirt off the leaves and lifts that branch

and those leaves up again.

The second way of understanding the word prune or as to remove leaves or parts

of the branches that are diseased and rotting.

This is crucial because God the Father prunes out the things in our lives as

individual Christ followers and as congregations that are infected with sin

that needs to be removed.

The Lord often prunes the sin-infected area of our lives through His loving discipline.

Let's look at Hebrews 12, verse 10-11.

Hebrews 12:10–11

And we need to understand that the author of Hebrews was writing to disciples of Christ.

Verse 10, For they, referring to our earthly fathers, disciplined us for a short

time as they seemed best, or as they seemed best to them.

But his disciplines are for our benefit.

Here's what I want you to see. So that we may share his holiness.

And all discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but to those who are

being trained by it. And please pay attention to this.

Afterwards, it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.

I'm sharing this scripture with you to show you that God's lovingly hard discipline

is a crucial tool that the Father uses in His pruning process to make His branches

healthy and productive for the glory of God.

There are two applications that I see in these verses here.

The first truth for us to learn as disciples of Christ is that there are spiritually

dead or diseased branches amongst God's people.

Yes, as disciples of Christ, we are saints who sin, yet there are also unbelievers

in the larger church, and even to use the biblical metaphor.

Wolves in sheep clothing that inhabit church communities in the larger church.

It's important for us to be aware of this fact and be on alert.

This is one of the reasons why God has appointed pastors and elders and biblical

teachers who are shepherds of his local expressions of his larger flock.

Using God's word through the Holy Spirit, pastors and elders are to watch over

the flock with diligence and guard to make sure false teaching and teachers

do not come into their congregation.

One of the best ways we can do this is by making sure that whatever is preached

and taught is based in and from God's word, the Bible,

and to train and teach their congregations that have sufficient knowledge and

understanding the scriptures so that they can tell for themselves which is truth or falsehood.

Elders and pastors, after using the Matthew 18 process of repentance,

are to remove false teachers and those who are unrepentant for the rebellion from congregation.

Sadly, many churches and colleges and seminaries who were once biblically sound

have rebelled against Christ and teach and promote all kinds of falsehood.

How that happened, in great part, is by not having good, diligent,

biblical elders, pastors, and teachers who watched over their flocks and taught

accurately the Word of God.

And I just want to thank our elders and Bible teachers here at Dillingham Moravian

Church for being so diligent at guarding our flock and teaching us biblical truth.

Secondly, we can learn that God will remove the spiritually dead or rotten from

amongst the larger church in His timing and in His way.

And although we are called to be diligent in guarding our local congregations

against false teaching and false teachers,

we are to be patient and wait on the Lord, for vengeance belongs to the Lord,

and He will remove the wicked in His way and His timing.

This also means that we as disciples of Christ are called to share the love

and mercy to all the people in our congregations because only God really knows

who a disciple of Christ is and who is not.

And maybe Christ is working through us to bring those people to salvation.

The first overarching truth that we have learned so far in this passage is that

God the Father, who is the vinedresser, takes away the branches that are not

bearing fruit and in His timing will cast them to the judgment of being burned

in the everlasting fires of hell.

We also learn that God cleans and prunes the fruit-bearing branches of His church.

The next fundamental truth that I want to point out to you is that as Christ's

disciples, if we abide in Christ we will ask for what we ask for will be done for us.

Before Christmas, I was teaching my seminary class about this passage in regards

to how to biblically revitalize the Alaska Moravian Church.

And four of our church leaders in my class are Alaska natives,

and they've been raised in the Alaska Moravian Church.

And I shared this story to them about the impact of the Moravian Children's

Home by Kwethuk, which had orphans that came out of the 1918 flu epidemic that ravished Alaska.

Alaska Moravian Children's Home was founded in 1926 as a way to house and care

for and disciple for Christ the children that had been left behind as a result of the epidemic.

Throughout the home's history, hundreds of children were saved from death and

raised and discipled by Moravian missionaries.

One such missionary couple was the Reverend Clarence Henkelman and his wife,

who served at that children's home for 30 years of their missionary career.

Reverend Henkelman also served here in Dillingham as our pastor towards the

end of he and his wife's missionary time in Alaska.

Most of the pastors and elders and missionary helpers that God used to evangelize

and disciple for Christ southwest Alaska came out of the Moravian children's home.

It's extremely likely that the Moravian Church in Alaska and maybe even other

denominations in Alaska would not have existed to the extent that it is today

without places like the Moravian Children's Home in Kwethluk, Alaska.

It is extremely important for us as Christians today to understand that God

so often uses disasters, such as the 1918 flu epidemic,

which was horrible, but he used that epidemic to further the magnificent cause

of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I shared this story with you because we know that God answers prayer and that

he uses our faithfulness to further his kingdom.

But God, as we know from Scripture, works in mysterious ways,

and He uses situations that we would not expect to be answered or to answer our prayers.

Jesus, in John 15, verse 7, continues on.

John 15:7

If you abide in Me and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish,

and it will be done for you.

This verse is very often taken out of context to mean that if we ask for anything we want, we'll get it.

This is not what Jesus was saying at all. What is the context here?

If you abide in me and my words abide in you, then ask.

What Jesus was meaning was that as we abide or stay in constant relationship

or connection with Christ and his words,

meaning the truths, the principles, commands of God's word, and they stay in

our hearts and our thoughts, and they are constantly ruling over our emotions

and wills, then we will ask for what Christ wants us to ask.

Then Christ will give you and I what we ask for.

John, in 1 John 5, verse 14 to 15, wrote, This is the confidence with which

1 John 5:14–15

we have before him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.

And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the

requests which we have asked from him.

How can we apply this truth to us as disciples of Christ?

We all pray for our congregations. We all pray for our families and neighbors

and community. The essential question is, what do we pray for?

Do we pray for the attendance of our congregations and the ministry programs to grow?

Are we merely praying for people's health and finances and physical needs?

Or do we pray that our churches and congregations abide in Christ our mind?

Numerical growth can happen in our

churches and ministries, more and more people can tune in to our live stream

here at Dillingham Moravian Church or for our radio broadcasts and podcasts, more people

can like our congregation's page on social media. We also can and should pray for the

physical needs of our local body of Christ In our village and our region.

However, if we truly want to see revival amongst the churches in Alaska and

the spiritual awakening of Alaska to Jesus Christ,

spiritual growth and maturity has to be the first priority.

Strongholds that we cling to need to be torn down. Prayer and the study of God's

Word and discipleship needs to be the central focus.

I want to encourage you that God cares about the prayers to spiritually grow

and breathe new life into your families and into your community and,

of course, our congregations.

And the promise here in John 15, verse 7, and please listen to this,

John 15:7

is that as we abide in Christ and we have Christ's desires for our congregation

and our villages, God will answer our prayers.

We must also realize that God doesn't always answer our prayers according to the way we see life.

God considers people, circumstances, and events over thousands of years from

the perspective of being beyond and over time when and how He answers prayer.

Maybe to answer a prayer for a congregation that grows spiritually,

a person or group of people need to be removed. or a person or people need to

move to that village and start attending that church.

Or maybe God is orchestrating a disaster to strike our region or a country or

an enemy to invade so as to bring people to repentance and salvation of the Lord,

just as God did for Israel throughout almost their entire history.

Jesus went on to promise to his disciples and subsequently to us that God is

glorified in our bearing fruit.

Jesus in John chapter 15 verse 8 promised, My Father is glorified by this,

John 15:8

that you bear much fruit.

Another reason why God will answer our prayers as we abide in Christ is because

faithful God-honoring prayer produces fruit in our own lives and in the lives of those around us.

And our fruit glorifies God and proves that we are truly Christ's disciples.

Matthew 13, verse 18 to 23, proclaimed, Hear then the parable of the sower.

Matthew 13:18–23

When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it,

the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart.

This is the one on whom seed was sown beside the road.

The one on whom seed was sown on the rocky places. This is the man who hears

the word and immediately receives it with joy.

And yet he has no root in himself, but is only temporary.

And when affliction or persecution arises because of the word,

immediately he falls away.

And the one on whom seed was sown amongst the thorn, this is the one who hears the word.

And the worry of the world and deceitfulness of wealth choke the word,

and it becomes unfruitful.

And this is what I want you to focus on. And the one on whom seed was sown on

the good soil, this is the man who hears the word and understands it,

who indeed bears fruit and brings forth some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty.

Back in John chapter 15, not only does our fruit bring glory to God,

John 15 · chapter mention

but our fruit proves that we are actually disciples of Christ.

The question is, what does it mean to be a disciple of Christ?

A disciple of Christ hears the word of God, listens to it, and understands the

word by the Holy Spirit, abides in Christ his true vine, and then obeys the word.

And in response to disciples' obedience, God brings forth fruit in and through that person's life.

Now, we have to understand that fruit can come in a variety of types and sizes and amounts.

Jesus in Matthew chapter 13 taught that the fruit that is born from the plant

Matthew 13 · chapter mention

was sown on good soil that could bear fruit a hundredfold, some sixtyfold, and some thirtyfold.

I want you to see that the amount or the size of the fruit is not dependent on the disciple.

Rather, the fruit is God's doing.

When it comes to ministry, we, you and I, can labor for years and not see much fruit.

But that doesn't mean that the fruit isn't there or that it's not coming.

I say this because some ministries flourish quickly.

Their congregations and movements that they found grow rapidly and largely,

whereas some ministries seem to grow slower.

And even though the fruit is not seen from our human perspectives to grow abundantly,

The roots of the plants are growing down deep.

As we heard from our illustration about the Canadian ministry in India,

often the smallest and insignificant things in this world, and from the world's

perspective, actually are great fruit.

Fruit such as a solid, biblically healthy marriage and family,

or a small but really healthy congregation who loves God, loves God's word and

loves others and shares the gospel whenever they can however the thing about

fruit is that we can't see we can't see it.

Is that maybe you and I are not the ones who will bear the huge crop of fruit.

Maybe you and I in our lives and ministries are called to bear the smaller portion of fruit.

But those fruit, when they have surrendered to Christ and died to their old

life, meaning those people that we have discipled, including our children,

they may bear abundant fruit to the glory of God.

The first foundational truth that Jesus has taught us today is that the Father

God, the vine dresser, removes the deceased,

rotten, or dead branches, meaning unbelievers or false teachers,

from the vine so that they can eventually go to their judgment in the everlasting fires of hell.

We've also learned that God the Father prunes the sin-infected parts of the

lives of His fruit-bearing disciples and congregations so that we can abide

more in Christ and bear more fruit for the glory of God.

Secondly, Jesus taught us that as we abide in Christ and bear fruit for Him,

we will have Christ's desires and God will answer our prayers.

And lastly, Jesus taught us that God is glorified as we as Christ's disciples

bear fruit for God as evidence that we are indeed disciples of Jesus Christ.

I want to encourage us today that as disciples of Christ, you and I are part

of His vine. We are loved by God so very much, and part of the privilege of

being loved by the almighty, everlasting God of the universe.

We have the honor to love God by bringing Him glory as we abide in His Son,

Jesus Christ, and bear fruit in our lives.

I know that all of us want to see God working in the lives of our church and

in our families and our villages and the region and the world.

But for that to happen to the fullest extent, you and I must faithfully and

joyfully abide in Christ as we trust and obey his word.

Let's pray. Father God, we pray thank you for your word today.

May you grow your word in us and through us. May we abide in you. May we trust in you.

May You bear your fruit in us and bring You glory.

Thank you, Father. In your precious Son's name, Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen.

I leave you with a blessing from Romans 15, verse 13.

Romans 15:13

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing,

so that by the power of the Holy Spirit, you may abound in hope.

Have a wonderful Sunday, and may the Lord bless you.