Harvest 2026 | Called To Be Fruitful

David, thank you for your welcome.

It wasn't too much of a hardship to come over to our dear

friends and along.

So good to be here this evening and good to see the girls

gathered here.

So, girls, eight years ago I stood in this position and it was

probably a different group of girls.

So lovely to see you here tonight.

And as I was walking down from the car over to the church building,

there was a little thing in my head saying, no, it's not the Sunday

after Christmas that I expected to be walking down that

little path or whatever.

We're still in October and that's good.

So great to be with you and thanks again for the ministry of

the choir and all the musicians.

It's been a blessing.

If I.

And girls, don't panic.

I'm not going to do this.

The sort of.

The teacher in me would nearly be thinking, right, I'll just focus

on these girls.

Not that I'm going to pick on you, but I want you to feel very

much part of this service tonight.

So I'm going to ask a question.

I'm not actually expecting you to shout out the answer, although

if somebody does that, it's not going to be the end of the world.

But in our United States Kingdom, the four nations, if you

like, of the United Kingdom, each of those four parts has a national

symbol.

And I know that you very bright girls and Annalong would know

what all of those are.

So we'll start closer to home here on this emerald island.

The national symbol that we all think about on St. Patrick's

Day is of course, the shamrock.

You all knew that.

Yeah, you did.

And then if we go over to Bonnie Scotland, the national symbol.

Anybody want to shout out what the national symbol of Bonnie Scotland

is?

The thistle.

Yes, indeed.

And what about Wales?

What's the national symbol of Wales?

Anybody want to shout out the lake, the good old lake.

And then our friends in England, what is the national symbol

there?

The rose.

Yes.

Okay.

Now, the reason I say all of that, girls and everyone else is

that in Jesus Day amongst the people of Israel, there was a national

symbol, if you like.

And it was not the shamrock or the rose or the lake or the thistle,

but it was the vine.

It was the vine.

And the vine had in some way become a kind of national symbol.

It appeared on coins, it appeared on the temple gates.

So it was a very important image.

And of course, there was a Bible background to all of that.

For example, Psalm 88, you brought a vine out of Egypt, the

prophets, Hosea 10.

Israel was a spreading vine and the people of Israel prided themselves

in being the vine.

They were the vine.

But here's Jesus who comes along, and so often he just turns

the whole thing on its head.

And Jesus appears one day and he says, I am the vine.

I am the vine.

I am the vine.

And so, girls and everyone else, Jesus was simply teaching here

that he was the center of everything.

And in this passage that David read earlier from the Gospel of John,

in this first little section, it's all about the teaching that

Jesus is the vine.

And to summarize the thrust of this section, he is teaching the

that when we come to trust in Jesus, which we must, that we are

the branches connected to the vine.

So what I want to do this evening, just for a little time,

is to speak about the theme of spiritual fruitfulness.

Okay?

And being the typical Presbyterian minister, I have three

headings.

And the first one is the call to be fruitful.

And you can see on the screen there, and if you've got your Bible,

open that in John, chapter 15.

John 15 · chapter mention

In those verses 2, 4, 5 and 8, it speaks about being fruitful.

And what this passage is teaching us tonight is that the Lord

Jesus calls us not so much to successfulness, but to fruitfulness.

And we think of other passages in the Bible, and in particular in

the New Testament, Galatians 5, the famous passage on the fruit

of the Spirit.

Love, joy, peace, and all of that.

Colossians 1:10.

Colossians 1:10

Live a life worthy, bearing fruit.

In every good work.

Tonight we think about fruitfulness.

Sometimes we equate fruitfulness with winning other people

for Christ.

And of course, that is very, very important.

And you'll allow me to give a little plug.

We were praying for you, dear folks, as you were having your special

time of mission in recent times.

And in Kilkeel, we are having a special week of mission in November.

And we would covet your prayers for that.

The 15th to the 22nd of November.

And we are praying not just for that week, but certainly for

that week, that people who maybe don't always come to church,

that they will come, and that they will hear the good news of the

Lord Jesus.

And that they will come to put their trust and faith in him.

And so we long for people to come to know the Lord.

And fruitfulness, yes, it's about seeing people come to know

the Lord, but also girls and everyone else.

Fruitfulness is about growing in the Lord when we come to know

him.

And maybe some of you young girls, and I'm sure this is true,

some of you already would profess to be following the Lord

Jesus.

And it's our prayer for you, as indeed for all the older people,

that we would not just profess to believe in the Lord Jesus, but

that we would actually grow in him and grow to love him with all

of our hearts and our lives and grow not only to love him, but

grow to be like Him.

To be like Him.

I don't know whether you've been mentioned here.

It probably has.

Some of you will listen to podcasts and a colleague of David

and ours, the Reverend David Cupples, who used to be minister

in Enniskillen, David has started sending out a podcast.

Apparently he has about nearly 400 little messages.

So there you are.

It's going to take a little while for those all to go out, but

they're quite short, only about 15 minutes.

But here's the thing, girls, what you think about this?

Do you know what he has called the podcast?

It's called Little Christs.

Some of you are surprised at that.

Little Christs.

And that comes from C.S.

Lewis famous book called Basic Christianity, where Lewis once said

that at the very heart of the Christian message, as we come to

Jesus Christ, God does something in us to make us like a

little Christ.

Now there's a sense in which we could never be like the Christ.

But it's not irreverent to speak this way.

We are called to be like Christ, girls.

Remember that.

Think about that.

Robert Meringue MacShane is a name that is much revered and he

was a young Scottish minister many years ago and he died as a young

man.

But he left a great legacy.

And one of the famous things that he said was, it is not great

talents that God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus,

girls.

All of us, we are called not only to come to Jesus, but to allow

him to work in us.

That we will become like Jesus.

Isn't that an amazing and wonderful thing?

Let me say this on a slightly more sterner note.

The late and highly respected Dr. John Girvin.

I'm sure he probably preached here.

I can't definitively say that, but highly respected.

I was always struck by something he said quite a number

of years ago.

And he said this, and I quote his exact words, it is one of the

great tragedies of Ulster that the message of the evangel has been

brought into disrepute because of the gross inconsistencies of too

many who claim to have had a born again experience.

And so it's possible for us to make some profession.

And yet when people see our lives, they do not see something

of Jesus that is a tragedy.

May God work in all of us that that is never the case.

Jesus says, this is to my Father's glory that you bear much

fruit showing yourself to be my disciples.

So the call to spiritual fruitfulness.

Secondly, the reason to be fruitful.

So the call to be fruitful.

Secondly, the reason to be fruitful.

And we see it just state it very simply.

By Jesus in verse 8.

By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit

and so prove to be my disciples.

By this is my Father glorified.

Girls, let me tell you a little true story, a very short little

story.

There was once a man again in Scotland.

His name was William Burns, and he was called to go to China.

And one day somebody who didn't believe the gospel and wasn't

a very nice person came to him and said, oh, Mr. Burns, I suppose

you're going to China to try to convert all the Chinese.

And William Burns said to him, no, I'm going to China to glorify

God.

What a difference.

What a wonderful response.

And girls and everyone else here, the reason that we are called

to be fruitful is for the glory of God.

As certainly a considerable number of us here tonight are Presbyterians

and Irish Presbyterians.

We know at least the first question and answer in our Shorter

Catechism.

What is man's chief end?

Man's chief end and girl's chief end is to glorify God and to

enjoy him forever.

What does that mean?

Well, it means that in whatever we do, wherever we are,

at school, in the classroom, at home, in the kitchen, outside

in the field, down the street, in the grocery store, wherever we

are, whatever we are doing, whoever we are with that there is

this thought within our hearts put there by the Spirit, that we

are to seek to do everything to the glory of God.

So, girls and everyone else, to be a Christian is not just a Sunday

morning thing for an hour on a Sunday morning or an hour on a Sunday

evening.

And then we just do our own thing.

To be a Christian is to seek by the grace of God to love and follow

and.

And serve the Lord Jesus every single day of every single week.

And people will say, well, how on earth is that possible?

It is not possible in our strength, but by the grace of God

and the Spirit of God, all things are possible.

The choir sang, There was a line there picked up about the glory

of God.

And Jesus says, this is to the glory of God that you're fruitful.

And the Apostle Paul said, whatever you do do it to the glory

of God.

The third thing I say is not only about the call to be fruitful,

and not only the reason to be fruitful, but thirdly, the way to

be fruitful.

So let me just remind you, if you've got your Bible open, look

at verse four.

Because in this little section there's a phrase and a word that

keeps occurring, and it's the word abide.

Abide.

Verse 4.

Abide in me, and I in you.

As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides

in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.

I'm the vine, you're the branches.

Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that will bear much

fruit.

For apart from me, you can do nothing.

So, girls, you may have somebody in your family, maybe a

parent or a grandparent or a big brother or a big sister or an

auntie or an uncle or someday.

And outside they've got the greenhouse and maybe they have a

little vine.

And you've seen the grapes growing, or you've gone into a fruit

shop and you've seen the lovely little bunches of vines.

And the point is that Jesus says, those little grapes that are

growing, they only were able to grow because they were connected

to the vine.

They didn't grow on their own apart from the vine.

They weren't able to grow.

So here's a question, and it teaches us.

This passage teaches us what is a Christian.

That's a very basic Christian.

But at heart, a Christian is someone who is in union with Jesus.

A Christian is someone who is united through repentance and faith

to Jesus.

A Christian is someone who.

Who has thrown themselves onto Jesus.

A Christian is someone who has a real living relationship with Jesus.

But here's the question that I want to come back to again.

Whether you're a young girl in the girls brigade or an older person

here tonight at this Monday night harvest service in Annalong.

How do we grow as followers of Jesus?

How do we grow as.

As Christians?

Well, Jesus speaks here of abiding in him.

In fact, if you look carefully, the passage speaks about

a double abiding.

Jesus says, abide in me and I will abide in you.

We are to abide in Christ and to allow Christ to abide in us.

There is a sense in the Christian life that we every day

submit to him and yield to him and surrender to him and his control,

our dependency is on him.

I'm sure you sing that lovely old hymn, lovely old hymn that has

the refrain each time Trust and obey.

For there's no other way to be happy in Jesus but to trust and obey.

One of the verses, verse four, I think, is quite striking.

Striking.

Some of you will know it well.

But we never can prove the delights of his love until all on

the altar we lay.

For the favour he shows and the joy he bestows are for those

who will trust and obey.

This sense of abiding in Jesus, yielding all to Jesus, and

allowing, humanly speaking, the Lord to have control of all of

us.

That's the secret to a blessed Christian life.

Christian growth comes from within.

Girls, I have to keep a wee eye on the time, but there's something

I want to show you here.

And so let me lift up this bag and I have two things in this bag.

I'm not really sure which one to bring out first.

Well, I'll bring.

No, I'll bring this one out first.

Okay, now you all know what that is.

We're back to me walking down the hill and reminding myself that

it wasn't quite the Sunday after Christmas.

It's a little bauble, isn't it, that you put on your tree?

Now I've got something else I want to show you, okay?

Something else connected to a tree.

A lovely cooking apple.

And this is the time when I. I'm sure there's some great produce

from the analong manse, but the Kilkilmanse for many decades

has had a wonderful apple tree, and I don't know how many decades

it has been there.

My theory, for those of you who are interested in history, is

that before the Presbyterians had that piece of ground, the Moravians

had that piece of ground and they loved to grow apple trees.

And I think this apple tree has been there a very long time,

and every year, girls, it produces a great harvest.

Now, I could get carried away here, but will not.

Here's my point.

The little bauble on the Christmas tree and the apple on the

apple tree, how did these get on these trees?

Well, this little bauble, when it comes to Christmas time, you lift

it out of the box and you stick it onto the tree, it comes

onto the tree from the outside.

This apple, on the other hand, has not been lifted out of any box,

it has not been stuck onto the tree, it has come from inside the

tree.

And girls, there's really a great lesson here.

If I was to ask everyone else which one of these is more akin to

the Christian life, and the answer, of course, is not the bauble,

which comes from the outside and is stuck on, but it's the apple

that comes from the inside and appears.

And, you know, if I was to ask you this evening, as I try to draw

this message to a close, your Christianity, is it more like a Christmas

tree Christianity that everything stuck on from the outside,

or is it more like the apple tree where nothing's stuck on from

the outside, it all comes from the inside.

Girls, learn this lesson if you learn nothing else.

True Christianity is about God doing something deep in our hearts

and changing our hearts and turning our hearts around and giving

us a love for Jesus and a love for the church that wasn't there

before and that begins to appear.

And so in your life, you discover yourself saying, you know,

I used to say, I don't really want to go to church, but I now want

to go to church.

I used to say, oh, I don't really want to get involved in the

gb, but I now want to get involved in the gb.

And that's the work of God in you.

And we could say many things about this, but folks, the call to

be fruitful, the reason to glorify God and the way.

So the challenge for all of us tonight as we finish this little

time together on a Monday evening, is your Christianity just

about what you look like on the outside and how you present yourself,

and yet you know that your heart's not right.

That's never going to do.

And it will not do on the great day when we stand before the

Lord.

Allow the Lord to touch your heart, to awaken you to your real

need of a savior and to the truth that God needs to work inside

us to produce all the fruit on the outside.

And then it will not just be something we put on for a show, it

will be something that's real.

It's coming from the spirit and coming from Christ.

So, girls, many lessons tonight.

God wants you to be fruitful, to live for him.

But you'll only do that when you allow his Holy Spirit to work

inside you, bringing you to Jesus, helping you to trust in Jesus

and then to see what he will do in bringing the spiritual fruit

in your life.

A wee prayer just before we sing.

Father, we thank you that you call us to be fruitful.

And we pray tonight not only for these girls, but for all of us,

Lord, that you would work in us, a wonderful work of grace, that

the fruit of the spirit of being like Christ will be seen in

our lives and will be seen in other people's hearts as we reflect

Jesus to them.

Help us, we pray for Christ's sake, Amen.