The True Vine

I. THE VINE IN THE VITAL UNITY OF ALL ITS PARTS. We shall best understand this thought if we recur to some of those great vines in royal conservatories, where, for hundreds of yards, the pliant branches stretch along the espaliers, and yet one life pervades the whole, from the root, through the crooked stem, right away to the last leaf at the top of the furthest branch, and reddens and mellows every cluster. This great thought of the unity of life between Jesus Christ and all that believe upon Him is the familiar teaching of Scripture, and is set forth also by the metaphor of the body and its members. Personality remains, but across the awful gulf of the individual consciousness, which parts us from one another, Jesus Christ assumes the Divine prerogative of passing and joining Himself to each of us. A oneness of life, which is the sole cause of fruitfulness and growth, is taught us here. This is a oneness which results

1. In a oneness of relation to God. In this relation He is the Son, and we in Him receive the standing of sons. He has access ever into the Father’s presence, and we through Him and in Him have access with confidence and are accepted in the Beloved.

2. In relation to men, if He be Light, we touched with His light, are also, in our measure and degree, the lights of the world; and in the proportion in which we receive the power of His Spirit, we, too, become God’s anointed--“As the Father hath sent Me, even so send I you.”

3. In regard of character, this union results in a similarity of character, and with His righteousness we are clothed.

4. In regard to the future, we can look forward and be sure that we are so closely joined with Him, that it is impossible but that where He is, there shall also His servants be. And as He sits on the Father’s throne, His children must needs sit with Him on His throne.

5. Therefore the name of the collective whole is Christ. And, as in the great Old Testament prophecy of the servant of the Lord, the figure fluctuates between that which is the collective Israel and the personal Messiah; so the “Christ” is not only the individual Redeemer, but the whole of that redeemed Church, of which it is said, “it is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.”

II. THE HUSBANDMAN AND THE DRESSING OF THE VINE. The one tool that a vinedresser needs is a knife, and the one kind of husbandry spoken of here is pruning--not manuring, not digging, but simply the hacking away of all that is rank and dead.

1. Fruitless branches mean all those who have a mere superficial adherence to the true vine. If there be any real union, there will be some life, and therefore some fruit. And so the application is to those nominal adherents to Christianity, who, if you ask them to put down in the census paper what they are, will say that they are Christians, Churchmen, or Dissenters, as the case may be, but who have no real hold upon Jesus Christ, and no real reception of anything from Him; and the “taking away” is simply that God makes visible, what is a fact, that they do not belong to Him with whom they have this nominal connection. The longer Christianity continues in any country, the more does the Church get weighted and lowered in its temperature by the aggregation round about it of people of that sort. And one sometimes longs and prays for a storm to come, of some sort or other, to blow the dead wood out of the tree, and to get rid of all this oppressive and stifling weight of sham Christians that has come round every one of our churches.

2. The pruning of the fruitful branches. We all, in our Christian life, carry with us the two sources--our own poor, miserable self, and the better life of Jesus Christ within us. The one flourishes at the expense of the other; and it is the Husbandman’s merciful, though painful work, to cut back unsparingly the rank shoots that come from self, in order that all the force of our lives may be flung into the growing of the cluster which is acceptable to Him.

III. THE BRANCHES ABIDING IN THE VINE AND THEREFORE FRUITFUL.

1. Union with Christ is the condition of all fruitfulness. There may be plenty of activity and yet barrenness. Works are not fruit. We can bring forth a great deal “of ourselves,” and because it is of ourselves it is naught.

2. There is the great glory and distinctive blessedness of the gospel. Other teachers come to us and tell us how we ought to live, and give us laws, examples, reasons, motives. The gospel comes and gives us life, and unfolds itself in us into all the virtues that we have to possess. What is the use of giving a man a copy if he cannot copy it? Morality comes and stands over the cripple, and says to him, “Look here! This is how you ought to walk.” But Christianity comes and bends over Him, and lays hold of his hand, and says, “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk.”

3. Our reception of that power depends upon our own efforts. “Abide in Me and I in you.” Suppress yourselves, and empty your lives of self, that the life of Christ may come in. A lock upon a canal, if it is empty, will have its gates pressed open by the water in the canal and will be filled.