The Fruit of the Vine

A vixE is planted solely for the sake of its fruit. There are many sorts of yines, each with its different sort of fruit. When a husbandman plants a vine or a vineyard, he selects that special sort of which he desires to have the fruit. The fruit will be the manifestation of his purpose. When God planted the Heavenly Vine, it was that its fruit might bring life and strength to dying men. The very life of God, which man had lost by the fall, was to be brought back to him by Christ from heaven; Christ was to be to men the True Tree of Life. In Him, the True, the Heavenly Vine, in His Word and work, in His life and death, the life of God was brought within reach of men; all who should eat of the fruit should live for ever.

* After I had written a little book just pubUshed, The Mystery of the True Vine, I felt how little I had realised or sufficiently emphasised the wonderful place that Fruit takes in Christ’s teaching in the parable. In these six chapters on Fruit, No Fruit, More Fruit, Much Fruit, Abiding Fruit, Fruit and Prayer, I have tried in some measure to make up for what is lackingthere. — A.M.

b THE FRUIT OF THE VINE.

More wonderful still, Christ’s disciples should not only eat and live, but in their turn again become fruit-bearing branches. The Divine life entering into them should not only dwell in them, but so assert its quickening power that it should show itself in the fruit they bear for their fellow-men. As truly as the Heavenly Vine, all its branches receive the life of God.

I. THE LIFE IX THE VIXE.

We often speak of receiving Christ, following Christ, of Christ living in us, when our ideas of what Christ is are very vague. Christ gave Himself a sacrifice to God for men, and that proved what is the true nobility of man as partaker of the Divine nature. We speak, and rightly too, of the obedience of Christ as the meritorious cause of our salvation: “By the obedience of One many were made righteous.” But we do not sufficiently recognise what it was that gave that obedience its redeeming power. It was this — that in it Christ restored that which is the one only thing that the creature can render to its Creator, and so rendered to God what man owed to Him. It is because of this obedience He became a Redeemer, and this disposition is the very life which as the Heavenly Vine He imparts. “Let this mind be in you, which was in Christ Jesus, who became obedient unto death. Therefore God hath highly exalted Him.” The life of God in human nature is obedience to the death.

And with that Christ loved men. In that He fulfilled the will of God. He gave Himself to the mighty Kedeeming love of God towards men, and so gave Himself as much to men as to God. There is no possible way of living for God but by loving and living for the men whom He loves and lives for. The human life in Christ could be nothing but a surrender to His love to be used in saving and blessing men. Whether in God, or in Christ, or in us, the Divine life is love to men. This is the life-sap of the True Vine, the spirit that was in Christ Jesus.

II. THE LIFE IN THE BRANCH.

It is essentially and entirely the same as that in the Vine. If we would bear fruit, it can only come as the life and the power that work in the Vine work in us. This alone is the secret of effective service.

In Christian work a great mistake is often made. The difference between work and fruit is overlooked. Under a sense of duty or from an inborn love of work, a Christian may be very diligent in doing his work for God, and yet find little blessing in it. He may think of gratitude as the great motive of the Christian life, and not understand that though that may stir the will, it cannot give the power to work successfully. We need to see that if work is to be acceptable and effectual, it must come as fruit; it must be the spontaneous outgrowth of a healthy vigorous life, the Spirit and power of Christ living and working in us. And that power can only work freely and effectually in us as our chief care is to maintain the relationship to our Lord close and intimate. As He streams His dispositions into us, our work will truly be the fruit the Vine bears.

Still another mistake is made. We pray very earnestly for God’s blessing on our work and on those whom we wish to help. We forget that the God who delights to bless wishes to bless ourselves first, to give into our hearts the blessing He wants to impart through us. We are not channels, in the sense in which a leaden or an earthen pipe is when it conveys water, and yet does not drink it in. We are channels in the way the branch is. The sap of the vine, before it goes through it to form fruit, first enters to be its life, to give it new wood and strength, and then passes on into the grape. When we preach the love of God and obedience to Him, when we call men to yield themselves to that love, we must first seek each day to be receiving afresh, in close communion with Christ Jesus, that love and devotion to God into our own hearts. When we teach love to man, we should do it as those in whom the fruit of the Spirit, which is love, is manifest in its freshness and beauty.

It is by having exactly the same spirit that was in Christ Jesus, and being possessed of the same mind and disposition that was in Him, that we can bear the same fruit He bore, that He can still bring forth fruit through us. And this spirit we cannot have by any imitation or effort, but only by receiving it fresh from Himself every morning and all the day. An intense devotion to God and an entire yielding up of ourselves to His service for men, and giving up of our life to live, and love, and die for men, as Jesus did, this is the life to which the branches of the True Vine are called, this is the life for which the True Vine will surely fit us. His words are true: He is the Truth and the Life. He gives all He promises. Count no time too precious and no pains too great, in waiting on Him by His Spirit to reveal to you the wondrous mystery of your being a branch, a partaker of the very Life there is in the Vine.

IIT. THE LIFE IX THE FRUIT.

If we have understood how the life in the Father, the Husbandman, and the life in the Son, the Vine, and the life in the Believer, the Branch, are, and cannot but be, one and the same, we shall easily see how it must still be the very same in the fruit the branch bears. It is of the utmost consequence to get a firm hold of this: tJie life, and words, and works of a believer can carry the life of God and convey it to Ms fellow-men. Our whole life, with all we are and do, can be the fruit of the Vine.

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