Abideნიმუში

True Disciples and Distinction

Jesus has drawn specifics with His language: what fruitful branches look like, how He prunes, and what branches will be cut and thrown into the fire. Healthy production takes great care, but it also distinguishes which branches remain. Buds are cultivated, and branches can carry greater clusters of fruit when they are strengthened by pruning—getting cut back for good fruit to grow. These are the results of care and attention.

I’ve seen overgrown gardens and vines. Most have fruit, but it is fruit that is inedible, or the branches were too weak to sustain the weight of the fruit being produced. So, the fruit dropped to the ground, becoming a feast for bugs or critters, or even being trampled on.

But when the Master Gardener tends to the vine, He does so with the end in mind, and when He sees the produce, it reflects the vine. The branch can feed multitudes, the vine grows into greater territory, and the process begins all over again.

This is what the life of a disciple is, and what we see in this passage of Scripture.

Oftentimes, we complicate the simplicity of Jesus’ message. If we consider the context, He was illustrating these truths to Galileans who understood life by the sea, eating from gardens they tended in close proximity.

The lesson is this: when we’re fruitful, it shows the world that we are His true followers. Yet too often, when taking inventory of our own fruit, we get tunnel vision—or we just let arrogance creep in—and our estimation is skewed.

Gardening is patient, humble, hard work. In our 21st-century mindset, we’ve become experts in telling other people about fruitfulness and abiding in Him, all the while we ourselves have become hardened in the journey of life.

As fellow followers, we are brought back to how He inspects us as His branches. We can’t move beyond our pace of obedience in remaining. To remain is to be patient. To remain is to tend to parts of the branch that have hardened.

The simplicity of tending to our condition and catching a glimpse of the patient fruit growing from within us is a beautiful sight and great honor—not ours personally—but to the glory and power of God at work in our lives.

Now the vine can continue to grow and produce in other parts of the garden, where the fruit can flourish for generations to come—all the while the Lord Jesus receives the glory in it all.