A number of years ago, a Johns-Hopkins University professor asked his graduate students to locate 200 boys, ages 12-16, and research their backgrounds. The assignment then was to predict the future of these boys. The students were sent to the slum area of the city to find the boys. The conclusion reached by the graduate students was that 90% of those researched would spend time in jail. Some 25 years later, Johns-Hopkins University sent the researchers into the slum area again. They were able to locate 180 of the original 200. What they found amazed them. Only four had ever been to jail! When the researchers began to ask this question, they found that they were getting the same answer, "Well, there was this teacher..." The graduate students traced down the teacher, now living in a retirement home, and inquired about her remarkable influence over a group of boys who were headed for a life of crime. She really could not think of any reason why she would have this kind of influence. She did mention that "...she truly loved her students." What is the difference between a good teacher and great teacher? One word: Love! (from the magazine, The Mediator)

This teacher understood one of the great truths in life; that the human animal responds best to love. All you have to do is to research our media to understand that great fact. There is another fact about love that shows up in today’s Bible reading. That is the fact that one has to be able to give out love in order to gain it. Love is never a one-way street. In John 14: 22-27, Jesus gives us another couple of truths concerning our relationship with God and His manifestation on earth, the Holy Spirit. The first of those truths is just what we have been talking about. If you want God to love you, you need to love Jesus. As we talked about yesterday, God, the Father and Jesus are so closely intertwined that they cannot be separated. There is no way that you can say you love Jesus and not love God, the Father. So it would not take a great leap to believe that if you did love Jesus, then that love would be returned to you from God, the Father.

It’s almost as if Jesus here created two different classes of people. Yet these two classes of people are not based upon where they were born or who their parents were. These two classes have nothing to do with what religion they belong to or what country they were born in. Jesus separated people simply on the way they feel about God. Where you sit in that equation will all boil down to that one reality. Do you love Him? If you can answer that question in the affirmative, then the rest of what Jesus had to say becomes true in your life. For if you truly love God, you will, as a natural course of that love, only wish to obey Him. The truth of that love has to manifest itself in a changed life.

If you love God, then you free up the Holy Spirit to do the job that Jesus describes here, that of teaching you the things that God wants you to know. Yet you will notice that the things that the Holy Spirit is going to teach you are the things that Jesus said and did while He was here on earth. One of the things that I have always noticed when I have sat under a truly great teacher is that I only can remember the tiniest bit of what that teacher taught me. What I remember more is the feeling of wonderment that I had when I sat in that class. Here Jesus is telling these men that they will have the best of both worlds, they will remember the feelings they had in listening to Him and everything that He taught them. That is what the Holy Spirit also does for us. If you have ever had the experience of talking to someone about Jesus and having these wonderful Bible verses pop in your head, you know exactly what Jesus was saying here.

If you love God, then another great truth will be a reality in your life: you will receive from God a peace that is absolutely indescribable. So, how does that happen? If you think about it, your future is already decided. Jesus says you will live forever. Your life will be guided by a God who loves you and has only your best as His goal for you. You will never be lonely or lost without Him. He has promised to never leave you nor forsake you. Of course, all of that is kind of dependent on your staying in that love relationship with Him. Even the best of us, at times, everyone wanders a bit from that relationship. Yet He is always there for us when we return to Him.

Day 2 – The Vine Illustration

As we pause now in our look at Jesus in the upper room on His final night, He has taken the entire 14^th chapter of John to do something that desperately needed to be done. As we take the entire 14^th chapter as a whole, we need to look at Jesus as the Master Teacher who understands us even better than we understand ourselves. When we started our journey to the upper room, I made a statement that I want now to go back and take another look at. That statement was, “You do the things you do because you think the way you think.” In other words, you will never act differently than you think deeply. If you want to correct wrong actions, it is first necessary to correct wrong thinking. That is exactly what Jesus was doing here with His disciples. Each of these men had begun their evening dealing with the shame of their Master taking on the role of a slave and washing their feet. Then during the meal, Jesus announced to the group that there was a betrayer in their midst. Each man there asked himself if he were that betrayer. I believe that each of them saw a bit of the betrayer in their own lives. I think if I had been in the room that night, I would have thought of things in my own life where I had betrayed Jesus. Then we have Peter’s prideful boast of being willing to lay down his life for Jesus, and Jesus’ subsequent prediction that Peter would disown Him three times before dawn.

If Jesus had left things as they were at that moment, it is doubtful that the church would have ever gotten off the ground. Instead of leaving these men in their own pit of despair, Jesus begins the process in chapter 14 of lifting them into the realms of heaven. If you take that chapter as a whole, Jesus’ whole idea was to say, “Let me tell you about the Father and His many mansions, let me tell you about who I am, let me tell you about the Holy Spirit.” He did that for the simple purpose that the more we know and believe about the Holy Trinity, the more it affects our actions. Remember, you do the things you do because you think the way you think.

So much of how we behave is wrapped up in how we view God. As the atheist philosopher Voltaire said, “God made man in His image and now man has returned the favor.” By that he meant that the world has humanized God to such an extent that their view of God is that He is not that much different than man. The problem with that view is that I can’t worship a God who is like me. How can such a God inspire me to any different level than the one I am currently on? The most important decision you can ever make is to determine your view of God, and that view changes constantly. What Jesus did here for His disciples is to elevate their thinking about God, the Father, God, the Son and God, the Holy Spirit. When you take the time to elevate your view of God, you will find that your attitudes and behavior change with that elevated view. You become what you admire. You do the things you do because you think the way you think.

One of the things that a Master Teacher does is that when he gets done with an important lesson, he brings it all into focus with a great illustration. As we move into the 15^th chapter of John, we see Jesus’ illustration to bring home the solid teaching in chapter 14. In reading the very last words of the 14^th chapter, we see that the group gets up to leave the upper room. Now some say that on the way to the Garden of Gethsemane, they passed a wall carving of a grapevine, others say they were looking at a vineyard growing in the Kidron Valley just outside the Dung Gate. In either case, Jesus points to the scene they were all witnessing and uses it to illustrate the points that He had just made in the upper room. The reason I say that is to caution you against getting your doctrines about God from an illustration. The doctrines you build your life around must come from the unadulterated teaching within the Word of God. In other words, be careful that any beliefs that you carry away from the vine illustration are consistent with what Jesus taught in the 14^th chapter, as one is merely an illustration of the other.

As we close today, let me one more time challenge you to spend your life getting to know your creator in new and better ways. We need to always be learning more about God as we allow His word to teach us. Never be content that you know all that you need to know about God. As we strive to gain more insight into the nature and character of God, the side benefit will be that we will become more like Him. That’s because you do the things you do because you think the way you think.

Day 3 – The Gardener Lifts

In reviewing what we talked about yesterday, Jesus and His remaining disciples are now walking out of the City of Jerusalem and have come upon a vineyard. Jesus uses that vineyard to illustrate what He had just been teaching these men about the triune God. For most of us this is a most familiar passage in the Bible. Your temptation might be to just stay on its surface. Yet I may be pointing out some of the things that God does for us as we daily live out His plan for our lives that might be a bit different from what you have heard before. In Jesus’ illustration, God, the Father, is described as a gardener, husbandman, or farmer, depending on what translation you are using. Do you notice that there are two things that the gardener does to the vine in order to promote the growing of fruit? We will talk about one of those actions today and the other one will have to wait for tomorrow.

The first action of the gardener, according to the New International Version is to cut off every branch that bears no fruit. Now there has been many a pastor who has done all kinds of handstands in order to get this part of the verse to mean that Jesus is talking about someone who is not part of the Kingdom of God. That’s because one can’t find another section in the Bible where God cuts off someone who is saved and then casts Jesus out of his life. That idea is just inconsistent with who God is and that the Bible teaches that salvation is a permanent thing. The problem here is not in trying to make this verse say something else; the problem is that we don’t understand what Jesus was saying in the first place. Now those of you who have been reading these devotions know that I rarely refer to the Greek directly, but this time I have to do it in order for those Greek students out there to check me out. The Greek word that Jesus uses here is AIRO. It is pronounced eye-ro. If you look up that word in any Greek lexicon you want, the first definition you will see is to lift or to hoist up.

Now I grew up and still live in California. We have more than a few grapevines growing in our fair state, so I know what a grapevine looks like. The problem I have is that I have no idea what these disciples were looking at. Dr. Earl Radmacher, former President of Western Theological Seminary, tells a story about a trip he made to Israel. While riding on the bus, he noticed that they were passing through a vineyard and immediately stood up and screamed, “Stop the bus.” As he left that bus and wandered through that Middle Eastern vineyard, he realized that he was witnessing the first 8 verses of John 15. After doing some research, he found that vineyards in Israel are tended to in a much different way than anywhere else in the world and that they were still being cared for in the same manner as in Jesus’ day. What he saw were vines that were laying flat on the ground as it was winter at the time and they were in their dormant season. As spring approaches, the farmer goes to each vine and lifts it a little bit towards the sun and places a stone under the main vertical branch to prevent it from returning to the ground. A little later he will repeat the process and lift the main branch a little higher. He does that because he knows that the lifting will prevent the main bulb, which will soon spout new branches and later large clusters of grapes, from developing thousands of small roots that will grow only a short distance into the ground. These tiny roots will only be able to draw small amounts of moisture and the plant will only produce small, very sour grapes. What the farmer wants is for that vine to draw its water from the plant’s main root system that has grown deep in the ground. As a result of his efforts, the farmer will harvest the plump, juicy grapes that Israel is known for.

That is what God does for His children. He patiently lifts each of us up towards the sun so that we may gain more of its energy and allow our developed spiritual root system to do its job in providing water and nutrients to better allow a better quality fruit to grow. Now I am not a farmer, but one thing I know is there is not a fruit tree in God’s creation that has fruit the moment it starts to grow. I have an orange tree in my backyard that I planted last year. I know that it is an orange tree because that’s what the label said when I bought it. It’s not because I have ever seen a single orange growing on it. If you had been a “fruit inspector” that night, you would have not seen a lot of fruit on any of those disciples. It’s not that God cuts those branches off; He lifts them into the sunlight so that they will bear much fruit. Jesus is illustrating His earlier idea that “I will do whatever you ask in My name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father.” The illustration that Jesus brings us is of a God who does whatever it takes in order to make us fruitful for His kingdom. That’s the God we serve.

Day 4 – The Gardener Prunes

We are still taking a long look at Jesus’ illustration of the vineyard as found in John 15: 1-8. Yesterday, we took a close look at the way that God takes whatever action is necessary for His people to produce fruit for Him. We saw how God lifts His children off of the ground so that large, juicy fruit can appear. Today, we want to take a look at the second action that God does for His children that can be found in verse 2. The New International version says that “every branch that does bear fruit He prunes.”

The first problem with that translation is that it doesn’t square with the normal principles of farming and the growing of fruit trees. No farmer cuts off a major branch while there is fruit on the tree. That’s because he realizes that the tree has a good chance of bleeding to death. At the very least, he realizes the fruit that is present will be seriously affected by the bleeding of moisture from the tree’s system. Instead the farmer will always wait until the tree enters its dormant season before he does any major pruning of branches.

The second problem I have with that translation is that it doesn’t square with how the Greek word Jesus used is normally translated. The Greek word Jesus used here is KATHAIRO, from which we get the English word, catharsis. The idea here is to cleanse or to purify the fruit. So what, then, is Jesus referring to in His illustration? Well once again, I am no farmer, but I do have fruit trees in my backyard. What I have found is that it is hard enough to get my fruit trees to bear significant amounts of fruit, but I always seem to be in competition with the various birds and bugs that also exist out my back door. They just seem to think that I grow all of that fruit for their own nourishment and enjoyment. The idea Jesus is giving us here is that the farmer cleanses the fruit in that he removes that pests that seek to infest and steal his crop.

So what does that have to do with my relationship with Jesus? Well I have a lot of bugs that want to infest my life and ruin my fruitfulness for God. Some of those bugs could be things like bad thoughts, attitudes, relationships, times when I am not as committed as I should be, or motives that tend to get in my way as I live my life in service to God. Those of us who have followed Jesus for any length of time have felt the pain of His cleansing at times. Yet it is those times of cleansing that have made us what we are today. What is the agent that God uses in order to purge us? Jesus gives it to us in verse 3 when He says, “You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you.” In fact, the Greek word for “clean” is the same word Jesus used in verse 2 that is translated “prune.” It’s the Bible that God uses to purify us and remove all of the bugs that exist in the world. If you have ever been reading in the Bible and had the Holy Spirit convict you of some bug in your life, you will understand how this process works.

Every time I venture into this chapter of John, I am always impressed at the work involved by God in developing me into a vine that can bear a lot of great fruit. It’s not that this process works perfectly every time. Even Jesus didn’t have immediate results that night. A few hours later after He gave them this lesson, there was Peter whipping out his sword. Just like the time of testing Peter went through that night, the work God does in me is not pleasant at the time, but the ultimate end of it all is well worth it. For in the end, after I have spent a thousand years looking at it, I will see that what God produced in my life has had real staying power. For the fruit that He has worked so hard to produce in me has lasted for eternity. That’s what Jesus was trying to convey to His disciples that night. Within the next few hours, they would have to go through a time of testing that would cause most of us to retire from active ministry. Yet in this time, Jesus was busy about telling them about God in order to get their thought processes where they needed to be. To be sure that it was indeed dark that night, but Sunday morning would soon be coming.

Day 5 – So Who Are Branches?

For the last couple of days, we have been looking at an illustration that Jesus gave to His disciples about a vineyard and the processes that occur there in order to produce and get to market some really great fruit for the farmer. Jesus is illustrating and bringing home some of the truths that He had given them in the 14^th chapter of John, so we always want to return back to chapter 14 to get the original teaching and not get too hung up in the illustration. Yet there are some amazing applications for us as we take a look at all that the Father does in order to ensure that His children are productive in promoting His Kingdom throughout the earth. As we get to verse 3-5 in John 15, the first thing that we notice is that there is a change in the pronoun that Jesus uses. It is at that point that He stops referring to the farmer and begins using the pronoun “you,” meaning He was now talking to the men who were following Him to the Garden of Gethsemane as well as everyone who are busy about following Jesus as these men had been doing.

So in answer to the title of our reading today, who are the branches? You are the branches if you have taken that first step to enter into the Kingdom of God. Jesus is the vine and you are its branches. Makes sense so far doesn’t it? So what is the main job of a branch? It is to remain attached to the vine. At my house there are several rose bushes that line the driveway between my house and my next door neighbor. I can always tell when someone has parked too close to these roses. In a few days a branch will turn brown and die. As I look more closely, I can see that this branch has been knocked free of the main stem. Such branches will die very quickly because they can no longer gain the things they need for life from the main branch. The same thing is true of us.

So what does Jesus say in this illustration that I need to hear. In verse 4, He tells me that I need to abide in Him. The idea here is simply to believe. Remember Jesus started at that point in the first part of John 14, when He said, “Believe in the Father, believe also in Me. In my house are many mansions…” It’s always the same starting point isn’t it? It’s always believe, believe, believe. We try to make the Christian life so much more complicated than it has to be. Jesus always tried to keep it simple, but we tend to mess it up by overcomplicating. Remember, you will never act differently than you think deeply. Jesus understands this reality so He is telling us to settle down in Him and believe. I need to keep on believing what God is like and I will keep on receiving God’s help in order for me to bear fruit. It’s like the old hymn that says, “Jesus I am resting, resting in the joy of who you are.” That’s what Jesus is trying to tell us in this illustration.

In verse 5, we see one of the greatest truths that can be found in the entire Bible. There are some people who are reading this today who have committed this verse to memory. It is that vital to the kind of person the Christian is striving to become. It is the pathway to becoming more like Jesus. As you take a closer look at that verse, you will see that word, “abide,” once again. If I remain attached to Jesus, I will be in a position to bear much fruit. If you will look over the last 5 verses, you will see a progression present in Jesus’ illustration. We have gone from producing fruit, to producing more fruit, to producing much fruit. Do you see it? That’s the way it is in the Christian life as we grow in Him. He causes us to bear fruit in ever increasing quantities. So we always live with the understanding that the best that a life in Christ has to offer is always ahead of us. That is because tomorrow we will always be bearing more fruit for Him than we did today. That is why the life that we live with Jesus keeps on getting better and better the longer we rest in Him and allow Him to give us the water and nourishment that we need in order to bear that fruit. So our challenge today is to stop fighting to do something for Jesus, but just allow yourself to rest in who He is and allow Him to do all the work. That doesn’t sound too hard, does it?

Day 6 – Burning Branches

As we wind down our time looking at Jesus’ illustration of the vine, it has been a wonderful journey. It is my hope that it has been a journey that has allowed you to think a little bit differently about this God whom you serve. Every time I revisit Jesus’ teaching in the upper room that night, it always spurs within me a deep desire to get to know God better. This teaching always rekindles within me a sense of the invincible because I serve the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, and there is nothing that can stand against that kind of power and authority. As Paul said to the church in Rome, “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” There is tremendous security that lies within those words, yet this is something that can muddy the waters a bit and Jesus is about to talk about that in John 15: 6 as He describes burning branches.

Now before we get too far along in our discussion, it is important to notice that Jesus gives us, once more, a change in pronouns. He started by talking in the second person when He spoke about all of the things that God, the Father, will do to bring us to a place where we will bear fruit. He talked in the first person when He told us of our need to continually abide in Him. Now Jesus switches over to the third person as He begins to describe the fate of those who fail to stay connected to the branch and so wither and die.

Now the idea of burning in the Bible usually is a symbol of the judgment of God. The problem is that I am not all that convinced that is what Jesus is talking about right here. In order for you to understand what I am talking about, let’s go back to the whole idea of fruit. What is the overall purpose of the Christian bearing a lot of fruit? Do we do it because it looks pretty sitting there on the vine? Do we do it because God is a great fan of wine? No, the fruit exists in our lives for the sole purpose of attracting those who are on the outside of the Kingdom to join us and gain a fuller purpose for their lives. We are to bear much fruit so that we may gain many more eternal friends, as Jesus described in the Parable of the Shrewd Manager.

So what happens when a Christian detaches himself from the vine and begins to lose that fresh blush of God within their life? Without the constant infusing of life from Jesus, he begins to wither in his faith and wither in his testimony. There are those in the world who are actively looking for answers. They see the total futility that the world has to offer and wonder if there might be a better way to live. He runs into a Christian on the street or already in his life and he immediately begins the process of looking for fruit. The true seeker wants to know if there is any reality to the words he hears coming out of your mouth. Now if the true seeker sees a lot of fruit on that vine because his friend has continued to abide in the source of his life, he will be attracted. A seeker is looking for reality, not empty words.

What will happen if the seeker finds only the dead branches of empty religion when he looks at you? Jesus tells us in verse 6 that he