There are times when life appears to be just one problem after another. This is going wrong. That is falling apart. She has been saying hurtful words. He is doing destructive deeds. They are making a mess of things.

Although it sometimes appears that life is just one problem after another, this is not the most accurate way to describe our lives. A much more accurate statement is that our lives are one choice after another, or that living is making one decision after another.

This being the case, then the key to living as God intends us to live has to do with our making the choices and decisions God wants us to make. And for us to make the choices God wants us to make, we must live in a positive relationship with God. This is what Jesus was talking about in the passage we read today. In it he used the metaphor of a grapevine to talk about our living as God intends, making the choices God wants us to make.

Just as the only way the branch of a vine can produce grapes is for that branch to be growing on a grapevine, just so, the only way our living can bear the fruit God intends us to produce is for us to be growing on the vine of Christ. When we live constantly nourished by Christ, the way branches are nourished by the vine, we are able to go through our days making the choices and decisions that are the mark of a fruitful life that is pleasing to God.

As obvious as this is, as true as we know this to be, it is still a great challenge to live as a branch on the vine of Christ. Most of us want to be the vine rather than just one of the branches. And we do not always want to be God's grapevine. Sometimes we want to be a trumpet vine. At other times we want to be an apple tree, and sometimes, a thorny cactus.

Outside a vital relationship with God, we play various games of pretending. We pretend to be persons other than the persons God created us to be, and we use our limited time and energies without any concern about God's will for our lives. This is the essence of sin: living our lives separated from God, and separated from our true identity, insensitive to what God wants, blind to who we really are, and refusing to do what God wants us to do.

But the truth of the matter remains; God is the owner of the vineyard of life; Christ is the vine from which we are to grow, and it is only when we live as branches on the vine of Christ that we are able to produce the fruit God created us to produce in life.

What is it to be a branch on the vine of Christ? To be a branch on the vine of Christ is something more—much more—than having one's name on a church roll. It is something more—much more—than carrying around in our head a bunch of beliefs about Jesus and God.

In the passage that was read today, Jesus said that those who are branches on his vine are those who abide in his love, that is, those whose living is shaped by the God of love who has been revealed in Christ. Being a branch on the vine of Christ means that the grace of God that is in Jesus is the grace of God that is in us and so shapes our living that our living bears the fruit of God's grace.

In the passage, Jesus said that if we will keep his commandments (and we know what those commandments are—namely that we love God with all that we are and our neighbors as ourselves)—that if we will keep his commandments, we will abide (live our lives) in his love in the same way that Jesus lived his life in God's love.

The real test of whether or not we are branches on the vine of Christ has relatively little to do with our name being on a church roll or our having the correct beliefs about Jesus in our heads. It has everything to do with whether or not God's love that was revealed through Jesus is flowing through our everyday living. The nourishment that is in the vine of Christ is all that is involved in God's tough and tender love. The real test of whether or not we are branches on the vine of Christ is whether or not our daily living is nourished by God's tough and tender love and whether or not that love is reflected in our living. This is the real test of whether or not we are branches on the vine of Christ. Does God's grace nourish us, and is God's grace reflected in what we say and do?

Of all the insights one can find in the passage we read, there is one more I want to call to our attention—or at least to my attention. It has to do with one of the biggest challenges in my life, and I suspect it may well be one of the biggest challenges some of you face. It has to do with making choices.

As I said earlier, I am convinced that one of the more accurate ways to describe our lives is as one choice after another, and that the basic challenge in living has to do with making the choices God wants us to make.

There have been a few times in my life when I have seriously had to struggle with the choice between what I clearly knew was wrong and what I clearly knew was right. But those instances have been relatively few. The vast majority of my days, almost all the choices I have had to make have not been between what is obviously bad and what is obviously good. The choices with which I have had to struggle most have been between doing "this" good or "that" good. Shall I use my limited time and energy to work for "this" good cause or "that" good cause? Of all the ways I can be helpful and responsible as the senior pastor of this congregation, shall I do "this" or "that" or "that" or "this"? Now my confession is that all too often I balk at making the choice, and when this happens I find myself trying to do more than I should. The end result of my not being realistic about my limited time and energy is that not much of anything of worth is accomplished.

For me, one of the more meaningful sentences in the passage we read today is this: "Every branch that bears fruit, [God] prunes to make it bear more fruit."

A branch that has too many grapes on it has to have some of the grapes pruned away so that the remaining grapes can develop fully and be worth harvesting and worth eating. One of the lessons I have learned in my thirty nine years of being a pastor is that less is usually more in my ministry. What I mean by that is this: the more I try to do, the less I really accomplish over the long haul. To be sure, in life there is no way to be responsible and avoid those moments, those days, those seasons when what life requires of us puts us in overload. However, my problem is not that this happens some of the time. My problem is that I tend to allow this to be the way I deal with life all of the time.

Rather than make the tough choice between being involved in this worthy cause rather than that good activity, I kid myself into believing that not only am I able to do both, but at the same time I can take on another responsibility plus another task or two. The result is that I spread myself too thin, so I do not have time to think and plan; I become physically tired and emotionally exhausted and on edge so that at times I not only fail to do much good, sometimes I even make matters worse. Meanwhile I move closer and closer to burn-out, which means I disconnect from the vine. I begin to believe and live as though I do not have time for prayer and meditation. Then I really wither.

You see part of my problem is a faith problem. I tend to be arrogant without realizing it. "Why, if I don't do it, it won't get done, and it all really needs to be done." And the truth of the matter is, it all really does need to be done.

But God does not expect me to bear all the fruit on my row much less in the whole vineyard. Nor does God expect that of you. We need to trust God, to have faith that God can and will use others to do some of those good things we leave undone. Our willingness to be more realistic as well as faithful in regard to what God expects of us involves our trusting God to use others to do all those other good things that also really do need to be done.

What God wants from each of us is for each of us to bear more of the fruit we have been given life to produce. If we try to do it all, what God really wants us to do will suffer. We must make choices. It is in making the right choices that God's pruning of our lives happens—the pruning that enables us to bear more fruit.

The trick is to allow God's will to decide what gets pruned and not merely allow our fear of burn out or our sense of pride or ego to make all the choices. Of all the "good" things we could do, which are the ones God would have us do, and—equally important—which ones does God want us to leave for others to do?

As I said earlier, life is just one choice after another. The key to making the right choices has to do with being a branch on the vine of Christ, nourished by the grace of God and allowing God's will to prune us so that our living will be more fruitful.

 

God, help us learn what we need to learn from Jesus' story about the grape vine. Amen.

Pastoral Prayer:

God, help us to be more aware of Your presence in our lives. In our hearts, we know You surround us like the ocean surrounds the fish of the sea. In You we live and move and have our being, and yet You are as impossible for us to comprehend as it is for the fish to comprehend the ocean.

Forgive us for being so focused on ourselves and what we want, that we are insensitive to Your presence. Forgive us for taking You for granted and doing what we want until we find ourselves in the midst of difficult times and only then crying out for You to "fix it" and make life be the way we want it to be.

Help us to be sensitive to Your presence and open to Your guidance. Teach us how to be aware of Your will for our lives, and help us live as You created us to live. All this we pray in the name of the one who both showed us who You are and who we are meant to be, the one who taught us to pray: "Our Father …"