Appointed to Produce Much Fruit

Mike Hosey, Elder

God is a fruit-loving God. This really should come as no surprise since fruit and fruitfulness are seen as profoundly desirable throughout much of the bible.

Of course, the story of fruit begins in the beginning. In Genesis, God commands both his animal and human creations to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:22 and Genesis 1:28). Notice that the idea of multiplication is strongly entwined with the idea of fruitfulness. In fact, it is so entwined that Isaiah 27:6 metaphorically predicts that Israel will bloom with fruit and fill the whole world with it.

In one sense, it already has done much of that by providing the world with the heritage of Jesus Christ.

The bible repeatedly likens God's people to sweet and delicious fruit, grapes, grape vines, figs and fig trees, and when these items are growing and expanding or producing much fruit, they are praised.  

Drawing of Fig, T.J. Crew, Circa 1771

Their productivity is a direct result of God, the vinedresser, pruning and gardening the vine to yield much fruit, and Jesus, the vine, filling the fruit with all of His spiritual goodness (John 15:1-8).

In that passage, God removes those branches of the vine that don't produce fruit.  And those branches that do produce fruit, well, he prunes those - removing anything that gets in the way of increasing the yield of that branch.

Jesus tells us that if we stray from him, then we cut ourselves off from His life-giving sustenance, and that when we do that, we cannot produce fruit. No branch separated from its vine can produce anything.

The biggest problem with separating from Jesus is that not producing fruit goes against one of God's direct plans for our lives. Jesus tells us in this passage that God is glorified through our production of fruit (John 15:8) and that we are, in fact, appointed to produce it (John 15:16).

When we follow Jesus there should be an ever increasing production of fruit within our personal character (Galatians 5:22-23) - which is something God very much loves.  And there should be a drive within us to tell others about Jesus so that they, too, can produce much fruit.