Producing Fruit with Rocket Fuel

Mike Hosey, An Elder

When the Saturn V rocket was built in the 1960s to take Americans to the moon, it was the most powerful rocket in the world.  It still holds that record in 2016.  If you are within a few hundred feet of it at blast off, the heat from the exhaust will kill you. And if you are just out of range of that deadly heat, the sound from it alone has the power to melt concrete and will easily kill you. The reason that the nearest unprotected observation points are over 3 miles away, is that if some catastrophic failure causes all the fuel to explode at once, then one Saturn V rocket has the same explosive power as the first atom bombs.  It took that much power for men to escape the gravity of earth and to live life in space. The fuel on that rocket was liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.  At launch time, those fuels are so cold that it causes ice to form on the skin of the rocket.  That same skin expands, contracts and groans from the temperature differences. The whole thing smokes and puffs like your breath on a cold winter day.  When the scientists and engineers who designed it, and the astronauts who flew it, first saw it fueled up, they commonly described it as a living thing.

Saturn V Rocket

But separate that rocket from that fuel, it becomes dead, powerless, and useless – just a hunk of expensive metal.

And that’s the kind of power that Jesus is talking about in John 15:1-8.  It is there that Jesus describes himself as the vine, and charges his followers to stay “in him.”  If they do, he says, they will produce much fruit, but if they don’t they will become brittle, dead branches that must be trimmed and thrown in the fire.  This is because Jesus, like the vine of a fruit bearing plant supplies them with the nutrition -- the fuel -- they need to live a good and God pleasing life.  It takes a great deal of power to escape the pull of the sinful and inferior life of the world.  If you want to escape that world, and produce the fruits of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23) then you must stay connected to your source of fuel.