Sermon: Responding to God's Pruning Is Not Passive (Part One)
#1694B
David F. Maas
Given 18-Feb-23; 36 minutes
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transcript:
Please turn over to John 15:5, a verse we will be reading Passover evening, April 5th, approximately six short weeks away.
John 15:5 “I am the vine; you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, bears much fruit: for without Me you can do nothing.”
The Amplified Bible version adds a few more colorful salient details. “I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in Me and I in him bears much fruit, for [otherwise] apart from Me [that is, cut off from vital union with Me] you can do nothing.”
To be sure, this does not mean that apart from Christ we are expected or required to do nothing. Or that, as those hapless individuals looking at the process of salvation through distortive Luther lenses maintain, that law keeping should be abandoned in favor of grace or faith alone. Abiding in the vine is far from a passive, spectator activity. As David Grabbe, in his Forerunner “Prophecy Watch” January-February 2021, “God’s Kingdom in Parables,(Part Four)” somberly warns us, “Even those who have been cleansed can still be thrown into the fire if they do not bear sufficient fruit. Admittedly, the branches do not—indeed, cannot—bear the fruit independently; it requires remaining attached to the Vine, Jesus Christ.”
His disciples, then and now, are merely conduits for the fruit, absorbing the metaphorical life-giving sap of God’s Holy Spirit, but they (the branches) must actively abide, adhere, cling, cleave, cohere, remaining faithfully and loyally committed to the relationship, ardently loving the things God loves and intensely hating the things that God hates, to ensure the fruit’s production.
If, God forbid, a believer’s spiritual growth is insufficient or if he or she becomes spiritually diseased (refusing to seek God’s healing or forgiveness), he or she will be cast into the fire at the end of the age. The “wailing and gnashing of teeth” will come not only from those who have maintained an anti-God stance, but it will also be the response from those who were initially cleansed by Christ’s sacrifice but who “neglect so great salvation” (referring to Hebrews 2:3) and “fail to abide in Him” (Hebrews 6:4-8; John 3:15-18; and I Corinthians 9:23). Again, responding to God’s pruning cannot be passive, indolent, or apathetic; we are required to do something active, namely produce fruits of repentance and righteousness (Matthew 3:8 and Romans 8:13). Please turn to Luke 13 where we find the Parable of the Barren Fig Tree.
Luke 13:6-9 He also spoke this parable: “A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it and found none. Then he said to the keeper of his vineyard, ‘Look, for three years I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree and find none. Cut it down; why does it use up the ground?’ But he [the gardener] answered and said to him, ‘Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and fertilize it. And if it bears fruit, well. But if not, after that you can cut it down,’”
Assuredly, our heavenly Father, as our Vinedresser (John 15:1), exercises abundant patience, longsuffering, and forbearance before removing or cutting a fruitless barren branch, but His tolerance for rebellion and non-productivity, sloth, or indolence has its limits, as the apostle Paul warns those who have fallen into a reprobate or apostate mindset in Romans 2:5, where he warns in the Amplified, “Because of your callous stubbornness and unrepentant heart you are [deliberately] storing up wrath and indignation for yourself on the day of wrath and indignation, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.”
Charles Whitaker in his CGG Weekly, March 10, 2017, “Pruning and Cleansing,” reminds us that both actions, that is, pruning and cleansing, involve cutting—but the results are different. Concerning the unproductive branches, the apostle John uses the Greek verb airo, which means alternately “to take up,” “to bear,” and “to remove.”
Admittedly, in the context of taking up a grapevine out of the mud, it does not mean to excise or remove, but Thayer's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament reveals a far graver context for this same word, meaning, “to take from among the living, either by a natural death or by violence.”
Concerning the cutting of productive branches, the apostle John uses the Greek verb kathairo, from where we get the word “catharsis” (connoting purging or cleansing resulting from removal, such as cleaning a floor with soap and water to remove the dirt, grime, and schmutz). Clyde Finklea, in his March 30, 2007 CGG Weekly article, “The Vinedresser,” assures us that before God permanently excises or removes a fruitless or barren vine, He, like a loving Father, performs three incremental mild to severe forms of discipline on His wayward rebellious children, beginning with a rebuke or a strong verbal warning, representing the initial first-degree discipline. The second-degree discipline consists of chastening, such as restricting activities or privileges or perhaps an hour spent cleaning floors. The third-degree discipline consists of scourging-afflicting with blows or punishment (physical or mental) allowing the full consequences of accumulated sin or law breaking to take effect.
Bill Onisick, in his October 16, 2017 message, “The True Vine of Agape,” informs us that “two year old canes [or vines], having been 90% pruned in the dormant season, that is, removing the lateral branches, diseased branches rubbing against each other, the dead wood, and the superfluous sun—depriving foliage, normally produce a mere seven tiny buds apiece, beginning the slow but steady growth process.”
In his April 6, 1993 sermon “Personal Growth and the Feast of Unleavened Bread,” John Ritenbaugh insists that “to be made clean only prepares us for producing fruit. God’s concern is for us to mature spiritually.” If we stand still (gazing through our Luther lenses, resting on our laurels of prior justification), the dark forces of Satan, the world, and our deadly carnal nature, are going to pull us irretrievably backwards. Uselessness or unproductivity invites profound disaster. We must get away from the negative fixation, that is, the ubiquitous Protestant red herring, insisting that if we attempt to do any works, we are trying to earn salvation, a mindset preventing us from participating in the role of God’s workmanship, created in Jesus Christ for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:10). The consequences of not bearing fruit are graphically and tragically described in John 15:6-to be cast into the fire.
God’s purpose, once we are cleaned, is to produce or stimulate growth in us. Charles Whitaker, in his March 10, 2017, CGG Weekly, “Pruning and Cleansing,” admonishes us that “as we approach Passover, we must remember that God cleanses as He prunes. We need to be careful to take no action to damage the fellowship we have with the Father, His Son, and each other, a fellowship made possible through sacrifice on the part of the God Family.” Consequently, the productive branches, Christ’s faithful disciples, then and now, must commit to remaining attached to the Vine, not permitting any root of bitterness to develop (Hebrews 12:15) because of God’s correction (pruning, trimming, or purging), thereby enabling them to experience a thorough invigorating cleansing, something far, far more desirable than burning.
In his April 16, 2022 sermon, “Christ’s Responsibility, Resurrections, and All in All,” delivered exactly 11 months ago, John Ritenbaugh implored God’s called-out ones that sanctification necessarily requires active cooperation with Almighty God, explaining that the English term “sanctification” is translated from the Greek term hagiasmos, which simply means “away from” or “separation.” Basically, hagiasmos indicates a spiritual movement of conduct and attitude from one state or quality of life and into another. Applied to biblical usage, it indicates a movement of heart, of mind, of attitude, and conduct, and dominance away from carnal worldliness, that is, Satan, the world, and or own flesh, into godly holiness motivated by God’s Holy Spirit as a brand-new way of life. That is why, for most of us, it takes us well over 50 years to get us over the track, or perhaps to get back on track.
John emphatically proclaims: “Now understand this: Sanctification absolutely will not occur in our life unless we cooperate with God! If we are cooperating with Him, and doing it willingly and throwing ourselves into it, we are going to do what He says to do—and exactly what we need to do.”
As Austin [del Castillo] reminded us two weeks ago, “Resistance, that is, resistance against Satan our adversary, the world, and our own carnal flesh, is by no means futile or unproductive.”
John Ritenbaugh reflects, “Now, why is it this way?” (In other words, why must we continuously resist evil with all the resources available to us?) “Because God must see, as He did with our father Abraham, He must witness that we are applying His words. He wants to see it happen. We must realize that God is looking at us perpetually because He wants to see if we are really applying His instructions for us.” Motivational author and clergyman Max Lucado once quipped “that although God may have initially accepted us just as were, He loves us too much to leave us that way—laden with sin and carnality.”
Two weeks ago, Austin cautioned us that the interval between the Last Great Day in the fall to the beginning of the spring holy day season can seem to many of us as a kind of foreboding spiritual wilderness in which we feel a high degree of stress, even near clinical depression, upon seeing the decay and plundering of the blessings of father Abraham on the part of hopelessly reprobate governments currently led by Jacob’s rebellious offspring.
For years, these otherwise dormant winter months, at least in the northern hemisphere, for God’s people seem to be coterminous with testing, pruning, and experiencing intense “pre-Passover trials leading to despair, discouragement, and a feeling of futility.” The prayer list the last two nights had several grave situations. During these dormant winter months, we can make several observations. God has apparently designated the winter interval as the most opportune time for pruning.
According to the California Avocado Commission, “most pruning takes place in winter (January and February). The best time to cut back is in spring to achieve good regrowth. Pruning between January and May promotes shoot-flush during fruit set, early fruit development through August and delays leaf hardening. Pruning in the winter is used to devigorate the trees, controlling the size and shape, while pruning in the spring is used to invigorate the trees, encouraging new growth.”
Jesus, the author of these horticultural laws, during the evening of His last Passover as a human, recognized the value of both winter and spring pruning (referencing John 15:1-2). We see that these bleak dormant winter and pre-spring months we are currently experiencing are coterminous with trials and tests, pruning, self-examination, taking spiritual inventory, deleavening, and pulling out spiritual weeds and cultivating spiritual fruit as God’s chosen saints.
Our role in the pruning process is no more passive than our original mom and dad, who were instructed to tend and keep the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:15)—no small job. Because of Adam and Eve’s sin of disobedience, God cursed the ground with thorns and thistles, forcing us (as their offspring) to toil and sweat, disciplining our fallen nature to receive the sustenance we need.
Those of us who have grown up on farms have had firsthand experience with the residual effects of that curse. Back in the early 1960’s, my brother Ed and I would work hours and hours on our hands and knees in the hot summer Minnesota sun, methodically, up and down the rows of soybeans, pulling a seemingly endless crop of cockleburs. In my series of sermons, titled: “Our Part in the Sanctification Process,” beginning in December of 2018, I used the metaphor of spiritual sharecroppers to describe the working relationship between God’s called-out ones and their Creator in the life-long sanctification process, cooperating with Almighty God in developing character, rooting out destructive sins, and qualifying for spiritual responsibilities (as the Bible study on Matthew 8 last night discussed), a doctrinal position thoroughly savaged and discredited by our previous fellowship which maintains that to attempt to do any works militates against the grace of God.
Those religious organizations clinging to the Calvinistic doctrine of eternal security, which encompasses the majority of professing Christianity, ignore the apostle Paul’s warning that God’s called-out ones are in a perpetual battle between carnal flesh and Spirit, requiring daily hand-to-hand combat with our deadly carnal nature which will kill us if we fail to get the upper hand.
Romans 8:6-9 For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. So then, those who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ [or we could say the mind of Christ, I Corinthians 2:16] he is not His.
As Martin Collins reminded us last week in his “Hope” sermon, “Without the gift of God’s Holy Spirit, it is difficult to look at the decay and decline around us as well as our own frail human bodies without feeling discouraged or depressed.
Romans 8:10 And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness.
From our John 6:44 calling to our death, resurrection, and glorification, we live in a precarious state, having two minds—spiritual and carnal—in mortal combat until one permanently perishes. We share some of the same miserable, seemingly hopeless characteristics experienced by the Siamese twins conjoined at the brain, which Dr. Ben Carson in several procedures successfully separated between 1987 and 1997. Our conjoined carnal twin is pulling us incessantly toward sin and death. Unless we, with God’s help, bifurcate our two opposing natures, our two warring minds, we will die spiritually. As the late Bill Gray has reminded us, “The only part of us that will survive through the grave is our character—our thoughts, the contents of hearts, what we think about all day long.”
Please scroll down to verse 13 for some marching orders from the apostle Paul:
Romans 8:13 For if you live according to the flesh you will die; but if by the Spirit you [not God the Father or our Lord Jesus Christ but you] put to death [that is mortify, or destroy] the deeds of the body you will live.
The Amplified Bible Version adds some more salient details: “for if you are living according to the [impulses of the] flesh, you are going to die. But if [you are living] by the [power of the Holy] Spirit you are habitually putting to death the sinful deeds of the body, you will [really] live forever.”
Romans 8:14 For as many are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God.
Herbert W. Armstrong, in his November-December1985 Plain Truth article “Mystery of Angels and Evil Spirits” declared, “But remember, there is one thing God cannot create automatically and instantly by fiat, and that is perfect righteous character. So God, of necessity, created in him the power of choice and decision, or he could not have a being of individuality and character.” John Ritenbaugh, in his April 1999 Forerunner article “The Beatitudes, Part Four: Hungering and Thirsting After Righteousness,” reiterated this important doctrinal principle, stating, “God cannot create His holy and righteous character by fiat. It requires the willing and freely given cooperation of the called; by exercising their free moral agency, they submit to Him in the experiences of life. Submission is difficult, and thus disciples of Christ, then and now, do not experience a cakewalk through a garden.”
I firmly believe that most of us over 18 or 21 have perhaps suffered the pangs of unrequited love and have desired to find some “magic love potion #9” to guarantee their continuous affection. But would we really want that, making our lover compliant and doting like a puppy dog? One Twilight Zone episode illustrated the undesirability of such a solution. We would not want to force someone to love us if it is not his or her choice. Likewise, Almighty God does not want mindless, subservient robots in His Family or Kingdom either. I think one reason why those of us who prefer cats as pets is because when they express affection, it is genuine from their own volition.
When we can see the benefits of the abundant eternal life, by incrementally intimately knowing God (John 10:10; John 15: 3), we devote our entire lives to always pleasing our Father as has our Savior and our Bridegroom (John 8:29, I John 4: 19), who loved us before we loved Him, when we were still sinners. Consequently, we begin to develop compatibility and singularly focused mindedness in our betrothal (Matthew 6: 22-24), loving what our spouse loves and hating what our spouse hates.
As we approach the Passover season, we customarily take stock of our spiritual progress, remembering that “if we judged ourselves properly, we would not come under judgment” (I Corinthians 11:31). The Scriptures are replete with cautions that God will critically appraise the works of His chosen people, not only in the annual period approaching Passover, but also from the onset of our calling throughout our entire lives, not ending until our death in the faith (or change at the first resurrection).
Our role in the sanctification process, insignificant as it may seem to us (somewhat like the 5 loaves and 2 fishes in feeding 5,000 people), consists of being junior partners (spiritual sharecroppers) diligently cultivating the fruits of God’s Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23), diligently pulling the weeds (the works of the flesh, Galatians 5:19-21) which attempt to strangle and snuff out the emergent succulent spiritual fruit.
Galatians 5:24 And those who are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
The Amplified Bible adds these details: "and those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified sinful nature with its passions and appetites.” It appears as though our heavenly Father, the Supreme Vinedresser, has provided His junior partners (spiritual sharecroppers) some tools to assist in pruning and cultivating His emerging spiritual crop.
One month from now, March 18th, when we will all be in the thick of our annual pre-Passover examination, I will return to the subject of pruning and cultivating God’s spiritual fruit in us in Part 2 of “Responding to God’s Pruning is Not Passive.”
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