August 3, 2020: Is Your Life Lived as A Duet for God, or Are You Living As A Solo Artist?

As a young boy in my small hometown in Central California, I was raised picking grapes with my mother and brothers. It was a very, hard, and dirty job. As I got older into my teen years, I learned later how to prune the unwanted branches from the grape vine so that the vine could produce more fruit from the remaining branches the coming season.

Once an unwanted branch is cut away from the vine, it is thrown away into a pile to be later burned with the other dead branches. It can no longer produce any fruit apart from the vine. In the book of John, in chapter 15, Jesus speaks about this very thing. God is the gardener, Jesus is the Vine and we are the branches.

John 15: 1-2

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.2 He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.

1. You see, our lives as Christians, are not meant to be lived as a solo artist...by our own "self-will", but by the "will of the Father". As we continue our walk with Jesus after our "salvation", we must come to learn to stay connected to the Vine. That means we must always and continually be surrender to the Vine and allow the power of the Holy Spirit to produce the fruit in us, not us trying to produce the fruit ourselves. Our own efforts of trying to produce our own fruit only leads to bad and rotten fruit that will lead to more pruning by the Father.

John 15: 3-5

3 You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. 4 Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. 5 “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.

PERSONNAL COMMENT:

Let us not live as a "solo artist", but let us remain connected and "absolutely surrendered" to Jesus at all times, that He may create a harmony in us that the world can hear, so that they may ask for the words of the song being played out in our lives.