John 15:3
“Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you.” (John 15:3)
We need pruning if we are to produce the best possible crop of godly behavior and effective ministry. Jesus introduces us to the Master Pruner – his own Father! (John 15:1). And then he shows us the two methods God uses in cutting back the bad, the unnecessary, and sometimes even good things that sap resources needed to grow and produce more. One method is gentle, the other severe. The gentle method, emphasized in John 15, is the Word; the severe is the sharp knife of God’s discipline.
The Lord of our personal harvest, seeking to bring us to maximum fulfillment, cleans out the hindrances with his Word – the entire body of his teaching. It won’t do simply to admire or respect the Word, it must abide in us. We must study it, think about it, master it, live in it. Without this relationship to the Bible, one cannot be at one with Jesus. To abide in Jesus, he said, was for his Word to abide in us.
The cancerous growth of self-orientation, injected into the life of the Church by popular culture, must be cut out of the believer’s thinking or there will be no fruit. The good news is that God’s Word will do it, if we allow it to. We do not take vows of poverty, chastity, and humility in some form of legalistic asceticism. But for the sake of a bumper crop, the Master Pruner will cut out false thinking by the instruction of his Word.
Some hold that the cleansing of John 15:3 continues the analogy of pruning. If we respond to the teaching of God’s Word with obedience, the pruning knife of harsh discipline may not be necessary. So the word cleans us, day by day.
I called this the gentle method of pruning. But actually, some of his sayings are not so gentle. One of his most repeated sayings is very painful, for it runs directly counter to much of contemporary counseling, preaching, and writing. As we have seen, the contemporary wisdom holds that life really begins with the affirmation of one’s self and aims at self-fulfillment. Jesus slashes into our lives with the announcement that life begins at the opposite end: self-denial, saying “no” to self-interest, not “yes.” And it aims in the opposite direction, too: not at my own fulfillment, but at God’s fulfillment. In fact, Jesus repeatedly warned that those who say “yes” to self-interest, who work to preserve themselves, to enhance their own welfare will lose it all! Whereas those who abandon their own interests for his sake and the gospel’s will find exactly what everyone else so frantically and futilely seeks: life, fulfillment.[103]
The pruning knife of the Word is used in two ways. The first is consciousness raising, the second is focus. Those who read through the Bible consecutively, day by day, are exposed to the whole of God’s revealed will and areas of unawareness are spotlighted, consciousness of unnoticed teaching will be raised so that it can be used to cut out counterproductive growth. Focus has to do with deliberately searching out all that Scripture teaches on some known temptation. That scripture can then be brought to mind in the time of temptation, just as Christ did in his hour of temptation.
For example, growth may be choked out by things and the “American dream” may have beguiled even the best-intentioned Christian. If the regular reading of Scripture does not raise consciousness about a materialistic lifestyle, a study of what the Bible says about covetousness will start cutting. To find out that covetousness is beguiling, idolatrous, and hell-deserving, for example, could begin the process of pruning!
And if through insensitivity or active rebellion we do not allow him to gently clean us with his Word, he will faithfully cut away at us with adverse circumstances. The analogy of John 15 does not go into detail about the nature of the pruning, but commentators almost unanimously agree that Jesus speaks in verse two of the pruning of discipline.
Suffering, according to Scripture, may come from many sources and may have a variety of purposes, but always there is the purpose of making us more like Jesus. In his skillful hand, every hard experience can be a pruning that will make us more fruitful than we might have been without it.
Growth and greater fruitfulness do not come automatically, however. They come only as we abide in Jesus- trust him, obey him. If we respond to the difficult circumstance with resentment, fear, worry, or retaliation, the circumstance will not prove to be a life-giving pruning knife. That very circumstance will become a hammer, battering us into damaged branches that bear little or no fruit. But if we bring that painful event or relationship to him with childlike confidence that he means it for our good – in other words if we abide in him – he will use it for cutting us back to make us more fruitful than we ever could have been with pain-free, random growth.
The reason is plain. Without the cutting circumstance we might never let go that shriveled, fruitless old twig from the past, that deformed off-shoot that keeps bearing ugly fruit, that out-sized growth that uses up the flow of life to produce a mass of showy leaves, or just that busy sprouting of so many buds that we never produce the full bodied fruit he plans.
To abide in Christ is to accept the daily cleaning action of the Bible and the sharp cut by the Master Pruner’s hand in the circumstances of life. Then comes the harvest! But continuing with fidelity in obedience to Christ’s words is not the end of “abiding.” It is only the starting place. The end is joy beyond telling. And that glorious love story can be our theme each time.
[103] Matthew 16:24-26; Mark 8:35-37; Luke 14:26, 27; John 12:24, 25