A couple of days after we unpacked, I was puttering in my garage when I noticed my neighbor hacking down a row of grapevines that rambled along a fence on our shared property line. I had assumed that we owned the vines jointly. Wasn't that how things worked in the country? We already had visions of feasting on bucketfuls of grapes in the fall.
I walked over to say hi. My neighbor, a large, white-haired man in overalls, wielded the biggest set of shears I'd ever seen. All around him lay heaps of grape branches.
"You don't like grapes, I guess?" I said, trying to conceal my distress.
"Love grapes," he said.
"Really. Well, I thought maybe we would be sharing the crop from this vine and I..." I hesitated. Maybe it was too late to do any good.
He eyed my shiny shoes. "You're a city boy, aren't ya?" he said.
"Not exactly, but I -"
"Don't know anything about grapes, do ya?" he broke in, and went back to hacking at the vine.
I told him I knew I liked the taste of them. And I told him I had particularly liked the promising look of this row of grapes when I bought the place.
"You like big, juicy grapes?" he asked over his shoulder.
"Of course! My family does too," I said.
"Well, son," he said, "we can either grow ourselves a lot of beautiful leaves filling up this whole fence line. Or we can have the biggest, juiciest, sweetest grapes you and your family have ever seen." He looked at me. "We just can't have both." ~Taken from "Secrets of the Vine" by Bruce Wilkinson
John 15:1“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.I look at that vine reference and I see my experience with people. The old man hacking the branches knew a thing or two about grape growing, obviously. He knew that the leaves of the branches were not the purpose of the plant. And stretched out over long areas the vine would have more to take care of, so there was no focus on any specific area. Had he let the vine expand the grapes would grow, but they wouldn't be the biggest and best the vine could produce. They would be the result of a vine that just continued to spread out, with no focus on anything other than spreading out.
You could just accept this about the vine. You could leave the vine alone and let it grow where it wants to grow. Some vines just keep going and don't stop, even when it ends up in crazy places. I had some experiences with grapevines. Most of the vines were on the side of the road. One grew down a rock wall that was lined with poison ivy. Another was crawling up the back of a house across a busy road. All of them were sour grapes. They were pretty gross. But no one ate them because of where they were growing and how they were growing. They were never tended to. They were left to fend for themself and instead of being pruned and the area weeded they became smaller and smaller and eventually they all died. I drive past where they used to be sometimes and there's nothing left to them. Without the care they needed they perished.
See here's where I get confrontational. People left to their own lives without pruning or tending to will eventually become as useless as those sour grapes. Any grapes those vines produced weren't very good. People who are compared to sour grapes are usually negative people. And anything they produce is usually negative.
We all have things in our lives that don't really need to be there. We all have habits that serve no purpose.
What this says to me is that God wants the very best from us, and to get that He's going to take His heavenly pruning shears and cut away the extra branches that are keeping the really good grapes from growing. My desire to be accepted was getting in the way of me doing anything. Every time I was rejected it was like I just really needed to make up for it... I didn't need to be accepted. In fact, I'm willing to say being accepted is not a necessary part of life. The only One we need to accept us is the One who created us, and that deal is sealed when we accept Him! From there on its just a journey of strengthening roots and branches to produce big, juicy, sweet grapes!
And what exactly do I mean by grapes? Not the actual fruit, silly! No! The Greek word fruit from this verse is translated to; fruit, deed, action, result, profit, gain.
What Jesus was saying when He talked about the fruit we produced was our lives would change! WE would change! Our actions would change, our deeds would change! And from them would be profit and gain!
So when I say we don't need acceptance I really mean we shouldn't be seeking for acceptance. That should not be our goal. Our goal should always be a true relationship with the GARDENER. He knows what it will take for our branches to produce the best, juiciest grapes ever!
What do I take from this? I can't keep seeking out how someone feels about how I feel. I can't keep relying on everyone else to feel good about myself. The only thing that has done is made me WAY more self-conscious and has messed with my confidence.
So these books are going to help me move toward becoming a branch producing BETTER fruit, not just MORE. So God wants me to have BETTER ACTIONS, DEEDS AND RESULTS from the things He is already working on in my life. There's no need to add anything right now, I just need to focus on the fruit that's already in my life!
