“He [God] cuts off every branch [Christ followers] in me [Jesus] that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.” John 15:2
The function of pruning a plant is so that it can continue to grow and produce more fruit. For those of us who don’t garden, I asked my grandma to break this down for us. First, you cut off the dead branches that don’t leaf because you can tell early on that they were never going to bear fruit. There are also times when you have to cut off rapidly growing branches because they are sucking life from the rest of the plant. An example of this might be doing good things for the kingdom but doing them with selfish motives. In both cases, those two branches will not bear fruit and are cut off of the vine. Then, there are times when you prune a healthy branch causing it to send up two healthy shoots from where it was pruned, subsequently making it bear even more fruit. At the end of the day, the branches must be useful and God will prune them until He feels they are fit for His service.
There are two ways by which God, the Gardener, prunes our branches as we abide in Christ, the Vine. The first way is by the reading of His Word (John 15:3) and the second by trials and temptations (James 1:2-4). The first requires more effort on our end to set aside the time each day to be sharpened by the double-edged sword otherwise known as the Word of God. Instead of challenging ourselves by studying the Word regularly, we can get in the habit of coasting through life when things are going well and it takes receiving some terrible news or getting stuck in a rut in our lives to force us to our knees to beg God to show up. In reality, He has been there all along trying to prune us into the likeness of His Son (2 Cor. 3:18) so that we may find complete joy in Him (John 15:11). Either way God is going to prune you but to an extent, you can choose which is the preferred method, hopefully the first, and make more of a concerted effort to be shaped by His Word. I don’t say this to give you false hope that if you are reading the Bible regularly, you won’t face trials and temptations because those are a guarantee as followers of Christ (or that reading the Bible won’t at times be a difficult task as it forces you to make changes in your life). But, we can provide God with more opportunities to sharpen us by His Word if we are reading it regularly.
“It is to God’s glory that you become profoundly effective. In order to get there, we have to allow Him to prune us” (Beth Moore). May you allow God to do the necessary and painful work of pruning you in order to shape you into the image-bearer He intended.
Abiding in Him,
Suzanne Teuben
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