Be Grafted In

When we lived in Lowell, Ohio, just outside of Marietta on the Muskingum River, I planted 50 seedless grape vines. A neighbor plowed a strip of land along the front of my property, and then we put two rows of grapevines down. We planted the vines about 8 feet apart, and strung four wires between posts, drawing the wires tight. As the grapevines grew, they were trained on the wires. During the second winter, I pruned the vines back so they came up out of the ground on a solid stalk and then had a double T shape on the top and the second wires.

I found out that there are certain important things to being successful with grapevines. First is the pruning. All the dead branches are cut off. But even the fruiting branches are pruned. Grapevines need to be heavily pruned every winter, leaving only the stalk and the main horizontal T for best results. All the rest is cut and rolled up to make grapevine wreaths from. This is because the fruit only grows on last year’s wood, not this year’s wood. So it is important to get rid of the extra vines that take up energy and leave only the heavy, main vine. You literally cut out 90% of the vine every year. If your grapevine isn’t producing, it’s probably because you didn’t prune it back enough last winter.

The second thing is to spray the vine twice. Once during the late winter with vegetable oil, because this suffocates the eggs that insects laid during the fall. The second spray is an anti-fungal spray in early May when the tiny flowers are beginning to come out so fungus spores will not take hold and later destroy the fruit.

Acts 8:26-40, Psalm 22:25-31; 1 John 4:7-21, John 15:1-8

Finally, it is important to walk the vines during the summer, removing dying leaves, bad grapes, and even removing extra leaves near the grape clusters to give plenty of ventilation to keep the grapes dry so mold and rot won’t grow on them.

There are also two things you don’t need to do with grapes.

First, you don’t need to fertilize grapes – they have very deep roots and will find all the nutrients they need as those roots go 7 or 10 feet into the ground. As many of you know, it is nearly impossible to kill an established grapevine, short of just the right type of Roundup herbicide or removing the old vine with a backhoe!

But that also means that after the first summer, you won’t need to water grapevines because of those deep roots. And you probably won’t need to water them much even that first summer. Those deep roots keep them going!

We harvested nearly 400 pounds of grapes that first harvest. We ate them at the table and made grape juice by pressing them. Gallons of grape juice.

Our grapes were not wine grapes. Oh, you can make wine from any grape juice – just add some yeast and wait a few months – but the French grapes that most wine is made from have a couple of problems growing around here.

First, we get too cold in the winter. French grapes simply can’t take temperatures below zero, and we get there every couple of years. And so they die.

Second, there is a little bug native to America that burrows into grapevine roots and with those little holes comes a fungus that almost wiped out the European wine industry a couple of hundred years ago. Today, all of the French wine grapes – even in France - are grafted onto North American grape roots, which are resistant to this fungus.

Grafting is an interesting process. You take one plant that has the roots you like and you put a cutting from a plant that has the grapes you like on top. You cut them, slicing them a particular way, and then wrap them up snuggly to give them time to grow together. And the next year, the grapes you wanted grow on top of the roots you wanted. This is absolutely necessary to grow good wine grapes today.

In ancient times, grafting was used for other reasons. Perhaps most importantly was the fact that grapevines live for hundreds and even thousands of years. There are grapevines at Mount Vernon that were planted by George Washington. If you want to change grape varieties, simply graft new vines to the old vine rootstock that's already established. And these old grapevines can be remarkably fruitful when you graft the right vine onto them, because they already have an established root system that gathers plenty of water and nutrients. Remember – in the Middle East, the top few feet of soil can be very dry, so it can be difficult to plant a new grapevine and get it started until it gets deep enough to find water on its own.

Jesus talked about the grapevine.

After the Last Supper, as He and His disciples left the Upper Room, they walked past a grapevine on their way to the Garden of Gethsemane. It was then that He called their attention to the vine and said:

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. 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. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. 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.

Jesus calls Himself the “true vine”. He says that God the Father is the gardener. Any part of the body of Christ – the church – that does not bear fruit is cut off. And we have seen this around us – churches that stopped baptizing people twenty years ago are closing all around us. If we don’t bring people to know the Lord, if we don’t bear fruit, we will be cut off by God.

We are being somewhat fruitful here. We have good years and bad years. We have programs, processes, and people who work to bring people to the Lord. Some things we do are very fruitful, like Pioneer Club and REFIT. Other things we do are not very fruitful. It is interesting – people want to be involved with and support fruitful ministries. People don’t want to support ministries that are not fruitful. We have ministries that have slowly declined over the years because they were not fruitful. And when they have died, nobody really noticed. God had pruned them, allowing the energy to flow to those ministries that were fruitful. That’s why our policy toward new ministries has been “Sure, let’s do it! What do you need from us?” For we realize that if God is behind a ministry idea, we’d better do it or God will just start up that ministry at another nearby church. And if God isn’t behind it, it won’t go anywhere, like several ministries we’ve tried in the last few years.

Sometimes a ministry just needs the right people involved – the ministry idea was good, but the team just wasn’t there yet, or there needed to have more Christ in the idea. It’s like getting the right vine grafted onto the right rootstock – and God will not support ministry without the True Vine, Jesus Christ, under the ministry.

Christ told the disciples to remain in Him, as He remained in them. He pointed out that you can’t just take a branch hanging on trellis and expect it to bear fruit by itself – It must be connected to the main vine, to the roots.

This is why many social ministries fail. A food pantry without Christ is just a cheap grocery store, unprofitable, unfruitful, a drain of money. But a food pantry connected to Christ, where Jesus is glorified, where prayers are sent up for people every day, where the love of Christ is demonstrated - that food pantry changes lives. A ministry must bear fruit for the Kingdom or it will be pruned and cut off – or it will just die.

Jesus continued, talking to His followers:

“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.
Jesus is telling us that we must remain connected to Christ, and if we will, we will bear much fruit.

How do we stay in Christ and how does Christ stay in us?

Think back to the structure of the vine. In the vine, there is the woody outside that gives strength to the connection, the tubes that are connected inside for water and nutrients to flow within – and there is the flowing water and energy and nutrients themselves.

When we first recognize Christ is the Son of God, worthy to be followed, and we believe and step forward to receive the gift of eternal life from Him, a connection is made. Our heart becomes connected with Jesus’ heart and that missing hole in our heart begins to fill. The graft is made. Yet, more is needed for that life to flow.

As we step forward to receive the baptism of water and the Holy Spirit, a fluid begins to flow through the graft. It is the life-giving fluid that is the Holy Spirit, the Living Water of Christ. Where before we were slowly dying, wilting, dry in our spirit, with baptism the graft that was barely connected with our belief now flows full of that Living Water that will sustain us even though our body physically dies, as the true vine sustains the grafted in parts of the vine even though the leaves may die for a time, for they will spring back anew with the life-giving power of the vine.

As we learn to read the Word of God and listen to the Holy Spirit, we allow that life-giving Living Water to flow throughout our body that is the grafted in vine, and buds form, buds form that turn into flowers and then fruit. Just like the grapevine, Christ does not need to be watered or fertilized Himself, for His roots are deep, beyond even the soil of Creation. Eventually, with support and the light that flows from God the Father, our fruit is ready to be harvested and the cycle is repeated again and again.

But if we stop reading the Word, if we cut off the Holy Spirit from our mind, then we are cutting off the true vine from our graft and we will surely die, falling victim to the rot and decay of the world, eventually pruned and tossed into the fire.

But what is the fruit Jesus is talking about?

The fruit is the rescue of souls from the certain walk into Hell, the falling down into the fire that many people have chosen. But let me be clear – I don’t believe that God throws people into Hell. Instead, God simply gives people what they have asked for all their lives – a chance to be left alone by God, a chance to do their will, not God’s will, a chance to be independent and avoid bowing their head to God. For you see, it is Heaven and the New Jerusalem that is the special place while Hell is the default choice. If we make no choice, we get to avoid God, going to a place where other creatures have gone who wanted to avoid God have gone – creatures like Satan, yes, but other creatures like Adolph Hitler, Mussolini, Attila the Hun, Ghengis Khan, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussain, Nero, and others like them, the ordinary people who simply refused to submit to God – God, Our ever polite Creator lets people get what they said they wanted – a world where they make the rules, a land where they can compete with others who wanted the same thing, a playroom with the others who felt they were smarter, stronger, self-reliant enough to demand special treatment.

God does not send people to Hell – God allows people to avoid God. If you do not want to be part of God’s Kingdom, ruled by Christ, then you can argue with all those other souls about who is in charge. Who knows? You might be able to establish your own kingdom and defeat all the other rogues of history. You might be craftier and more ruthless that Hitler, than Nero, that Ghengis Khan, than Saddam Hussain, than Al Capone and all the others that rejected God. You just might be the strongest, the smartest, the most ruthless.

But our job is to bear fruit, helping people avoid that fate and instead live in a New Jerusalem where a just and merciful ruler rules, where the Tree of Life bears a different fruit every month of the year, where God’s presence is seen, where Jesus walks among us and his other followers.

Jesus said:

If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.

Remember when you were first grafted into Christ. Remember when you first believed. Some of you don’t remember, it happened when you were so young, you are so blessed. But others can remember exactly what happened – for some it was a sudden realization that the connection was made and for others, it was a slow realization as the connection was gently made and then you looked up one day and realized that you had indeed believed for days, weeks, months, years, even decades.

The Living Water began to flow through you and you became aware that God was paying attention to you, to you in your life as little signs added up, as certain decisions were made, small and large, and you found yourself walking in certain ways, meeting certain people, seeing certain things, experiencing other things, not experiencing other activities, but always there was a hand on your shoulder, guiding you, and perhaps that hand became a voice as you listened and watched ever more carefully for that gentle, soft whisper of the Holy Spirit flowing through your life.

And then, you began to realize that this life was not about you, but it was about what the true vine was leading you to, the people you were encountering, the ones that broke your heart, the hurt that you saw in the world and the Spirit flowing through you was telling you, “Look. Look at these people, these children, these older people and think about what you can do.”

At first you turned away, but then you began to give. You gave some money, you gave some time, you thought about what you might be able to do, you turned away again because it really was a struggle between you, your family, and the hurting ones, but you began to do more. Someone asked you for a donation, someone else asked you for some time. And the Spirit said, “I can help, but I need you to speak and do. I need you to speak and do.”

And some of you began to speak, others began to do, and still others began to both speak and do.

And the more you gave, the more you did, the more you speak, the more you have felt the Living Water flowing through you from the true vine. And flowers have begun to blossom, perhaps even fruit has begun to appear.

Jesus said:

If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

And as the graft has taken, as you have grown stronger in the connection with the true vine, you have begun to realize that this is true – now that you know what to ask for, the right things to ask for, the proper goals in this world, whatever you ask for will be done for you. And your vine begins to bend toward the sun, and the fruit begins to show and your life becomes meaningful and fulfilling and joyous and wonderful!

The True Vine spoke and said:

This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.

In a fully developed grapevine, the graft is as strong or stronger than the original parts of the vine, just as a good weld is as strong or stronger than the original material.

With Christ, our goal is to become so in tune with God’s will for us as transmitted to us through the Word of God which is both the Bible and the Son, and given to us by the gentle coursing of the Holy Spirit through our minds. We are to be so in tune that there is no conflict between what God asks of us and what we desire to do. In that way, we are like the fully developed grafted grapevine – it is hard to tell where the true vine ends and the graft begins. How hard is it to tell where Christ ends and you begin?

Before Christ, we were dead. We just didn’t know it at the time. Now that we have been grafted into Christ, into Christ’s body, we are alive again. But there is this deep question: Will we accept the Living Water flowing into us, giving us life? Or will we fight against God’s will, against the graft, complaining about what Christ asks us to do, arguing against Beauty because it is difficult, fighting against speaking because it is uncomfortable, debating about paths because our pride would rather win than accept the wisdom of Christ, asking for special treatment because we think we are deserving of it from the God who has led more than a billion souls into eternal life?

If you have not accepted the leadership of Christ in your life, accept Him today in prayer.

If you have not let the Living Water flow through your life and received the Holy Spirit in water baptism, talk to me or your local pastor about being baptized on Mother’s Day, as four other people are planning.

If you continue to argue and drag your heels and fight against the will of Christ for your life, look up in prayer and say, “So be it, Jesus, I will surrender to you and do your will. I will stop fighting You today.”
And if you have done these things, bow in prayer and ask that Jesus, the True Vine, might successfully graft another person or a dozen dying souls onto Him, that they might live eternally in Christ, as you are living in Him.