Once again I share like this in the hope
that my personal testimony will encourage and help you in your walk with God,
and that it will encourage you to have your own daily time with God,
prayerfully meditating on his word, so that the Holy Spirit can minister to you
all that is on Father’s heart for your place in the body of Christ.
Yesterday, God drew my attention once again
to joy. Early in the day the focus was on this verse:
You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.[1]
There is no greater joy than the fullness
of joy in God our Father since his fullness of joy is as full as joy can be.
There is no more lasting pleasure than the pleasures at his right hand since
they are forevermore and there is nothing longer than that!
With that in mind, the joy my soul longs
for is found in God the Father. Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father,[2]
the image of the pleasures of the invisible God, the Word who speaks the
pleasures of God into our hearts.[3] Together,
they pour their love into our hearts through the abiding presence of the Holy
Spirit,[4]
and so, “the kingdom of
God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and
joy in the Holy Spirit.”[5]
By the end of the day, my attention was
drawn to the reminder that the “fruit of
the Spirit” includes “joy”.[6] This
suddenly hit me in a more personal way than I had ever considered it before.
The “fruit of the Spirit” does not
speak of some impersonal thing the Holy Spirit does in the background, sneaking
into my life at night and producing fruit that has nothing to do with my own
attachment to him. Neither does it speak of something that I must do as though
God is telling me that, now that I have the Spirit, it is up to me to produce
joy in my life.
No, this was a realization that everything to
do with the calling on the church to “be
filled with the Spirit”,[7] to
“serve in the new way of the Spirit”,[8] to
“walk by the Spirit”,[9]
and “keep in step with the Spirit”,[10]
is an invitation into a personal fellowship with the Holy Spirit in which
hearts that are filled with the Spirit bear a certain kind of fruit as a
result.[11]
For me, this was already an extremely
personal comfort as I could see how Father was ministering things into my soul.
For a long time I have seen this, that God wants me to know his desire to have
an intimate love relationship with me unlike anything I could have ever
conceived.[12]
This reminder that joy is the fruit of fellowship with the Holy Spirit, not
something I have to try to do or be, gave me such hope and encouragement as I
realized that this was a work God was doing in me, and it was his will and desire
that I experience joy that is “inexpressible and filled with glory.”[13]
As I met with God this morning, talking to
him about where these things were taking me, the call to joy became all the
more encouraging as I understood this as something I could work out with fear
and trembling because of the way God was already working in me to will and to
work for his good pleasure.[14]
By the time I moved into my downstairs prayer time I discovered that Father had
a very special lesson for me that was more of a personal encounter than a mere
intellectual understanding of something that is true.
For a long time I have understood that Jesus
is the vine, I am one of his branches, and when the church abides in Jesus we
bear much fruit.[15]
However, my good-boy propensities often seek to sabotage this by putting the
focus on me trying to bear much fruit rather than me resting in the abiding
relationship with Jesus that would naturally bear much fruit simply because the
life of Jesus is flowing to and through my life.
The special and gracious gift God had
waiting for me was when I received the reminder that, “my Father is the vinedresser”,[16]
or, “my Father is the gardener.”[17]
I suddenly saw a connection between the Father as the gardener, and Jesus’ declaration
that, “By this my Father is glorified,
that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.”[18]
Part of yesterday’s ministry to my soul was
John Piper’s summary statement that, “God
is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.”[19]
It has been a long journey for me to accept this deeply, that God is not
glorified because I do such a good job of serving him, but because I find such
satisfaction in him that everyone knows he is the most glorious person we could
ever know.
When I came to this declaration of Jesus that
our Father is glorified in our bearing of fruit, I suddenly “got it”. Father is
not glorified because I do such a good job of serving him that people see that
because I’m such a good guy I must surely have a good Father. No, the gospel is
quite different than that.
Instead, when I look at the whole picture,
that Father is the gardener, the pruner of the vineyard, and Jesus is the perfect
vine, with us prune-needy believers as his branches, when Jesus says that his
Father is glorified when we bear much fruit it is similar to what people think
of me as a gardener when they walk into my garden!
In other words, in the same way as people
feel impressed with a gardener’s abilities simply because they see how fruitful
his garden is, so Jesus used this simple and basic metaphor to show us how our
lives show people around us that our Father is the most glorious person in the
whole wide world. When we go around showing how good we are, like the religious
hypocrites of Jesus’ day, people only see how good we are, and we receive
whatever limited reward we get from their pats on the back.[20]
But when we bear much fruit, it glorifies
our Father since he is the gardener who prunes the branches to that end. As
people see that my son is a good pruner when they know that he pruned my trees
and they are loaded with fruit, so people look at the good fruit in our lives
and see that the gardener has done an amazing job. He has taken branches from a
wild vine that was rebellious and sinful in every way, and grafted us into his
Son so that the life of Jesus now flows through us, and when these grafted in
branches bear much fruit, people will see what a glorious gardener we have over
the household of God.[21]
The fact that he is our Father makes it all the more glorious as we add in all
the great truths of redemption so it includes the great cost of our salvation
through the death of Jesus Christ.
I know that emotionalism is not
automatically evidence of the Holy Spirit’s work. However, I also know that we
cannot understand the things of God without the direct ministry of the Holy Spirit.[22]
So, to some extent the Holy Spirit taught me these things today, and reminded
me of things I had already been taught,[23]
causing a sudden burst of tears of joy that God was releasing me from trying to
bear fruit, from the curse of poisoning thoughts of fruit-bearing with the
wrong beliefs of self-effort, and assuring me that I would bear much fruit
through abiding in Jesus by grace through faith, not by trying to add my good
works to his.
It is very interesting that Jesus concluded
this section on the vine and branches by telling his disciples, “These things I have spoken to you, that my
joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”[24]
Do you see that? Jesus has told us about the
Father’s work in us, and our relationship to Jesus, and how we give God glory
through our own bearing of fruit, and then he tells us that his own joy would
be in us through our attachment to him in his words (the vine sending his own
joy into the branches), and our joy would be filled to the full through our
experience of these things (the joy of the branches maximized), so that
whatever pruning Father must do in order to make us to bear much fruit would
give him exceptional glory through our lives since the fact that he could cause
people like us to bear much fruit magnifies the superior skills of the
gardener.
Part of this ministry to me today was simply
the fact that Father would add so much comfort to my life by making something
clear to me that I needed to know. The other part of this was the specific
encounter with God in which his Spirit taught me more of what it means to abide
in the vine, or to rest in the Lord Jesus Christ, so Father is free to make us
so fruitful that it reveals his glory to all. The fact that he would include me
in this at all is also to his glory!
© 2017 Monte Vigh ~
Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8 ~ in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise
noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible,
English Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway
Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.)
[1] Psalm 16:11
[3] Jesus is the image of
God (Colossians 1:15), the Word of God (John 1:1-3), the radiance of God’s
glory (Hebrews 1:3), all showing that Jesus is the one through whom we come to
know the Father (John 14:8-11).
[4] Romans 5:5
[5] Romans 14:17
[6] Galatians 5:22-23
[7] Ephesians 5:18
[8] Romans 7:6
[9] Galatians 5:16
[10] Galatians 5:25
[11] It is the apostle Paul
who wrote down the breathed-out words of God, pronouncing his desire on the
church that all of us experience “the
fellowship of the Holy Spirit” (II Corinthians 13:14).
[12] John 17:3 speaks of
eternal life as “knowing” God; Paul’s
prayers in Ephesians 1:15-23, Ephesians 3:14-21, and Colossians 1:9-14, all aim
towards us knowing God in a deeply personal relationship.
[13] I Peter 1:8
[14] Philippians 2:12-13
[15] John 15:11
[16] John 15:1
[17] John 15:1 ~ NIV
[18] John 15:8
[19] John Piper, Desiring
God Ministries: http://www.desiringgod.org/
[20] In Matthew 6 Jesus addressed different ways the religious elite did
their good deeds in hypocrisy, and each time concluded that, “they have received their reward”
(Matthew 6:2, 16). Whatever applause or recognition they received was the only reward
they would get since God would never reward such false expressions of goodness.
[21] Paul uses the imagery
of wild branches grafted in (Romans 11:17-24)/
[22] I Corinthians 2:10-16
[23] The Spirit’s work of teaching and reminding is expressed by Jesus in
John 14:26.
[24] John 15:11
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