The Walk of Love

Anybody like grapes?  A cluster of grapes goes through quite a process for us to be able to enjoy.  Many of us get our grapes from Wal-Mart.  Wal-Mart gets its grapes from a company called Sun World which has vineyards in California.  After approximately 150-180 days of development, at just the right time, when these grapes were ripe, they are cut off, put on a truck, and delivered to Wal-Mart where we can purchase and enjoy them.

For you and me to enjoy the fruit of salvation, Jesus Christ went through quite a process. He left heaven, He was born as a baby, He lived 33 years of a sinless life, He died on the cross, He was buried, and He rose again three days later.  A week before Jesus death, burial, and resurrection He prayed to His Father in John 12:27, “for this purpose I have come to this hour”.  The night of Jesus’ betrayal and arrest John 13:1 says, “Jesus knew that His hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father”.  Just before Jesus’ crucifixion His life was ripe, His “purpose” and His “hour” had come.  Why?  So that all those who would believe in Him might enjoy the sweet “fruit” of salvation, the forgiveness of sin.

READ: John 15:1-17

Living life in the same way as Jesus did requires producing the sacrificial FRUIT of LOVE!  Jesus lived His life to display God’s love to a sinful world.  Jesus produced the greatest fruit of love when He died on the cross in order that we might enjoy the fruit of salvation. Since the disciples didn’t get it from the life He lived, He told them in John 15:12-13, “this is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down His life for His friends”.  Sacrificial love is the fruit that Jesus wants His disciples to display to others.  How are we able to exhibit the sacrificial fruit of love?

Our ability to sacrificially love others is the natural result of being loved BY GOD (John 15:9-10) – A vital part of what it means to abide in Christ, and producing sacrificial love, is knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt how immeasurably much God loves us.  Jesus ability love was the result of the fact that “the Father loved (Him)” and “abide(d) in His love”.   Paul prays in Ephesians 3:17-19 that, “(we), being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses all knowledge”.  Christ’s love for us is far beyond what our minds can comprehend.  Christ overwhelmed us with love on the cross.  Only when we have believed in Christ’s love for us on the cross will we be able to sacrificially love others.  1 John 4:19 says, “we love, because He first loved us”.  For us to bear the fruit of sacrificial love that others can enjoy we must first accept and experience God’s sacrificial love for us.

Our ability to sacrificially love others should be EVER-INCREASING (John 15:2-8) – Jesus subtly communicates with this metaphor of vine and branches that His disciples are capable of producing more and more and more fruit.  In verse 2 in distinguishing two completely different branches, He says there are branches who by nature of their unity with Christ “bear fruit”.  In verse 2 He says there is a process through which a branch can go in order to bear “more fruit”.  In verses 5 and 8 He says there is a branch that bears “much fruit”.  This multiplied production of fruit happens as God the Father, the vinedresser, prunes branches abiding in the vine.  Pruning is a process of cutting away excess and unnecessary growth in order to produce a higher quality and greater quantity of fruit.  In order to allow space for a higher quality and greater quantity of sacrificial love in our lives, God removes things that are get in the way or prevent increased growth from happening.  We should not be surprised if this is a hard and even painful process.  And yet, it is a process we should invite and welcome in our lives (2 Thes. 1:3).

CONCLUSION
Jesus said in John 3:16, “God so loved that world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life”.  Jesus lived His life so that the world would taste and experience the fruit of salvation.  He may no longer be physically present on the earth, but He is present in a way even greater than when He was on the earth.  Jesus miraculously multiplies Himself through us.  Jesus is the true vine, He produced the fruit of sacrificial love on the cross, we are the branches, and now we must bearing the fruit of sacrificial love as well!  Are others enjoying the fruit of sacrificial love that is being produced in your life?