INTRODUCTION

Good morning. My name is David Sorn, and I’m the Lead Pastor here at Renovation Church.

One of the subjects that I think is necessary to teach on often is the subject of suffering, or difficulties, adversity, pain.

Exciting stuff, right?

But the reason it’s so important for us to talk about it often is because most of us are fairly unfamiliar with it.

And maybe immediately you object to what I just said!

And you say, “But wait a second! Think of all of the problems in our world today!”

And I agree, there are many.

But when we think of a baseline for how difficult our lives are and how much adversity we face daily basis, we have many conveniences.

If you were one of the first residents of Blaine in the 1870’s, what would your life had been like?

Well, firstly, 9 months of the year, you would have been…cold…like all day.

No Heat in your house (besides a fire, maybe)…

No air conditioning ,no fridge, no indoor plumbing…certainly no technology.

Maybe half of your children would live to adulthood…the rest would die mostly of diseases that we can treat fairly easily now.

You yourself would have suffered probably a number of health problems, probably have some sort of chronic pain, and maybe you’d have half your teeth?

Life would have been full of an everyday adversity that we couldn’t even imagine.

And while that’s certainly unfortunate for those who lived then…

The upside of that, was that they were not as shocked or appalled …when difficulty and obstacles came their way.

It was, in a sense, a normal part of life.

But for many of us, when adversity comes, or pain, or unexpected obstacles…we often don’t know what to do with it.

Especially from a Spiritual perspective.

And we wonder:

Are these new obstacles my fault?

Was God somehow involved in these difficulties?

But when you read through the Bible, it actually gives many different reasons for the obstacles we face.

And one of those reasons, is a unique one, called Pruning.

And so we’re going to cover this very interesting topic of “Pruning” today.

WHAT IS PRUNING?

Go ahead and grab a Bible

John 15:1-4

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We are starting a new 4-weeks series this morning on John chapter 15 called “The Vine”

And we’re going to study the pretty deep and amazing things that God’s Word has to teach us about our relationship with Him…all through the metaphor of the Vine.

Jesus’ teaching in John 15 actually takes place the night before his death.

So this is Thursday night…just after the Last Supper.

Jesus is walking with the disciples towards the Garden of Gethsemane.

And there were vineyards all over ancient Israel.

And so it’s possible that Jesus even stops near a vine to explain this next teaching.

Let’s read together.

Jesus says:

(John 15:1-4) – NIV

“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. 3 You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. 4 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.

Okay, let’s walk through this metaphor carefully so we can understand what Jesus is teaching.

Jesus is the vine

We see that right in the beginning of verse 1

God the Father is the gardener

He is the one who tends to vineyard

People are the branches

Fruit is the product of a Godly life

Fruit is used as a metaphor in several different places in the Bible, including Paul’s famous Fruit of the Spirit passage in Galatians 5.

Where the fruit, the result of having the Spirit move in your life, is things like: Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, etc.

Now, we’re going to go deeper next week into what Jesus teaches in verse 4 and beyond about remaining and abiding in the vine, but today, I want to spend an entire message talking about this idea of pruning.

So our first question of the day is this:

WHAT is pruning?

If we’re going to answer that, we need to understand the vineyard a bit better first.

So I want to show you a quick video of how they actually prune vineyards.

(Pruning Video)

Find someone who loves you as much as that guy loves grapes

(PruningGrapes.jpg)

So why do they prune every year like that?

If they don’t, the vines simply grow wild and many, many problems result

For example

When you have too many canes (those were all of those different branches he cut off), the grapes can’t draw enough from the vine.

There is too much going in ten different directions.

So the gardener must prune the other branches, so the sap may flow more powerfully where it needs to go.

But pruning is the only way to get this (photo)

HOW DOES GOD PRUNE OUR LIVES?

So that answers our first question of “What is pruning?”, but it just begs another question:

1. WHAT is pruning?

2. HOW does God prune our lives?

If Jesus says in verse 2 that God prunes our branches (our individual lives) to make them even more fruitful…

…what does that actually mean?

Like how does God do that?

Let me start giving you some different examples of what this can look like:

So let’s say, God the master gardener, walks by your section of His vineyard that is your life, and He sees this branch that is “a branch of pride.”

And He sees that you have this over-confidence in your own abilities.

And this long, wild growing branch of pride that’s actually causing less fruit to grow on your part of the vineyard…

…because much of your energy is going into the unfruitful branch of pride.

God knows that if He’s going to grow the fruit of humility in your life, and thus make your life more beautiful, He’s going to have to get His shears out and start pruning.

But how is He going to actually cut some pride out of your life?

Probably through allowing failure.

Because it’s often only through the “pruning out of success,” that many of us only begin to grow the fruit of humility.

I can tell you, “Be humble!!”

But most of us won’t learn to be humble until we’re humbled…by the adversity of life.

That’s one way God prunes.

But not all pruning is because you’re going in the wrong direction.

Pruning is not the same as discipline.

I suppose there probably is some overlap

But God’s discipline (like we talked about a couple of weeks ago) is where we are intentionally rebelling, and God, like a loving Father, must use discipline to help us trust in His ways.

But pruning, is when the Master Gardener looks at us, and says, “I can make this more effective! More fruitful! More beautiful! ”

“But it’s going to hurt a little!”

Let me show you this in the Bible: Look at second half of verse 2 again!

every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.

Did you notice that the branch that God prunes is already bearing fruit?

It’s not bad! It’s not straight-up rebelling!

It’s actually bearing some fruit (good-works for God); good character!

God just wants to make it MORE fruitful!

I think of it this way:

When I started as a youth pastor at 22, there were several difficult situations I had to deal with over the first few years.

Leaders who were mad at each other, students going through difficult situations, unexpected roadblocks.

At each difficult moment, I remember looking to God and thinking,

“Why are you doing this?

“Why are you making ministry so hard?!”

“I want it to be easy branch of blessing, but you are pruning my flow here!”

But I thank God for those trials now.

I got to learn how to handle conflict in a relatively safe environment, where I could watch one of my mentors (Sean McDowell who was here last week), lead through it, and model for me and train me.

God was pruning me, so that years later, He could grow more fruit on my branches.

And…

We can grow mightily through the adversity of God’s pruning.

But notice I just said, “We CAN grow.” Growth is not guaranteed.

Look back to verse 3.

Jesus says:

3 You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you

What’s interesting here is that the Greek Word (that’s the language it was written in) for “clean” is actually the same word Jesus used for pruning in verse 2.

Jesus is telling the disciples that what really pruned and shaped their lives was His teaching. His Word.

Here’s how verses 2 & 3 work together.

It’s often in our hard times (our failures, obstacles, & storms) that we will truly turn again to God’s Word

And it’s God’s Word that truly begins to reform, prune, and shape us into the image and likeness of Jesus.

And here’s why verse 3 is so important.

Sometimes Christians wrongly assume that trials automatically lead to Godliness.

And that isn’t always so.

We can all probably point to people who lost a job, faced opposition, or endured difficulty…

but instead of getting closer to God, their difficulties hardened them towards God.

And so, yes, God, the master gardener, will prune your life…but it’s on you to respond to His WORD when He does.

If you don’t get that job or house or test results you wanted…

You can become bitter…and wonder if God is perhaps not good, or maybe doesn’t even exist at all!!

Or, you can start asking God questions.

And you can say,

“God what are you teaching me?”

“Is there something you’re protecting me from?”

I mean, is it possible that you didn’t get that promotion because God knew that all that extra money would begin to negatively affect your character…

Sometimes God blesses us through the “pruning of saying no”

WHY WOULD GOD PRUNE OUR LIVES

And here’s where we have to dive deeper into a 3rd question.

WHY?

1. WHAT is pruning?

2. HOW does God prune our lives?

3. WHY would God prune our lives?

I explained some of the how, but our hearts, in part because of our unfamiliarity with adversity (as I said at the beginning), our hearts want to know more of the “WHY”

If God is good, why would He ever allow difficulty into my life?

And this is important because if we don’t begin to understand the WHY, we won’t see the beauty and wisdom of God.

If you know nothing about WHY the vineyard works the way it does, and you just show up at a vineyard (perhaps for a tour of wine country of something), right after they’ve finished pruning…

…and you see a whole field full of branches lying on the ground…

…if you know nothing of how the vineyard works, you might think, “What are they doing?! These people are awful. They just butchered a beautiful vineyard!”

But there is wisdom in their actions, right?

And likewise, there is wisdom in God’s pruning of our lives.

Every true believer undergoes pruning.

Charles Spurgeon once said it this way:

“All the fruit-bearing saints must feel the knife. Observe Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, had not those patriarchs their trials? Moses and David, Jeremiah and Daniel, who among those escaped? Though they honored their Master much, who escaped without the pruning knife? – Charles Spurgeon

And again, in most of these cases, these faithful giants were not experiencing discipline from the Lord, but pruning.

Just like verse 2, they were already bearing fruit, but God just wanted them to bear MORE fruit!

But here, today, when we experience any sort of adversity or difficulty, we’re more apt to say, “How could a loving God let me go through this?”

1. WHAT is pruning?

2. HOW does God prune our lives?

3. WHY would God prune our lives?

But, if I can humbly say this to you, we say these things, and I see so many people (especially young people) even walking away from God, because they haven’t been taught a good Theology of Suffering and difficulty.

They’ve never been taught a theology of evil (that yes, sometimes suffering happens because the devil and evil spiritual forces are real)

Or they’ve never been taught the doctrine of total depravity…that we are all born naturally sinful, and much of the suffering of life comes from our own sinful choices.

They haven’t been taught about the Lord’s loving discipline.

Or they’ve never been taught how the Master Gardener prunes us.

They’ve only heard that God is good and loving and kind and that He blesses His children.

So then they infer, that if life gets difficult, that God must not be real after all.

But not only is that reductionistic and simplistic, it’s more reflective of the Eastern Teaching of Karma than it is the richness and depth of the Christian faith.

So when obstacles come, you need to train yourself to stop saying,

“How could God do this?,”

…and start saying:

“God, what beautiful fruit will you grow with this?”

And if you’re looking at me like, “C’mon!”

This is actually EXACTLY how the believers in the New Testament thought about difficulty!

I’m serious!

I brought the receipts!

(Romans 5:3-4) – NIV

3 Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; 4 perseverance, character; and character, hope.

(James 1:2-4) – NIV

2 Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3 because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. 4 Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

1. WHAT is pruning?

2. HOW does God prune our lives?

3. WHY would God prune our lives?

These early believers are rejoicing in the pruning trials God has given them.

Because they know it’s going to produce character and spiritual maturity and God-honoring fruit in their lives!

I was reading a couple of weeks ago about the House Church movement in China, and they said they don’t even trust someone as a leader, unless they’ve been to Prison for their faith.

Because in the pruning and adversity of prison, that person will grow much fruit, and thus is ready to lead.

And remember, God’s aim for you is not to bless you, it’s to mature you.

It’s to shape you into the image of His Son.

As I often do, I was reading Pastor Timothy Keller’s words on this subject, and I thought he was so spot on as usual.

He said that we need to think more deeply about how things mature and grow.

And he said:

As 1 Peter points out, when you give gold ore to a refiner, what does the refiner do with the gold?

Just cuddle it and love it?

No, he puts it in the fire…to take out all of its impurities.

If you give an athlete to a good coach?

What does the coach do?

Just praise the athlete?

No, they train them to push their bodies harder than ever before.

When a parent has a child…

How does the parent help grow the child into maturity?

Yes, they love their child.

But they also shape their child by challenging them to do hard things, and by not giving them everything they want.

Because, what happens to children who get everything they want?

They don’t mature!

We say, “They’re spoiled”

They’re often awful adults.
Not mature!

So realize if everything out in the world grows & matures through refinement and adversity, so God will mature you sometimes through the adversity of pruning.

But you won’t probably like it.

And you might not always understand it.

Does the branch understand when it’s pruned?

Does the gold understand when it’s thrown in the fire?

Does the teenager understand when the parent says, “You lied about where you were last night. You’re grounded…because I want you to learn that if you lie as a teenager, you will lie as an adult, it will bring even more painful consequences”

What does the teenager say to their Father?

You’ve ruined my social life. How could you! You don’t know what you’re doing!”

And so really the big spiritual question here is:

Who knows what they’re doing?

You or the Master Gardener?

God is the Master Gardener, not us.

But you can trust Him.

Not just because of His Wisdom.

But because He is your Father in heaven

If a good gardener loves their plants, and often obsesses over them by going out multiple times a day to make sure everything is looking right, and will grow to be beautiful…

…how much more so does your Father in heaven LOVE YOU, and meticulously care for you?

So trust Him.

Even when He prunes.

Even when it hurts.

He loves you, and He’s growing you into something beautiful.

Amen? Amen.