In John 15:8, Jesus told his disciples, “This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.”
Jesus had chosen his disciples for just that reason too, “to go and bear fruit,” verse 16 – fruit that would uniquely identify them as his disciples. So what kind of fruit did Jesus have in mind? He answered that in verse 8: it would be fruit in their lives that would bring glory to his Father. It would be “lasting fruit” too (16), so a disciple’s life would become a lifelong legacy to the Father’s greatness.
Which sounds like a tall order for any disciple to fulfill, but Jesus explains how such fruit is produced. Using the analogy of a fruit producing vine, he said, “No branch can bear fruit by itself” (4). To bear fruit a branch has to remain attached to the main stem of the vine – to which Jesus then says in verse 5, “I am the vine; you’re the branches. To bear fruit, then, you must remain attached to me and I to you, because on its own a branch cannot produce anything.”
So Jesus wasn’t saying, “Go to it lads, bear much fruit to the glory of the Father” – leaving it up to them to figure it out. That would be like asking branches on an apple tree to figure out how to produce apples on their own, without being connected to the tree.
Instead, Jesus says, “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, you can ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you.” (7). This was a new world his disciples were entering, where the means of fulfilling what they’d been chosen for would be totally provided by Jesus – in both instruction by word and direct help. He’d already provided the instruction by word (3), but from now on he’d provide the direct help to fulfill it too.
If, then, they wished for what he’d chosen them for – to bear fruit to the glory of the Father – and they took that wish to Jesus, asking him to make it happen in their lives – he would guarantee an answer. So when Jesus says back in verse 4, “Remain in me, and I will remain in you,” it’s like a tree saying to its branches, “I exist to help you produce a ton of fruit. So stay attached and I’ll feed through whatever you need whenever you need it.”
And in this way they could produce the kind of “Fruit that brings glory to the Father”….(next blog)
