The True Vine

The Fruit of the Spirit

By Alistair Begg

Between 1962 and 1967, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan served as the second president of India. It's said that on one occasion, addressing his community, he challenged the Christians who were listening by commenting, “You claim that Jesus Christ is your Savior. But you do not appear to be more saved than anyone else.” In other words, “I hear your story, but I’m not seeing the evidence.”

A little poem raises the same issue:

You are writing a gospel, a chapter each day,

By the deeds that you do, by the words that you say…

Men read what you write, whether faithless or true.

Say, what is the gospel according to you?

Radhakrishnan’s statement and this poem both point out that one of the places the impact of the good news of Jesus is most evident is in and through the lives of those who embody its message. If our confession of faith is accompanied by a life of love when relationships are tough, joy when sorrow runs deep, peace when turmoil invades, and patience when times try us, that often causes people to wonder about and to be attracted to the hope that is in us (1 Peter 3:15).

The impact of the good news of Jesus is most evident is in and through the lives of those who embody its message.

In our consideration of the fruit of the Spirit, we have arrived at patience, which is arguably one of its most frequently tested facets. In a hurried culture, hardly a moment goes by when our patience isn’t tested by a crisis, interruption, or bump in the road. To aid us in our understanding of patience as the fruit of the Spirit, we will consider together: (1) How patience is defined, (2) How patience is developed, and (3) How patience demonstrated.

How Patience Is Defined

While the Oxford English Dictionary could offer us a fine definition of the word patience, we are really better off beginning with God and His revelation of Himself. Let’s consider, then, how the Bible treats the concept of patience.

The Old Testament

When God reveals Himself to His people in the Old Testament, He consistently does so in terms that points us to His wondrous patience. For example, when God reveals Himself to Moses after He reinscribes the Ten Commandments, this is His self-proclamation:

The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation. (Ex.

34:6–7)

This self-revelation of God, shades of which are often repeated throughout the Old Testament, tells us of God’s tremendous patience toward us. Indeed, the story of Israel, the unfolding drama of the Bible, is one of His great mercy, forbearance, and kindness. We see another example of God’s patience in Jonah. There, as we know, after God calls Jonah to preach to Nineveh, the prophet gets himself in a whale of a problem. But when he is finally spat up and reconfigured, he finally does what God told him to do—and miraculously, the people respond, and many of them repent. But how does Jonah respond? O LORD, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. (Jonah 4:2)

In other words, Jonah knew that God would have patient mercy on people who didn’t deserve it. Perhaps Jonah, along with us, would have done well to ponder what we all really deserve from God. And yet God is still patient beyond anything we can fathom.

The prophets restate the patience motif again and again. At one point, for example, Isaiah, speaking from God, confronts the people and points out the foolishness of their rebellion:

They are a rebellious people, lying children, children unwilling to hear the instruction of the LORD.

Against such disobedience, you might expect that God, in His justice, would enact immediate judgment and punishment. But here is what He says:

Therefore, the LORD waits to be gracious to you, and therefore, he exalts Himself to show mercy to you.

For the LORD is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for Him.

Certainly, there are times when God must judge—and severely, at that. In this case, however, His justice is paired with and demonstrated by His matchless patience.

The New Testament

The New Testament adds even more clarity to the picture of God’s patience for us—especially as Jesus Christ, the very embodiment of patience itself, steps in fleshed into history.

The apostle Peter clues us in to the fact that some may be prone to mistake the Lord’s patience for inability or indifference: “Where is the promise of his coming?” he imagines them asking (2 Peter 3:4). But then he provides us the answer: “The Lord is . . . patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” What may appear to some as slowness is actually abundant grace, mercy, and love for the least deserving.

God has perfect patience for imperfect sinners.

Similarly, when the apostle Paul tells his testimony, he admits to his sordid past, identifying himself as a “blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent” of the gospel (1 Tim. 1:13). Yet he also testifies to the Lord’s bountiful patience: “I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life” (1 Tim. 1:16).

In short, the New Testament affirms the glorious truth that God has perfect patience for imperfect sinners.

How Peace Is Developed

See FRUIT on Page 48

FRUIT

Continued from Page 47

If our heavenly Father dispenses such patience to us, then He rightly expects us to share His patience with others too. So how can we go about putting on or clothing ourselves with patience, as God calls us to? Our patience won’t be perfect like His, of course. But we ought still to reflect some measure of the gifts He has poured out on us.

James opens his epistle with these words regarding faith and hardship: “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness”. The word rendered “steadfastness” in the ESV could also be translated “patience,” as it is in the KJV. So, according to James, it is actually life’s friction—the testing of our faith— that produces patience. He goes on to say that this trial-by-fire sort of patience causes us to be “lacking in nothing”.

But the benefit we receive from trials and difficulties still depends on how we look at and handle them. In and of themselves, trials can’t form patience in us. It is God’s Spirit who increasingly produces that patience within us, and it’s the same Spirit who enables us to “put to death” our sinful tendencies (Rom. 8:13) and “walk in a manner worthy of the Lord” (Col. 1:10).

Since God grants forgiveness to the truly penitent, one of the evidences of being truly penitent is the ability to show a forgiving spirit to others—especially those who have offended us.

To show us how patience is formed, Charles Spurgeon once preached a sermon that used the picture of a ruggedly handsome, weather-beaten sailor:

You look at the weather-beaten sailor, the man who is at home on the sea: he has a bronzed face and mahogany-colored flesh, he looks as tough as heart of oak, and as hardy as if he were made of iron. How different from us poor landsmen. How did the man become so inured to hardships, so able to breast the storm, so that he does not care whether the wind blows southwest or north-west?

He can go out to sea in any kind of weather; he has his sea legs on: how did he come to this strength? It was by doing business in great waters. He could not have become a hardy seaman by tarrying on shore. Now, trial works in the saints that spiritual hardihood which cannot be learned in ease.

You may go to school forever, but you cannot learn endurance there: you may color your cheek with paint, but you cannot give it that ingrained brown which comes of stormy seas and howling winds. Strong faith and brave patience come of trouble, and a few men in the church who have thus been prepared are worth anything in time of tempest.

To reach that condition of firm endurance and sacred hardihood is worth all the expense of all the heaped-up troubles that ever come upon us from above or from beneath. When trial works patience we are incalculably enriched.

How Peace Is Demonstrated

Once the wind and waves begin to shape us a bit, how do we demonstrate patience in real life? There are countless ways for us to extend God’s patience to others, but here’s an easy place to begin: since God grants forgiveness to the truly penitent, one of the evidences of being truly penitent is the ability to show a forgiving spirit to others—especially those who have offended us.

How often are we like the unforgiving servant who chokes his fellow servant, demanding what he’s owed even after the master had forgiven him an incalculable debt (Matt. 18:23–35)? How many of us would say all too readily with Margaret Thatcher, “I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end”? May it not be so for us.

Our Lord Jesus Christ had “perfect patience” on us (1 Tim. 1:16), even though we were stone-cold “dead in our trespasses” (Eph. 2:5). We will never match such patience, no question. But in the power of the Spirit, we can build up a surplus of patience that overflows to other undeserving sinners and saints, pointing them to

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The True Vine: 3. The Branch

By Andrew Murray

Every Branch in me that Bares Not Fruit, He taketh It away--

(John 15.2)

Here we have one of the chief words of the parable--branch. A vine needs branches: without branches it can do nothing, can bear no fruit. As important as it is to know about the Vine, and the Husbandman, it is to realize what the branch is. Before we listen to what Christ has to say about it, let us first take in what a branch is, and what it teaches us of our life in Christ. A branch is simply a bit of wood, brought forth by the vine for the one purpose of serving it in bearing its fruit. It is of the very same nature as the vine and has one life and one spirit with it. Just think a moment of the lessons this suggests.

There is the lesson of entire consecration. The branch has but one object for which it exists, one purpose to which it is entirely given up. That is, to bear the fruit the vine wishes to bring forth. And so, the believer has but one reason for his being a branch--but one reason for his existence on earth --that the heavenly Vine may through him bring forth His fruit. Happy the soul that knows this, that has consented to it, and that says, I have been redeemed and I live for one thing--as exclusively as the natural branch exists only to bring forth fruit, I too; as exclusively as the heavenly Vine exists to bring forth fruit, I too. As I have been planted by God into Christ, I have wholly given myself to bear the fruit the Vine desires to bring forth.

There is the lesson of perfect conformity. The branch is exactly like the vine in every aspect--the same nature, the same life, the same place, the same work. In all this they are inseparably one. And so, the believer needs to know that he is partaker of the divine nature and has the very nature and spirit of Christ in him, and that his one calling is to yield himself to a perfect conformity to Christ. The branch is a perfect likeness of the vine; the only difference is, the one is great and strong, and the source of strength, the other little and feeble, ever needing and receiving strength. Even so the believer is, and is to be, the perfect likeness of Christ.

There is the lesson of absolute dependence. The vine has its stores of life and sap and strength, not for itself, but for the branches. The branches are and have nothing but what the vine provides and imparts. The believer is called to, and it is his highest blessedness to enter upon, a life of entire and unceasing dependence upon Christ. Day and night, every moment, Christ is to work in him all he needs.

And then the lesson of undoubting confidence. The branch has no cure; the vine provides all; it has but to yield itself and receive. It is the sight of this truth that leads to the blessed rest of faith, the true secret of growth and strength: "I can do all things through Christ which strengthened me."

What a life would come to us if we only consented to be branches! Dear child of God, learn the lesson. You have but one thing to do: Only be a branch--nothing more, nothing less! Just be a branch; Christ will be the Vine that gives all. And the Husbandman, the mighty God, who made the Vine what it is, will as surely make the branch what it ought to be.

Lord Jesus, I pray Thee, reveal to me the heavenly mystery of the branch, in its living union with the Vine, in its claim on all its fullness. And let Thy all-sufficiency, holding and filling Thy branches, lead me to the rest of faith that knows that Thou works all. >

The True Vine

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