Council Community Church

Pastor's Corner

CHANGE REQUIRES A RELATIONSHIP & TAKES TIME

            This last week our grandkids were helping me with trimming some branches in our yard.  I got called away to answer the phone and when I returned, a flowering bush that I had been nurturing back to health had been trimmed.  Lying on the ground were branches that looked alive but were separated from their life source and today they are very much dead.

               Jesus said, “I am the vine , you are the branches.  If a man remains in Me and I in him, he will bear much fruit;  apart from Me you can do nothing.” [John 15:5]    

            The relationship of a branch to the vine is the relationship we must sustain to our Lord if we are going to change. If we allow our circumstance to separate us from our God and try to deal with them on our own, we will wilt and lose the opportunity for His life to flow through us and bear much fruit. 

            We must remain or “abide”, to use the older term.  We must set aside everything we normally rely on and cling to Him, closely joined to Him, sustained by His life, waiting for His resource that will in time produce the fruit for which we were created.  As He said, Apart from Me YOU CAN DO NOTHING!  A relationship is required.  Do you have one?

            Also, real change takes time!  In our modern society of instant everything, we find it hard to believe that for some things we have to wait.  We expect immediate transformation and miraculous productivity, but great tasting fruit takes time.

            It may begin with a period of dormancy with little indication of the life within.  Then in the appropriate season the warmth of the “Son”, the springs “Living Water” of His Holy Spirit, and the climate of warming Fatherly love, bursts into “leaves” of productivity that provide for growth and a budding of future fruitfulness.  Life becomes evident, but the real benefit of that life, the purpose for which it is given [fruit], has only just begun.

            It requires “waiting” as a part of the process.  There are no short cuts to maturity.  Fruit takes time to develop size, and sweetness.  If you pick it too soon, its intended glory is gone.  But if you wait, there is nothing sweeter and more refreshing than a tree ripened, fully matured piece of fruit.

            As I approach the sunset years of my life, I pray that I will cultivate and enjoy my relationship to my “Eternal Vine” and that I will be patient, waiting for the fruit He wants to produce and ripen in my life.  May you allow Him to do the same for you!

            As the French wine maker, Paul Masson said nearly a century ago, “We will sell no wine before it’s time!”  So may we not expect any real, vital change “before its time.”