Fire On Your Head

I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch of mine that does not bear fruit He takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit. Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in Me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in Me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.

John 15:1-8

Someone was telling me recently about some observations they’ve made concerning a vine his parents have in their front yard. He was telling me that when the useless branches are cut off, they really don’t do anything but die and need to be thrown away or used in a fire. He went on to explain to me, that if you don’t prune the branches that are bearing fruit, then the vine grows very large, and has leaves and branches everywhere, but only very tiny grapes. The reason you prune the branches is so that the ingredients that travel from the roots in the ground and through the stem will make it all the way to the grapes on the ends of the branches, and thereby produce more in quality and size. The less spread-out their pathways are, the more ‘focus’ and concentration–if you will—the juice will have, so that the fruit that is coming forth will be larger and more plentiful.

So in other words, the energy is channeled into specific branches, instead of spread too thin all over the whole vine.

Time and again, the Bible uses the imagery of wine to describe the Holy Spirit and His work in our lives. We obviously get wine from grapes, and so the implications of this passage and the work of the Holy Spirit are made clear, especially given that in the previous chapter and the one following, Jesus went into detailed explanation of the role He’d play in the believer’s life.

The clearest I have ever been able to hear God clearly, has been when I cut out of my life the junk that kept me just bearing leaves and tiny grapes. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be a leaf-bearing tree. There’s nothing wrong in and of itself when a tree has a lot of leaves—that’s just the point. It may look nice from a distance, but in your hunger when you approach that tree looking for food, you are sadly disappointed and go elsewhere to satisfy that hunger. Jesus cursed a fig tree that only had leaves, but nothing to feed his hunger. What does He think when He comes to your life expecting fruit? Does He find any?

Jude also called such people ‘clouds without water’ (Jude 12), when talking specifically of false teachers. There’s many trees in our midst but since the tree looks good, we think nothing of it. But is your hunger and thirst for spiritual matters satisfied by such? Is there healing in those branches? There’s many false teachers out there, making rules like ‘tongues are not for today‘ and ‘it’s ok to ordain practicing homosexuals to the ministry.’ But the culture around us disintegrates because we the church are mostly clouds without water, trees without fruit substituting power and truth with proper theology.

Jesus Himself told the scribes and pharisees “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.” (John 5:39-40).  What kind of vessel does the Holy Spirit use–one who has their theological ducks in a row and is not too “imbalanced”, or one who is YIELDED to Him fully, in whatever HE may desire of the vessel? The Holy Spirit and His work is just as resisted, rejected and taught against and ignored as something demonic and not heavenly, as Jesus’ was when He walked the earth in His day.

Now, of course I’m not saying that Jesus ‘curses’ us, His children for not bearing fruit. But we do have texts like the one quoted at the beginning of this entry that we have to contend with. What do eternal securists who believe once you’re saved you’re always saved do with passages of Scripture that say things like ‘if you the branch don’t bear fruit you’re cut off and thrown into the fire?!’ But that’s another topic for another time, sorry to digress.

But everything in God’s kingdom gets the knife. The second verse of John 15 states that the branches that don’t bear fruit, get cut off, and the branches that bear fruit get pruned, so they can produce more fruit. Either way, we can decide if we’ll give certain things up in our lives so that we can be more fruit-bearing, or we can let God cut them off Himself. When we wait for Him to do it for us, it’s always more painful than if we just willingly lay things down on the altar of His grace.

Everything in the kingdom of God gets the knife one way or another. Does God have to prune you, or does He have to cut things off? When He prunes, it’s so that we bear more fruit, and can yield “larger grapes”. So that the Holy Spirit wine can flow through the veins of our branches all the more easier. But in order to discuss the Holy Spirit as wine flowing through our lives, it’s necessary to make a little detour for a moment.

Fruit vs. Gifts

The Holy Spirit’s work within the believer produces the following fruit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). When Jesus comes to you looking to quench His thirst, does he find fruit like this in your life? The fruit of the Holy Spirit is not to be confused with the gifts (or more appropriately, enablements of power) of the Holy Spirit. Jesus told his disciples the Holy Spirit would be with them and in them (John 14:17), but then he also told them to not leave Jerusalem until they received power from on high. This obviously is a different experience altogether than when they received the Holy Spirit within, or else Jesus would have been mistaken or foolish to tell them not to leave Jerusalem until they received something they already had!

The baptism in the Holy Spirit is not a synonym for receiving the Holy Spirit upon salvation. For one thing, Jesus told them to tarry in Jerusalem until they received power, and did not tell them to wait until they “got saved”, “reborn”, or “regenerated” or any other synonym used to describe the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives upon salvation. They were bearing evidence of salvation already when they met to pray in the upper room every day until that famous day of Pentecost. And lest you think otherwise, let me remind you how rare it is to find unbelievers gathering in groups to pray every day to God! The burden of proof is on those who say we’re baptized in the Holy Spirit AND indwelt by Him both at the point of salvation, to explain away Scripture; for example how come it happened as separate experiences in the Bible, and to explain how the disciples could not possibly be saved already until Acts 2. The explanations I’ve been given or heard take hermeneutical and logical acrobats in order to hold water, and aren’t persuasive enough for me to list and refute all here.

When Paul wrote to the Ephesians, he was writing to a group of believers who already had both experiences—this is where many people make their exegetical (fancy Bible interpretation word) mistakes and start making assumptions about all that’s promised in the empowerment from on high is included in the role the Holy Spirit plays when he dwells in us upon getting saved. The two experiences, in my opinion were never meant to be separate but all believers should have and want this baptism for power in their witness for Christ, and the earlier they get it the better. When I witness to people and pray alongside them giving their lies to Jesus, I also take them through the steps of how the Holy Spirit will come on them also for power to witness for Christ, as well as in them for lifestyle–and it’s SO much easier to lead someone in this prayer as a baby Christian because they don’t have all the bad theology to unlearn and years of living without the power of the Holy Spirit to resist. But it sure would be nice if this experience DID happen at the point of salvation with every individual believer!

Interesting to note also, is that we have two groups of nine connected with the work of the Holy Spirit; nine fruit in Galatians 5, and nine gifts in 1 Corinthians 12:7-11.  The fruit might be referred to the character traits resulting from the indwelling of the Holy Spirit: fruit grows on the branch because of the life within the tree. The fruit of the Spirit is demonstrative of the indwelling and fruit-bearing of the Holy Spirit in our lives as individual believers. The gifts of the Spirit are for service to the Body and the lost, and not ourselves, as a community where each individual constituting the whole, does its part.

We need to stay connected to the vine, and abide in Him or we’re not going to produce any character traits of the Spirit, or flow more fluidly in the gifts of the Spirit.

If you enjoyed this post or were blessed by it, then you may enjoy mp3s we have for free download on our podcast dealing with these same subjects:

Fire On Your Head Episode 21: Spiritual Disciplines
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Transformed into the Image of Christ – message by Bob Gladstone
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Hindrances to the Baptism in The Holy Spirit
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More Hindrances To a Spiritual Life
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