Love and Sacrifice

I will not speak much more with you, for the ruler of the world is coming, and he has nothing in Me; but so that the world may know that I love the Father, I do exactly as the Father commanded Me. Get up, let us go from here. (John 14:30-31)

I love it when a plan comes together. That is a saying that I hear sometimes when people's plans work out just the way they want that pleases them. But in this case I love it when I begin to see obvious providences that remind me that the really good plans are those that God has for me that often I know nothing about until they come into my view. For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. (Jeremiah 29:11-13 NIV)

When I begin to notice how God prearranges events, conversations, articles or talks to come into my life at just the right time to emphasize some truth or reality that He desires for me to notice, I am sometimes surprised but most of all appreciation is awakened and I feel more motivated to want to know Him even more deeply. Over the past few years, things that He has been sharing with me, both for my head and my heart, have served to bring life-changing truths about the nature of His consistent love in sharp contrast with nearly everything I thought about Him in my past. As each new revelation emerges from the fog of confusion that obscures the truth about His character, I see how beautifully everything fits together and reinforces each other which only serves to intensify the light of His glory.

The verse I am looking at today is just such an example. As is often the case, it contains one of those puzzling phrases that I have generally brushed past in my reading because I simply could not find a good place to fit it into my concepts about truth. Though it has not been as troubling as some passages can be, at the same time it seemed to not be nearly so compelling as much of the other material in the surrounding context until this morning. Some things just seem to be redundant or fill-in material until their real significance suddenly emerges when the right light is present.

Enter the providence of God to prepare me to see much more significance in this verse. In the last couple weeks I have become engaged in some intense but enjoyable discussions with a visitor who has started coming to our church. We have spent several hours exploring various aspects of truth that have been coming alive for me over recent years but that are relatively new and different for him. Our discussions have been positive and sometimes rapidly move from one subject to another in his eagerness to try to make sense of so many new concepts. But at the end of each discussion thus far he has challenged me to help make sense out of the concept of where sacrifice fits in to everything we are learning about the true character of God.

At first I didn't understand his confusion about sacrifice and tried to explain to him as best I could how I saw it. But he kept pressing the point and wanted to know why there is such insistence in the Bible of the need for blood if the core issue of sin is not a legal problem demanding punishment. This belief in the need for punishment is the core issue that is polarizing much of the Christian community these days and that is becoming sharpened in my own thinking. How do you fit together the many references to sacrifice and blood throughout Scripture with our emerging picture of a God who has no interest in appeasement but rather is passionate to reestablish a relationship of trust and love with His children again? This fundamental dispute is at the heart of why many people find it very difficult to embrace new ideas about God that do not satisfy the traditional views of religion and beliefs about the nature of sin and a just God.

Enter another providence of God with perfect timing. I just started reading a book that is already proving to be a tremendous help in clarifying a number of these issues in my thinking. Now I want to be clear that I don't believe in being an unthinking reflector of anyone's opinions. But at the same time when a person has a right spirit and what they are teaching is consistent with the many things God has already been showing us in His Word, I am willing to consider their explanations and see if God may be using them to help me go even deeper in my understanding of His truth. In this case that appears to once again be the case. So far nearly everything I have read is helping to clarify and solidify truths that are already taking root in my thinking and that are consistent with the emerging theme that God is love; God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. (1 John 4:16; 1:5)

Given the pattern I have observed over a number of years now of how God has things waiting to answer my needs before I even realize I have them, it came as little surprise that I began to read in this book clear explanations of the very issue that this visitor has raised. I wouldn't have even given it much thought myself since this was not a burning issue in my own mind. But because someone else has brought up an issue that I do not yet have a satisfying answer for, my interest is now peaked to pay closer attention as God has brought a valuable resource to help me understand something I need to know. The very next chapter that I began to read in this book is titled “Loving Sacrifice” and leads into wonderful explanations of this very issue.

What I am in the process of discovering is vitally important and thrilling as well. And as I am learning more about this topic it gave me the needed context to alert me to the significance of the verse quoted here at the beginning, so that the world may know that I love the Father, I do exactly as the Father commanded Me.

Now, I probably don't have time here to fully unpack what I am in the process of learning about this. But I will try to condense it enough to hopefully make sense and then urge you to look into this issue more carefully yourself in the light of the real truth about God's character of pure agape love. But so far what has really grabbed my attention from what is emerging in this book and that correlates perfectly with what I have been learning from the Word of God is how the Old Testament sacrificial system relates to the sacrifice of Jesus.

This brings in another passage that was even more puzzling for me up to this point. Take a look at this and see how these passages begin to complement and even reinforce each other.

For the Law, since it has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the very form of things, can never, by the same sacrifices which they offer continually year by year, make perfect those who draw near. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. Therefore, when He comes into the world, He says, "SACRIFICE AND OFFERING YOU HAVE NOT DESIRED, BUT A BODY YOU HAVE PREPARED FOR ME; IN WHOLE BURNT OFFERINGS AND sacrifices FOR SIN YOU HAVE TAKEN NO PLEASURE. "THEN I SAID, 'BEHOLD, I HAVE COME (IN THE SCROLL OF THE BOOK IT IS WRITTEN OF ME) TO DO YOUR WILL, O GOD.'" After saying above, "SACRIFICES AND OFFERINGS AND WHOLE BURNT OFFERINGS AND sacrifices FOR SIN YOU HAVE NOT DESIRED, NOR HAVE YOU TAKEN PLEASURE in them" (which are offered according to the Law), then He said, "BEHOLD, I HAVE COME TO DO YOUR WILL." He takes away the first in order to establish the second. By this will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. (Hebrews 10:1, 4-10)

To merge one more factor in, a couple days ago in prayer meeting someone else brought up a serious question about another verse that I now see ties directly into this issue and is reflected in this passage from Hebrews. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. (Isaiah 53:5 NIV) They were asking an excellent question that was not easy to answer: how does this really work? What does it really mean practically that His wounds heal us? There is certainly no shortage of religious clichés to throw at someone about this, but like this man raising the question, I too would like to make more sense out of this text.

But here is where the conflict begins. If one chooses to embrace the commonly accepted belief that God the Father must be appeased, that His justice demands punishment for sin because He is so offended by sin that nothing else will satisfy Him but blood, then this whole question about sacrifice does not create any tension. It is simply assumed that in some way the death of Jesus was a substitute punishment to create a loophole by which sinners can be saved without being punished themselves.

But there are huge problems with this rationale, not the least of which is the fact that such logic is actually 'legal fiction'. Even in our diminished perceptions of justice this practice simply would not be tolerated in a criminal court of law. That in itself should raise a red flag, for God will never participate in deception or dishonesty which is exactly what this penal substitution teaching relies on to hold it together. In addition, it simply makes no sense that if God demands payment for sin that He could pay Himself. As the author of the book I am reading put it, you can no more appease or bribe yourself than you can steal from yourself. (Healing the Gospel p. 32) If God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself on the cross, then it simply makes no logical sense to claim that He was being paid off in order to make Him able to forgive our sins. The more I think about these commonly accepted teachings the more illogical they appear.

But if the penal substitution, justice satisfaction theories don't hold water – and in my growing understanding they cannot – then how are we to understand the purpose of all the sacrifices in the Old Testament system that God Himself put into place? And how does this all fit the way we see the sacrifice of Jesus? This has been a question in my own mind as well as with many others who are wrestling with these concepts and trying to see how they all fit together without twisting logic to force things to fit. I now realize I should thank the visitor who brought this to my attention, for I can see that he was sent by God to make me aware of my own need to look more closely into this issue.

What is now becoming clearer to me is what is found in this passage from Hebrews. I have not seen it previously mostly because I have not looked at this with enough other pieces of information in place to see what it was really saying. But here is the core issue which suddenly came over me in the light from everything else I have been learning about God recently. The most important part about Jesus coming to this world was not the fact that He died but was the in His living and how sinners reacted to His love. Hebrews states clearly here that He takes away the first in order to establish the second.

I had always assumed that what He took away was the animal part of the sacrificial system by replacing it with the sacrifice of His own human body. But now I am starting to see that this is not at all what this passage in Hebrews is saying. What is being revealed here is that the whole idea of sacrifice itself was in essence a sort of shorthand for something far more significant about Jesus and had nothing to do with appeasement of a desire for blood on the part of God. That kind of thinking drives a wedge between the Son and the Father that is promoted by the great accuser but has no place in the heart of a true Christ-follower. Jesus did not come to appease an offended, angry God but rather came to explicitly reveal the heart of a passionate, loving God longing to change our minds about Him so He can once again bring us back into an intimacy of close fellowship with Him that has been missing for 6,000 years.

So what is it that Hebrews says replaced the sacrificial system altogether? Jesus, the one being referred to here, said that it was His purpose to do God's will. It was not God's will that Jesus be offered as a substitute punishment through some sort of legal fiction to satisfy His alleged fury against sinners. That itself is one of the most satanic lies promoted by popular religion that must be exposed and expelled. What it says here in Hebrews is that Jesus came to do the Father's will, and the Father, just like the Son, is pure, agape love. The will of love is to love, to demonstrate what love looks like, to reveal the truth about love that has been obliterated by myriads of lies from the accuser and promulgated by most all religions throughout history. Love is what love does and living a loving life is the ultimate will of the great Lover.

So, what does love look like lived out? That is what Jesus' life was all about. He did not just come to reveal love to the world in person but also came to convince us that the Father is exactly like the Son – total love and nothing else. This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5) This verse has been hammering itself into my thinking for several weeks now as I am starting to see the enormous significance it has on how I view the big picture of sin and salvation.

So, the real reason why Jesus came to this earth, contrary to the emphasis that religion has placed on His death, is really the demonstration of love that He gave us throughout His life. Then why did Jesus die if it was not intended as a sacrifice of appeasement to satisfy wrath of an offended God? Jesus died because sinners were so hateful, resentful and filled with wrath in reaction to that pure love that they had to kill Him to escape the suffering they experienced in His presence. The atmosphere of love that surrounded Jesus was a constant source of extreme irritation to all who were unwilling to submit to its drawing influence. So what resulted was that His death became the inevitable evidence of God allowing sinners to have their way with the Personification of all love. Rather than the lies that have been used to terrify people into embracing religion warning of what might happen when sinners fall into the hands of an angry God, the reality that was demonstrated in Jesus torture and death was what happens when a loving God falls into the hands of angry sinners. That is the essence of what Hebrews is trying to convey.

The more I learn about this and the more my heart perceives these emerging revelations about God's passionate love for me, the more I find myself responding spontaneously with growing affection for Him. This is so opposite of the inner terror that I grew up with ever perceiving God as an angry, offended deity constantly holding me under a heavy blanket of condemnation and guilt in order to force me to obey Him or else. For some time as I began to emerge out from under that heavy, suffocating view of God, I was very angry that I had spent so many years of my life suffering under these lies.

But now I feel myself starting to move to another stage moving from resentment toward compassion for those still stifled and living under constant fear like I suffered from for so long. And though they are usually very defensive about their fear-based beliefs about God, I can recognize those reactions as typical symptoms of starvation for love. The human heart was never designed by God to live close to Him motivated by fear but only in mutual love and joy. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. (1 John 4:18)

Now I want to be so transformed in this love myself that God can begin to use me more effectively to help others escape the trap of Satan's lies about Him and begin to see and experience for themselves the love found in the real truth about God that can deliver them from the terrible slavery of fear.

Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. (Hebrews 2:14-15 NKJV)

Overcoming Faith

For whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that has overcome the world--our faith. (1 John 5:4)

Our faith. That brings up disturbing memories of one of the many mistaken views in religion that confused my thinking growing up. Like so many around me, I thought that faith was something that I had to work up enough until it was finally sufficient to get God to answer my prayers. I was told that faith was belief, so after trying to reason this out strenuously I decided that the only faith that would move God to act for me must be believing so hard that there would be no trace of doubt left anywhere in my mind. But of course the way our mind is designed that is impossible. So once again I began to suspect that this was yet another scheme of God to prevent me from quite achieving the blessings and experience the victories that I so desired.

Did I grow up with dark views about God's intentions toward me? Yes I did. And looking back on how much I secretly resented God keeping these tantalizing promises just slightly out of my reach, I shudder at how much my thinking affected the way I talked about God to those around me. My religion revolved around trying to develop a perfect character in preparation for entrance into heaven. That is what I was taught I was supposed to do. Of course everyone knew that we cannot develop such a character on our own so my prayers (compulsive, obsessive and almost non-stop every waking minute of my life) were sprinkled generously with 'help me!' petitions meant to compel God to give me enough power to overcome temptations. That is a whole different story that I have shared at other times, but this verse reminds me of my journey toward understanding clearer truth about this word 'faith'.

As I just began to type that last word faith, the auto-word feature on my computer offered up the word faithfulness as a suggestion. I find it interesting how this feature on my computer can at times influence the direction of my thoughts with suggestive and even unexpected words. In this case that word is exactly the truth that began to finally dawn on me as the key to my dilemma. It took many years of wearing frustration and unanswered prayers and searching for better explanations before I finally began to realize that it is not my faith that has to be worked up with my effort. What is needed is for me to spend far more time dwelling on the evidences of His faithfulness. I know that may sound like an avoidance of the real issue. But as more time goes by I realize that true faith has little to do with what I can force myself to produce through mental gymnastics but everything to do with a natural, spontaneous response from discovering how good and faithful and kind God is towards me. (Romans 2:4)

The word in this verse – overcome – is closely linked in my memories to the heaviness of condemnation that weighed my heart down for many years and nearly extinguished all hope. Overcoming sin was at the center of all my religious attention as I attempted for many years to perfect holiness, live sanctification, overcome temptations and any number of other familiar religious expressions that all have to do with what was expected of me to be saved in heaven at last. I must be careful here to not imply that my parents or teachers had a diabolical plot to discourage me with perfectionism; I am sure that was not the case. They were only doing the best they knew how and many were likely also struggling in their own lives trying to figure out salvation themselves. Most of them I am sure were simply repeating the religious clichés that they had learned as formulas kept getting passed around and around like so many traditions.

But in my own experience it felt like I was at the small end of a funnel of a concentration of legalism, perfectionism and works. At the same time I had a very weak understanding and appreciation of things like grace, forgiveness and love. All of this combined to discourage and depress me and even produced the heart of a rebel in me. I see now that this has been the scheme of Satan ever since sin entered this world, to prevent people from knowing the incredible goodness, kindness and love of God that can set us free from all of these lies. I do not want to place the blame on the humans in my life from which I inherited all of these dark views of God, because our fight is not against flesh and blood but against supernatural dark forces fully intent on obscuring every truth about God from our hearts.

I do not wish to dwell too long on the darkness that has marked so much of my past. But that is the context from which my current perspective has been shaped. I find myself comparing the glory that is starting to emerge now with the darkness from which I am emerging as it sharpens my own appreciation of how good God really is.

I am amazed, humbled and thrilled as I see the increasing freedom and inner peace that I now enjoy deep inside in stark contrast to the fear and dread that verses like this used to produce in me. I still have a long ways to go, because the pervasiveness of these dark ideas about God so saturated every corner of my thinking that I still continually find them lurking behind dark corners and jumping out at me at unexpected times. I sometimes question whether I am really born again or not. But even in the face of that uncertainty I have learned to place that issue in God's hands and trust His work in my heart to follow the schedule He has for my healing.

This is not at all what I intended to write about when I began this. Maybe it is too easy for me to focus on my own experience instead of on the exciting things I am seeing about Him in the Word. At any rate, let me get back to what I first noticed as I meditated on these verses and see what else might emerge.

The first thing I saw here besides the fact that it is faith that overcomes, was the contrast between the beginning of this verse and the next one.

Who is the one who overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? (1 John 5:5)

In the previous verse the subject is a what. But here in this next verse is shifts to a who. In fact, just at this moment it is breaking through to me what John might be trying to say here. Faith is the what that overcomes the world, but real faith that overcomes is a faith that is born of God, not something contrived by me Of course faith cannot even exist outside of a person so when a person allows their heart and mind to catch enough vision of the glory of what God is really like and allows their heart to respond, the inevitable will be saving, living faith or belief in how good and trustworthy God really is.

It is becoming more and more clear to me over the past few years that the kind of faith that I need to prepare me to live in God's intense presence is a confident trust in the pure reality of His extreme love. My heart must be transformed to reflect that love and to let go of every belief about Him that is tainted with darkness. This is precisely why Satan has done anything and everything possible to insinuate subtle or not so subtle accusations and lies about what God is like into every aspect of our thinking. He knows better than any other being in the universe how dangerous it is to be in the presence of the Almighty if thee is any trace of doubt or unbelief about His goodness and purity and passionate love. It is not God that we need to be afraid of as Satan has asserted, for in God there is never any thought to hurt or punish or inflict suffering on His children. Rather it is our resistance to the extreme truth about Him that creates within us liabilities that when exposed to the intensity of the passion of God's pure agape love presence, our resistance itself will overheat from exposure to God's passion and will become the cause of our own self-destruction.

This is what the focus of true overcoming is all about. It is not so much bad behaviors that we need to overcome. In fact, wrong behaviors and breaking of rules are symptoms of a much deeper problem, and that core problem is distrust and believing lies about God that increases our resistance to the truth about God. What we are battling against are not outside forces of sin from other people. No, the battle we wage is mostly taking place between our ears in the various avenues of our thinking and feelings. This is where the real war is taking place and where we need to be the most aware of our need for divine influence.

We live in this world, but we don't fight our battles in the same way the world does. (ERV) The weapons we use in our fight are not the world's weapons but God's powerful weapons, which we use to destroy strongholds. We destroy false arguments; we pull down every proud obstacle (GNB) and all intellectual arrogance that opposes the knowledge of God. We take every thought captive so that it is obedient to Christ. (GW) (2 Corinthians 10:3-5)

It is becoming clear that the faith that overcomes the world works inside our minds and hearts where the center of the real battle is taking place. This is not a faith that we work up in some sort of forced believing mentality or some formula that we figure out how to operate. No, it is a spontaneous kind of belief in who God really is, a faith that is actually a reflection of the faithfulness of God. I have been learning that just as love induces love in others, likewise faith also induces faith. So the more I come to appreciate how much faith God has in me, how much He is willing to trust me to respond to increasing revelations of His love for me, my natural reaction can be to trust His heart more and more.

The battle heats up when my responsive faith suddenly comes up against lies about God that lurk in so many places inside of me that resist the truth I am learning about Him. This is what Paul is talking about here. My growing faith has to be constantly fueled and empowered through revelations from the Spirit of God so that it conquers the strongholds of the enemy's lies inside of my heart. As I embrace the light of God's goodness it exposes and dismantles false beliefs and arguments against God that have kept me hostage to fears about Him. My growing appreciation of the amazing humility of Jesus described in Philippians 2:5-8 (who is the perfect reflection of His Father) directly attacks and pulls down every proud attitude and belief that blinds and hardens my heart. And most of all, I experience the life of overcoming as I come to really know God intimately and allow His love for me to ravish my heart, transform my perceptions about Him and draw out my affections. This is what results from knowing the God who is love.

There is much more that is jumping out at me from these verses in 1 John, but I need to save that for another time.

What About Dead Branches?

I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit. (John 15:1-2)

For much of my life, many of the promises of the Bible seemed to be just out of my reach. Because of my views of God that made Him seem harsh, demanding, stern and even selfish, associated with almost every promise I could see a condition that seemed like an impossible demand precluding me from being able to enjoy it. It always seemed that the promises of God were too good to be true, but not in a positive way. They were probably true, but always with a catch precondition that I could not quite meet so I could not claim the needed blessing.

Even as I contemplate the memories of these feelings I sense again some of the intensity of my frustration of being forced to live in a system of religion that was unattainable and yet contained so many threats of punishment for nonconformity that I felt compelled to keep trying. Many, if not most, of my friends growing up threw in the towel at some point and gave up on religion, choosing instead to look for relief and satisfaction from other sources. Some admired me for choosing not to give up on religion, but I did not feel so privileged. I always felt that maybe I was the coward who stayed with religion because of fear rather than because it was fulfilling my deep longings and needs.

I have for many years been trying to make sense out of religion as a result of choosing to stay inside rather than indulging in the wild pleasures of sin for a season as the Bible puts it. I immersed myself in the education system that filled my brain with biblical information which has certainly proved to be a tremendous blessing for me in the long run. But for many years that information and familiarity with the Bible did not feel like a blessing but rather created a heavy weight of obligation that I had to maintain each day. Going through the routines of religious practices and disciplines often were performed only to keep some hope alive that someday I might break through the darkness and encounter a more consistent and caring kind of God behind the veil. But that is taking me in a different direction than what I want to explore this morning.

What caught my attention as I meditated on these verses was this cutting away of branches from the vine. It brought to mind the familiar feelings of frustration and even resentment that I have felt so many times when coming across examples of what seemed to be impossible demands of God keeping valuable promises just out of reach or threats of God meant to intimidate me into obedience. I guess I have been supersensitive to this sort of mentality for whatever reasons and so I see things like this where others find nothing at all. But for me, now when I come across this reaction I choose to face it head on, grab it by the throat and drag it out into the open to expose it to the light of what I have been learning about God over the past few years. I compare it and challenge it with the fresh revelations about God that are radically better than how I saw Him for all the early years of my experience.

What got my attention in this passage was that in my Bible I had penciled in the word 'up' next to where it talks about taking the branches away. I know I probably did this after hearing some teaching from someone in the past presenting a wonderful explanation of this passage that really inspired me. But because I can't remember what they said now I have to go back and research it for myself to rediscover the good news embedded in this seemingly negative threat against those who don't produce enough 'fruit' to satisfy God's expectations.

What I found when I looked up the Greek word behind this was actually exciting for me. And while it is true, as in many cases, that there are multiple possibilities within the definition to interpret one direction or another, given my changed views and beliefs about what God is really like over the past few years, I found reason for encouragement within this word. And even though I could not find a single Bible translation that offered an alternative reading that reflected the positive alternatives in this definition (except a neutral one translated from the Septuagint), I felt the Holy Spirit revealing to my heart implications here that are consistent with everything else I have been learning about God's extravagant goodness, kindness and love.

The word used in the Greek here is airo. It can be used to imply the following ideas found in Strong's definition that can take one in two different directions depending on how the translator chooses to believe what the author may have had in mind.

airo - to lift up; by implication, to take up or away; figuratively, to raise (the voice), keep in suspense (the mind), specially, to sail away (i.e. weigh anchor); by Hebraism (compare nasa') to expiate sin:--away with, bear (up), carry, lift up, loose, make to doubt, put away, remove, take (away, up).

Now, it is clear from the analogy that Jesus was using here that the meaning certainly implies the idea of taking away and removing branches that fail to produce fruit. That is how vine growers work with vines. But rather than being presented as a threat to induce performance or meant as a punishment for failure to perform, I find in this meaning real hints of a hopeful spirit behind the actions that the divine Vinedresser is doing that might not be present in the mind of a normal grape farmer.

Notice that the Father, the true Vinedresser here, can be seen as not just removing unproductive branches, but when He must do so the way in which He does it and the attitude which prompts Him is more redemptive and hopeful in nature, not punitive. Using terms from within the definition I see God keeping these individuals in His mind, seeking to do away with their sin, bearing them up, lifting them up, trying to make them doubt their security and maybe even getting them to see their apathy.

When I went a little further and looked up the connected word nasa' suggested as being connected to the meaning of the original word, it gets even more exciting. Within the definition of that word are such encouraging terms as bear up, bring forth, lift up, desire, extol and even forgive.

Given all the things I have been learning about what God is really like over the past few years that are very different from my views of God growing up, I find it quite consistent that while God may reluctantly have to separate unproductive branches from the vine because their supposed connection to Jesus is not making any difference in their lives; at the same time He will do everything possible to awaken them to their true condition. Even though they are ignorant or uncaring about their condition of emptiness, still He bears their sins and the weight of their guilt on Himself in hopes that they will wake up before it is too late and choose to be reconnected to the vine and open up the passages within them so that the life-giving sap of love can flow through them and cause them to bear real fruit.

Paul uses a similar analogy when he speaks of the Jews being cut off from the Olive tree of God. He notes that though they have been cut away because of their refusal to believe the truth about God as revealed in Jesus, at any time they could easily be grafted back in, and even more readily than gentiles who are not near so used to being connected to the trunk as the Jews have been. (see Romans 11) And with the Corinthian church, Paul had them cut off a member from the body for a time who was living in immorality of such a nature that even non-Christians were disgusted with his behavior. And yet in his second letter to that church Paul urged them to not alienate this man so much that he could not return to full fellowship after he had seen his mistake and turned away from his sin.

I see in all these things a different picture of God than the one I grew up with who was primarily looking for excuses to keep as many as possible out of heaven. Rather, I am starting to find overwhelming evidence in Scripture of a God who is passionate about drawing as many as possible into repentance and letting go of their resistance to His Spirit's convictions so that He can pump His grace and love through their lives in order to produce fruit that will attract others to the beauties of God.

I also see in this verse, not only the kindness and patience of God even with those who must be removed from the vine, but He is also working diligently with those who are producing only limited fruit in their lives, to encourage them to be even less resistant to the flow of His grace through their hearts. He wants everyone to be as fruitful and luxuriant as possible when it comes to displaying the good things meant to be experienced in the kingdom of heaven.

And what is this fruit that the Vinedresser wants to produce in my life by opening up the channels of mercy and compassion within me?

But the fruit that the Spirit produces in a person's life is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these kinds of things. (Galatians 5:22-23 ERV)

This is to my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. (John 15:8 NIV)