“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener” (John 15:1 NIV).
In the springtime, gardeners have a little extra bounce in their step. Whether they’re tending neat rows in raised beds, a small patch in the yard, or a container garden on the porch, gardeners are eager to put seeds in the earth, water them, and watch them grow.
If you have a garden, you likely are out every chance you can get to poke around, to watch, to care, and to cultivate. You regularly check to see whether you are providing enough water or whether weeds or pests are impacting your flowers, vegetables, and fruits. You look forward to a bountiful return of good things to eat and beautiful treasures to behold.
In other words, you can barely wait to harvest the fruit of your efforts.
Sometimes as believers in Jesus, we can get a little impatient about our life’s harvests, especially the various fruit we hope for in arenas of our influence. The fields we tend may be our families, careers, ministries, dreams, or goals. Yet, cultivating and nurturing our relationship with the Lord matters most. He knows that when we prioritize our time and affection in His felt presence and His Word, all the fields mentioned above will be fruitful and amazingly abundant.
This attention to fruitfulness is called abiding in the Lord.
Abiding in the vine of Jesus, according to the Apostle John, is the only pathway to a bountiful harvest. Instead of ramping up, strategizing, or obsessively pondering the roads to fruitfulness, Jesus calls us first and foremost to be grafted into Him.
To abide in Jesus means to remain in Him no matter how challenging life can get.
When life gets hectic or when sorrows come, we tend to take matters into our own hands. We may feel God’s timing is too slow, so we act impulsively. Instead, we need to remain immovable in the security and safety of what He has told us and who He is.
To abide means to tend our souls just like we tend our gardens—carefully weeding out what is not helpful or healthy and removing pests or distractions that the adversary might throw our way. Tending the soil of our souls means surrendering each day to Jesus’s presence and to the living water of the Holy Spirit. We must continually choose to receive the lavish love of God and to listen carefully for His voice through His Word.
What is the promise Jesus gives as we nurture the branch of our lives into His life-giving vine? We will harvest a love relationship with Him as deep as He has with our Father. We will receive fruit that blesses our lives and gives Him glory. We will reap a harvest that remains through thick and thin.
That is a garden worth tending. That is a harvest beyond anything we could think or imagine.
