John 15:1-3 NASB [1] … “ I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. [2] 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. [3] You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. …
I have taught from the Scriptures for three or four decades, but a few years ago, in reading over them again, I discovered something I had never seen before. The word “prune” in verse two is the same word in the Greek for “clean” in verse three. The correct translation is the one in verse 3, which is “to cleanse.” I had taught for many years that the pruning process was always about God allowing us to go through difficult times, and this is the way I had heard others teach, also. Though this can be part of the process, it doesn’t have to be, for if you will notice in verse 3 that Jesus talks about cleansing us through the word that he speaks to us. In other words, it is the voice of the Lord speaking to our hearts that cleanses us from the junk that would keep us from bearing much fruit. Many years ago, I worked with a landscaper to help pay my way through Bible college, and I spent many days pruning azaleas and other flowering shrubs and trees. There had to be the right time of the year to prune, the right amount to prune, and just the right place so the flowering shrub could blossom even better. Pruning comes as a result of our listening to the voice of the Lord and him speaking a word that is uniquely fashioned for us. In Ezekiel 1:3, it says that “The word of the Lord came expressly to Ezekiel…” That word “expressly” would be better translated as “fashioned.” When you cleanse the fruit-bearing or flowering tree or shrub, you are simply cleansing it from debris around the branches that might hinder the branches from bearing more fruit. Whenever God speaks a word to us, it always causes us to alter our hearts about how we think or what we believe. God is always speaking life to us, and his words bring about transformation through the renewing of our minds. But many times, his words can create conflict in our hearts because it requires us to participate in the ways of Christ that might be contradictory to the ways of the flesh that we’ve become comfortable with in certain areas. It could even be areas that we thought were spiritual, but once God speaks, we realize that we have to make adjustments. These adjustments always bring forth the fruit of the likeness of Christ in and through our lives, but they can cause tumult. Listen to what it says about the voice of the Lord in Ezekiel 1:24, “[24] I also heard the sound of their wings like the sound of abundant waters as they went, like the voice of the Almighty, a sound of tumult like the sound of an army camp; whenever they stood still, they dropped their wings.” It says here that the voice of the Lord is like the sound of tumult. Of course, his voice is full of comfort, and as I said before, life, but it can also have the sound of tumult. This is how God normally disciplines us. The issue of pain used by the Lord to prune or cleanse us is usually because he’s been trying to speak something to us, but we’ve not been postured to hear, so he will use pain to get our attention so that we are postured to listen once again. In Revelation 1, John, as a 93-year-old man, called Jesus “The Voice” and said that his voice was like the sound of many waters, and at the sound of the voice of the Lord, he fell down before Jesus like a dead man. The voice of the Lord can do that to us. It can call us to fall down before him in deeper surrender, cleansed, ready to bear much fruit.