Given on New Years Day

It’s interesting that our new year begins during winter – the season when things look drear and drab. We have grape vines in our back yard. Every winter the leaves fall off and the runners dry up. To all appearances, the vines look dead. You can even snap the ends off the runners and there is no trace of green at the break. The first few times I witnessed this phenomenon I thought there was no hope for the vine. How could something which was dry and shriveled up turn green again?

But then spring comes. The seemingly dead vines start to swell and bud. Soon leaves burst forth and by the time summer is over, the vine produces so much shade that sometimes you have to cut it back so it doesn’t prevent other things from growing.

However, there’s another characteristic of grape vines. If you want a vine to produce a lot of fruit, you have to cut back the runners one or two joints from the main stem. Even from a single vine you can end up with a huge pile of leaves and runners. It seemed to me, when I first saw this kind of drastic pruning, that it would kill vine. Yet this is not the case. Life, in the form of fruit, comes from dying. The runners must be killed for the vine to fulfill its purpose.

It is the same way with us spiritually. In order to live, we must die. God desires to prune all that is wrong and evil out of our lives. From our perspective it seems like there is nothing left. But without the death of ourselves, the fruit of the Spirit will never be found in us and we will not fulfill the purpose for which God made us.

The Apostle Paul expresses it this way in Colossians chapter 2, beginning in verse 9, “For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form, and in Him you have been made complete, and He is the head over all rule and authority; and in Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ; having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead. When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.” (Colossians 2:9-14 NASB)

To rephrase what Paul wrote, if we want fullness – that is, if we want meaning in life – we have to die. We have to let Christ prune everything away which holds us back from living for God. But when we allow Him to do this, He takes our dead selves and makes us alive.

This is one of the purposes of baptism. It is in baptism that Christ strips away our old nature and gives us a new one. He nails everything that stands between us and God to the cross.

We gather each week to remember what we were, what Christ has done for us and what we are now. He made us alive when we were dead. He prunes us back so we can bear fruit.

The bread we eat reminds us of His sacrifice. The juice we drink reminds us of His blood which covers our sins. As we partake this morning, let’s thank God for the season of renewal He has given us. That He brings us into life out of death.

Let’s pray.