Restoring the Broken

My Father… cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit.
–Jesus, John 15:2

The average temperatures this winter in Missouri are 20-25 degrees below the average for this time of year. Not a big deal in itself, and not all that uncommon. We have moderately cold winters here every four or five years, where you wake up and the frozen layer of frost outside betrays the single-digit temperatures that ran throughout the night. Most of us complain about it throughout the months, though, used to having at least several days in a row where the rivers and lakes can thaw. Certainly the birds clambering for food from our feeder in the back yard are wondering now whose idea it was to stop short of Texas on their flight southward.

But this winter has been a mix of really cold and really wet, which, as you can imagine, begs a lot of ice and snow. Three weeks ago we had a three-round bout of ice, sleet, and snow pounding us in alternate blows, and they left their mark. Thousands of homes were without electricity, some even still, the roads were layered for several days with ice like glass, and trees snapped under the weight.

Driving to work this morning I pass through rural areas where it looks almost as if a giant played hop-scotch through the forests, the trees split and their tops dangling or fallen to the ground like crushed toothpicks. Clean up will go on for months, or possibly years.

I realized how much like my heart this winter has been, as if in peering out into the woodlands full of torn and broken branches I’m looking into a kind of reflection, the freezing winds stealing my breath and the heavy veneer of ice suffocating and slowing the beats of my heart into a slow and arctic rhythm.

Which explains why instead of being encouraged (read: given courage) in my walk with God by those who are ahead of my on the journey, those full of the life and character of Jesus, I am discouraged (read: courage stolen). It is because I see their fruit and desire it, but then try to make it on my own. There are holy and passionate men of God in Scripture, for example, that I read of – David and Paul and John the Beloved – and I immediately think, Yes! I want to be that way! But then I lose heart somewhere in the “long obedience in the same direction,” as Eugene Peterson has it, thinking that these men brought about their holy and full-of-life and life-giving character on their own.

I was lost in all of this on the drive when Jesus broke in and cut through (Hebrews 4:12) with ancient words that He spoke to his disciples, speaking them to some deep place in me, “I am the vine; you are the branch. Remain in me, and if you do, then you will bear fruit. Simply abide, that’s all. Come, rest yourself in me dwell here” (from John 15).

The words that Jesus spoke in John 15:2 concerning the Father cutting off every branch that bears no fruit used to scare me, thinking He meant that if I did not work up some good fruit before He came along, I’d be cut down and thrown into the fire. This is not what He says. There are dead branches in us, places within our inner being that have been separate from Him. The Arborist prunes them, cuts them back, destroys the dead branches that we might live and grow up in Him, producing the fruit of right living simply by living with and in Him. He is telling us here that we cannot do this on our own, and as I have tried I have been left with broken and crushed limbs. But He has come, not only to bring us into a place where I can have full life (by just abiding with Him!), but also to remove the dead places (“circumcision of the heart” – Romans 2:29) and prune back living places so that we can have even more life. This is the glory of God (John 15:8).

The winter here isn’t over yet. Many, in fact, believe the worst is yet to come for us. The trees that will survive the season and come into the spring bursting and blooming with life will be those that have been carefully pruned back, those whose dead branches have been removed so as not to add to the weight of ice and threaten to snap the tree in two, those whose roots go deep into firm and good earth. This work is what the Gardener is up to in we who believe.