Is your vine full or empty? As a teacher I have observed that students often come with their vines full. It is difficult to grow fruit on an already full vine. Often, the vine must first be cleaned of all the wrong stuff in order to be filled with the right stuff. Jesus told his disciples: "you are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you." I think the illustration is apt. How is it that Christ's teaching "cleaned" off the vine? Wouldn't it make more sense to say that the word He spoke caused the vine to be full; to bear more fruit? I think it is more like Jesus, in a sense, cleaned off the vine of all the wrong stuff, all the stuff that was keeping them from recieving from God. Sometimes everything we thought we knew has to be erradicated in order to receive the truth. I must always ask myself: am I full of myself? am I full of my own ideas about things and how I think they should be? Often the answer comes echoing back that I just don't know. The Lord, in His infinite mercy comes to me and takes away all that is unnecessary; all that is precluding the growth of the kind of fruit that lasts. This can be a painful process. But it is good and always brings forth life.
