Chasing Vines: Finding Your Way to an Immensely Fruitful Life

by Beth Moore

You do matter—already—without making one single change.

engaging in what God is doing is the only thing that gives us true satisfaction and peace.

Or will we set out, light on our feet, with hearts ablaze, and give chase to this call to flourish?

Our perceptions can be very convincing, but God tells us the truth. Nothing about our existence is accidental. We were known before we knew we were alive. We were planned and, as a matter of fact, planted on this earth for this moment in time (Acts 17:26).

Because God likes watching things grow.

Why would He opt for taking us through the long, drawn-out process of planting, watering, pruning, and harvesting?

I’ve come to the conclusion that what most of us have in common is the feeling that we’re misfits.

terroir (pronounced “ter-war”) meaning “sense of place.”[1]

It captures the interplay between factors such as soil, climate, the plant itself, and its orientation toward the sun. Together, these factors ultimately shape the “personality” of the resulting fruit.[2]

By placing these lyrics on the permanent page, God was reminding His people to remind Him.

And God knew. God knew that slavery wasn’t the end of His people’s story. He knew the enemy wouldn’t get the final victory. He knew He would keep His promises in dramatic fashion. He had delivered them before, and He would deliver them again. The same is true for you, whether you’re battling a vicious ruler or a vicious disease, whether you’re up against an occupying army or your own anxiety.

The name of the second [Joseph] called Ephraim, “For God has made me fruitful in the land of my affliction.” GENESIS 41:52

In the smack-middle of the land of his affliction. Never confuse fruitfulness with felicity.

It’s only when we find our place in Him that we find rest. David said it with beautiful simplicity: I am at rest in God alone. PSALM 62:1, CSB

I hope to show you that we care because Jesus chose vines and vineyards for some of the most important imagery in our entire theology.

the fruit from the land of promise was weighty.

Maybe you feel passed over. Invisible. Unviable. Maybe you believe that God calls other people to contribute and use their gifts for His noble purposes, but your own branch seems bare.

the hand of God pushed the pen across the scroll of Isaiah almost entirely in Hebrew poetry.

Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”

Do you think all tomorrow’s wonders will look like yesterday’s? Do you think divine deliverance always happens the same way? Do you imagine the Creator of heaven and earth is satisfied to stifle His creativity?

I’m pretty sure most people who serve an unseen God for enough years, trying their danged hardest to obey His inaudible directions and love His confounding people with their own contorted hearts, live a quarter-inch from sheer madness much of the time. But maybe that’s just me.

Try to absorb the wonder of it: we have a soundtrack playing over us, proclaiming our deliverance.

“But it yielded wild grapes”

It can also mean sour, bitter, unripe, worthless, or even rotten. But the most insulting interpretation of all is “stinking.”

What more was there to do for my vineyard, that I have not done in it? When I looked for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?

No one is exempt from the pain of rejection, not even God. No, I’ll push that further: especially not God.

Within those pages, we find a God who cannot be changed by man but can be affected by man. His immutability does not deplete or delete His affections.

Is what I’m doing (this action, approach, example, or instruction) bearing good fruit?

Look for evidence of the fruit of the Spirit—things like “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, [and] self-control”

Ongoing chaos, however, is a different matter. When peace seems to have vacated the premises, the scent of rotten fruit is usually in the air.

None of us can do a thousand things to the glory of God, but we can do several.

Are people I’m helping disciple actually being discipled?

Is good fruit being produced in the believing lives of a significant number of those who sit under the influence of your teaching, mentoring, leading, counseling, advising, preaching, spiritual parenting, or big brothering or sistering?

“Straw or wheat?”

The sincerest vows of the disfigured heart inevitably beg for self-sabotage.

_______________ + TIME = _______________ FRUIT

Simply put, the health of their souls and their attentiveness to the things of the Spirit manage to outshine the decline of their bodies. It also seems to leave a permanent mark.

A parent willing to confront the truth

between contentiousness and healthy confrontation.

Sometimes we won’t be glad about what we see. Molded, marred, or bug-scarred fruit is no welcome sight. But we will always be better off knowing.

Being loyal to people at the expense of loyalty to Christ and His gospel and to the simple truth bears a harvest of unrighteousness every time.

It’s possible to inhale a certain stench for so long that our sense of smell adapts.

A vineyard’s aspect is a combination of two factors: the direction it faces and the degree it slopes.

He regards our steep challenge with equal compassion. He promises that your struggle will not be wasted, even if it feels that way now.

You, too, have been intentionally planted. You didn’t land here by accident. The direction you face, the way your life slopes—none of it came about by happenstance. There may be days when you grow weary of climbing and you long for flatter terrain. But the slopes are overlaid with tremendous purpose. God uses them to tilt us toward the light, to drain the sludge from our hearts with spring rains, and to offer us a view of the landscape that will one day turn into vision.

Making the vines struggle generally results in better quality grapes.

If you take a grapevine and make its physical requirements for water and nutrients easily accessible, then (somewhat counter-intuitively) it will give you poor grapes.[3]

Goode goes on to say that good soil gives the grapevine a choice—and given the choice, it will opt for the easy way instead of going to the trouble of bearing fruit.

[Give the grapevine] a favourable environment and it will choose to take the vegetative route: that is, it will put its energies into making leaves and shoots.

Instead of devoting itself to growing big and sprawling, it will focus its effort on reproducing itself sexually, which for a vine means making grapes.[4]