Chasing Vines: Finding Your Way to an Immensely Fruitful Life

by Beth Moore

Father, I forgive them in Christ’s name, for they don’t get what they did.

Imagine it. If you are planted in really rich soil, that means one little teaspoon holds millions of microbes. It also produces ample evidence of both life and death. In other words, all of it matters. Even unwanted endings. Even crushing losses. Even death itself.

If you have enough years and maturity to get this far in life, your soil already possesses multiple elements that make it fertile—if you’re willing to let God use these messy parts to grow you instead of you fighting them off like the most monstrous of foes.

Don’t tell me death isn’t already in your soil. I won’t believe you. And here’s the big reveal: it didn’t kill you. It didn’t kill me, either. I thought it would. I bet you did too. But here we are, you and me, very much alive. Whether we wanted to be or not.

In essence, God’s reassurance to His people consisted of this message: on the other side of this catastrophe, you will once again find normalcy.

When the framework of our daily existence gets completely dismantled and the landscape around us grows increasingly unrecognizable, our strongest longing is seldom prosperity. What we yearn for is normalcy. We don’t tend to ask for the moon when we’ve lost all we’ve known. We just want some semblance of our old lives back.

Unwanted changes occur. Crises happen. Catastrophes invade our days without warning. The enemy comes to steal, kill, and destroy. He wages threats and makes good on some of them. From all appearances, the pleasant field that once surrounded us—increasingly pleasant, in retrospect—has been scorched and razed. However, God makes threats of His own, and He never wastes His breath. Whether or not our physical surroundings ever again resemble what we once knew, if we have an ounce of breath on the other side, we can bear much fruit again.

Though you wouldn’t want to endure it again, in all likelihood, you’d be able to answer affirmatively, “Yes, it was worth it.”

Jesus is worth it. He’s worth trusting. He’s worth anticipating. He’s worth getting out of bed for when you wish you could go to sleep and never wake up. You may have to believe that by faith until faith becomes sight.

Down is the way up with God. There’s no bearing fruit upward without first taking root downward. There are no shortcuts. No special dispensations. No exceptions for exceptional people. No special entitlements. Oh, it may seem so for a while, but a shallowly rooted plant won’t pass the test of time.

The shoot can’t last without the root.

If we’re not firmly anchored, there’s little hope that the dormant branch will bud in spring.

that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Only one love cannot let go. Only one love refuses to ebb and flow despite the conditions. There’s just one thing “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,” will be able to separate us from—“the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).

That strength isn’t something we come to possess all on our own; it’s a “strength to comprehend with all the saints” (emphasis added). We need other strengthened saints to remind us that we are loved beyond any human estimate of breadth, length, height, and depth. When those around us forget, they need our strength to remind them of this truth.

“It’s John 15:9. Jesus said, ‘As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.’”

Christ loves us, just as God loves Him. When God quits loving Christ, Christ will quit loving you. Till then, you’ve got a knot in your rope no demon in hell can hope to untie.

When we overinsulate ourselves, we’re protecting ourselves right out of our callings.

Nobody told me a remotely productive life would involve quite so much manure. That’s why I’m telling you. If you want to live an immensely fruitful life, you will have to deal with substantial piles of it. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but we both know better.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying you have to like the manure. It is, after all, dung. But what you can come to appreciate is that the Vinedresser can use it as potent fertilizer toward some fine fruit in your life.

At some point in your growth in the faith, you will face a drought or a plague or a blight of some kind. That’s when you will discover what your fruit is made of—and if it can withstand the elements that rail against it.

Your effective fruit bearing imposes the biggest threat to his agenda. His primary interest in your secrets is in leveraging them most effectively to stifle, smear, or stop your successes.

That’s how this works. Resist is no passive term. It stands its ground, steel toed. It pushes back. It shoves hard. It applies divine might—a coat of armor, a sword in the right hand, and a shield in the left.

Will we resolve to do what it takes to become a bona fide, tested-and-tried disciple of Jesus Christ—bearing what we have to bear, learning what we have to learn, denying what we need to deny, and embracing all there is to embrace? Or will we slip into the

seductive black hole of busyness and business, platform and position, notoriety and name making, marketing, carnality, self-importance, celebrity, and branding?

Partying was God’s idea. He strung festivals like holiday lights into the annual Hebrew calendar—seven in number, each commemorating His faithfulness, and He commanded His people to celebrate them. Three of these were pilgrimage feasts, trumpeting Israelites throughout the land to come up (always up, never down) to Jerusalem.

Altogether joyful.

Joy was divinely determined to be one of a believer’s most consistent and distinguishing features.

Delightfully, many vineyards, even those in Texas, still invite people from nearby communities to participate.

Despite the reputation of many believers, Christian virtue is not marked by a quickness to bemoan and a reluctance to rejoice.

When we act as if we don’t notice God’s blessings, it’s not humility. It’s ingratitude.

In the presence of co-laboring, egos shrink.

Autonomy, a value so prized and awarded in our culture, has made the body of Christ sick. We are bleeding our joy, stifling our songs, and muffling our laughter. Our self-reliance has kidnapped us and left us stranded on the shores of microscopic one-man islands.

We forget that we were meant to work together, feast together, mourn together, and celebrate together. These are the birthrights we’ve been given as children of God.

That’s not the way God intended it. Extravagant joys can abound in community, as long as we don’t succumb to big egos, petty rivalries, and our own insecurities. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that we who are in Christ are never happier than when we’re celebrating a harvest in community.

“These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”

Morris writes, “It is no cheerless, barren existence that Jesus plans for his people. But the joy of which he speaks comes only as they are wholehearted in their obedience to his commands. To be half hearted is to get the worst of both worlds.”[3] I deeply believe this to be true. We resist offering ourselves wholly to anyone or anything that has the potential to encroach on our personal desires, and Jesus made clear from the start that God’s will and ours would be in conflict at times. Yet our surrender to Jesus is also ultimately our surrender to joy.

It is the holy feast of the happy ingathering, the dance of God and man.

The leftover fruit wasn’t to be left haphazardly here, there, and yonder. The Israelites were to leave it on the edges, where it would be most accessible for those who needed it.

Take a look at the edges of our fields, and you’ll see people our society claims don’t matter. But in God’s eyes, every soul is of inestimable worth. And these people at the edges of the field are hungry. Hungry for love. Hungry for affection. Hungry for friendship. Hungry for a listening ear. Hungry for hope. Hungry to know God is there and that He cares. And I wonder—have we harvested with the margins in mind? Do we intentionally serve people on the edge?

Our fruit is sweetest to the Vine when it extends a direct advantage to the disadvantaged and to the orphan, to the widow and to the poor. Our fruit best reflects the Vine when it deliberately leaves room at the edges—for the marginalized, the cornered, the oppressed, the mistreated, the harassed, and the abused. That’s where Jesus went, and that’s who Jesus sought. “As he is so also are we in this world” (1 John 4:17).

Fruit is stockpiled to the skies in our Christian communities. We have enough gifts, enough abundance, to fill the arms of untold gleaners at the edges of our fields.

If we’re exercising this authority as imitators of Christ, we don’t do so as bullies who are strong-arming others in the name of Jesus. Rather, we’re acting as influencers of good, identifiable by the kindness of Christ. We may not see the likeness of Boaz in the mirror, but we resemble him every time we use the authority and influence God has entrusted to us to extend our advantage to the disadvantaged and to protect those who are vulnerable to mistreatment and abuse.

God alluded to that day long ago through the prophet Hosea. He describes the coming of the Kingdom, when wars will cease and peace will reign. He quotes God, saying, “I will betroth [my people] to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness” (2:19-20).