Richard Ellis Talks

Richard Ellis: If you're abiding in Him and He is your life and He is flowing through your life, then the desires that you have are His desires. So I will not find myself asking for things that He doesn't already want to give me in the first place.

Guest (Male): Welcome to Richard Ellis Talks with Richard Ellis. Richard's going to take the next few minutes to share some great words of hope and insight for you, and in today's broken world, that is something everyone is desperate to hear. Richard shares unapologetically the truth of the Bible in a way that's clear, relational, and uplifting.

So thank you for taking this time to listen. We know it will bless you. And when you have a moment, you might want to check out our website so we can stay connected with you: richardellistalks.com. But right now, let's go ahead and get things off and running with today's talk. Here's Richard Ellis.

Richard Ellis: The title of today's message is "Prune Juice." Why does everybody respond that way? I have no idea. Prune juice is not exactly something I go into the store looking for just because I'm thirsty. Anybody ever have a craving for prune juice? No, of course not. But when you need it, you need it. So we're going to talk about Christians and prune juice today because sometimes things can get backed up. John Chapter 15.

We're going to see how far we get through this chapter. We're probably going to try to just move through these verses and see what Jesus was talking about here. John Chapter 15, verse 1: "I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser." So what do you have in verse 1? You have a vine coming out of the ground and you have a vinedresser who is the Father.

I lived at a place—our family lived in a house one time that had a big fence around the whole place. And on that fence and kind of woven into that fence were grapevines, some kind of vine. And it provided blockage—this has nothing to do with the prune juice—but it provided blockage so people couldn't see in, you couldn't see out, and it was cool because of some privacy.

Well, one day the guy that owned that place sent a crew over there, and they destroyed that grapevine. They left the fence, but they found I think there were like six vines coming out of the ground. And they took that thing down, stripped it all the way down to the vines, and that was all that was left. I remember thinking, "What kind of fools would come over here and not know anything about what they're doing? We have no privacy now. This thing will never come back and they've destroyed it."

Now what do you think happened? Did it come back? It exploded. Now I had no idea anything about that. So keep that picture in mind. So you have a vine—Jesus is the vine. And then you have a vinedresser. A vinedresser is the guy that comes through the vineyard, let's say, and he's got some pruning shears, he's got some tools, and he is clipping and cutting and removing stuff, as we'll see here in a second, for a reason.

Just track with me. "I am the true vine, my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit He takes away." So who are the branches? We've got a vine: Jesus. The branches: we are branches on that vine. If you are a Christian, you're a branch on that vine.

Now what in the world does this mean, that the vinedresser comes through and every branch that does not bear fruit He takes away, and every branch that bears fruit He prunes that it may bear more fruit? So there's two options here. So you say, "I'm a Christian. What does this mean?" If you are not bearing fruit, you're going to get clipped. If you are bearing fruit, you are going to get clipped. You're going to get clipped.

And sometimes I think we all feel this way, we go, "What in the world is going on? Why is God coming after this stuff in my life? It seems like literally I'm getting cut upon, things are being removed." So you can be doing the right thing and He's going to clip you anyway. You say, "I'm bearing fruit. What's wrong with this picture? Leave me alone." No, you're bearing fruit, we're going to clean this thing up and make it run so efficiently that you bear more fruit.

Verse 3: "You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you." The words that He has given them are part of what cleans that branch up. So if you're in the scriptures and you're abiding in Him, then there are certain things that the scriptures clip. It's a self-pruning thing.

Verse 4: "Abide in me and I in you, as the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me." So what does this "abide" mean? It simply means to remain, to stay connected. You say, "Well, how would I get disconnected anyway?" Precisely. You cannot disconnect if you're truly a believer, but you've got to walk with God, talk with God, abide, stay connected in such a way that the life that is coming out of the ground through that vine, the nourishment is coming through that branch. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself.

Every once in a while, certain time of year, I know where to go get this. I don't even know what it's called. I can go out in the woods and there's this beautiful tree that buds, these little flower branches. I get big stalks of this and put them in a vase. Anyhow, it's springtime. I find this, I'll cut a branch, take it home to Rebecca and I stick it in water. And it's beautiful until it dies.

Well, why did it stay beautiful for a while? It was pulling some water out of that vase. It's never supposed to live in a vase. It makes it because it's connected to the trunk of the tree which is connected to the roots of the tree which is in the soil and pulling nutrients, and the little thing of water is only going to keep it alive so long.

So some Christians think they can get propped up by a weekly vase of water and come in and go, "Ah," and we all go, "Ah," and think that's impressive and like, "Okay, where's the fruit? Why are these flowers dying?" A branch cut off from the vine by itself will never generate fruit. You are not supposed to be by yourself. You are supposed to be connected to Him.

Verse 5: "I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me and I in him bears much fruit, for without me you can do nothing." He stated a fact here in verse 5. If you abide in Me and I in him, you bear much fruit. So how do I know if I'm really abiding in Him? He just told you: you will bear much fruit.

Now this is a weird thing when you meet someone who reads something like that and is not really abiding in Christ but realizes to look like a Christian they've got to start cranking out something that looks like love, looks like joy, looks like peace, looks like longsuffering, and they are in pain because it is work. It is not naturally coming up.

I was raised with artificial fruit, and I've seen some impressive artificial fruit. Walk in somebody's house, bowl of fruit on a table, you look, you almost want to reach and go, and then you touch it and realize it's plastic. But some very effective plastic. Visually it looks real, but it's going to give you nothing because there's no fruit there.

But I was raised to know how to put on something to look like real fruit, and it was artificial fruit. I had no peace—fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace. I didn't know that God loved me, didn't love myself. Forget loving you, I don't even have it coming this way. No love, no peace, no joy. And this doesn't take long to figure out whether you've got it or not. You either do or you don't. And when you do, you do. And when you don't, you really don't. There's not much middle ground here.

It would be like me stepping out of this theater taking some real pears and going and hanging them on these other trees that are not pear trees. I might fool you for a minute, be like, "This didn't come off this tree, did it? No, because you see the string. This isn't a pear tree." You get caught pretty quickly.

I didn't realize this when I was in the pain for so long as a young man—no peace, no fruit of any kind—that people who knew the fruit inspectors would look at me and go, "Ooh, that brother's in trouble." Because if you've got genuine fruit in your life and these things are manifesting on the branches and the limbs of your life, then you're not judging someone else. But I'm telling you, you're busted whether you realize it or not.

And if you are living a life with no fruit manifest and you meet someone who has that, you are going to be inclined to get away from that person or those people. So why do some churches attract certain kinds of people and other churches attract other kinds of people? Fruit-producing people tend to gravitate to fruit-producing churches.

And we'll get to this in a minute: you've got to stop being upset that there are people that get around you and want to get away from you if you're walking with God. You're not being judgmental, you're not doing anything, it's just that if they—especially if they claim to be a Christian—they go, "Something's wrong because you've got something going on I don't have going on. I've got to get away from you because this is showing me up." So don't take it personally. It's the vine's fault.

And then the last part of that verse 5: "For without me you can do nothing." What does that mean in the context? "Without me you can do nothing." And if you look in the original Greek, does anybody that's studied gone to seminary know what the word "nothing" means? Exactly. It means nothing. So nothing means nothing. You can't do anything without Him.

But what is the point of that? If you're bearing fruit, you're not the one generating the fruit. Without Him you can't generate this fruit. So I grew up in a system where I thought I had to work, work, work to generate. And we'll see in Galatians in a minute that the work comes from working in the flesh to generate certain things. In the spiritual side of it, the fruit side of it, it is the Spirit who generates the fruit.

So if you've got a fruit tree with a branch or a vine with branches off of that vine, you say, "Well, what are the branches doing?" They're just chilling. All they've got to do is stay connected. All they've got to do is remain connected to the vine. And the vine will push everything through that branch to the extremities of that branch, and the Father is going to come through and if there's too many limbs that are pulling that nourishment—things that are distracting from the fruit bearing—He'll clip those away.

And just supernaturally what a vine does in the physical realm, the vine will do in the spiritual realm and it'll push that nourishment out, and on the end of those branches, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, start exploding fruit everywhere. You say, "How'd you do that?" I didn't do any of it. Why? Because without Him I can do nothing.

So I'm not surprised when fruit is manifest in my life, but I'm pretty excited because I go, "I can't do this." I can't generate love. I can't generate peace. I can't generate longsuffering, joy. This is coming straight from the vine up my branch, and if you see something, it is all Him because without Him I can do nothing. And that's how you can rest and be a Christian at the same time. You say, "Well, isn't that branch working?" How can it be working? It's just connected to the vine and letting it flow through.

I will tell you from personal experience that living the Christian life without being rightly connected to Christ is one of the most exhausting things you will ever endeavor to do. It will wear you out because you know something is supposed to be different and look different, and you're trying to manufacture that, and you have to go back to the connection point and say, "Lord, are we connected?" And He says, "No, that's your problem, you've got to abide in me." And then all of a sudden everything changes.

Now, let me get to this here. So let's say you're producing fruit, but like He says, the vinedresser, the Father, comes along and starts clipping. What is He clipping? He is going to clip anything that will take away from the production of fruit. Dead branches, worthless stuff in your life.

Now that can be very painful because if you've got a lot of stuff hanging from that that you've kind of arranged and you think it's cool and He goes, "It's got to go. It's got to go. We're not doing this anymore because this is pulling, this is serving no purpose. This part of your life has got to go."

Now the Bible talks about running the race, laying aside every weight that so easily besets you. That's something we can choose to do. In this case, the Father comes through and this can be painful. You know, if you're one of the branches and you kind of peek down the aisle and one of the younger branches goes, "Who's that?" "That's the Father." "What's He got in His hand?" "He's coming for us." "What's going to happen?" "Oh, you'll see." "Am I in trouble?" "No, you've got fruit." "Then why is He coming up our lane?" "He's just going to clean this up a little bit more so that not just that you bear fruit, you bear much fruit."

Then you've got to ask yourself, "Am I cool with that?" You don't want to be caught arguing with the vinedresser. "Could we negotiate here and you just leave a couple of these little branches here? These things are very important to me, they give me security." "Nope, they've got to go."

So sometimes our angst, our fear is that we have built our lives on things that don't produce fruit, and He says, "Okay, it's got to go. Here we go. Clip." And you're like, "There's no way I'm going to make it without that in my life." And He goes, "Well, watch and see. Trust me." And then you lose that thing, but then all of a sudden because that is gone, boom, more fruit.

Verse 6: "If anyone does not abide in me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered, and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they're burned. If you abide in me and my words abide in you, you will ask what you desire and it shall be done for you."

Now what in the world does that mean? That sounds to me like if I do whatever He's talking about here, then I'm going to ask for whatever I desire and that's going to happen. But you're leaving out an important piece of the information. If you're abiding in Him and He is your life and He is flowing through your life, then the desires that you have are His desires. So I will not find myself asking for things that He doesn't already want to give me in the first place.

When you're in the flesh, you tend to go to God for fleshly requests. When you're in the spirit, the main prayer is, "Not my will, Your will be done." Look, I don't even know what to pray for anymore. If this is what you want for me, great. I don't even want to ask, Father, for something You don't want for me.

So my suggestion sometimes to people is this: don't ask God for anything. Start with, "Lord, am I rightly connected to you? And why don't you just tell me what you want me to ask you for? And that way I'll get that because I'm connected to you and we'll save a lot of time." You say, "Well, why wouldn't everybody do that?" Because we don't want His answer sometimes. We really don't want His will. We want what we want, and sometimes He actually answers those prayers too and we go, "Wow, why didn't I listen? Why did I push so hard?"

The stuff that happens out of being connected is pretty extraordinary. Verse 8: "By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit, so that you will be my disciples." So what happens here? Who's the Father? The vinedresser. There's nothing like an orchard or whatever. How many of you have a garden with flowers? Anybody grow flowers? Raise your hand if you grow flowers. Okay. So it ain't like you're a flower. But if you're the one with the garden and somebody comes to your house and goes, "Oh my gosh, look at these beautiful flowers," you would think you're a flower because you light up because you're so proud of what you've done. You're not the flowers.

So what does it mean the Father's glorified? Someone sees me, someone sees you exploding with fruit, and anyone observing that goes, "Oh my gosh, who's behind this? Because someone clearly knows exactly what they're doing." Because it isn't the branches. It's the Father and the Son knowing how to clip everything out of the way to maximize fruit so that the world sees the change that's come about in the life of the church.

The world goes, "Who is behind this?" And as amazing as the grapes and the fruit look, everybody knows they can't do it by themselves. Someone has to be moving this along and then He is glorified. "By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit, so you will be my disciples."

Another indication: you say, "Well, I'm a follower of Christ." Fruit and follow always go together. You cannot claim to be a follower of Jesus and bear no fruit. And you will bear no fruit unless you're a follower of Jesus, you're connected to Him.

"As the Father loved me, I also have loved you. Abide in my love." In other words, stay connected to that love. "If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in His love."

I know this may seem like an oversimplification and people tried to explain all this stuff to me when I was a mess, and I still have my days, but I cannot tell you how much easier it is to live your life and live the Christian life if you'll just remain connected to Him.

Verse 11: "These things I have spoken to you that my joy may remain in you and that your joy may be full." So I want my joy to be in you and then I want you to be full. Enough of this half-empty mess. That's not what God intended. Full, bearing much fruit, that's what He intended.

Verse 12: "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you." Just love each other. "Yeah, but he's goofy." It doesn't say you're going to like everybody, but I've got people I have not liked through the years and then I choose to love them and I'm like, "Oh great, now I think I like the guy. This is terrible. I had it all figured out." Just choose to love people.

I ended up at a 40th anniversary party for a couple in our church, and it's all Hispanic. All Mexican, it's all Hispanic. My wife and I go, love this couple. And in comes a full-blown mariachi orchestra. They ain't coming by the table to do a song. This for about an hour and a half, we're all mariachi-ed up, and everybody in the room is singing along with these songs. I don't know—they didn't even do "La Cucaracha." I don't know what they were thinking.

Now you say, "Well, how did you do?" These people are my family. I didn't grow up with any of that music. Extraordinary mariachi band. They had to keep putting quarters in a guy's hat to keep them singing. But you know, I looked around that party and I thought, "I didn't grow up with this. I don't know these songs. I love these people."

"Well, I don't like that kind of music." You'd be amazed what you can like when you love. We get so far from the cross we don't know who we are anymore. And for me, the cross kind of feels like playing tag, and I know if I can make it to base, I'm going to be safe. And I grab the foot of that cross and then I look up and there's some black dude and some Mexican girl and everybody's grabbing the same cross. Like, "We're safe? Yeah, we're safe together because we've got Him in common."

And we wonder why the world doesn't want our Jesus because it looks like we don't even want Him. And all the stuff, even if they picked up a Bible in a hotel and read, they go, "Well, where's all that stuff?" And we're supposed to be the proof of the change of the life, that sweet fruit on the end of those branches that creates some hunger in their hearts. They're like, "I don't know what you've got, but I'd like to get hooked up to that."

Guest (Male): We'll get back to Richard in a moment to close out today's talk. But first, I want to share something with you about the program. Our mission is actually very simple: to take the planet. So it's our prayer that these daily talks from Richard aren't something you only hear and enjoy, but that they inspire you to share with others.

Together we can do this. The message of the gospel is something everyone needs to hear. And that's why it's a huge priority to us. And you can join us in this important mission. Call us at 855-6-RICHARD to say you're in, or you can get on board with us through our website, richardellistalks.com. But right now, here's Richard with some closing thoughts for you.

Richard Ellis: So prune juice. If you let Him prune, you're going to produce some fruit that will be turned into some juice. And in the case of Jesus, that juice was the wine in a cup that He had to drink. And when He said, "This is my blood in the new covenant," it gets pretty serious pretty quick.

The thing about grapes that are turned into juice, that are turned into wine, is that it doesn't happen without some crushing. And He got crushed so that He could be that for us. And when we drink of that cup, we can remember that He got crushed for us and was poured out for us to make all of this possible.

Guest (Male): You've been listening to Richard Ellis Talks. We really appreciate that you spent this time with us, but we want to keep the conversation going with you. So give us a call any time at 855-6-RICHARD. Or through our website, richardellistalks.com, by sending an email to us so we can stay connected with you.

We love bringing you the program every day, but it means even more to us when you let us know how the program has helped you. Call us at 855-6-RICHARD or through the website, richardellistalks.com. Your story needs to be heard, and we're listening, caring, and encouraged.

Finally, if you enjoy the program, let us know by your generous support to join us on our mission to reach the planet. We can't do it alone and need your help on this mission: richardellistalks.com. So until next time, have a great day and thank you for listening to Richard Ellis Talks.