Sunday Message: Photosynthesis for the simple

A pastor I listened to suggested, if you are hungry for Jesus' teachings, start at John 15.  This is the "I am the vine, you are the branches" passage.  There are many comparisons that Jesus makes between us as the bearers of fruit and Jesus the vine we are attached to, without which we can't bear fruit, or even exist.

The word that kept coming up over and over was "abide".  Joh 15:4  Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it remains in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. 

  So I looked into the word "abide".  It meant "to stay (in a given place, state, relation or expectancy)".  But it means more than that, if Jesus wants you to remain as a PART of Him, as a branch is to the trunk.  It means being a functional, integral part.  But how MUCH more?  It brought me to thinking of photosynthesis, a topic that seemed so simple when we were kids learning it in science class; but when I reviewed it in meditating on this, I saw things like pheophytin, proton gradients and NADPH, and knew I had to simplify before I started rubbing a finger over my lips and making baby sounds.  So I simplified:  a leaf is an input/output device.

Inputs

Sunlight:  the leaf absorbs the sunlight, which provides energy for the system to re-engineer the other inputs.  Sunlight is the grace of God the Father, enabling us to convert the other inputs into positive good for the rest of the system.

Water:  The Word of God through Christ, the roots of the system.  He provides the Living Water, which we use through the grace of the Father, to pull out what we need to live.

Air:  Air is drawn into the leaf, where the energy from sunlight combines it with the water to create the food that feeds the entire system, including the fruit.  Air is the Spirit, with which the Word from Christ becomes something that benefits us.

All three are needed for the leaf to do anything worthwhile.  A tree won't grow in a cave; the sunlight is most important.  But without the water, the sun will just wither the leaf.  And what is a leaf without air?  It is a memory pressed in a book, trying vainly to retain the beauty of life but having no function whatsoever.  And so too are we, because what is the output?

Output

The fruit:  The endgame of the branch is to make fruit.  And why is the fruit valuable?  It does two things:

1- It propagates the system;

2- It provides good for others.

So you believe you have fruit.  Does it meet these two conditions?  Does it grow the Church?  Is it sweet even to those who aren't in the Church?  If not, then maybe it isn't the fruit Jesus commanded us to bear.  And if it isn't, then we have to ask ourselves- which input are we missing?  And why are we missing it?

Are we hiding from God, like the tree that won't grow in the cave?

Are we immobile in time, ungrowing, having the seeming of life but really just a memory pressed in a book, because we won't accept the air of the Spirit's motivation?

Or have we fallen to Satan's greatest temptation- to be independent, a branch broken from the vine, saying to ourselves we have everything we need- and slowly dying of thirst in the process?

So I guess you can consider this a "nature's checkup" we all need to do.  Check the inputs; check the output.