From the Fig Tree to the Vine

“My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples.” (John 15:8).

I have written this book as a tool to help us as we develop vibrant Christian communities that bring glory to God. Wider than that, I am very happy to share it with anyone who:

1. wants to be an authentic disciple of Jesus Christ,
2. desires to glorify God with their life.

Based on the verse above we will meet those two goals if we simply “bear much fruit.” Fortunately, Jesus made it quite easy for us, because he told us how we can do that:

“I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit.” (John 15:5)

So, this book is about life in the vine, and how to abide. I call it the “new creation life” because this life only happens as we live fully out of what Jesus provided for us in the new birth. Any effort to live a Christian life outside of that is what I call the “fig tree.” I’ll explain why I call it that in chapter one, but the fig tree includes religious traditions, fleshly striving, and any effort to produce fruit for Jesus. All that comes from the old creation, not the new. The fruit on the vine is his fruit manifested in, on, and through us. He is the vine, we are the branches, and our privilege is to become the bearers of his fruit in the world. What exactly is that fruit? I’ll get to that in chapter two. I will have a whole series of chapters on how to abide, but I’ll dial in on that right away in chapter three.

Realizing this fundamental contrast between the old life and the new led me to the title of the book: “From the Fig Tree to the Vine: a pathway to new creation wholeness.”

The focus on fruitfulness or how to achieve it was not laid out for me very clearly when I first became a Christian. I wish I had a book with this content back then! Not that there was a lack of teaching or books. Quite the opposite, there was just so much teaching and such varied opinion, and I developed a lot of confusion and mixture along the way as I tried to love Jesus well. I needed a simple, clear framework to live from. I was often told that the bible is the sole authority for faith and practice, but that just made matters worse. It’s a big book! Failure to understand the unfolding revelation of the bible caused so much mixture in my life. I hold vehemently to the bible as our authority, all of it, but when clarity came about what it says about the new creation, the confusion dissolved. I suddenly had focus. I’ll explain what I mean by that in chapter four. It’s enough to say at this point that this exhortation from the apostle Paul to his protégé Timothy has become a precious ray of light to me:

“Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” (2 Timothy 2:15, NKJV, emphasis mine).

As I look around me, I see that many believers seem to struggle to live the fruitful life. I see a huge amount of confusion and mixture, just like I had! I don’t think this is by chance. We have an enemy who works through lies, deception, and doctrines of demons. He works hard to keep us from a fruitful life, and he uses the bible for his work extensively, just like he did when trying to tempt Jesus. He comes as “an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). But when truth settles, light overcomes darkness and freedom comes.

I believe I have solutions now, but I didn’t come across them easily. It took years of exploring the pathway and wrestling through tensions. I am writing this out of nearly forty years in Christian life and ministry. The good news is, I am pretty sure that you don’t have to take the long way round into freedom and flourishing like I did – you can get the accelerated pathway by learning the lessons I learned. I will share them in this book, and they are yours to keep.

The fascinating thing for me is that the Lord gave me a glimpse of this pathway early on. The seed of the core content came from a series of encounter moments I experienced only about six years in. Of significance, it was intense frustration with deep tensions I was feeling by then that led me to experience his response. I had virtually no understanding of where things would lead to back then, but the book in your hands is really just my capturing the journey of letting that seed grow into fulfilment of what I saw and heard. I’ll get right into that in the rest of the fourth chapter, and in chapters five and six!

Like most books, the best way to approach this one is to read through from beginning to end. That will give you the fullest picture. But there are three tracks embedded throughout the book: my story, biblical revelation, and application. Because of that, you could choose to prioritize whichever track best connects with where you are right now: