“He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful” (John 15:2).

After a long winter, I am always anxious for spring. Aren’t you? I love to see the daffodils and tulip trees display their beauty against the backdrop of barren landscape. The starkness of winter gives way to the tinge of green, red, and pink as trees begin to flower and leaf out. Spring is rebirth, renewal, and it rejuvenates my soul.

Spring also reveals a lot of dead. Depending on the harshness of the winter, I might find just a few dead branches here and there in my landscape. Other times, entire plants, shrubs, and trees died over the winter. This deadwood will never bloom, never flourish, and needs to be cut out because leaving them in my gardens will mar their beauty.

In a very simple analogy, this is exactly what Jesus says God will do with us in the first part of our theme verse, John 15:2: “He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit.”

Apart from Christ, we live in the dead of winter.

New Testament writers liken this to living in the darkness. Christ is light and life, apart from Christ is darkness and death. Paul refers to our earthly nature, or our sinful nature as that spiritual part of us that is dead in our transgressions. When we receive Jesus Christ as our Savior, we experience our own personal spring. We are spiritually reborn into Christ, into light, and into life. This new birth, like spring, unfurls color and beauty against the starkness of our old life. And at the same time, it reveals the old, ugly deadwood that will do nothing but mar the beautiful landscape God desires our lives to be.

Most translations of John 15:2 use two different words in translating this verse: cut off in the first part and then prune in the second part. At first glance it can seem to us, in the English, that the writer is saying the same thing. But he isn’t. He uses two distinctly different words in the original language. The first word translated cut off is the Greek word Airo and it means removed, taken away, gotten rid of. Make it so it isn’t there anymore. Anything that does not bear the good fruit of Christ-likeness is deadwood subject to God’s cutting.

Maybe my mentioning this doesn’t give you a compelling reason to put your faith in Jesus. I mean, who wants to undergo cutting and pruning right? It sounds painful. And honestly, it can be. It sounds like we experience a lot of losing. Yes. We do.  But just as it takes spring to reveal the deadwood in our landscape, it takes new birth in Christ to reveal the deadwood of sin in our lives.

Faith in Christ ushers us into spring!

The cutting and pruning starts after we have received God’s give of salvation and are committed to walking out our lives of faith with the Lord. This is not something God does in the lives of non-believers. Remember, Jesus told the disciples they were already clean because of the word he had spoken. They were already saved by God’s grace because they had, however imperfectly, believed in Jesus as their Savior. We come to God, through Jesus, with all of our junk. God never says we need to clean up first. We are to submit to the work of the Master Gardener.

Secondly, God is the one doing the cutting and pruning. We don’t clean ourselves up. We don’t determine what needs to go and what should stay. When we submit to Jesus as our Savior and Lord, we turn all of that over to him. The Holy Spirit is the one who will do the growing and flourishing in our lives. This is really great news! The pressure is off. Jesus never loves us more or less than at the moment when we believe in him for salvation. We are never more righteous before God than right then.

The cutting and pruning doesn’t make us more righteous, it grows us in our Christ-likeness. It causes us to look like Christ and to bear his image well. When Christ shines his light into our darkness, he reveals what needs to go. Thoughts. Habits. Hobbies. Relationships. Anything that keeps us from being who God intends us to be is illuminated. It might feel a little harsh to have those things cut out. Gone. A smoldering ash heap like the dead pine tree branches my husband cut down and burned last week in our yard. Our sin nature will want to cling to those things and will try to make us think we are losing because our sin nature is aligned with our defacer.

But we have a beautiful promise in this passage. God has a purpose for the cutting. Those things that we feel like we are losing are things that keep us from flourishing to the glory of God.  There is beauty in your life being hidden by the deadwood. As a believer in Christ you are now aligned with Christ, have the mind of Christ, and bear his image. The cutting reveals what is already there. Oh, friend. We do not lose when God cuts. We win. Big Time.

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