WHOLE-HEARTED: A 5-Day Journey Exploring the Essential Center for MissionSample

While talking with His disciples in the intimacy of the upper room on the night before His death, Jesus paints a picture for them of the kind of whole-hearted life He desires for them. He wants them to be deeply connected to Him and abundantly fruitful because of that connection, which He pictures as lush verdant branches (the disciples) firmly connected to a strong vine that flows with vitality (Jesus), tended by a wise and loving gardener (the Father). John 15:1 is deeply encouraging to us—but then we run into verse 2, where the first tool we see in the hand of the gardener is pruning shears. “He cuts off every branch of mine that doesn’t produce fruit, and he prunes the branches that do bear fruit so they will produce even more” (v. 2, NLT). In our productivity-driven mindset, many of us immediately feel pressured to do things for Jesus; we equate “bearing fruit” with producing “results.” This reduces our understanding of missional living to monitoring statistics.

But the heart of this passage is really about holiness (whole-hearted living), and the fruitfulness it contemplates is not about doing but about being. Jesus declares that our connection to Him means that we have already been “purified” (NLT) or pruned, and that fruitfulness will naturally flow out of that connection. Nowhere in this picture of whole-hearted living is there a command to “bear fruit.” The central imperative is “abide” (NRSV) or “remain” (NLT); forms of this verb appear 10 times in John 15:1-11. It is a word that conveys an intentional choice to persevere in a deep, intimate connection to Jesus the Vine. The heart of Jesus’ vine-and-branches metaphor is found in verse 5: “Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing” (NLT). A deep, intimate connection to Jesus will inevitably produce fruit, including the fruit of holiness; lack of that connection will render us useless for God’s missional purposes.

From the writer of 1 Kings and the four evangelists, we have seen over these five days a consistent picture of what it means to live wholeheartedly in pursuit of becoming more and more like Jesus and equipped to follow Him in mission. It means having an undivided heart, fully and faithfully aligned with God and His purposes, unweakened by competing loyalties, priorities, or masters. It involves aligning our desires with the things that are important to God. It calls us to love God with all we are and with all we have and to love our neighbor selflessly. And most of all, it means abiding with Jesus in deep, intimate connection, which will cause us to overflow in fruitfulness.