Abiding in the Vine Produces Fruit

My sophomore year of college, I took American Lit. One piece of literature I was required to read was written by Benjamin Franklin. It was his account of his personal pursuit of morality and virtue.

Franklin made himself a thorough grid of all of the virtues he decided were good to acquire and set about following a complex routine every day in an attempt to master these qualities. Among them were patience, charity, truthfulness, etc.

He later admitted utter failure.

It took him such extreme effort to work on one area of his character that he found it impossible to maintain any one virtue when he moved on to the next virtue on his grid.

I admired Franklin's honesty. I remember sympathizing with him--it was exactly how I felt. I had given up 'trying to be good.' It was too hard and exhausting trying to live up to God's standards so I had just stopped trying and I lived under a shadow of condemnation.

We were two dead people, Franklin and I, trying to run a marathon. Impossible.

We knew morals were good to have--and we both knew moral people we admired--but we didn't know Jesus. Ah, to want to 'be moral for morality's sake' was not enough. Jesus provides, not only the motivation, but the ability to bear good fruit.

"I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing." John 15:5

Jesus truly does set the captive free. Free from self-reliance, condemnation, guilt...oh, does He ever cease from giving?! What is impossible with me is DONE by Christ.

C.S. Lewis expressed this wonderfully well:

I want to add now that the next step is to make some serious attempt to practise the Christian virtues. A week is not enough. Things often go swimmingly for the first week. Try six weeks. By that time, having, as far as one can see, fallen back completely or even fallen lower than the point one began from, one will have discovered some truths about oneself.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is...we never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means--the only complete realist

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.141-142