Jesus learned obedience through his suffering, and you are called to do the same. Thank your Savior today for being the vine the Father pruned – all for the glory of God!
Happy Thanksgiving, friend, happy Thanksgiving! And here’s a pilgrim hymn just for you.
For the beauty of the earth,
For the glory of the skies,
For the love which from our birth
Over and around us lies.
Lord of all, to Thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.
Hi, I’m Joni Eareckson Tada and all of us at Joni and Friends wish you a delightful, delightful Thanksgiving today. And I love those words, “Lord of all, to Thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.” Can’t get closer to the heart of Thanksgiving more than that, right? And you and I, we’ve got so much to be grateful for. You know, this time of year – harvest time, where we thank God for his abundant provisions; harvest time is when I love to sample all the different fruits and vegetables, and, yes, a couple of unusual varieties of grapes. Tiny little sweet ones we will have on the table today, grapes that remind me so much of my grandmother’s grape arbor along the side of her house. Ken and I have a friend nearby who grows grapes up on the hills, and he was telling us recently that his berries are going through a distinct change in color right now, which always signals the final weeks of ripening.
Anyway, he was doing some leaf and stem pruning to allow the mature berries to receive a lot of sunlight in order to heighten their percentage of sugars, and he told us that as he was pruning, he was struck again by the astonishing admission of the Lord in John 15. Listen to what Jesus says. He says, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the Gardener. 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.”
Why is that so astonishing? Well, look at it again. Jesus calls himself the true vine and he admits his heavenly Father is the gardener. The Father cuts off every branch, he says, “in Me” so that it will be more fruitful. Oh, my. How humbling it is – and yet how comforting – to know that even for the Lord Jesus there were unfruitful branches in his humanness that needed to be pruned, perhaps some in the dormant winter of his youth or some just before harvest at Gethsemane. Branches that could have – that would have – siphoned off a measure of spiritual nourishment from his Father, and not allowed every drop to be purely directed toward the great fruit of his work on the cross.
To me, that’s a wonderful thing to remember on Thanksgiving Day. I give thanks that even my Savior learned obedience through the things he suffered. He suffered, he learned, and that learning process was, no doubt, a process of painful pruning of his human nature, always saying no to any desire set before him – whether in the wilderness when the devil tempted him, or right before the cross when Peter told him he shouldn’t have to die. Thank God Jesus let himself be pruned, because 1 Peter 2:21 tells us, “To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his steps.” Pruning is a painful thing but, oh, the harvest it yields. So I invite you to join me today as we sit at our Thanksgiving table thanking our Savior for being the vine the Father pruned – all for the glory of God. From all of us at Joni and Friends, have a blessed Thanksgiving.
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