Part of a Whole

“I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.  If anyone does not abide in Me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered; and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they are burned.”  – John 15:5-6

For a lot of people, going to work is you do your job, you come home, and it becomes monotonous.  For teachers, it’s not like that.  You bring work home with you and burnout is a very real thing.  It’s easy to get burned out when you work with children because it is so demanding and so challenging.  That’s why these words of Jesus are so necessary.  Here is a picture of two branches: 

Which one of these branches is going to continue to grow?  The one still attached to the tree, right?  When you’re disconnected from the tree, you’re not going to thrive.  This is what Jesus is saying in John 15.  Here’s the other thing you should notice:  Those disconnected branches are thrown into the fire.  That’s clearly talking about those who have never accepted Jesus as Lord. 
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But there’s a third type of branch.  What if you were to have a plant – say by the front doors of the school or in your office – that you never nurtured, didn’t water it, and basically ignored it?  It may have started out healthy, but what happens over time?  It starts to wither and die.  Can it be revived? Absolutely.  If you start taking care of it and watering it and giving it sunlight, sure, it can thrive again.  The same thing is absolutely true in our walk with Jesus.  There may have been a time when we were on top of the world and we were on fire with the Lord, but we start to gradually distance ourselves from necessary habits like praying, reading our Bible, attending church, etc. and what happens?  We start to diminish.  We have to continue to nourish our spiritual needs just like we do our physical needs.  Remember 2 Corinthians 10:4 that says the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but spiritual?  We are in the midst of a war and we’re trying to reason with people that don’t understand.  Why can’t they understand? 1 Corinthians 2:14: “But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”

We’re trying to fight a battle physically when we need to be waging that war spiritually and as we’re fighting that battle, it needs to be done in love.  1 Corinthians 13 tells us that if we’re not doing things in love we’re like a clanging cymbal.  Oh, we might have the truth, we might have the answers people need, but if we’re not doing it in love, they’re not going to hear us, and so many Christian people just antagonize those outside of the church.  Listen, as teachers, we’re going to have children that are unchurched.  We’re going to have families that believe a different ideology than the church does.  We’re going to eventually face battles regarding gender and sexuality even in the youngest of grades.  So, how are we going to prepare for those battles? We have to strengthen ourselves spiritually and be led by the Holy Spirit instead of our own fleshly desires.  1 Corinthians 3:6 says, “I [Paul] planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase.”  I prayed this over the school when we had just a handful of students and God gave the increase.  We have the opportunity to plant seeds in the lives of these children and we may only have some here for a month, a year, two years, who knows?  But we have an opportunity to give them the most important information they’ll ever need: That Jesus is the only way to heaven and He wants a relationship with them.