Being Rooted in Christ Produces Fruit

The letter that Paul writes to the church at Rome is one in which he is addressing both Jewish and Gentile Christians. These two religious groups grew from the soils of what seem like two different histories, but really aren’t. Paul believes that they should not be two wholly separate groups, but rather two peoples unified as one under the banner of Christ Jesus. He goes to great pains to make the case that the ingredient both groups should be sharing is a faith in Christ as the Jewish Messiah and Son of God who reconciles fallen men to God. According to Paul, Christ does this through his sacrificial death and his triumphant resurrection. In Paul’s mind, faith was not a magical force that made things real, or that bent reality to the will of men, but a trust that moved people to follow Christ and rely on God’s plan to save them and thus make their reconciliation with God genuine and concrete.

But some Jews, particularly those in religiously elite political circles had a misplaced faith. They had placed their trust in religious rituals and personal religious works. This misplaced faith did not make for men closer to God. Instead, it made men of pride who sanctified themselves from others on the basis of a false moral piety. In their zeal to make themselves right by their own deeds, they rejected the divine savior sent to rescue them from their unrighteousness. By the end of Romans 10, Paul makes it clear that God sees much of Israel as a disobedient and untrusting people (Romans 10:19-21). But he won’t reject all of them. Instead, he will find in their numbers a remnant and will grace those in that remnant with salvation through their faith (Romans 11:5). The rest would be hardened in the same way that Pharaoh was hardened (Romans 11:7-10, Romans 9:17-18). Paul takes care to warn the Gentiles that even though God removes some of the Jewish branches that make up his divine, metaphorical olive tree, and then grafts Gentile branches into that very same tree in their place, that God can remove those Gentile groups just as easily should they succumb to their own kinds of arrogance (Romans 11:17-21).  Paul plainly reminds them that they are supported by the root, and not the other way around. And that root is not a Jewish cultural or religious system. It is a person. Interestingly, he returns to this imagery in other places and clarifies what that root actually is. One notable place he does this is in his letter to the Colossians. He tells that church to be “rooted and built up in [Christ] and established in the faith (Colossians 2:6-7). Paul paints a picture with that verse in which a person who is rooted in Christ is nourished in such a way that his trust is made foundational, and his spirit then abounds with the spiritual quality of thankfulness. Jesus painted a similar picture in John 15, where he likens himself to a vine with branches. The branches that produce fruit are the ones that are living in him as the vine. The branches that don’t produce fruit are not living in him – that is they don’t have an established trust in his spiritual provision. Those branches, just like arrogant, elite Israel, are cut away by the gardener. The remaining branches that do produce fruit, are then pruned of their own useless branches so that they produce even more fruit. When you are nourished by Christ’s vine or root, you will keep his commandments of loving God and people (Matthew 22:36-40), and your trusting of him and living in him will produce love and joy (John 15:10-11, John 15:16-17).  Paul rounds out that imagery in Galatians, by pointing out that the divinely inspired fruits of Christ’s spiritual vine are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness and self control (Galatians 5:22-23).

Jesus tells us that we can recognize true and false followers by their fruits (Matthew 7:15-20). This is why it is important to remember Paul's statement that not everyone is a child of Abraham just because they are his genetic offspring (Romans 9:6-7).