Full Quiver Ministries

“Now this is a story all about how my life got flipped, turned upside down.” Not really, but I thought it would be a good intro! I want to talk with you guys about an experience I had with Jesus, not too long ago. I wanna talk about what I think He was saying to me, the impact it has had on my life, and what I feel like He is potentially saying to His Church.  

A few months ago, I really felt the call of God in my life for consecration. It felt almost Levitical, if I’m honest. The definition of that word according to Oxford Languages is “the act of making or declaring something, typically a church, sacred.”  I define that in my own life as removing things that could hinder my relationship with Him, or cleaning out my temple.  I began what I had described as a wilderness season, but it started in the strangest way. I felt like there was a freedom to do whatever I wanted, which isn’t something I’ve felt in a long time. Most of the time I guard what I watch and listen to. I watched movies I haven’t seen in years, listened to some of my favorite secular albums, and lost myself in the gossip column of social media. I had absolutely no guilt or shame for any of it. 

It was an interesting time, and I partook of that freedom with a little bit of a “Really?” mentality. It seemed out of place and odd considering everything I had felt before and where I thought the Lord was taking me.  Then, in the back of my mind somewhere, I got an understanding about the invitation of this wilderness. It was to refine my focus to Jesus only when all things were available. I could tell that what He was saying was that He wanted to be my only option. Kind of an uncomfortable thought in a way.  With that as my refined focus, I began to pare down what entertainment I allowed to come into my life. I wanted to really focus on what Jesus was doing and saying. 

Around that same time, I was listening to a video from my school. The speaker was Haley Braun and while I was watching, she took her Bible out and got ready to read it. I had just been listening but I felt compelled to open up my own Bible. I went to grab one of mine off the shelf. I sat down and began to thumb through it while I waited to hear what passage of scripture she was taking us to. While I was thumbing through the pages of my Bible, something caught my eye. It was a highlighted passage in Isaiah. Seeing that startled me, because I wasn’t aware that anything was highlighted in that Bible. The passage was Isaiah 5:1-4 and as I read it, the Lord began to open it up in a beautiful way. Let’s look at the passage together!

“I will sing for the one I love, a song about His vineyard. My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside. He dug it up and cleared it of stones and planted it with the choicest of vines. He built a watchtower in it and cut out a winepress as well. Then He looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit (wild grapes in the NKJV). Now you dwellers in Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more could have been done for  my vineyard that I have not done for it? When I looked for good grapes, why did it yield only bad?”

Isaiah 5:1-4 NIV

After reading it I remembered that I had highlighted this passage while I was doing a small study on where the word ‘vine’ showed up in scripture. The passages that I focused on in that study were centered around understanding Jesus’ own statement in John 15:1. So I sat down with Isaiah’s book and the Holy Spirit to see if I could remember where I was going with this. I started to pray and ask God what he was saying here. That’s when it felt like the passage began to unfold. I want to share with you what I felt like the Lord was saying as I meditated and prayed about these scriptures.

When I started reading, It sounded like this passage was a song being sung between God the Father and Jesus. “I will sing  for the One I love, a song about His Vineyard.” Whose vineyard is it? And who is singing? Is Isaiah singing? Maybe, but I felt like and still believe that this passage is a prophetic look at the children of God (Israel), and even more poignant a look at the modern church. I feel like those are the mindsets that we should approach this passage with. It feels like the posture of the passage is almost musing about the questions, “How did we get here?” and “How did this happen?”. I also feel like those will be answered as we go. 

The atmosphere of the moment shifted for me when I read verse 2. While I was reading,  I asked the Holy Spirit what hill we were talking about. He said, “Golgotha.” I began to weep almost uncontrollably. It was early morning when I was having this experience and my weeping actually woke up my oldest Daughter! Think about the implications of this in context of what I felt like the Holy Spirit was saying. The hill of Golgotha was fertilized with the blood of Jesus. Stones are hindrances to planting seed. Jesus removed every hindrance when he was crucified. (Luke 23:45; 1 Cor. 6:19, 17:21-23; Eph. 4:22-24; Just some examples of what I’m talking about.) This act of ultimate surrender on Golgotha created only good soil and Jesus planted Himself there as the Choicest Vine (John 15:1). Do you see what I saw? I was undone with the beauty of what Jesus’ sacrifice had done on Golgotha! 

When you read about the field’s preparation, you find that it came complete with a watchtower and a winepress. It’s important to note that the purpose and supply for what is supposed to grow in this field is present from the beginning. There is protection and provision in the watchtower, and there is also the promise of crushing. Everything that the Lord has for you, in great and intimate detail, was present from the very beginning (Rev. 13:8; Jer. 29:11; Jer. 1:5; John 3:16; Romans 8:38). You can also see the purpose for the grape, the crushing of the winepress. 

Thinking about a Grapes purpose, I wrote this:

“It is the glory of a grape to be used up for the good pleasure of the vinedresser. The winepress is the highest use of a grape. Like the vineyard, the winepress is also a place of cultivation and care, but it is often viewed as a place of suffering and pain. The purpose of the press is to remove the parts that are not useful to wine making, the waste, and leaving only the juice.”

In my own life I know that I’ve spoken and acted dismissively where the pressing is concerned. It’s one of those uncomfortable truths about the kingdom. We are always in the process of becoming, or of being made, into the image and likeness of Christ. That means the things that exist in me, that do not exist in Him, have to go. Proverbs talks about this process in 25:4:

Remove the impurities from silver, and the sterling will be ready for the silversmith.

Prov. 25:4 (NIV)

There is a process of removal and a process of forming. Both sound violent. And in the case of silver, it probably is. I just don’t remember any process that the Lord has brought me through with anything but fondness and joy. That may sound like masochism, but it’s not. I don’t like pain, I just have the understanding that everything the Lord has graciously removed from my life through process or deliverance was killing me. This is what worldly minded Christians will call the cost. It’s the things that I have to give up to truly follow Jesus. It boils my blood when I hear people refer to “counting the cost” when sharing their experiences with the process. How badly do I want to cling to the things that are killing me that I would use them as a warning for following Jesus? How badly do I need to justify my way of living? What “cost”?!? Again, the only cost to you for following Jesus are the things that are killing you.

As we move through these scriptures, there’s the point where the vinedresser comes and inspects the vineyard planted with the choicest vines and finds out that instead of cultivated grapes the vine has yielded wild grapes. Imagine planting a tomato plant and getting blueberries, or vice versa. That’s the kind of shock we’re talking about. It’s a  “this shouldn’t be here,” moment.

Here in the south, there’s a grape that grows wild naturally. It’s called a muscadine. We’ve got country songs that are sung about the wine made from these. They have thick, bitter skin and large seeds. It takes a lot of them to satisfy you, because there’s so much waste. Imagine for a moment that you had planted concord grapes or something like that. The vines you planted should’ve yielded sweet fruit with thin skin and none or very small seeds. Then with no explanation, your plants have produced muscadines. Wouldn’t you be upset and confused? What is interesting to me about this comparison, the idea of a wild grape on a cultivated vine, is that for us in the south people have begun to cultivate muscadine grapes. You can now purchase these vines and plant them in your backyard, you no longer need to search for them in the wild. I think this is a picture and warning that the same thing is being done in our churches. We cultivate ideas and heart postures like “Counting the Cost”  that are grounded in the world’s standards without realizing that the root of that is rebellion. We’ve taken what should have created good fruit and made stink berries (this is the other, more literal definition for wild grapes in Isaiah 5)!  

Honestly, it’s here that the realization takes place of how a vineyard that was created for a purpose and given everything that it needs to thrive could produce something called “wild.” Every profitable condition for good grapes exists: good soil free of debris, no hindrances or enemies, the best fertilizer, protection and care, and the promise of a higher use. The only reason I can think that good grapes were not present is that the grapes rebelled. It’s rebellion. And it’s not in big open ways, but in the small and tiny things. I call them the quiet rebellions. It’s rebellion that is not readily evident, widely accepted, or is easily hidden. It has the feeling of a coup or something like that. I apply this in my own life like this: If I espouse that Jesus is Lord of my life, any place He doesn’t have control is in rebellion. This is where I felt the pull of the Holy Spirit. He was showing me that in my own life I had these areas of small or quiet rebellion. One of them is speeding! I would speed constantly! I was always going at least 5 or more miles an hour over the speed limit. And I realize that this is my conviction and not possibly not yours, but the truth is that there is a law that governs the maximum allowable speed and to break the laws set in place is to be in rebellion. That’s the season I have found myself in. It’s a season of refined focus. It’s the call to refine what I will allow to distract me from who God is making me into.  The truth is that the smaller a target gets, the smaller the miss you can make while still hitting the target. Sometimes when the focus gets refined, the error band, so to speak, decreases. There’s less room for frivolity now in my actions and what I consume. Smaller mistakes have bigger consequences. Not anything that can’t be redeemed, but this idea that the closer I get to Jesus the more like Him I should look and the less I should sin.

I feel like I want to wrap this up now, all nice and tidy. What am I trying to say? What do I think this passage is trying to say? Don’t let things God didn’t plant grow in your life. I feel like there are a lot of things that we’ve cultivated in the church that are grounded in these tiny rebellions. I think that a lot of times, the church looks at the example of Jesus and explains away why it can’t happen. Instead of looking at what we are called to, and looking to Jesus for the grace to accomplish it, we create thought processes that hamstring us and keep us from growing into the image of Christ that Paul was so confident that he reflected. What would it look like for me to say with confidence, “Follow me as I follow Christ”? We, followers of Christ, are grapes in His vineyard. Let’s not be wild or stink berries. Let’s be used up for the good pleasure of the vine dresser.