Q3, S02 The Barren Tree

Quarter 3, Session 2: The Barren Tree

WILL THE KINGDOM GROW IN YOU?

Passage

Luke 13:6–9

Concept

This session falls under Jesus’ seventh question: Can you see my kingdom as a tree? When Jesus tells a parable about a barren tree, he is showing the Jews of his day that they had the structures of religion in place, but their religion was ultimately dead and devoid of fruit. The call for us is to diligently ask whether or not we are, in fact, living trees.

Key Question

What barren things might you be clinging to that are really only leftovers from a time when your faith was actually alive? How so?

The Tree Tool

Do you see our Tree tool being played out in Luke 13:6–9? With whom? How so?

The Barren Tree

What do you do when you have a dying plant in your yard? Assuming you have at least a few basic plants around your house, and also assuming you’re not the world’s best gardener, you have probably encountered a dying plant or two. Do you immediately give up on the plant, pulling it out of the ground and either replacing it or re-landscaping the area? Or do you work hard to give the plant more water, more fertilizer, more sun or more shade? In each case, you have to ask how far gone the plant is, and how much you care about that particular plant.

Considering a dead plant may seem relatively inconsequential. What do you when something more significant is dying? For example, what do you do when your relationship with a spouse, sibling, or parent begins to die? How do you know when it’s really dead and needs to be uprooted? Do you dive back in and devote your diligent efforts into keeping it alive?

What about your spiritual life? What do you do when see your relationship with God begin to wither? What does it look like to acknowledge the lack of health and to work to revive the life that once flowed through that relationship?

In Luke 13, Jesus told a parable that exposes the deadness of Israel’s religion. What once had been vibrant had now atrophied into dead religion. They were left with a decision to either regain life or be uprooted.

1.     Read Luke 13:6–9. Right off the bat, what strikes you about this passage? What do you find interesting or challenging or confusing?

Signs of Life

A plant can be alive at one point and dead at another. You can successfully get a plant to grow in the ground and even get it to flower or produce fruit, but that is no guarantee that the plant will continue to thrive. It requires constant care and attention. Something can be alive in one season and dead in the next.

This was true of Israel. They were once spiritually alive, but by the time we get to the Gospels, Israel looks like something that was once alive but is not alive anymore. Religious rituals were still on full display. They were offering sacrifices, praying, teaching, following dietary laws, etc. There were many elements you could point to that demonstrated the religious system in Israel. But Jesus’ point in this parable is that they were no longer alive spiritually. What had once been a system of life was now dead and withered. It no longer produced fruit. What is the fruit that is not being produced by the nation of Israel? There are things that happen in a group of people as they enjoy a living relationship with a living God. Things like love, joy, peace, patience, etc. But these things were largely absent from Israel at this moment in their history, though they kept on with many external signs of religion.

The same could be true of us. And this could be true of us on either the individual or corporate levels. Jesus’ warning to Israel is not difficult to apply to our own lives. We do well to heed the warning of this parable.

Think of it like a tree. A tree has two major components: the stem structure and the root system. The stem structure’s job is to reach out and grab the sunlight. The root structure goes under ground and its job is to reach for water. The entire shape of the plant above and below the ground is determined by its reaching for light and water.

In our spiritual life, God offers us the light of truth through the Word of God. It’s there for us to reach out to and stretch and bend until we are able to grasp it—not just to understand it, but to act in accordance with it. But reaching out for the light of God’s truth always requires us to stretch and grow.

When we stop reaching, we stop growing. For example, if you’ve never shared your love for Jesus with someone else, that does not mean you should stop reaching in that direction. Don’t assume that God would never call you to do something that doesn’t come naturally to you. When we follow Jesus in these things that are difficult to us, it always requires stretching and growing.

The root system is based on us knowing and being fed by God in ever deeper ways. Specifically, we’ll focus on the mercy of God. We can come before God in the darkest seasons of our lives in confession and repentance and have full confidence that he will work these things into life. When we have an understanding of and love for God’s mercy, we find that we are able to take risks, because we’re grounded in him and we know that his love for us does not depend on our success. And the more we do this, the more we will find ourselves developing a stronger and healthier root system that becomes the foundation for the growth of our stem structure. Israel in this passage is refusing to repent, refusing to fall upon God’s mercy. This means that their root system is dying, which causes the rest of the tree to quickly die.

For Israel, their relationship with God quickly became dead religion. Israel had become barren by the time Jesus spoke to them here. So we have to ask ourselves, is the same thing happening to us? In what ways are we barren?

2.     What are the barren spots in your life? Are there limbs that need to be pruned? Dead spots that need to be addressed? Areas in your relationship with God that have turned to dead religion?

Constant Feeding

Plants require constant feeding, constant care. If you fail to water your lawn in certain places, it quickly becomes obvious which parts are dying because the grass turns brown. It doesn’t matter how much you watered your lawn last year, it needs the water still today. The same is true in our spiritual lives. It’s wonderful that you’ve experienced God’s mercy and reached out for the light of his word in the past. But if you’re not experiencing that today, then there will be spiritual atrophy and death.

Fruitlessness is not the same thing as death. But fruitlessness is one key step along the path toward death. When we find a lack of fruit being produced in our lives (fruit like: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control, etc.) we have to ask why that fruit is lacking. What is dying? Why?

3.     What is God calling you to follow him in that you’re not willing to take a risk to pursue?

4.     What is God calling you to repent of that you’re not willing to acknowledge (or is it that you don’t believe his mercy is sufficient)?

Something More

The scary thing about a dead tree is that it still looks like a tree. Israel, even as a barren tree, still had all of the structure in place (sacrifices, prayers, temple worship), but it was a leftover from something that was no longer alive. The same may be true of us. We may have the outward symbols of a living relationship but it may not reflect the present reality.

5.     What barren things might you be clinging to that are really only leftovers from a time when your faith was actually alive? How so?      

The parable is about how God deals with fruitless trees. The owner wants to cut down the tree, but the vinedresser suggests that they wait another year, put some fertilizer around it, and then see if it can bear fruit again.

God is patient with us. He continues to work in us. But we can’t settle for being dead. There is a life we are called to seek and find in him. That is the point of a fruit-bearing tree. It’s not enough to be a barren tree, we are patiently and lovingly called into something more.

6.     If you could identify one area in which you need to be reaching for light or rooting down deeper into God’s character, what would it be? Why?

7.     Spend some time in prayer. Ask God to bring life to that which is dead. Ask him to prune what needs to go and to revive what has been neglected. Pray for eyes to see where God wants to work in your life.

Key Question

What barren things might you be clinging to that are really only leftovers from a time when your faith was actually alive? How so?