Illustration of the vine and the branches
15
📚✭“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower. 2 📚✭Every branch in me that bears no fruit he takes away,✭ and he prunes✭ every branch that bears fruit, that it might bear more fruit.3 ✭“Now you are clean through the word which I have spoken to you. 4 📚✭Remain in me, and I will remain in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it remains in the vine, so you also cannot, unless you remain in me. 5 📚I am the vine, you are the branches. He who remains in me, and I in him, he will bear much fruit.✭ For without me you can do nothing. 6 📚✭If a man does not remain in me, he is thrown away like a branch and withers. And men gather them and throw them into the fire, and they are burned.
7 📚“If you remain in me and my words remain in you, you will ask what you want,✭ and it will be done for you. 8 📚✭My Father is glorified in this, that you bear much fruit; so you will be my disciples. 9 📚✭As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Remain in my love.✭ 10 📚✭If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11 📚✭“These things I have said to you that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full. 12 📚✭This is my command, that you love one another, as I have loved you. 13 📚✭No man has love greater than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. 14 📚✭You are my friends, if you do whatever I command you. 15 📚✭From now on, I will not call you servants, because the servant does not know what his lord is doing. But I have called you friends, for everything that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.
16 📚“You have not chosen me, but I have chosen✭ you, and ordained you, that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain,✭ so that whatever you ask the Father in my name,✭ he may give it to you. 17 📚✭These things I command you, that you love one another.
The character of this world
18 📚If the world✭ hates you,✭ you know that it hated me before it hated you. 19 📚If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own. But you do not belong to the world. I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.
20 📚✭“Remember the word I spoke to you, ‘The servant is not greater than his lord.’ If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they have kept my word, they will keep yours also. 21 📚✭But they will do all these things to you for my name’s sake, because they do not know him who sent me. 22 📚If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin.✭ But now they have no excuse for their sin. 23 📚✭He who hates me hates my Father also. 24 📚✭If I had not done among them deeds which no other man did, they would not have sin. But now they have both seen and hated both me and my Father. 25 📚✭But this happens that the word that is written in their Law might be fulfilled, ‘They hated me without a cause.’