The Wild Branch

"But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, although a wild olive shoot, were grafted in among the others." (Romans 11:17)

Olive trees grow wild across Israel the way weeds grow anywhere. And when a wild olive matures on its own, the fruit it produces is bitter and essentially worthless. It will not feed anyone. It grows, and it fruits, and the fruit is no good. So the farmers graft. They take a branch from a good tree, cut into the wild one, and bind the good branch into the wound. The union takes. The wild tree begins to carry the character of the good tree, its very identity changes, and it starts producing fruit sweet enough to set on a table.

Paul turns that image on us and says we are the wild branch. We were the bitter one. We grew well enough on our own, and what we produced was not fit to serve. And we have been grafted into Christ.

Which means the fruit that comes out of your life from now on is not being generated by you. It is being drawn from the tree you were bound into. The sweetness is not something you manufacture by effort. It is something you carry because of a union you did not arrange and could not have arranged. So stop straining to produce good fruit by willpower, as though you were still a tree on your own roots. You are the wild branch, and the cut where you were joined in is the only reason you are sweet.