Spiritual Hiccups - Bearing Fruit

One of the hallmarks of Protestantism is the idea of Scripture topping all other sources of information about God, salvation, true human life, etc.  Back during the Reformation, the Latin motto Sola Scriptura, or Scripture Alone, said that the Bible contained all that was needed for faith, life, etc. and that Church traditions needed to be measured and critiqued by Scripture.  (The motto never meant that no other sources of information were good or true or to be considered.) 

Therefore we Protestants like to think of ourselves as biblically shaped and formed.  We think of our faith and beliefs as embodying what it says in the Bible.  Unfortunately, we do not always confer with the Bible on these assumptions.  We simply assume that the beliefs we cobbled together from what we heard at church and what we picked up here and there are, in fact, solid biblical faith.

Yet the Protestant focus on "justification by grace through faith" - a very biblical idea - has often so overshadowed other parts of Scripture so that our presumed biblical faith gets reduced to, "Believe in Jesus and go to heaven."  The notion that God lovingly embraces us without regard to any merit of our own (grace) is a solidly biblical concept.  But the idea that God wants nothing from us other than to believe in or accept our "salvation" through grace requires ignoring large parts of the very Bible we claim as the source of our faith.

Today's gospel is simply one of many such texts.  Over and over in today's reading, Jesus calls his followers to "bear fruit."  He says to "abide in" him, which happens when we keep his commandments.  Now I don't suppose anyone is likely to keep Jesus' commandments without believing in Jesus, but clearly believing in Jesus and obeying his commandments are not the same thing.

I wonder if we Christians don't tend to get off track when we worry too much about "salvation," understood as getting into heaven rather than being left out.  What if we were simply left the "in or out?" question to the gracious love of God, and we focused on being disciples, on following Jesus, on bearing much fruit, on letting him show us the shape of human life as it is meant to be lived?  If the Church turned out people who lived in ways conspicuously different from the world, bearing much fruit and demonstrating the shape of God's coming Kingdom, I wonder if people wouldn't beat a path to our door to find out what we knew that they didn't?

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