FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

Jesus Christ Is the True Vine Who Bears Much Fruit in Us
“God is Love,” and He has manifested Himself to us by sending “His only Son into the world, so that we might live through Him” (1 John 4:9, 16). By the ministry of the Gospel, “He has given us of His Spirit,” so that we also believe and confess “that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.” In this way we “abide in Him and He in us,” and we “love one another” (1 John 4:2, 7, 13). Such divine love is exemplified in Philip’s preaching of “the good news about Jesus” to the Ethiopian eunuch. And when “they came to some water,” the eunuch was baptized into the very Gospel that Philip had preached (Acts 8:35–38). That Ethiopian was thereby grafted into “the true Vine,” Jesus Christ (John 15:1), just as we are. Already we are clean because of the Word that Christ has spoken to us and by the washing of water with His Word. We now abide in Him by faith in His forgiveness. As He abides in us, both body and soul, with His own Body and His Blood, He “bears much fruit” in us (John 15:3–5).