Chapter 2: The Root System

“Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.” John 15:4 KJV

We can see here in this verse that Jesus Christ is the root of the Church, and we being Christians are extensions of that root. Now, for us to be able to produce the fruit that Jesus has already started, we must be connected to Him. If we have a break in our connection, then we are unable to produce any of the fruit. In turn we along with our fruit, or works, will dry up and die, producing nothing and thereby perishing. That is why it is essential for the modern-day Church to be rooted in Jesus Christ.

“I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.” John 15:5 KJV

We can also see here in the preceeding verse that if we are staying rooted with Jesus that He is certainly staying with us, and that without Him we are able to do nothing. Now we can understand more of why the dead church, that I mentioned in the first chapter, is unfruitful in their works. We can understand why there is no joy or excitement to be found there, why the Holy Spirit is not moving in that place, and why the sick people are not miraculously being healed of their sickness.

Because, that church is not working in Jesus Christ they are working in themselves, therefore Jesus is not working there either and that is why we do not see any good fruit from this church. This is how we know for a fact that this place is dead in its faith, being worthless in the kingdom of God.

This has happened because this church has discarded their root system by dismembering the connection to it. Until the connection is restored to the root, the entire rest of the tree along with all its fruit is dying and withering away every single day. If this church is not willing to reconnect to the root, then it will never produce any good fruit, and it is only a matter of time before it is too late and the church will not be able to be grafted back into the root, being stuck in a state of decay for the rest of eternity.

How has the dead church gone about the process of dismembering its root connection? The answer is simple, it has been done through the altering of the fruit of the Spirit. The Bible gives us the reciprocal of the fruit of the Spirit, it calls it the works of the flesh. We can read this in the book of Galatians, chapter five, verses nineteen through twenty-one.

“Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.” Galatians 5:19-21 KJV

These are the things in which the dead church has replaced its good fruit with. Now therefore Jesus is not working in the dead church because of these things. These actions are what has made the dead church both corrupt and dead, which Jesus is neither.

You may be thinking that these actions certainly do not sound like the works of “Christians”, but you would be wrong. These works are made manifest in the day to day lives of most people in the Church. Now you might also be thinking that most people do not do all these things, and you would be correct, however almost everyone is practicing at least one if not several of them. As the old saying goes “one bad apple will spoil the whole bunch” or we could say one work of the flesh will ruin all the fruit of the Spirit.

How can this be true? Just as simply as how oil and water do not mix, and there is a separation in between the two, with the oil covering over the water. If you put even the smallest drop of oil into a glass of water, then all the water is covered up by a thin layer of oil. No matter how thin the layer is, it is still covering up the water, thereby corrupting it and making it unfit for consumption. The same holds true with the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit. The dead church corrupts its good fruit by its bad works, and by doing this makes the fruit unfit for the consumption of the people, therefore they do not consume any good fruit, and therefore we see no works of faith in this church because the people can not eat the fruit without consuming the works of the flesh.

The two do not mix and that leaves behind a carcass that is dead and perishing, without hope until the water is purified by the removing of the oil.

I think this would be a good time to clear up the fact that the Church is not a building in which Christians gather themselves together. The Christians are in fact the Church itself, being the body of Christ, a building in which Jesus Christ Himself is the cornerstone of, or we could say the Church is a tree in which He is the root.

Now in the following chapter we are going to look at how the Church is corrupting its good fruit, or we could say water, by contaminating it with its bad works, or we could say oil. This does happen a lot more often than some of us even realize, whether it is done intentionally or not, the Church is making its water unpurified, day after day, with little drops of oil.