ONE MORE YEAR TO LIVE
LUKE 13:1-9
Jerry Vines
1/7/96
This has always been to me one of the most fascinating parables that the Lord Jesus ever told.
It is a parable which is fairly familiar with all of us and it's a parable very easy to understand. It's about
a man who had a fig tree who came every year to get fruit from the fig tree. In fact, he has been three
consecutive years and each year he has not found any fruit. He's a little bit out of patience and he says
to the one who is keeping this tree - why don't we just cut it down? He understood, as we do, that a
fig tree is intended to produce figs. A fig tree is intended to be productive. There is probably nothing
any more useless than an unproductive fig tree. It just takes up space, fills up the ground.
The keeper of the vineyard said to the owner - "Let me have one more year to work with this
fig tree and let me cultivate it a little, dig around it and let's give it one more year. You come again at
the end of this year and if it bears fruit - well; but if not let's just cut this fig tree down."
So, really what we have in this parable is a fig tree that has only possibly one more year to live.
I have often thought about that picture here and have widened it to apply to my own heart and to the
lives of other people. I wonder what would you and I do if we knew that we had only one more year
to live. Of course, none of us knows that. Many years ago, in my ministry, a young man came to me
wanting to talk and he said he had been to the doctors and they had diagnosed that he had a terminal
disease and they estimated that he had only one more year to live. Of course, no doctor can really tell
us how long we are going to live. None of us knows exactly how long we are going to live. The Bible
teaches that our death is something that is uncertain in terms of the ti ...
LUKE 13:1-9
Jerry Vines
1/7/96
This has always been to me one of the most fascinating parables that the Lord Jesus ever told.
It is a parable which is fairly familiar with all of us and it's a parable very easy to understand. It's about
a man who had a fig tree who came every year to get fruit from the fig tree. In fact, he has been three
consecutive years and each year he has not found any fruit. He's a little bit out of patience and he says
to the one who is keeping this tree - why don't we just cut it down? He understood, as we do, that a
fig tree is intended to produce figs. A fig tree is intended to be productive. There is probably nothing
any more useless than an unproductive fig tree. It just takes up space, fills up the ground.
The keeper of the vineyard said to the owner - "Let me have one more year to work with this
fig tree and let me cultivate it a little, dig around it and let's give it one more year. You come again at
the end of this year and if it bears fruit - well; but if not let's just cut this fig tree down."
So, really what we have in this parable is a fig tree that has only possibly one more year to live.
I have often thought about that picture here and have widened it to apply to my own heart and to the
lives of other people. I wonder what would you and I do if we knew that we had only one more year
to live. Of course, none of us knows that. Many years ago, in my ministry, a young man came to me
wanting to talk and he said he had been to the doctors and they had diagnosed that he had a terminal
disease and they estimated that he had only one more year to live. Of course, no doctor can really tell
us how long we are going to live. None of us knows exactly how long we are going to live. The Bible
teaches that our death is something that is uncertain in terms of the ti ...
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