Rusty bikes and Fine Wine

If you can drive or play a piano or do more or less anything that requires one hand knowing what the other is doing…read on. Here it’s driving two metaphors for the price of one.

I grew up living in a house two streets behind a beach. I also grew up in an era when cars, motorbikes, and bikes had a great deal of chrome-covered external steel components like bumpers, wheels, and handlebars.

The combination of the above meant that gallons of rust-removing pink fluid were sold annually to the good citizens of Whitstable and millions of others living close to the sea. The salt content in the moist air acting as an annoying catalyst for the complex electrochemical process colloquially known as ‘rusting’.

Every ten-year-old boy, seventeen-year-old boy racer, and more mature car owners would be seen ridding their cars and bikes of the rust that had accumulated over the previous weeks and months. Armed with rags, toothbrushes, and maybe sand-paper in dire circumstances. Holes were filled with paste, glass-fibre replaced rotting metal, exhausts were wrapped in metal tape; the war with rust continued both sides scoring victories as each year progressed.

Why indulge in this reminiscence?

It’s not just cars that rust, it’s us. People. Individuals.

Having moved inland away from the sea and now that many of the external chrome has been replaced on cars and bikes, it is less common to see rust. One Saturday morning I was working away in the front garden when a lad rode his bike past on the pavement. In fact, I heard him coming before I saw him. His bike was squeaking. As he worked his way past, I could see why; his wheels, but more importantly, his chain, was very rusty.

So, I stopped him. We chatted about his bike and the rust. He’d never bothered to look after his bike. I offered to get some oil for his chain. He couldn’t quite figure out why I should want to help but, without much comment, he said ‘Alrite’ and stayed in front of the house. I went into the garage and came back with a can of WD-40 and some chain-lube. I’m not a bike mechanic but I flipped his bike over and worked on the chain and the gears. Then noticed his brakes were worn down and the tyres flat. I pumped up his tyres but didn’t have any replacement bike pads. He still had rusty wheels and needed new brake pads but when he tried riding his bike with a lubricated chain and inflated tyres, he could hardly believe the difference. No more struggle. It was easy. A grunt and a half-smile were his ways of saying thank you and on he went, quieter, and faster.

It made me feel happy at the time but now I see the whole thing differently.

The boy’s bike did not become rusty overnight. For weeks after he had the bike for the first time it was rust-free. He might even have left it well it fell, outside, picked it up in the morning, and rode around carefree. Sometime later, however, the first signs of rust appeared on the handlebars and maybe the wheels. But the bike did not feel any different to ride that the day before and so it went on; the bike never feeling different from the day before. Without realising it, however, he as having to put a great deal more effort into pushing the pedals than he did at the start when it was new.

You’re a worship leader. Or you’re a preacher, or a writer, or a scientist, or a midwife, or a financial advisor, or a personal trainer and so on. Or a sommelier, of course.

And you sit back one day and realise that you’re working so much harder now than you did a year or so ago to get the same results. In fact, it’s all hard work. The joy has gone. The joy that fuelled your occupation is now a minor and transitory offshoot of all you do.

What has happened? You neglected yourself. Or you can think of it as the opposite of neglect! Once we’re ‘born again’ by the Spirit of God we are to ‘led by the Spirit’. Neglecting this means we have switched or reverted to a different operating system, ourselves. We attempt to run the show, to live the Christian life independent of the indwelling Christ. In biblical terminology that is the ‘living in the flesh’. It doesn’t mean out and out sin, it means you have become Lord, despite your profession that Jesus is Lord. You might be doing any number of ‘good’ things but they are all dead works. You have switched from the Holy Spirit to relying on your mind or your emotions or your willpower. Today appears to be very much like yesterday, and it is. But incrementally you have neglected ‘walking in the Spirit.’ Your inner man, your soul, and even your body, have become rusty and now you have to put in so much effort for the same results. It’s exhausting. And it will end in tears.

What to do?

And here we switch metaphors. Jesus spoke of a vine. He said ‘I am the vine and you are the branches. My father is a gardener. He will prune a fruit-bearing branch to produce more fruit. Or, if there’s no fruit, the branch will be cut off and thrown into the fire.’

Either way, the gardener will appear with a knife.

One of my holiday jobs many years ago was working on an apple orchard. And that is exactly what we did. Sometimes we pruned branches that were loaded with apples but blocked the light and took up too much energy from the tree, so the fruit was numerous but small and low quality. At other times, whole branches were removed that were not bearing fruit.

So, first, we have to realise what has happened. And be honest about where we are. How rusty we have become or our state as a branch. Is this a sign that there is a need to ‘die to’ whatever we are doing and move on to something fresh? It’s not bearing fruit anymore. Or whether of needing to be pruned so that there’s more energy to renew the joy in what we are doing. Let the gardener do His work.

In spiritual terms, it’s coming back to God and yielding everything. Laying everything at His feet. Thanking Him for everything that He has given you up to this point. Including the endless supply, the baptism, in the Spirit. Or asking for that gift for the very first time. It all starts with the pouring out of the Holy Spirit into a vessel yielded in faith and trust to God. What happens after that is unknown. It is the journey of faith, the Christ as you adventure through life. Maybe you will pick up your guitar again, if you are a worship leader, or you will preach again, or you will advise people again about their money, or you will return to work as a midwife, the activity is immaterial; the joy will again be central. The activity, an overflow of that joy. ‘Not by might, nor by strength, but by My Spirit.’

Maybe you will need to resign from your activity, or your role, not knowing exactly what lies ahead.

Back to the fine wine.

The purpose of a vineyard is to produce grapes and then wine. Not just quantity but quality. That’s the picture Jesus has about life, that He is producing fine wine through us, as us, in the world. We never stray too far from the first miracle recorded in John’s gospel, water into wine at a wedding. It’s just that now we are water pots in the hands of Jesus.