Branches In Me

Lately, I've been coming to a new understanding of John 15 Josh has been bringing it up a lot, even memorizing it, and so it has come up quite a bit in our conversations.
When I started really listening to Jesus talk about being the vine for us branches, one phrase in particular really caught me off guard. He says, "I am the vine and my father is the Gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while the branches that do bear fruit he prunes back so that they'll be even more fruitful."
I have come to ask myself some questions about this idea of having branches that bear fruit and others that do not. And in my meditation on this idea, I have really come to internalize God cutting off the branches in me that bear no fruit.
There are so many parts of my life that need to be gotten rid of, branches that need to be cut off, gathered up, thrown into the fire and burned. Lust, procrastination, sarcasm, materialism, selfishness, arrogance. The list goes on. (Prejudice, addictions, irrational irritability...) They don't necessarily need to be cut off because they are inherently sinful, but because they are utterly fruitless. Besides the fact that some of those things might separate me from God, there is no point to them. They're simply a waste of time.

I struggled for a little while, wondering if I was taking this passage completely out of context. My background in biblical studies encourages me to stay true to what the verses were originally intended to say to the people they were originally spoken to. But if that were all there is to it, then the whole idea of meditation would be rather unproductive compared to the practice of picking apart Scripture academically or exegetically. Surely there is value in the meditation, as well as in the contextualization. One synonym of "meditate" is "to chew over." Chewing breaks down the food we eat so that we can digest it, absorb its nutrients. Meditation is the process that allows us to apply and internalize, to absorb the nutrients of this Living (as opposed to static) Word.

This internalization has shaped the way I read these words of Jesus here in John 15, but it has even changed the way I read other parts of Scripture. Take Habakkuk 3 for example. Instead of being a pruned branch, we are silver in the raw, full of dirt and imperfections that make us unable to reflect the image of the careful, vigilant Refiner.
Even in the Psalms, I have begun to see the difficult--even vengeful--passages as an affront not to some eminent physical danger, but to my biggest enemies, those who threaten to lay siege to me, my time, my thoughts, my decisions: this dirt and imperfection, these fruitless branches. When the Psalmist cries out against the wicked, asking God to destroy them, I ask God to be merciless to the wickedness inside me. It's just a waste of my time, and there are much better things for me to be doing.