Category: Devotion of the Day

PURPOSEFUL PRUNING

Every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.
John 15:2

“Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.” The beloved child is chastised and the fruitful branch is pruned. Many a troubled soul in an hour of distress has fancied itself the object of God’s displeasure. But it is the fruitful branch that feels the knife. The unfruitful branch is taken away and burned. Many a saint in adversity has feared that he is perhaps a stranger to grace, forgetting that it is the bastards, not sons, who escape the Father’s discipline.

There is a purpose in the pruning, “that it may bring forth more fruit.” Not the feverish stepped-up production of this machine age but the natural, spontaneous fruitfulness of the branch that draws its life from the vine. Too much of our religious productivity is ground out by the methods of this age. The true Christian abides and abounds, and to him the Father-Husbandman’s pruning is part of he process.

ABIDING AND OBEYING

If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love.
John 15:10

This is only one of many verses that connect fellowship with Christ with obedience to Him. We are His friends if we do His commandments. If we do God’s will we are Jesus’ brother and sister. He that has and keeps His commandments, he it is that loves the Lord.

We are prone to make much of abiding, not much of obeying. We bask in the blessedness of being His friends, dwelling in Him, being hid with Christ in God. But Jesus always joins this holy estate with practical obedience. We hang up promises as mottoes but we are not so fond of commandments. Contemplation and adoration and mysticism have their place, but the friend of Jesus is the man who does what Christ commands him. To be sure, His commandment is that we love one another, but that includes a lot of other commandments and is as practical as the Thirteenth Chapter of First Corinthians.

A lot of people sing, “Oh, How I Love Jesus,” who are not keeping His commandments. And He said, “If a man love me, he will keep my words.”