Daily Devotionals

Devotional: March 3rd

BEARING FRUIT

As for Me, I am like a green olive tree in the house of God, - Psalms 52:8

The God-bedewed soul, beautiful, pure, strong, will bear fruit. "His beauty shall be as the olive tree." Anybody that has ever seen a grove of olives knows that their beauty is not such as strikes the eye. If it was not for the blue sky overhead, that rays down glorifying light, they would not be much to look at or talk about. The tree has a gnarled, grotesque trunk, which divides into insignificant branches, bearing leaves mean in shape, harsh in texture, with a silvery underside. It gives but a quivering shade, and has no massiveness, nor sympathy. Ay! but there are olives on the branches. And so the beauty of the humble tree is in what it grows for man’s good. After all, it is the outcome in fruitfulness which is the main thing about us. God’s meaning, in all his gifts of dew, and beauty, and purity, and strength, is that we should be of some use in the world.

The olive is crushed into oil, and the oil is used for smoothing and supplying joints and flesh, for nourishing and sustaining the body as food, for illuminating darkness as oil in the lamp. And these three things are the three things for which we Christian people have received all our dew, and all our beauty, and all our strength - that we may give other people light, that we may be the means of conveying to other people nourishment, that we may move gently in the world as lubricating, sweetening, soothing influences, and not irritating and provoking, and leading to strife and alienation. The question, after all, is, does anybody gather fruit off us, and would anybody call us "trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified?" May we all open our hearts for the dew from heaven, and then use it to produce in ourselves beauty, purity, strength, and fruitfulness!

Union with Christ is the condition of all fruitfulness. There may be plenty of activity and yet barrenness. Works are not fruit. We can bring forth a great deal " of ourselves," and because it is of ourselves it is naught. Fruit is possible only on condition of union with Him. He is the productive glory of it all. We are not to be content with a little fruit - a poor shriveled bunch of grapes that are more like marbles than grapes, here and there, upon the half-nourished stem. The abiding in Him will produce a character rich in manifold graces. "A little fruit" is not contemplated by Christ at all. God forbid that I should say that there is no possibility of union with Christ and a little fruit! A little union will have a little fruit. Why is it that the average Christian man of this generation bears only a berry or two here and there, like such as are left upon the vines after the vintage, when the promise is that if he will abide in Christ, he will bear much fruit?

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