Daily Devotionals

Devotional: March 9th

THE INDWELLING LIFE OF CHRIST

He that abideth in Me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit: for apart from Me ye can do nothing. - John 15:5.

Like most writers and speakers, John had favorite expressions, which exercised a fascination over him, and were always ready to trickle from his pen or drop from his lips. He has a vocabulary of his own. Life and death, light and darkness, love and hatred, are antitheses constantly recurring in his writings, and in which he puts the deepest things he has to say. These repetitions are not tautology. He turns the jewels every way, and lets the many-coloured light flash from them at all angles. One of his pet words is this "abide," significant of the quiet, Contemplative temper of the man, but significant of a great deal more. He uses it, if I reckon rightly, somewhere between sixty and seventy times in the Gospel and Epistles, far more than all the other instances of its use in the rest of the New Testament put together. To John, one great characteristic of the Christian life was that it was the abiding life. The Christian life is a life of dwelling in Christ.

I have said that this is one of John’s favorite words. He learnt it from his Master. It was in the upper room where it came from Christ’s lips, with a pathos which was increased by the shadow of departure that lay over His heart and theirs. It was when He was on the eve of leaving them, as far as outward presence was concerned, that He said to them so tenderly, "Abide in Me, and I in you." No doubt the old Apostle had meditated long on these words, and experience and age had done their best work for him, not in carrying him beyond his Master’s utterances, but in showing him how these were elastic, and widened out to contain far more of wisdom, of comfort, and of guidance than he had at first suspected them to hold.

Heaven must bend to earth before earth can rise to heaven. The skies must open and drop down love ere love can spring in the fruitful fields. And it is only when we look with true trust to that great unveiling of the heart of God which is in Jesus Christ that our hearts are melted, and all their snows are dissolved into sweet waters, which, freed from their icy chains, can flow, with music in their ripple and fruitfulness along their course, through our otherwise silent and barren lives. With unworn and fresh heart we may bring forth fruit in old age, and have the crocus in the autumnal fields as well as in the spring-time of our lives.

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