Bible Reading: John 15:1-14
Key Verse: Verse 7 - “If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.”
Key Words: If you abide in me
As you read the Scripture reading for today, it becomes clear that the key to bearing spiritual fruit and having answered prayer is abiding in Christ (verses 4 – 7). The fruit and answered prayer are not the results of our striving but our abiding.
Missionary pioneer J. Hudson Taylor of China was working and worrying so frantically that his health was about to break. Just when his friends feared he was near a breakdown, Taylor received a letter from fellow missionary John McCarthy that told of a discovery McCarthy had made from John 15 – the joy of abiding in Christ. McCarthy’s letter said in part:
“Abiding, not striving or struggling; looking off unto Him; trusting Him for present power...this is not new, and yet `tis new to me.... Christ literally all seems to me now the power, the only power for service; the only ground for unchanging joy.”
As Hudson Taylor read this letter at his mission station in Chin-kiang on Saturday, September 4, 1869, his own eyes were opened. “As I read,” he recalled, “I saw it all. I looked to Jesus, and when I saw, oh how the joy flowed!” Writing to his sister in England, he said:
“As to work, mine was never so plentiful, so responsible, or so difficult; but the weight and strain are all gone. The last month or more has been perhaps the happiest of my life, and I long to tell you a little of what the Lord has done for my soul.... When the agony of soul was at its height, a sentence in a letter from dear McCarthy was used to remove the scales from my eyes, and the Spirit of God revealed the truth of our oneness with Jesus as I had never known it before. McCarthy, who had been much exercised by the same sense of failure, but saw the light before I did, wrote (I quote from memory): ‘But how to get faith strengthened? Not by striving after faith but by resting on the Faithful One.’”
What to do:
✞ Abide, not strive.
Are you Saved? | Get These Free Devotions Everyday By Email
