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 ye 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.
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