March 15

“You did not choose me, but I chose you, and appointed you, that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you” (John 15:16).

God desires to see fruit in the lives of His people; that is plain. But it is a mistake to be preoccupied with bringing forth fruit; we demand the fruit immediately. Much of present day Christianity is impatient for fruit without understanding that the fruit can only endure if it is connected to the root. It is “the root of the righteous” (Proverbs 12:3) that will produce the true fruit. A fruit-bearing branch of a tree can be broken off in a storm and will still flower, giving the impression that it is going to be fruitful, but its blossoms will soon perish and the branch itself soon wither and die.

Much that passes for Christianity today is the brief bright effort of the severed branch to bring forth its fruit, but being disconnected from the root, these efforts are destined to fail. This is a type of “Santa Claus” Christianity in which there is an elementary feeling of love and where we think of God putting up a kind of Christmas tree and putting our gifts underneath. It is rootless and, ultimately, fruitless. Preoccupation with appearances at the expense of diligent attendance to the root, the true spiritual life of the individual, are prophetic signs that the Church is following after, and fulfilling, the pattern set down by apostate Israel.

“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5).

The meek man does not care who is greater than he, for he has long ago decided that the esteem of this world is not worth the effort. The meek man is not a human mouse afflicted with a sense of his own inferiority; after all, Paul described Jesus as meek and gentle (2 Corinthians 10:1). Rather, he may be as bold as a lion and as strong as Samson in his moral life, but he has stopped being fooled about himself; he has accepted God’s estimate of his own life and knows that he is as weak and as helpless as God has declared him to be. Paradoxically, he also knows that in the sight of God he is more important than the angels; in himself nothing; in Christ everything!