November 13 - Morning"The branch cannot bear fruit of itself." — John 15:4
How did you begin to bear fruit? It was when you came to Jesus and cast
yourselves on His great atonement, and rested on His finished
righteousness. Ah! what fruit you had then! Do you remember those early
days? Then indeed the vine flourished, the tender grape appeared, the
pomegranates budded forth, and the beds of spices gave forth their smell.
Have you declined since then? If you have, we charge you to remember
that time of love, and repent, and do thy first works. Be most in those
engagements which you have experimentally proved to draw you nearest to
Christ, because it is from Him that all your fruits proceed. Any holy
exercise which will bring you to Him will help you to bear fruit.
The sun
is, no doubt, a great worker in fruit-creating among the trees of the orchard:
and Jesus is still more so among the trees of His garden of grace. When
have you been the most fruitless? Has not it been when you have lived
farthest from the Lord Jesus Christ, when you have slackened in prayer,
when you have departed from the simplicity of your faith, when your
graces have engrossed your attention instead of your Lord, when you have
said, "My mountain standeth firm, I shall never be moved"; and have
forgotten where your strength dwells — has not it been then that your
fruit has ceased?
Some of us have been taught that we have nothing out of
Christ, by terrible abasements of heart before the Lord; and when we have
seen the utter barrenness and death of all creature power, we have cried in
anguish, "From Him all my fruit must be found, for no fruit can ever come
from me." We are taught, by past experience, that the more simply we
depend upon the grace of God in Christ, and wait upon the Holy Spirit,
the more we shall bring forth fruit unto God. Oh! to trust Jesus for fruit as
well as for life. November 13 - Evening"Men ought always to pray." — Luke 18:1
If men ought always to pray and not to faint, much more Christian men.
Jesus has sent His church into the world on the same errand upon which
He Himself came, and this mission includes intercession. What if I say that
the church is the world's priest? Creation is dumb, but the church is to
find a mouth for it. It is the church's high privilege to pray with
acceptance. The door of grace is always open for her petitions, and they
never return empty-handed. The veil was rent for her, the blood was
sprinkled upon the altar for her, God constantly invites her to ask what
she wills. Will she refuse the privilege which angels might envy her? Is she
not the bride of Christ?
May she not go in unto her King at every hour?
Shall she allow the precious privilege to be unused? The church always has
need for prayer. There are always some in her midst who are declining, or
falling into open sin. There are lambs to be prayed for, that they may be
carried in Christ's bosom? the strong, lest they grow presumptuous; and
the weak, lest they become despairing. If we kept up prayer-meetings
four-and-twenty hours in the day, all the days in the year, we might never
be without a special subject for supplication.
Are we ever without the sick
and the poor, the afflicted and the wavering? Are we ever without those
who seek the conversion of relatives, the reclaiming of back-sliders, or the
salvation of the depraved? Nay, with congregations constantly gathering,
with ministers always preaching, with millions of sinners lying dead in
trespasses and sins; in a country over which the darkness of Romanism is
certainly descending; in a world full of idols, cruelties, devilries, if the
church doth not pray, how shall she excuse her base neglect of the
commission of her loving Lord? Let the church be constant in supplication,
let every private believer cast his mite of prayer into the treasury. November 13 |