(Excerpt from Cheryl Gnagey's Spiritual Healing: The Surrender That Brings Victory, Chapter 12)
Yesterday, I revealed to you that I would be sharing a quote from Joanna Weaver's book Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World. She let's us have a peek into her thought process before she understood the meaning of being grafted in to the Vine, which is Christ Jesus. Can you relate to living with wrong suppositions, only to discover the truth later? I surely can. Here is her testimony.
"'It is not enough simply to be associated. To be acquainted. We have to be spiritually grafted on--to draw our life from [Jesus], to be so closely attached that we would wither and die if we were cut off.
I missed that point for a long time. I had spent so much of my life concentrating on the 'fruit' of my own personal holiness, that I missed out on the connection, the sweet intimacy of being attached to the Vine. And as a result, what I tried to do was as ludicrous as an apple tree branch trying to produce apples by its own effort.
"Be good, be good. Do good, do good," the broken branch chants as it lies on the orchard grass. "That apple should be popping out anytime," says the helpless lifeless stick.
But that is not how it works. It's the tree, not the branch, that determines the fruit. The tree is the life source. The branch has no power of its own. But once it gets connected, once that sap gets flowing and those leaves start growing, that insignificant little twig will find itself loaded with fruit. And it didn't have to do anything--except abide.'
Our lesson from the Israelites is that hard work will be required of us to rebuild our hearts and bring them under Christ's full control. But the hard work of learning how to walk by the Spirit, to make the Word our life's road map, and to worship as God desires will reveal to both God and others something of great significance--our surrender."
If you are a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, then you are a grafted in branch. Having now been grafted into Jesus the Vine, you must now begin to recognize and accept that the Holy Spirit is the life-transforming, fruit-producing sap. He is the life of Christ inside of you. It is His job to cause fruit to be produced out of you. Your only job is to surrender to Him. And as you do, you will become the bearer of the fruit. He produces through you; you simply bear what He produces. In essence this is the definition of abiding in Christ the Vine.
Have you been a successful graft?
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