Lesson 67: The All-Inclusive Condition, part 1
John 15:7 - If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.
In all God’s interaction with us, the promise and its conditions are inseparable. If we fulfil the conditions, He fulfils the promise. What He is to be to us depends upon what we are willing to be to Him. “Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.” And so in prayer the unlimited promise, Ask whatsoever you will, has its one simple and natural condition, if you abide in me. It is Christ whom the Father always hears; God is in Christ, and can only be reached by being in Him; to be IN HIM is the way to have our prayer heard; fully and wholly ABIDING IN HIM, we have the right to ask whatsoever we will, and the promise that it shall be done unto us.
When we compare this promise with the experiences of most believers, we are surprised by a terrible difference. Who can count the many prayers that rise and bring no answer? The cause must be either that we do not fulfil the condition, or God does not fulfil the promise. Believers are not willing to admit either, and therefore have invented a way of escape from the problem. They put into the promise the qualifying clause our Savior did not put there—if it be God’s will; and so claim both God’s integrity and their own. Oh if they did but accept it and hold it fast as it stands, trusting to Christ to vindicate His truth, how God’s Spirit would lead them to see the Divine propriety of such a promise to those who really abide in Christ in the sense in which He means it, and to confess that the failure in the fulfilling the condition is the one sufficient explanation of unanswered prayer. And how the Holy Spirit would then make our weakness in prayer one of the mightiest motives to urge us on to discover the secret, and obtain the blessing, of full abiding in Christ.
“If you abide in me.” As a Christian grows in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus, he is often surprised to find how the words of God grow too, in the new and deeper meaning with which they come to him. He can look back to the day when some word of God was opened to him and he rejoiced in the blessing he had found in it. After a time, some deeper experience gave it a new meaning, and it was as if he never had seen what it contained. And yet once again, as he advanced in the Christian life, the same word stood before him again as a great mystery, until again the Holy Spirit led him still deeper into its Divine fulness. One of these ever-growing, never-exhausted words, opening to us step by step, the fulness of the Divine life, is the Master’s precious “Abide in me.” As the union of the branch with the vine is one of growth, never-ceasing growth and increase, so our abiding in Christ is a life process in which the Divine life takes ever fuller and more complete possession of us. The young and feeble believer may be really abiding in Christ up to the measure of his light; it is he who reaches onward to the full abiding in the sense in which the Master understood the words, who inherits all the promises connected with it.
Prayer: Beloved Lord! teach me to take this promise again in all its simplicity, and to be sure that the only measure of Your holy giving is our holy willing. Lord, let each word of this promise be made quick and powerful in my soul.