Lesson 69: The All-Inclusive Condition, part 3
Truly, faith and obedience are the pathway of blessing. Before giving us the parable of the vine and the branches, Jesus told us very distinctly what the full blessing is to which faith and obedience are to lead. Three times over He had said, “If you love Me, keep My commandments,” and spoken of the threefold blessing with which He would crown such obedient love. The Holy Spirit would come from the Father; the Son would manifest Himself; and the Father and the Son would come and dwell in us. It is as our faith grows into obedience, and in obedience and love our whole being goes out and clings itself to Christ, that our inner life opens up, and the capacity is formed within of receiving the Life and the Spirit of the glorified Jesus, as a distinct and conscious union with Christ and with the Father. The word is fulfilled in us: “In that day you shall know that I am in my Father and you in me, and I in you.” We understand how, just as Christ is in God, and God in Christ, one together not only in will and in love, but in identity of nature and life, because they exist in each other, so we are in Christ and Christ in us, in union not only of will and love, but of life and nature too.
It was after Jesus had spoken of our knowing this through the Holy Spirit - that He is in the Father, and even so we in Him and He in us - that He said, “Abide in Me, and I in you. Accept, consent to receive that Divine life of union with Myself, in virtue of which, as you abide in Me, I also abide in you, even as I abide in the Father. Your life is mine and Mine is yours.” This is the true abiding, the occupying of the position in which Christ can come and abide; so abiding in Him that the soul has come away from self to find that He has taken the place and become our life. It is becoming as little children who have no care, and find their happiness in trusting and obeying the love that has done all for them.
To those who thus abide, the promise comes as their rightful heritage: Ask whatsoever you will. It cannot be otherwise. Christ has full possession of THEM. Christ dwells in their love, their will, and their life. Not only has their will been given up; Christ has entered it, and dwells and breathes in it by His Spirit. He whom the Father always hears, prays in them; they pray in Him: and what they ask shall be done for them.
Beloved fellow-believer, let us confess that it is because we do not abide in Christ as He desires, that the Church is so impotent in presence of the infidelity and worldliness and heathendom; in the midst of which the Lord is able to make her more than conqueror. Let us believe that He means what He promises, and accept the condemnation that the confession implies.
But let us not be discouraged. The abiding of the branch in the Vine is a life of never-ceasing growth. The abiding, as the Master meant it, is within our reach, for He lives to give it us. Let us be ready to count all things loss, and to say, “Not as though I had already attained; I follow after, so I may capture that for which I also am caught by Christ Jesus.” Let us not be so much occupied with the abiding, as with Him to whom the abiding links us, and His fulness. Let it be Him, the whole Christ, in His obedience and humiliation, in His exaltation and power, in whom our soul moves and acts; He Himself will fulfil His promise in us.
And then as we abide, and grow evermore into the full abiding, let us exercise our right, the will to enter into all God’s will. Obeying all His will commands, let us claim what it promises. Let us yield to the teaching of the Holy Spirit, to show each of us, according to his growth and measure, what the will of God is which we may claim in prayer. And let us rest content with nothing less than the personal experience of what Jesus gave when He said, “If you abide in me, ask whatsoever you will, and it shall be done unto you.”
Prayer: You say: It shall be done. Oh You who are the Amen, the Faithful and True Witness, give me in Yourself the joyous confidence that You will make this word yet more wonderfully true to me than ever, because it has not entered into the heart of man to conceive what God has prepared for them that love Him.