True Growth, True Grace and the True Gift

Hey Readers,

The following devotional blog is one that I'm hoping will speak to you.  More and more each day the verses in this passage speak greatly to me. I hope to use this one later down the road but we will have to wait and see what the Lord wants to do with it.

"But if you remain in me and my words remain in you, you may ask for anything you want and it will be granted. When you produce much fruit, you are my true disciples. This brings great glory to my Father" John 15:7-8 NLT

I have to say this is an interesting passage, verses 7- 10 are placed in the midst of Jesus' sermon I am the vine you are the branches.  It is important that we realize and understand that.  When we look at these four verses we can easily misunderstand the purpose behind them.  For the longest time I thought that verse 7 simply meant that God would give me everything I wanted if I just asked him.  I was wrong.  There is so much that we can grasp from this passage.

You see, all I was looking at was the second part of verse 7, "you may ask anything

 you want and it will be granted".  The connection was never made to the first part of that verse or its surrounding verses. The most important part of this passage does not refer to getting all that we desire, it refers to the challenge of remaining in HIM.  Life is full of its ups and downs; I know I've faced many of the downs even in the past two weeks. There have been some ups but sometimes it is going to seem like there are many more downs that ups. This is just part of life. The thing we need to remember is that while things seem to be heading the wrong way, God knows the outcome and he promises that it is wonderful, but only if we apply the first part of verse 7 to our lives "But if you remain in me and my words remain in you".

Apart from Christ, our efforts unfruitful. Therefore without Christ at the wheel in our lives, sure we can ask for things from him but that doesn't mean we will get it. We must let HIM work in our lives first. We must let HIM take up those burdens that we often carry and surrender our lives to HIS will. As our lives our given over to HIS will it does not mean we will always be fruitful or that we will always get what we want here on earth, it only means that one day God will fulfill the desires of our hearts, as it says in Psalm 37 (this is another topic entirely).

Remember this; our purpose in life is not to get all that we ever wanted but to embrace a life that strives to remain in HIM and to let HIS words remain in us.  I say this means that our only purpose in life is to remain in the love of God. As long as that is our true motivation all we will ever need is to grow in the grace that God gave us through the gift of HIS son who died for us because of the love HE has for HIS father.

Thanks again for visiting "The Gathering Room"

Stand Strong and continue to believe the teachings given to you   (2 Thes. 2:15b NCV),

M.E.