Devotional Song: ... GO TO THIS LINK ... Please take the time to take in a YouTube video of images and lyrics from Sara Groves singing Abide With Me ... poignantly singing of how we can abide in Christ in times of trials praying and tapping into the essence of His live-giving fruitfulness.
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Highlight Verse[s]: John 15:4 [NKJV] ... 4 Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. .
.. Jesus promises our fruitfulness as Christians when we abide in Him.
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Highlight Passage [context]: John 15:1-8 [NKJV] ... USE THIS LINK ...
… Jesus assures His followers of their importance to God in the vastness of the universe.
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Reference Passage : ... Psalm 80:8-9 [NKJV] ... You have brought a vine out of Egypt; You have cast out the nations, and planted it. 9 You prepared room for it, and caused it to take deep root, and it filled the land.
... God planted Israel to be fruitful in the promised land.
Reference Passage : …Luke 9:23 [NKJV] ... 23 Then He said to them all, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me. … “
... We will only be fruitful as disciples of Christ when we follow Him and abide in Him.
Reference Passage : ... John 14:21 [NKJV] ... 21 He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.”
... Jesus can only manifest Himself in fruitfulness when we abide in Him, being obedient to His word.
My Devotional Journal: Today's ODB author, Amy Boucher Pye, uses a botanical word picture to illustrate the fruitfulness we can find in Christ when we’re grafted into Him thru salvation and partake of (i.e., abiding in and blossoming thru) His life-giving fruitfulness. … The ODB author wrote: One spring after a particularly dreary winter during which she helped a family member through a long illness, Emma found encouragement each time she walked past a cherry tree near her home in Cambridge, England. Bursting out at the top of the white blossoms grew blossoms of pink. [see photo] A clever gardener had grafted into the tree a branch of pink flowers. When Emma passed the unusual tree, she thought of Jesus’s words about being the Vine and His followers the branches (John 15:1–8).
And when Jesus used this picture of the vine of life for His Jewish followers, they would have recognized that He was referring to the image from the Old Testament of Israel being from God’s tree of life and to becoming fruitful by following the power to come from their Messiah (see Ps. 80:8-9).
But as with picture in the photo, Jesus was promising that anyone - yes, even the Gentiles - could blossom from His essence when grafted into Him as the One who would provide the life-giving power of God’s grace thru salvation. That’s the message of the highlight passage; and when we obey and follow Christ (see Luke 9:23 and John 14:21), abiding in Him thru obedience to His word, we can grow and blossom like the cherry tree in the photo.
I pray today that all reading with me are doing all we can to abide in “the Vine” of life and are being fruitful in/for Him.
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My THANKFULNESS: ... Oh Abba Father, ... thank You, Lord, ... for grafting us into Your vine of life thru faith in Your finished work on the cross and by abiding in Your word.
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My Prayer Today: Oh Abba Father, ... King Jesus, ... I pray, Lord, that all reading here are grafted into Your vine of life and doing all we can to abide in You so as to be fruitful in this life. … Amen
Blogger Note: Everyday during this year, my daily devotional blogs are influenced by the reading and study of the online devotional blog entitled “Our Daily Bread,” distributed online via email by RBC Ministries. If you GO TO THIS LINK on the date of my blog, you can read/study the ODB blogs; or you can subscribe to the blog via email at that site.</ span>
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