THIS ABIDING IN Christ or not abiding in Him is not a matter that you can take or leave and nothing much happens. Something does happen, in fact everything happens, for good or ill. If you abide in Him, then everything He has is yours—His purity, His goodness, His victory, His peace, His joy, His everything is all yours. You can and do draw on the most important fact of the universe—the fact of Christ.
If you do not abide in Him, then the direst of consequences follow. “Every branch . . . that bears no fruit, he takes away. . . . If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned” (John 15:2, 6). These sayings belong to lurid, verbal warnings without any basis of fact, or they belong to the facts themselves. These words are so close to fact that they are facts themselves. This removal of fruitless branches and their withering and their subsequent perishing into ashes are facts taking place before our very eyes. Every life cut off from Christ inwardly withers. This is not an arbitrary punishment imposed from without. It is the result of cutting oneself off from the root of His being—“the root of every man is Christ.” We are made by Him and for Him, and when we are cut off from the source of our life, the inevitable result is a withering; not a marginal withering of leaves leaving the tree intact, but a root withering, leaving nothing intact. This is what Dr. Boss, the head of the International Psychoanalytical Association, said: “Psychiatrists, who are not superficial, find that almost all of the vast neurotic misery can be called Neurosis of Emptiness or Dullness. People become ill when they cut themselves off from their real root, or innermost spring, that is, from God. They lose all real energy and all sense of life.”
O Thou Who art the light that lighteth every man who comes into the world, when we are cut off from Thee we stumble in the darkness to our doom. Thou who art the Life of our life, cut off from Thee we perish at the root. All our progress is progress toward decay and death. Save us. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “The root of every man is Christ”—if I sever my relations with that Root by neglect, or deliberately, I am a withered branch automatically.
