WE ARE CONSIDERING what happens when we do not abide in Christ. We are cut off from the source of our being—Christ—and when we are cut off from Him who is life, then there is only one thing left: non-life, death. This passage describes that condition as withered, then ashes. Is that the destination of all life apart from Christ? There is only one scriptural answer: yes. That scriptural answer is the answer that life is rendering now. All life separated from Christ is in the process of decay. We say of a person who doesn’t know how to live: “He is going to pieces,” and he is. He is tearing himself to pieces by his own inner conflicts. The life forces are breaking down. That happens when the life apart from Christ is lived in open blatant sin, or in secret self-centeredness. The joy, the peace, the hopes, the security, the wonder of living—everything begins to decay and the futile attempts by outer props to hold it together result in further inner dismay and hasten the process of deterioration and decay.
All coming to Jesus has the sense of a homecoming upon it, and all going away from Jesus has the sense of home-leaving—going into a far country, an alien land. Do all our sunsets turn to sunrises when we come to Him? Yes. That works with a mathematical precision—no exceptions: come to Him and be glad; go from Him and be sad. The sadness is not a surface sadness—it is a deep-down sadness, for going from Him spells doom and the soul knows it.
“Withers . . . thrown into the fire and burned” (John 15:6)—that is not rhetoric; it is reality. The soul perishes in the fires of its own impossible ways of life. God doesn’t kindle that fire; we do. “Our God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29)—to sin; we are a consuming fire to ourselves—on account of sin. We light our own funeral pyre.
O Jesus, Thou art Life, and when we are in Thee we live all over—body, mind, and spirit. When we are out of Thee we are death—death to ourselves, to our hopes, to everything we touch. Help me to live every moment in Thee and Thee alone. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: The worm that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched I take within my bosom when I sin.
