The chapter begins this way: “In God’s great school of tribulation there are many classes. In the section where God trains parents, there is one room, which everyone greatly fears to enter. Many, as they are led into it, are seen struggling and murmuring. As it’s darkness closes in over them, they almost refuse to believe that God is love. Many pass through it and come out of it without receiving any divine comfort. They did not know why they were there. They did not wait silently to receive the teaching and the blessing of Jesus. Others, who entered trembling, can testify that it was the death of a little one that first led them truly to know Jesus.”
These are the words of Andrew Murray, a man who spent his entire life in South Africa ministering to the needs of God’s people. Of Murray’s sixteen children, five sons became pastors, four daughters married clergy, two daughters remained unmarried, and five of his children died young. Murray had 108 grandchildren.
He wrote these words in his book, “Raising Your Children for Christ.” He wrote it to help his congregation face the harsh realities of living in a fallen world. His closing prayer for the grieving mother and father to pray reads as follows: “Speak, Lord, and comfort your child. Reveal yourself to me as the resurrection and the life, the shepherd who has taken his lamb into his bosom. Reveal yourself as my shepherd, by coming nearer to me with your abiding presence. Reveal yourself as the family friend, making your self at home with us. Amen.”
Due to the tragic effects of COVID and the stress and strain many are feeling over sickness and loss, it would be good for us to consider how one learns to know Jesus, to believe on him fully and to live by faith in Him when it seems as if the darkness is all around. We know that Jesus desires to take possession of us, but how does one wait silently in the darkness to receive the teaching and blessing of Jesus?
I believe Jesus’s words in John 15 point the way. First, I’d like for us to focus on the nature of our union with Christ and then next month address what it means to wait on him in the darkness.
What is the nature of our union? The imagery Jesus presents is intensely personal. Using the agrarian image of a vineyard, he describes three people. First, there is the Vine and verse one tells us it is Jesus. He is the exclusive source of fruitfulness. We also see that God the Father is the Vinedresser. He is the one who ensures that there is much fruit on the Vine by pruning the branches. If no fruit is found he removes the branch. He is looking for superficial relationships with Christ. Judas is a good example. Judas was connected to Jesus in a spurious way. And then, throughout the remaining verses, we are told that believers are the branches. We are told that when the same life-sap that is in the Vine is found flowing in and through us, fruit is produced. This is the nature of our union.
Seeing the beauty of this union is often all that is needed to receive comfort in the darkness. For example, many of us enter the darkness with a wrong perception of Jesus. We see him as an outward or detached person. But the great story being told here is that believers are united with Jesus in a living union, a union whereby he occupies our hearts. He lives there by his Spirit. In other words, he comes into our hearts and wants to be present in our willing and thinking and doing and feeling and living. When we understand this, our souls become weighed down like a ripening vine.
This idea of a living and intimate union with Christ is found everywhere in the New Testament. Consider Galatians 2:20. Paul writes: “Christ lives in me. I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” Or consider John 17:21: “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
These are profound truths coming from our Lord. Reflecting upon the implications of this living union in his own life, Martin Luther, the great Reformer had this to say: “My holiness, righteousness and purity do not stem from me, nor do they depend on me. They come solely from Christ and are based only in him, in whom I am rooted by faith, just as sap flows from the stalk into the branches. Now I am like him and of his kind. Both he and I are of one nature and essence, and I bear fruit in him and through him. The fruit is not mine; it is the Vine’s.”
Perhaps this alone is what is needed to lift the cloud of despair. Rest in your union with Jesus. He is in you. You are in him. You are one. Receive him as your friend and shepherd.