Daily Manna · Day 280 · October 7
Abiding in the Vine
“I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.”
Jesus was not the first to use the picture of a vine. Isaiah once sang a song about one: "Now will I sing to my wellbeloved a song of my beloved touching his vineyard." Jesus' disciples would have known how that song ends: "he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes."
By the time of Jesus, Israel had been called God's vine for centuries. Isaiah uses the picture, and so does Jeremiah. The eightieth psalm says to God, "Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt." A vine made of gold also hung over the doors of the temple in Jerusalem, where Jesus and His disciples had been that week. It was a picture of the whole nation, and again and again in the prophets, that vine let God down. So when Jesus says "I am the true vine" on the night before He died, He is doing more than picking an example from a hillside. He is taking a name the nation wore and putting Himself inside it.
That changes what is asked of the branch. The old vineyard was expected to produce, and it did not. The branch is asked to abide, which means to stay. "He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit." A branch does not make a grape by trying hard. It stays joined to the vine and carries what the vine sends up into it. Then Jesus shuts the door on any other way in one short sentence: "without me ye can do nothing." Apart from Him there is no fruit at all.
The old vineyard failed at producing, and you will fail at it too if you try it on your own. That is the very reason Jesus came as the true vine. Stay joined to Him today, and He will bring forth the fruit.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 280 is Finish My Course (Acts 20:24).