Wednesday, May 22, 2002
My wife and I passed a sign for a town with what I found to be an amusing name - "Girdletree." Now, if you live there, I'm sorry - but I did get a chuckle out of that name. And then my wife let me know that "girdletree" really described a process I had never heard of. She said, "When I was a kid, my Dad used to girdle trees on our farm." Now without further explanation, that's going to get some ridiculous images going in your overactive imagination. Now, what she described to me was a process her Dad, and other farmers, used to soften a tree so it would be easier to bring down the next year. He took his ax, and he cut a ring in the bark that "girdled" the entire trunk at that point. The idea was to cut off the tree's sap delivery system. And it worked. The next year, that tree was softer and pretty easy to bring down. So, I'm not laughing anymore.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "The Strategy for Bringing You Down."
That strategy for bringing a tree down actually can work on people, too - especially on those of us who belong to Jesus Christ. Cut the tree - or the believer - off from its life-supply. Before long, it will be relatively easy to bring that believer down. Without even knowing it, that softening, weakening process may be happening in your life right now.
To head that off, you need to remember where your spiritual life-supply comes from and to protect it fiercely. That's what our word for today from the Word of God is about. In John 15, Jesus is comparing our relationship with Him to a branch's relationship with the grapevine - probably as He and the disciples were looking at a grapevine. He says, beginning in verse 5, "I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in Me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from Me you can do nothing...If you remain in Me and My words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you."
Now, clearly, the issue in remaining spiritually strong and alive is "remaining" in Jesus - staying in close touch, not getting disconnected, not drifting away. Your enemy the devil knows that you can, as Jesus said, do nothing spiritually apart from Jesus. So how is the devil going to bring you down? He's going to keep you away from Jesus, of course. And for someone who's listening right now, you've been falling for it...and getting weaker as time goes by.
I'm talking about your personal Jesus-time - the time you set aside each new day to be with Him and Him alone. Could it be that your times with Him have increasingly been abbreviated, postponed, even canceled or ignored? Notice that Jesus ties together "remaining in Him" with His words remaining in you. The focal point of your Jesus-time is supposed to be daily hearing His heart for you through His words in the Bible. This whole business of being a follower of Jesus is all about a relationship with Him that is going strong. But you've been busy, or down, or preoccupied - for whatever reason, your time with your Savior has been shrinking or vanishing.
Before you get any farther from Him, before you get any weaker and more vulnerable, you need to move your time with Jesus from "when I can get to it" or "when I feel like it" to being non-negotiable. That time with Jesus is your life support system. Every other demand in your life has to fit around your time with Him! Let Jesus be the highest priority of your personal schedule. Without Him, you're just too easy to bring down.