the vine

Does my life please you God?

How rarely I ask. How little I am concerned with Him, his thoughts, his ways. The desire of the Lord is for our whole bodies to be filled with light. As full of light as a lamp and its rays. To be filled with the light of the lord. The light that is the Lord Himself. What a great gift to be filled with such a light. To possess such a warmth that the closer people get to us, his sons and daughters, the warmer they become.

I think of myself and how the opposite seems to be true. The closer people get, the more nervous and unsure I become, the more I worry that my following is not sufficient and that my love for the lord is feeble, that they may extinguish the flame.

If my body was full of light, or if I understood that my body is full of light, I could rest without worrying that I am not doing all that I am to do for God and using my time well enough, because I would be his light, and I could rest in the joy of the assurance that I am indeed used by God to bring light into the world he is so intentionally and faithfully redeeming.

Christ is willing to fill us with light daily, hourly. To pour his spirit into us, to lead us in the way of obedience, to teach us how to love.

I tend to confuse what determines what we do for the lord and what we do for ourselves, thinking that it is a matter of the things themselves instead of my heart. If my heart belongs to the lord, if he owns it and he rules in my soul and I am nothing more than a branch of the vine of Christ it will not matter what I am doing. Whether I am in class or starbucks or at hunter or in chesapeake or in haiti, it will not matter if I am with the poor or the rich, it will not matter if I am with believers or unbelievers, because it will be for the lord because I will be for the lord. Likewise, if I hold on to my heart, the great things that I do won't be great, they will be just as selfish as anything else.

If I allow myself to be only a branch, he will be able to do the work only he can do. Everywhere I am. He will not be limited by whether I am with college students or kids, friends or strangers. Nothing will stop him when my heart is all his.

In psalm 80 it says

 You brought a vine out of Egypt;
you drove out the nations and planted it.
You cleared the ground for it;
it took deep root and filled the land.
The mountains were covered with its shade,
the mighty cedars with its branches.

A vine. Hardly anything is as tender and fragile as a vine. Vines shouldn't cover mountains and mighty cedars. But this vine is christ, and we are the vine with him. And he will not leave us. He will drive out nations to plant us. He will clear ground for us. We will take root here and do much for him and his mountains and his cedars, for his world and his people. All of this is his. All of us are his.

So what is our role? If he is the vine dresser, if we are just branches, what must what we do. Yield. Yield to him. Trust him. Lean into our lord, and bear fruit. And be pruned so that we can bear more fruit. And know that his pruning, though painful, is sweet because he is the vinedresser and we are branches. And this pruning will only make us more dependent on him, it will never pull us from the vine that is christ. Our comfort is that Christ is the vine. He came down to be with us. To be pruned with us. To come to our status, so that we could come to his as son of the most high God.