«　WEEK 4　DAY 3　»

　　John 15:4-5 Abide in Me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am the vine; you are the branches. He who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit; for apart from Me you can do nothing.

　　As the many branches of the vine, the believers of Christ are members of the Christ of God to form the organism of the Triune God in the divine dispensing. In John 15:5 the Lord Jesus declared, “I am the vine; you are the branches.” Such a statement implies that Christ and His believers are one tree… The vine in John 15, therefore, is a universal vine comprising Christ and His believers as the branches. (The Conclusion of the New Testament, p. 2930)

　　A branch of a vine cannot live by itself, for it will wither and die apart from the vine. The relationship between the branches and the vine portrays the relationship between us and the Lord Jesus…What we are, what we have, and what we do must be in the Lord and by the Lord in us.

　　As long as we abide in Christ, He will abide in us. His abiding in us depends on our abiding in Him… If we do not abide in Him, we fail to meet the condition of His abiding in us… This mutual abiding will bring forth fruit.

　　How good, how miraculous, how wonderful, and how excellent it is that we all are a part of this organism! Christ is this organism, and we are included in this organism… As far as we, the branches, are concerned, Christ, the tree, lives to be our support, our supply, and our everything. Christ as the tree also does everything through His believers as the branches. Just as the tree needs the branches and cannot do anything apart from the branches, so today Christ as the very embodiment of the Triune God can do nothing without us. In the carrying out of God’s economy—that is, growing a vine tree—without us Christ is unable to act, work, or to have any kind of activity… We surely need Him for the purpose of our enjoying the wonderful, excellent, and marvelous divine life, and He surely needs us for the purpose of fruit-bearing, the multiplication and the enlargement of this divine tree… Christ as the true vine is an organism full of life, like the tree of life (Gen. 2:9). (The Conclusion of the New Testament, pp. 2932-2933)

　　How can we be grafted into Him? This is why Christ needed to pass through various processes. The first process that He went through was His becoming flesh (John 1:14)…that we might be grafted together with Him. As human beings, we are branches, pieces of wood; in like manner, Christ came as the branch of David, as a piece of wood. He is exactly the same as we are; hence, He and we can be grafted together.

　　A grafter knows that in order to have a successful grafting, both of the grafting parts need to be cut and to die. First, the part to be grafted has to die, and second, the part to be grafted into has to die also. Only when both sides die can the grafting be accomplished. On Christ’s side, one day, as the branch of David [Zech. 3:8; Jer. 23:5; 33:15], He died on the cross; however, although He died in the flesh, He was resurrected in the Spirit (1 Pet. 3:18b). Through death and resurrection He became the life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45b). By becoming such a Spirit, Christ was ready for the grafting. On our side, as sinners, we need to repent and receive the Lord… [Then] He as the life-giving Spirit enters into our spirit and puts the divine life in us. After we have been grafted together with Christ, we should no longer live by ourselves; rather, we should allow the pneumatic Christ to live in us. Furthermore, we should no longer live by our flesh or our natural being; rather, we should live by our mingled spirit, a spirit grafted with Christ. (CWWL, 1994-1997, vol. 5, “The Experience of God’s Organic Salvation Equaling Reigning in Christ’s Life,” pp. 496-497)

　　Further Reading: CWWL, 1989, vol. 3, “The Experience and Growth in Life,” chs. 2, 4, 25, 31; CWWL, 1980, vol. 2, “The Secret of Experiencing Christ,” chs. 5-6