John 15:4

How did you begin to bear fruit? It was when you came to Jesus and cast yourselves on his great atonement, and rested on his finished righteousness. Ah! What fruit you had then! Do you remember those early days? Then indeed the vine flourished, the tender grape appeared, the pomegranates budded forth, and the beds of spices gave off their fragrance.

Have you declined since then? If you have, we charge you to remember that time of love, repent, and do your first works. Be most in those engagements which you have experientially proved to draw you nearest to Christ, because it is from him that all your fruits proceed.

Any holy exercise which will bring you to him will help you to bear fruit. The sun is, no doubt, a great worker in fruit-creating among the trees of the orchard: and Jesus is still more so among the trees of his garden of grace. When have you been the most fruitless?

Has it not been when you have lived farthest from the Lord Jesus Christ, when you have slackened in prayer, when you have departed from the simplicity of your faith, when your graces have engrossed your attention instead of your Lord, when you have said, "My mountain stands firm, I shall never be moved"; and have forgotten where your strength dwells—has it not been then that your fruit has ceased?

Some of us have been taught that we have nothing apart from Christ, by terrible abasements of heart before the Lord; and when we have seen the utter barrenness and death of all creature power, we have cried in anguish, "From him all my fruit must be found, for no fruit can ever come from me." We are taught, by past experience, that the more simply we depend on the grace of God in Christ and wait on the Holy Spirit, the more we shall bear fruit for God. Oh! To trust Jesus for fruit as well as for life.