will enable us to pray as we should, and to receive
what we ask? The answer is in one word: it is the branch-life that gives
power for prayer. We are branches of Christ, the Living Vine. We must
simply live like branches, and abide in Christ, then we shall ask what
we will, and it shall be done unto us.

We all know what a branch is, and what its essential characteristic. It
is simply a growth of the vine, produced by it and appointed to bear
fruit. It has only one reason of existence; it is there at the bidding
of the vine, that through it the vine may bear and ripen its precious
fruit. Just as the vine only and solely and wholly lives to produce the
sap that makes the grape, so the branch has no other aim and object but
this alone, to receive that sap and bear the grape. Its only work is to
serve the vine, that through it the vine may do its work.

And the believer, the branch of Christ the Heavenly Vine, is it to be
understood that he is as literally, as exclusively, to live only that
Christ may bear fruit through him? Is it meant that a true Christian as
a branch is to be just as absorbed in and devoted to the work of bearing
fruit to the glory of God as Christ the Vine was on earth, and is now in
heaven? This, and nothing less, is indeed what is meant. It is to such
that the unlimited prayer promises of the parable are given. It is the
branch-life, existing solely for the Vine, that will have the power to
pray aright. With our life abiding in Him, and His words abiding, kept
and obeyed, in our heart and life, transmuted into our very being, there
will be the grace to pray aright, and the faith to receive the
whatsoever we will.

Do let us connect the two things, and take them both in their simple,
literal truth, and their infinite, divine grandeur. The promises of our
Lord's farewell discourse, with their wonderful six-fold repetition of
the unlimited, _anything, whatsoever_ (John xiv. 13, 14; xv. 7, 16; xvi.
23, 24), appear to us altogether too large to be taken literally, and
they are qualified down to meet our human ideas of what appears seemly.
It is because we separate them from that life of absolute and unlimited
devotion to Christ's service to which they were given. God's covenant
is ever: Give all and take all. He that is willing to be wholly branch,
and nothing but branch, who is ready to place himself absolutely at the
disposal of Jesus the Vine of God, to bear His fruit through him, and to
live every