Grafted Into the Old Rugged Root

Grafted Into the Old Rugged Root

by Reginald (Reg) Goff

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

I was thrilled this morning, as Esther gave her talk on the 17th chapter of St. John. I’ve been wishing all week somebody would do something about that chapter, because it is, I think, my favorite chapter of all the Bible. I noticed that when she came up this morning and went into the pulpit, that she looked with a very funny, grinning look at something on the side here. I wondered if she wondered if the caretaker hadn’t cleaned up. But what she saw was something I had put here before that for now.

So we’ll come to that in a minute. I am the true vine, and My Father is the husbandman. Every branch of Mine that bears no fruit He takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit He prunes that it may bring forth more fruit. You, already made clean by the word which I have spoken to you, abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, ye are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from Me, you can do nothing. If a man does not abide in Me, he is cast forth as a branch, and withers.

I got trifocals. And the branches are gathered and thrown into fire and burned. If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you. By this My Father will glorify that you bear much fruit. So prove to be My disciples. As the Father hath loved Me, so have I loved you. Abide in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love, just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love. These things I have spoken to you, that your joy may… that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.

This morning I want to take an illustration that I hope will stick with you all the rest of your life. To some of you, it will be very calm, because you perhaps know, others of you, it will not be.

I think that there is something wonderful about this story of the vine. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if we could know all the facts. That Jesus was standing or sitting in a courtyard with His disciples around Him. He happened to look over perhaps to the vine, which were tremendous in those days in that country. They tell us that some of the old vines will grow for two, three hundred years and become bigger than a tree. And they will spread over a whole courtyard. And they may get as many as a hundred bushel of grapes of one vine. That’s something. I imagine Jesus was sitting there looking at this whole grapevine that was growing up and making shade for them. And as He looked toward, down toward the root of the vine, He perhaps saw a very big scar across that vine. For it has been a custom in many, many ages and down to the centuries to graft and to transplant this type of thing. We have found that when we cross plants and vegetables and all these things, sometimes they get weaker and weaker. We somehow lose some of the native power and strength they have. And so we go and get an old rugged tree or an old rugged root, one that has the ability to go down to the earth and take out moisture when there isn’t any there, almost like in the desert.

And we take this top, which is of the finer group, which we have grown and made a hybrid out of it. And it is not as strong as the other. And we engraft this top into the old rugged root. The old rugged root will become the life of the new. In our country, where I was raised in Canada on the Georgian Bay, it is known as the great apple center, one of the great apple centers of all of Canada. Almost every farm has an orchard on it, and many farms are nothing but orchards. And so, as a boy, I grew up in the orchard country. And this thing of grafting was as common to me when I read the scripture as a young man after I had become converted at the age of 25. It began to mean tremendous things to me, these stories out of life. And so, this morning, I want to use this and show you exactly what it means to be grafted in to the vine. I went out this morning… Now, don’t anybody run around and think I ruined a tree this morning here on this nice campus? Because I know enough about trees and about pruning that I went to an apple tree and I cut off a limb that should have been cut off about three years ago.

Because it was ruining other limbs. And so, the tree will thank you and everybody else will run on. Now, you hear… Well, this will represent the old stubby tree. Now, we go out and we find a tree that is bearing beautiful fruit. Well-shaped, well-colored, perhaps very free from scab and all kinds of blight. And we want to reproduce this kind of fruit. Because it’s saleable on the market, maybe it has extra special good texture in the fruit and flavor and all of that. And so it is, we go out into these trees of the fine variety. And in the spring, long before the leaves come on, we will cut little pieces, about six to eight inches long, off the end of a real, fine, well-formed branch. And we will gather a bundle of these, perhaps, and tie them all together and wrap them around with a wet cloth so we’ll keep them moist. And we take them over to the trees that are not producing so well. At least the fruit is not the kind that the stores want today. And so we take it, and we take the limbs and cut them off with a saw, straight across. Now, I want to say something here this morning that is very important, especially to anyone who thinks they are a leader or trying to help people into the kingdom of God.

There are those kind of people who believe you can be rough and ready, and you have to be tough and more or less rough and nasty and really almost beat people down before you can get them into the kingdom of God. Now, in grafting, it’s the very opposite. And I think it is in Christianity, too. Now, we take a very, very sharp saw and cut straight across the limb. Why do we want a very, very sharp saw? Because we do not want to ruin the cell structure of this limb. When you take something that is rough, a saw that is not sharp, and cut a board, you know how it kind of pulls and tears and twists, and the cell structure is gone. Now, we want to save that, and we cut it very. And the same with the little scions. If we would take this, and as we sharpen this point into a long point, if we would use a dull knife, we would destroy the cell structure. We kind of push it together, and it would kind of fill the holes. And when you do that, you can’t ever have a good graft. It’s got to be cut off with such a sharp knife that those cells and the holes of the cells are left perfectly open.

So I think sometimes that we ought to realize the fact that when we are trying to help people out of a life of sin and know so little about God, sometimes we ought to be more careful while we handle them. We ought to be more careful in trying to destroy everything they believe just because it’s wrong at first. We ought to leave that somehow to God and somehow to the gardener and to these things. We ought to treat them as though they were precious things. I am a lapidary. And when I take a stone and I find a beautiful precious stone and I start to put it on the wheel, I can handle it pretty rough when I handle it on the left stone, just sizing it, getting into the general shape. But when I leave the 80 grit of the stone, when I leave that stone which has nearly shaped it, I watch very carefully every bit of pressure and every movement I have. And when I get to the polishing thing, you have to handle it almost like as if it was a glass bubble. By the way, I have done some stones which we call some of the moonstones which have a water center. And when you grind those down and you’ve got them just almost perfect, and you maybe have spent 10, 15 hours getting up there, and if you get 1 to 10 degrees too hot, it’ll just melt in your hands and there you are.

Nothing left. That’s why most people don’t work them. Because it takes them. What I’m saying this morning is, I’m pleading this morning, but when we work with souls who are out in the night in the darkness and do not know all the scriptures meek and quote and wouldn’t interpret them the way we did if they did, we want to handle them as though they were something precious. These little scions are taken care of almost as though they were diamonds or far more. You don’t have to have the diamond very precious because you can’t hurt even though. But as though it was something of very rare beauty, a rose bubble, something you don’t want to take. Now, after we have severed this across, we take a knife and lay it on top and strike it with a hammer and it splits the limb down whatever it weighs. Then we take these little scions and after carefully with a real sharp knife, we have made it to a long, long point. Now, this little scion then is taken and put in right as close as you possibly can to the very edge of the limb because we know that the sap does not come up to the center of the limb. It comes up around the periphery, around the outside.

So this must be put in where the sap is going to come up. Now, we nearly always take two because we know we’re not very perfect. We may miss. And we will generally put two in. We never leave two in. If the buds grow, a month from now we come back and look at it and the buds grow in. Whichever one is going in the right direction to fill that part of the tree which is vacant and is not going across the limbs, we’ll leave them. Maybe one looks more robust than the other. Maybe it’s better shape, better form. Always leaving the best. And we take the other one away. But after a while, when we put this little in here, then you’ve got a crack here. You’ve got an open sore.

Now, I wish I could tell you, had time to tell you all the things I’d like about this grafting, but I’ve got to cut some of them out. And this is one of my parts I’ll have to leave. The grafter has in his pocket a bottle of grafting wax which every man that grafts makes to his own little way. Everyone thinks it needs to be a certain consistency. And now, it’s made largely of these wax, but many other things are put in. And he has his own wax which he has mixed by hand. He takes this wax and holds it in his hand until it becomes pliable. And again, I’d like you to notice this. You can’t force these things. How often people today are trying to force people into the kingdom of God. Not so in grafting. You take this and you hold it in your hand until it becomes warm, with the water and pliable. And then you take a small portion of it and you begin to knead it and push it in and push it and push it until it begins to ooze out the bottle. Why? Because you have to have an absolutely perfect tight seal or you’ll have no life.

Not whatsoever. When I have a man, Brother, old Jonas, he used to call him old in love, not in derision. He was a man everybody loved. He was the greatest naturalist I’ve ever known. He taught me nearly all the nature things I know. In the spring, when in the north, and this is in Canada, in the north, when the robins come back, and boy, what they mean to us when they come back after a winter up there. And when the first robins began to come, I have seen Joel Sussap sit at the foot of a tree, real quiet and still and whistle. The robins call, and I have seen as many as a dozen robins come on the top of that tree looking for a mate. They’re all fooled.

But he can do that. He was offered $500 a night to whistle bird songs on the radio. That’s way back when you work for five hours a day. And he went down and took it one night, didn’t like to sit in that humble’s boobs.

He lived better after too. So he taught me these things. You have to push it in and push it in and push it in until every single bit of the hole that you’ve made is filled again. Now listen, my friends, there’s a good sermon here. Don’t ever take anything out of your child’s life or anybody else’s life until you can put something in that’s better.

You remember that. Don’t go around taking things out of people’s lives. Until you have something better to fill that vacuum, nature of hell is a vacuum. And the moment you take something out of their life, something else will come in. And it may be just as bad as what you took out. So you may have doubled trouble. Now, as we take this tree and as we take this little scion and place it in here carefully, put one on each side as we generally do, and then pack it solidly with wax, then we will take a piece of rag and we will wrap it around and pull it real tight until the wax oozes out through the pores of the cloth. And we fill it in and tie it. Then we take a string down and tie it around. I don’t know how the wax is, softer or not. Now the reason for that is that anything that dries in the sun cracks. Almost anything. So you’re going to have an air vent in there if you leave the wax on there and it can crack and open. And listen, my friends, a little scion that is being grafted into a tree is so delicate that if even air gets in there, it’ll die. And you will see why in just a moment.

Now, when we take these scions from the tree that we want, now get this, this is the first part. It’s a long time to come to the first part, haven’t it? Here’s the first part. When you come to the first part, when you come to take these things away, they are dead, aren’t they? You could leave them in the most beautiful sunlight in the world and the most beautiful climate in the world and in a few hours, they’re nothing. They were dried up sticks. They’re dead. Now, the very first point I want to remind you about this grafting is the fact that we must be completely severed from the old life. If you are going to live a real, wonderful, victorious life, you must be completely severed from the old life. Now, I’ve troubled some people who keep talking about this born-again experience. And I understand I have troubled some people. But I’m not going to quit talking about it because it’s real. But if you are troubled, please come and talk to me, won’t you? I can settle it for you in five minutes. We’ve been around worrying about it. Well, I was in Nebraska camp. Two businessmen came to me and were troubled about the same way. They said, “Well, we think we’re Christians, but we don’t know it.” I said, “Boy, you don’t have to go on that road.”

And we went into the prayer group, and in five minutes, they dedicated themselves completely to God, gave themselves over, and they said, “Well, now I know I’m a Christian.” Now, they didn’t have any boys’ spirits. They didn’t get up and shout and turn the place apart. But there was a time and place where they could go back and say, “God, I gave myself to You here.” And you can do that in your bedroom. If you are not sure, if you’re up and down, when do you think you’re a Christian or not? Oh, my friends, let’s make it real sure. This is something that brings peace into our lives and contentment. You can always go to God and say, “Lord, I did it back there. I am Your child.” I think I’m a Christian. I think I’m a child of God. Oh, let’s get rid of that. Now, you’re dead. You’re cut off. Now, listen to this. Listen carefully. Number two, you can never again draw your support from the old life.

You are completely severed. The thing which gave you strength and life before can never give you strength again. Now, you see how you’re burning the bridges? I wish people begin burning the bridges. Go in the old garden. Burn every bridge you walk to. And make it sure. People tell me, “Why are you so happy?” Well, I don’t want to be happy. I’ve got a lot of bridge burning going on. I don’t want to get back, and I don’t leave the way to sneak back at your door. I’m going to go one way, one direction. I’m bound for the glory land, so help me. That’s where I’m going. You want to come with me? I’d like to have you. Now, it’s dead. It’s severed from the old life. It cannot ever again regain life from the old source. It’s got to have a new source. Now, when you take it and graft it into the kingdom of God or into Christ, and push it in here, and fix it up solid, and make it tight, and work it in until it’s absolutely solid, and make it. Now, let me give you the secret of the whole thing.

By the law of us… By the way, this has no power in itself. Number three. There’s no power to live. It has no power to gain strength. It has no power to get strength. It has no power to grow strength. Has it? There’s no pumps in this. There’s no suckers or vacuums in this thing to make it worth it. I know of them. It’s got to get it from something else. But, the law of osmosis, and most of us learn the law of osmosis by taking the shell off an egg and leaving the membrane intact, and sticking a little glass tube down through it, and sipping that in a little bit of water, and watching the stuff drop in the tube. Is that the way you learn it? That’s what I learned in high school when I was a kid. Maybe I’m too old. That’s the way they taught me. The law of osmosis, to put it very simple, is this. That the capillary action of the liquid, or whatever it may be, will gradually just force its way up. Now, the tree is not pulling it up. It’s being forced up by the law of osmosis, from cell to cell to cell to cell, through the membranes. Now, as this tree keeps on forcing its sap up through it, and sap is just light.

It’s light. As the sap is being forced up through here, if you don’t have a good, tight seal, it’ll run out. You see what happens? See why you’ve got to have a perfectly tight seal? If there’s as much as a quarter of an inch, an eighth of an inch, if there’s a hole as big as a pin, that sap will run right out the other hole, run right back down, and your little scion will die. It’s got to have a perfect seal. And when a perfect seal is made, the law of osmosis will work in this and in this. So now, actually, the life of this plant actually goes into the life of the river. Now, this doesn’t have to do one thing but stay put.

It doesn’t have to get off the committee to send up some juice. It doesn’t even have to ask the bishop for confirmation. Now, this is all right. But, all it has to do in Jesus’ words is abide. That’s all. This little branch needing new life, it only has one thing to do, and that is abide. If ye abide in Me and I in you, you can ask what you will and fruit will come on the end. That’s paraphrasing, but that’s what I’m saying. That’s what I mean. You see? Now, you’re not going to get fruit down here. You want fruit out here. You want the new fruit. But you want the old juice. From the old trees, the old trees, the old knotty, rugged trees, but staunch and true and just as strong as they make them. Can stand all kinds of weather and all kinds of light and all kinds of sun and all these things. And it will gather the food and push it up. And if you will remain put, if you will abide, that’s all you have to do. I wish somehow I could get… And there’s 50 people here I’m looking at. I wish I could get this into your thinking, because you talk to me about these things. You fuss.

Like if you had to do it. He said God wasn’t doing anything. Listen, my friend. All you have to do in Jesus’ own words, the vine will bear fruit if it abides. I read it to you. You can read it again in the 15th chapter of John. I hope you’ll read it and read it and read it and read it and read it. Abide in Me, I in you, as the branch alone by itself cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine. In union with Jesus. This is the secret of the Lord. This union. So really, you don’t have to worry so much about how to pray and how to do this and how to do it, as you have to keep your union up. And do you know how you keep your union up? One word. Obey.

And that’s abiding. You don’t have to run off on your own way while you’re done. Well, hi, Mr. Fly. But if you abide, if you stay there and just take it in. I wish I could think you’d believe that. I really do.

I wish you could. But all you have to do is abide in Christ. And His will and His power will actually by His power flow because He said, I am the vine. I am the vine, He said. And if My words abide in you, that’s the sacral of them. You shall bear much fruit. Herein is My Father glorified. You want to make God happy? Well, abide and bear a good bunch of fruit. That’s all. You don’t have to be this and be that and believe this and believe that and do this and do that and join this and join that. You just abide in Jesus as a housewife, a mother, a pastor, a pastor’s wife, something else. Abide. Abide and let God, Jesus, bring the juice up in your life and it will flow until actually fruit will be hanging on your branches. And listen, listen to this. Wherever there is fruit, people will come together.

And if you are having people come to you and want what you’ve got, you better get something else. Now you’re mad at me, aren’t you? That’s right. If nobody wants what you’ve got, for heaven’s sake, get rid of it and get a new shipment.

That’s right. Change the brand or something. Well, if you didn’t, in a boy’s haberdashery today, if you didn’t have a button on the back of your shirt, no matter how nice the shirt was, you can’t sell it. You don’t choose a button. It has to be there. You watch every kid in his shirt. Look at those buttons back here on the floor.

I think it’s for tags you’re going to put on after a while before you’ve got the tags yet. Now, you’re completely severed. You have no life in your own self. You must be placed into the other one in perfect union. And when that perfect union there, you cannot stop fruit from coming.

You cannot stop a branch from bearing fruit if it abides in the branch and is in perfect union. Now, listen, frankly, honestly, I think we preachers have thought here. I think we preachers have just been fooling you people. We’ve given you every kind of a program in the world. Let’s say, if you do this, you’re going to be a nice person. It isn’t so.

All you have to do is abide. Now, I’ve got to hurry along. Oh, dear me. I’ve got to hurry along. Jesus talked about another thing which I’d like to go into. He said, “Every branch that beareth forth not good fruit, He taketh it away.” This is kind of rough.

This is kind of rough. If you are not bearing fruit and somebody else can’t eat of what you produce and be blessed by it, you will lose your opportunity. What about the children you have in your home? Do they want your kind of religion?

Or do they want the religion of the alley gang? What do they want? Are they believing some professor in school whose head is bigger than his heart and his education kind of got past his soul? Doesn’t believe in the church anymore? Are they going to accept him just because he has a PhD which means pile higher?

The reason I say that is I’m jealous I don’t have one. I’m waiting until my son gets one that I can bask in his sunlight. He passed his pre-doctoral exam to the day in the newest field in physics and believe me that’s something. So I can break around and snort around after a while if he ever gets it. Now what I’m saying is, is your child listening to somebody who doesn’t know about God what God is and isn’t and who doesn’t know the church? I like to say this to every student who goes out of my church to the university and I say, “Listen, when anybody speaks on religion, hold what they say until you’ve done one thing: find out if they’re active in their own church. If they’re not, don’t believe a thing they say. Don’t believe one thing they say. They are not specialists in that realm.”

They are no more specialists in religion than I am in science and you know how many mistakes I can make in that. Everything I say I’ve got to go and ask my boy. I’m not a specialist in that at all. Some kids came and asked me some questions about the lazy way I couldn’t answer. They had been talking about it. Read the book. Now every branch that beareth not fruit He taketh away.

And listen to this, this is worse. Every branch that does bear, He purges it, takes away the unnecessary things in order that it may bear more fruit. You see in our day of specialization we don’t want quantity of apples, we want quality of apples if you’re going to sell it on the market. I’ve been in the apple business, I know. I managed the sales office for one of our largest apple firms in our country for two summers. I know what I’m talking about. The apples that were half green and half sized were run over the machine, dropped down through the holes and were dumped into casks and sold for almost nothing. But the apples that had beautiful color were carefully picked off that table by loving hands and they were sized and polished and packed and wrapped and loved. Why? Because here was our money, this was our bread and butter, not the junk. And so if a tree is bearing too much fruit and it’s not good, something has to be done and there’s a lot of church people that need to get this bone.

And I need it myself. I am one that really needed it. You know, in our conference I got up on the conference floor one time and resigned from six conference committees at one time. Yeah. I was a do-it-yourself wizard. You’re the boss. The Lord told me to quit doing that. And I quit. I kept on too. Evangelism and missions. These are my two heart problems. Now let me say this. If you are doing too much, your fruit will be small, undeveloped and colorless and unpalatable. They aren’t fit to eat.

They’ll spit them out. Now if any of you are having trouble here, I hope you get off the committees. I really do. If you haven’t time for devotions every day because of church work you’re doing, you’re doing too much church work.

You’re not abiding in the vine. You’re not getting the sap coming up which is a strength and the fruit bearing potential. You see. Now there’s another thing that this takes up, for I have learned to prune too. Now first of all we like to prune a tree for symmetry.

Now don’t ever think that God doesn’t love beauty. If God didn’t love beauty, why did He make so many erosions or anything else? God loves beauty. So don’t ever think that your tulipy is more valuable than beauty. It’s not. It’s all a part of the whole. So we stand back and look at the tree and here’s a limb sticking out here kind of all by itself as much as they waving their hands saying, “Look at me,” and we just going to take it over. You ever see any people like that? In the church? Or in a camp? “Look what I did. Me.” Well, we cut them up. You know what happens to them? They drop down and are picked up and burn. Oh, it goes up in smoke.

Well, that’s an extra thought putting in the notes. Every branch then that takes away from the beauty of the tree we take off. That’s the first thing we do. The second thing, we take off every branch that is tending to hide another branch so someone can’t get in so its fruit is green instead of green. Now this is kind of subtle because lots of us overshadow other people and don’t know about this. And we hinder leadership in the church. And actually we are destroying the leadership development of three or four people by doing all ourselves and God sometimes has to maybe take us aside. Say, “You’re in the road, buddy. Let’s get off the path.” Four or five we’re going to get up here. So any branch that shades another branch that can’t get sunlight and bear good fruit, we cut into it. And the third thing we do is we go into the tree. In fact generally I do this second rather than third but it doesn’t matter too much here. Another point of pruning is you go in and take off every branch that is bearing on another branch.

Barling it. Cutting it. Hooting it. Or even just rugging it. None of you are like that. That’s why I’m going to hurry on here. And then the next thing we do is we cut off smaller branches off the big branch when it’s producing too much fruit to be able to bear good fruit. I had a wonderful experience one time. It was the last year I was in the apple world. I had been in it a long time and became fairly good at it. And we were in competition at the Royal Winter Fair for the World’s Championship Apple Box. Now that took in many of the northern states of the United States and all of our provinces in Canada. Canada and it was a real weapon. It was really something for the company that could get this grand championship. And so I and two other men were sent out into the orchard before Picker’s King. And we had nice little light ladders and we would go around through all the orchards and we’d spot a limb up here with some beautiful apples. We’d try them up, look them over. And if it looked as perfect, almost as defined, we’d take them off carefully and take them down. We picked 200 barrels. Take three barrels to make a barrel.

I think it still does. We picked 300 barrels of the choicest spy apples. Now the spy apple is not highly colored like the McIntosh, which is so red, but it’s a nice shaped apple and a beautiful apple in many ways, but it’s not as highly colored. Therefore, the McIntosh has beat it out for years in the world championship, world competition. But we were at the spy. Now we had McIntosh in the show too, but we were out to get the spy. And we picked 200 barrels. And then we took those in and put them in cold storage. On about a month before the time of the show came up, these 200 barrels were brought up about at a time and run carefully at a slow speed over the belts and over the tables. And we stood there and threw out everything that had a mullet or discolor or ill shape, took anything in the room, it went out. We got it down then to 10 barrels. Then we put them back in the storage. After a while, about two weeks before the show came on, we began to work on these after hours when nobody was around and we had all the machinery to work ourselves. We’d go back at night and take these barrel by barrel.

Out of this 10 barrels, we picked 113 perfect apples. All exactly the same size, as near as we could to the best coloring, perfectly shaped, and you know, that box went to the Royal Winter Fair and was judged and it took them two days to decide who got the championship and you know, the competition was so keen that the judges actually took apples out of those boxes and took magnifying glasses and looked in the ball for man to see if there’s any scabs in them. Now, brother, that’s getting down really funny. You can’t see any of your eyes. And we won.

The only time in the history of the apple world that the spy won the World Championship. That is, in recent years since the other new high-to-cow apples have been on the market. It is a great thrill. I strolled around there for two days. Big deal.

Of course, I wasn’t a Christian then. Now then, you take away when there’s too many branches and too many works. You take them away and cut them down. Well, I would rather have us proficient in a few things and know how to do them well. Then it would have to do a lot of things just a little tiny bit. So sometimes, and I’ve been saying this to a dozen people on this campus, but let me tell you a funny story. I was up in Massachusetts in a lovely Methodist church and they had a prayer group in that church that I think is one of the most powerful prayer groups we’ve ever met. My wife and I still believe that this is one of the most powerful souls we’ve ever visited in all across America. But you know they had no influence in the church. They weren’t adding to their numbers. They weren’t splitting and dividing. They weren’t producing fruit. They were getting asked to prayer and people would call them in emergencies, but they just weren’t getting anywhere. And the pastor was for them. In fact, he was a part of the group. And they kept coming to me and saying, “What’s wrong with us?” Well, I’m not a magician and I’m not a judge and I didn’t know because it seemed to me as if they had everything.

And I was preaching one morning at 10 o’clock before the forum discussion on prayer and it hit me just like a shot of a loud noise. A clap of thunder. And I stopped and it had no connection to what I was saying. And I said, “By the way, God has told me what’s wrong with you people.” Boy, they looked and they had a right to. And I said, “God is telling me in silly words, but these are the words that came in.” I think God has a good sense of humor. If you don’t think He has, listen to Him.

God said to me, “Tell the people to sit down on God. Quit fasting and quit working.” Imagine telling a good program to quit working. You know, it revolutionized that program. It so revolutionized it that the pastor had to leave. You know, that’s the worst thing about getting your pastor on fire. Somebody else will come and take them on you. That’s better than having a fossil there, though. That’s a lot better. I’m a fossil hunter, too. All our goodness is sitting up there and telling you, that one was that he lived 2,000 years ago. Or 200 million.

So, get him on fire in a way, and if somebody else takes him, then you get somebody else and fire him up and take the job you’ve got of firing up a half a dozen in your lifetime. What a privilege of firing a man up that didn’t, that was kind of lukewarm. I think that’s good work in the kingdom of God. Now, so, I want to say and I’ve got to close, and the time is gone and I don’t want it to be. I want to read again the words I read and I want you to notice these things as I read. And these are the things we talked about. First, you are severed from the old life completely. Temporarily, you have no life in yourself whatsoever. And then you are placed into another life. And all you have to do is become perfectly united and abide. That’s all. And the vine will come, or the fruit will come, and the dressing will come, and the pruning will come, but you will bear fruit. And Jesus said, herein is My Father glorified that you bear much fruit. Oh, hallelujah. Let me read it to you again, and that’s all. I could talk for another one. I am the true vine, and My Father is the husbandman.

Every branch of Mine that bears no fruit He takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit. You are already clean through the word which I have spoken to you. Now abide in Me, and I in you, as the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, 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 it is that bears much fruit, for apart from Me, you can do nothing. If a man does not abide in Me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers, and the branches are gathered and thrown under the fire and burned. If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you. By this My Father glorified that you bear much fruit, and so you prove to be My disciples. As the Father hath loved Me, so have I loved you. Abide in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love, just as I have kept My Father’s commandments, and I abide in His love. These things I have spoken to you, that My joy, imagine the joy of Jesus.

That My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full, and I’d like to add something else, that your joy may be full and running over. Someone at a camp said that they got so full of the glory of God that every time somebody bumped them, they just spilled love all over them. Wouldn’t you like to be like that? Somebody rubs you the wrong way, and they just get slopped all over them. Love.

Mary rubs your sandpaper, gets going like they should know, and they just get all wet with love, and they can’t rub anymore. My friend, abide in Him. All you have to do is abide, and remember what I said, abiding is obey.

Read your scripture, and find what He’s told you. Don’t ask the preacher, and don’t ask Reg Goff, but read the scripture, and find what He’s saying to you. Abide in Me, and I in you, and you shall ask what you will. I feel like saying this, herein, for a good many of you, lie some of your answered prayers that are unanswered today.

God said it to me just as I was going to finish. God is trying to say to some of you people, quit running around after people, quit running around to do things, quit trying to find new forms, new ways, new pressures on God, but begin to abide in Him. And let the love of God, which is the only energy in all the world, the divine energy, flow through your body until even your body will be rejuvenated and come alive. I believe this. Let us pray.

Our Father, we couldn’t explain half of the things that run through our minds this morning, but help us that we’ll never see an apple tree again, but what we’ll think of the abiding. Help us to go out and look at some, too, and see how small the apples are when they’re too many. Help us to stand under a tree someday and look and see these cross limbs that are weighing down other limbs and giving them burns and blisters and disease is setting in. And, O Lord, help us to look at ourselves and see if we stick out past the rest. For fear we may get cut off. But God wants symmetry and balance and beauty in His church, in His camps, in our homes, in the prayer group, in our lives. Grant, O Lord, that these lessons may be written deeply upon our heart. O Lord, we ask it in Jesus’ precious name. Amen. Oh, did you ever see timing like that?

Must be in the spirit this morning. He.