November 10, 2024 Devo

As I walked and prayed today, I was confessing to God how dependent I am upon Him for wisdom, strength, and steadfastness. As I asked Him to flow in me and through me, I found myself praying scripture. One verse I quoted was from John 15 where Jesus said, “I am the Vine, and you are the branches. Apart from Me, you can do nothing. But if you abide in Me and I abide in you, you can produce much fruit.”
That time of prayer came back to me as I sat with Jesus’ question in our verse today. “Can you pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?” It was obviously a rhetorical question where the answer is, of course, “No.” Thornbushes don’t produce grapes. Thistles can’t produce figs. If you abide in thornbushes, you’re going to get thorns. If you abide in thistles, you’ll get thistles. You can’t produce good fruit when you plant yourself in bad stuff.
Wow. What an amazing and helpful understanding. If you want to know why you’ve been prickly and sharp lately, maybe you ought to examine where you’ve been planting yourself. What has your mind been focused on? What have you been pouring into yourself? What have you allowed to capture your heart and take root in your soul? Plant yourself in the wrong stuff, and thistles and thorns are what you’ll get. You can’t be rooted in ugliness and expect beauty to be what comes out. You can’t plant yourself in the soil of anger, resentment, or jealousy and expect to see the fruit of love, peace, or joy. Tell me where you are “abiding,” and I’ll tell you what kind of fruit you will see.
Be thoughtful about where you plant yourself today. Guard what you allow into your heart and your mind. Be careful about whom you surround yourself with and how much you let them speak into your life. Root yourself firmly in God’s Word, and saturate yourself with His Presence. Do you want to produce thorns and thistles or the fruit of God’s Spirit this week? Where you plant yourself will make the difference! That’s God’s Word for you today.