"Is He a Vine? His heavenly root
Supplies the boughs with life and fruit.
Oh, let a lasting union join
My soul, the branch, to Christ, the Vine."

Thus the poet sings. But it is just for that reason that the Lord, our God, visits us so often with painful affliction, that He may cement our union with our blessed Savior.

It may seem painful and destructive to the vine when the gardener comes along with his sharp pruning knife and cuts away so many of its luxuriant shoots and branches. But the wise gardener knows if he left his vines untrimmed, they would soon run wild and bring forth inferior fruit. So he trims the vine and cuts away all unnecessary wood. Why? That the sun may shine on the grapes and ripen and sweeten them. With the same wise purpose in view our heavenly Father cuts away with His knife of affliction the wild, sinful shoots in our hearts, purges them from the love of self and of the world, that the sun of His saving grace might ripen and sweeten in us more and more the fruits of true righteousness and piety. It is not punishment for our sins, as we often wrongly think in our affliction, that causes these painful experiences to befall us, but it is "pruning" by our heavenly Father, who loves us and therefore cannot mean our hurt - but has our good in view.

And what comfort it is to hear that it is just the "branch that beareth fruit" which He thus prunes and afflicts! Oh, let us not resist the wise and loving design of our heavenly Father! Let us humbly submit to His afflictions and through them draw nearer and nearer to our Savior and abide in Him; for the branch that beareth not fruit is finally taken away and cast into the fire. [verse 6]

[devotion text by Rev. F. W. Herzberger (1920) -
from the Family Altar - CPH (1957 edition)]
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