The True Vine

It is Andrew Murray's set of thirty-one short daily meditations on the vine and the branches — a month spent in the fifteenth chapter of John. Day by day Murray presses one secret of a fruitful Christian life: to abide in Christ. From the Vine and the Husbandman through the pruning and the fruit, he unfolds what it means to remain in Christ and to let his life flow through us.

Because abiding is learned by returning, not by understanding once. Murray gives thirty-one brief chapters, one for each day of a month, each taking a single phrase from John 15, so that the reader dwells on the same truth morning after morning until abiding in Christ becomes not an idea but a settled habit of the heart.

It means remaining in living union with Christ as a branch remains in the vine — drawing all life, strength, and fruitfulness from him rather than from oneself. Murray teaches that the branch's whole business is simply to stay joined to the vine and let its sap flow; the fruit is the vine's doing, not the branch's striving. Abiding is dependence, receptivity, and rest in Christ.

That fruit is the natural, certain result of abiding, not an achievement wrung from the branch. A branch joined to a healthy vine cannot help but bear fruit; so the believer who truly abides will bear the fruit of a Christlike life. Murray turns the reader away from anxious effort toward the one condition Christ gave — remain in me — and lets the fruit follow.

He takes seriously Jesus' word that the Father prunes even the fruitful branch that it may bear more fruit. Murray reads the trials and losses of the Christian life as the Husbandman's knife — not punishment but care, cutting away what hinders growth. The pruning, he teaches, is a mark of the Father's love for a branch he means to make more fruitful, not less.

A South African pastor and one of the most beloved devotional writers of the deeper Christian life, author of many short books on prayer and abiding in Christ, including Abide in Christ and Humility. The True Vine, published in 1897, belongs to that same stream — a month's meditation on the union with Christ that was the heart of his teaching.

Any Christian who is weary of striving in their own strength, or who longs for a more fruitful and restful walk with God. Murray writes for the ordinary believer, and his gentle, repeated pressing of the single lesson — abide — has made the book a lasting help to those seeking to live from Christ rather than for him.

With the first day's reading, and then one each day for a month, unhurried. The book is designed for slow, prayerful use rather than straight-through reading; taken a day at a time, its meditations on the vine and the branches sink in by degrees until abiding in Christ becomes the reader's settled way.