The Branch and the Vine — Andrew Murray on John 15
⏱ 8 min read
You are trying to bear fruit, and the harder you try the drier you feel. The list of things a Christian woman is meant to be producing is long — patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, the good word at the right moment, the prayer for the friend, the slow love for the difficult child — and the harder you push for the production, the more visibly the production thins. Andrew Murray, writing in The True Vine, knew that woman. He spent thirty-one short meditations on John 15 to undo the single mistake she was making about how fruit actually grows.
This is the question underneath the dryness. What does the vine and branches mean, really, in the way Jesus said it on the last night before His death? Murray’s answer, walked patiently across the whole book, is that John 15 is not a discipline. It is a biology. A branch does not produce grapes by effort. A branch produces grapes by vital connection to the vine. The fruit is the natural overflow of the sap, not the achievement of the branch. The harder-trying woman is dry because the trying itself is what is interrupting the sap.
The slow daily companion for re-learning this connection is the Bible Study Workbook for Women — a pre-printed walk through scripture built for the woman who needs the small structure of a daily page to hold her until the connection is doing the work again, not the striving. The article below is the short reading for the doorway.
Murray’s first turn — the branch is not the source
The first thing Murray does is name the category mistake. You are trying to bear fruit as if you were the source of it. The branch is not the source. The vine is. The branch is the place where the fruit appears, because the sap of the vine is flowing through it. The branch’s only work is to stay connected.
“Let this truth, accepted under the teaching of the Spirit in faith, remove every vestige of fear, as if abiding in Christ were a burden and a work. In the light of His life in the Father, let it henceforth be to you a blessed rest in the union with Him, an overflowing fountain of joy and strength. To abide in His love, His mighty, saving, keeping, satisfying love, even as He abode in the Father’s love — surely the very greatness of our calling teaches us that it never can be a work we have to perform; it must be with us as with Him, the result of the spontaneous outflowing of a life from within, and the mighty inworking of the love from above.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read the last clause. The result of the spontaneous outflowing of a life from within, and the mighty inworking of the love from above. That is John 15 in two motions — the life flowing out through the branch, and the love working in from the vine. Both motions belong to the vine. The branch does neither. The branch only abides, which in Murray’s reading means stays connected, which is the only thing it has ever been asked to do.
This is what the vine and branches mean, in Murray’s hand. Vital connection, not effort. Fruit is what happens when the connection is held. The harder-trying woman is dry because she has, without meaning to, replaced the connection with the trying. The trying feels like devotion. It is actually substitution. Murray’s whole book is a quiet, repeated invitation back to the connection.
What John 15 actually says about the trying
Here is the part of the passage most missed in the harder-trying season. Jesus does not, in John 15, ask the branch to try to bear fruit. He says, abide in me, and I in you. He says, apart from me you can do nothing. He says, if you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. The verb that does the work is abide. Every other outcome is hung on it.
Murray sees this clearly. The branch’s only assignment is the abiding. The bearing of fruit is the vine’s part, done through the branch, when the connection is maintained. The fruit is not the test of your effort. The fruit is the test of the connection. And the connection, in Murray, is restored not by harder pushing but by the resting in union that abiding always was.
“‘At Thy bidding I take Thy yoke; I undertake the duty without delay; I abide in Thee.’ … And with ever-increasing simplicity its meaning will be interpreted. Abiding in Jesus is nothing but the giving up of oneself to be ruled and taught and led, and so resting in the arms of Everlasting Love. Blessed rest! the fruit and the foretaste and the fellowship of God’s own rest! found of them who thus come to Jesus to abide in Him.”
— Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Resting in the arms of Everlasting Love. That is the posture of the connected branch. Not the strained, productive, harder-trying posture of the woman who has confused the vine’s job with her own. The fruit appears in a rested branch. The dryness appears in a striving one. The biology of John 15, in Murray’s reading, is not negotiable.
A minute for the body
Sit somewhere quiet. Let both feet press flat against the floor. Let the shoulders, which have been holding the weight of the production for a long time, lower by an inch. Let the chest open a fraction. Let the spine soften out of the bracing. Let one slow inhale come in. Let one slow exhale go out.
You are not being asked to feel fruitful afterwards. You are being asked to notice that the body, given one minute of unstrained sitting, releases the small ongoing effort it had been holding. The branch on the vine does not strain. It simply hangs, connected. The minute is the body learning, in the small, what John 15 has been asking the soul to do in the large.
What the vine is doing that the branch is not
Here is the inversion that gives the harder-trying woman her rest. Almost everything the branch is meant to do is being done by the vine. The drawing-up of the water. The producing of the sap. The flowering. The setting of the fruit. The ripening. The branch’s only assignment in the whole long list is the staying-attached. Everything else belongs to the vine.
Murray makes the point gently but persistently. The Christian life is not a production project the soul has been given to manage. It is a life that is being lived in the soul, by Christ, through the soul’s continued willingness to remain in union with Him. The fruit will come the way fruit always comes — quietly, in its season, from the inside out, with no straining on the branch’s part. The harder-trying woman is exhausting herself doing the vine’s work in addition to her own. The cure is not more help with the vine’s work. The cure is the laying down of the vine’s work and the return to her one job, which is the connection. (For the foundational reading on what the connection itself is, what Andrew Murray meant by abide in Christ walks the same posture from the other end.)
The pre-printed daily page for the re-connection
The slow daily companion for re-learning the connection is the Bible Study Workbook for Women. It pre-prints a short passage of scripture for the morning, a single question for the soul, and a quiet space for the resting that John 15 keeps asking of the branch. It does not ask the woman to produce a study. It asks her to sit on the page long enough for the sap to do its work, and then to go into the day connected. It is the format Murray’s thirty-one meditations takes when held across the slower season the dry branch actually walks.
This is the kind of devotion that fits the harder-trying woman, because it requires of her only the staying-on-the-page, not the manufacturing of fruit from the page. The fruit is the vine’s part. The page is where the connection is gently re-rooted, morning by morning, until the connection is doing the bearing again, the way Jesus said in John 15 that it always was meant to. (For the wider stream on the same listening posture, how to recognise God’s voice — Brother Lawrence’s quiet answer walks the same continual presence, and why God whispers instead of shouts — Tozer on the still small voice is the listening end of the same union.)
The Murray line to keep near the page
If you take only one line from the whole article into the rest of the week, take this one:
It never can be a work we have to perform; it must be with us as with Him, the result of the spontaneous outflowing of a life from within, and the mighty inworking of the love from above.
That is what the vine and branches mean, in Murray’s reading. Spontaneous outflowing from within. Mighty inworking from above. Both belong to the vine. The branch’s part is the staying-connected. The fruit is what appears when the trying stops and the abiding begins. The harder-trying woman is being invited, slowly, into the rest that always was the only place fruit grows.
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The 140-day form of this slow practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women.
We also intend, in time, to bring The True Vine itself back into print under Everspring Press, so Murray’s thirty-one meditations on John 15 can sit beside the daily companion that walks the connection they teach.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women walks the slow re-rooting of the connected branch at the pace of one short page per day. Built for the woman who has been trying to bear fruit and is ready, slowly, to let the vine do its part again.