John 15:16
… I chose you and I appointed you that you should go out and produce fruit and that your fruit should remain..

We said yesterday that our personal daily connect with God and regular and frequent fellowship with the brethren represent the table at which we feed on Christ for our spiritual sustenance. This is where we receive nourishment for our spirit, where our inner person is fed.

It is as we feed on and receive constant nourishment from Him that we attain to fruitfulness. In fact, in John chapter 15 the Lord employed an everyday example to drive his point home beyond a shadow of doubt. Depicting Himself as the vine and we as the branches, He categorically illustrated our utter and complete dependence on Him to produce the desired and naturally expected fruit just like the branches of the vine to the tree. If we are to produce the desired and natural fruit in our lives that God intended and planned for us to do so, we too need to remain connected to the vine (who is Christ) receiving constant nourishment from Him. John 15:4
Remain in Me, and I in you. Just as a branch is unable to produce fruit by itself unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in Me.

This “remaining” is facilitated and made possible through our daily connect (devotion) with God and regular and frequent fellowship with the brethren. This is where we receive our daily sustenance, where we actually feed on and practically abide in Christ – the basic precondition for this insane fruitfulness the Lord destined us for. Without these two most basic elements of the Rule of Life we can rest assured that we’ll never attain the fruitfulness to which the Father appointed each of His children. On the contrary, if we neglect and undermine our position and fail to abide in Christ, we stand at risk of withering and dying (John 15:6).

It is to fruitfulness that Christ has appointed us but that can only be realised when we intentionally and deliberately make the effort to remain in Him through our personal daily connection with Him and committed fellowship with the brethren. It is in our personal, individual connections with Him that we derive deep nourishment and achieve true fruitfulness of the kind Christ purposed for each one of us.