Tired Of Being My Own Root

He worked it out on a Tuesday and it took him about four seconds and it was not a spiritual moment.

He was standing in the pantry looking for something and he thought, without any warning at all: I am tired.

Not tired of God. He wants to be very clear about that, and if you are here you will probably want the same distinction, so let us have it out at the front. Not tired of God, not doubting, not on the way out of anything.

Tired of being the one who keeps it going.

Because when he looked at how his faith actually works, in practice, on an ordinary week, this is what he found. He decides. Every time. He decides to get up early, and he decides to open the book, and he decides to keep his temper, and he decides to be the kind of man he intends to be, and every single one of those decisions is made out of a supply that he is also responsible for producing.

He is the pump and the well.

And a man can run that arrangement for a long time. He is forty seven and he has run it for twenty two years and he is good at it, and that is the trap, because being good at it is what keeps you doing it.

In the pantry he thought: something is supposed to be feeding this and I think it has been me.

You know that pantry.

Maybe you have never named it either. Maybe you would describe yourself as committed, disciplined, faithful, and all of those would be true, and underneath them is a person running a supply line out of their own body.

Nobody handed you that job on purpose. It is what happens when everything you were ever taught about faith was framed as a decision, and decisions are yours to make, and so the whole apparatus ends up sitting on the one part of the arrangement that gets tired.

He said branches on purpose

Here is a sentence He said the night before He died, and every word in it is a job description.

I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.John 15:5

I am the vine. You are the branches.

That is two roles and He assigns both of them, and He does not offer you the first one, and He is not asking you to help with it.

A branch does not manufacture. A branch does not store, or plan, or generate, or worry about the supply. A branch is a place where something that comes from somewhere else arrives and turns into fruit. That is the entire job and it is the whole job.

You are a branch and you were never the root, and the supply has never been your responsibility to produce. That is what He assigns in one sentence, I am the vine, ye are the branches (John 15:5), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the life moving up through that vine, which means what has been keeping you alive was never manufactured in the pantry.

And notice the last five words of the verse, which are not a threat. Without me ye can do nothing. Read as a warning, that sentence is heavy. Read as a description of a branch, it is the most restful thing in the chapter, because it means the thing you have been trying to do was never possible and the tiredness was never a character failure.

The graft is the point

Now put the two pictures side by side, because this is where it comes home.

A graft is the operation that connects a branch to a supply it did not have. That is the whole procedure. The cutting is not improved, or trained, or motivated. It is joined.

And once it is joined, it does not have to remember to receive. Sap does not need to be requested. It comes because the connection exists.

You have been joined to a supply, and the flow does not depend on you remembering to open a valve. Scripture says he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ (Philippians 1:6), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the earnest of that inheritance, put into you as a deposit, which is not a thing anybody has to hold in place by attention.

Nothing here says your decisions did not matter. They did and they do, and twenty two years of them have made you a man other people lean on. You have not wasted a day of it, and none of that effort was misplaced love. The word says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love (Hebrews 6:10), and His Spirit is the one who has been in every one of those early mornings, whether or not you could feel Him there while you were being the pump.