Rooted by the Rivers
r I HE spring has been calling the roll in orchard and forest. Every living tree has ere this responded by issuing its leaves or bedecking itself with blossoms. Some are well on their way with tiny germs of fruit. The dead trees give no answer to the call. A sick tree or a dead tree is a sad sight, especially if it once shaded our childhood’s sports or shook down its generous fruit into our baskets.
A diseased or dying Christian is a far sadder sight. The marks of health and growth in a Christian are described in the Bible by the marks of health and growth in a tree. The tests of life or of decay and death are the same. One of the most happy descriptions of a flourishing Christian ever written is that one contained in the seventeenth chapter of Jeremiah: “He shall be as a tree planted by the waters and that spreadeth out her roots by the rivers, and shall not see when heat Cometh, but her leaf shall be green. She shall not be troubled in the year of drought, neither shall she cease from yielding fruit.77
This is God’s idea of a flourishing Christian. Hardly any text in his Word affords a better test for each one of us to try himself by than this beautiful but searching passage. It is very thorough. It includes both the inward motive and the outward life. Let us look at ourselves a few moments as this passage reveals to us what we ought to be.
(1.) The first mark of a healthy Christian is that he is rooted by the rivers of water. In that Oriental country water was the staff of life to man and beast and plant. A tree whose roots were not kissed by some unfailing vein of moisture was doomed to certain death. What the root is to a tree are the secret motives and affections of the heart to each one of us. No part of the tree is so invisible as its roots. But the condition of the tree soon reports just where its roots are and what they are about. Dryness below ground soon means deadness above ground. The roots of our religious life are our secret motives and the affections which govern us. God only beholds them, but men soon discover what they are from the evidence of daily conduct. We wonder, for example, why a certain church-member is so lax in his devotions and loose in his practices. The reason is that, while his trunk and his branches are over on the church side of the wall, his roots run under the wall and dwell in the bad soil on the other side. Outwardly the man is a Christian professor. Inwardly he is a thorough “man of the world,” with no genuine love of Jesus pervading his heart. A Christless heart will soon yield a Christless life. “If ye abide in me ye shall bear fruit.” When the Master said this he indicated clearly that heart-union to himself was the only source of permanent Christian living. Some men root down into covetousness.
There is no need of shaking their boughs with the vain hope of getting any apples of liberality. Others root into secret sensuality. Their thoughts are impure. Lust fills their souls. By and by they are detected in some open act of lechery or drunkenness. The conversion of a sensual man or woman which does not radically change the affections and principles of the heart is not a genuine conversion. The reason why so many “reformed” sensualists go speedily back to their cups or their licentiousness is that their roots of character were never touched. They were never transplanted into Christ. They were never “renewed in the inner man by the Divine Spirit.”
A true servant of Jesus draws his motives of action from his deep loyalty, his deep heart-love to his dear Lord. Up through these roots comes his daily devotion to those things which are pure and holy and of good report. These are the motives which keep him self-denying and steadfast. They hold him firm
in moments of sudden temptation, as stout roots hold the tree against the assaults of a gale. Paul was so rooted and grounded in love to his Saviour that no blast of persecution ever shook him for an instant. Strangers must have wondered why these early apostles so rejoiced in bearing bloody stripes and in being locked up within filthy dungeons. They little knew the depth and the strength of that victorious love of the Crucified which lived down in their bottommost souls and kept them by the “rivers of water.’7 Jesus kept them and Jesus fed their strength. This is the double office of a root: it holds and it feeds. All the nourishment of the vital sap issues from it. Now, then, here is the test question with me, and with you, my brother. Are our hearts in all their affections and desires and motives so united to Jesus Christ that we draw Mm up into our daily lives? Do we keep the connection close with secret prayer? Does this inward love of our Lord underlie our whole character? Is Jesus in us? Is his law our law, and his interests our interests, and to please him the first instinct of our being? Then we are rooted by the river of unfailing waters. (2.) While the soul thus reaches down through its every rootlet into Christ’s deep, cool well there is no danger that our leaves will wither. Our “leaf shall be green.” Some professors have a very dingy look. Their clammy leaves get so powdered over with the dust of worldliness that they are very unsightly objects. They are not attractive with any beauty of holiness. When people eye them closely, they see only cross censoriousness, or stingy selfishness, or frivolous formality. There are others whose leaf turns yellow very soon after they are set out in the Church. This betrays lack of moisture at the root, or perhaps a secret worm of sin there, that is killing the tree by inches. The leaf is the tell-tale of the root and the soil. It is a wretched mistake to deal with the externals of our conduct while we neglect the condition of our hearts. If the heart is by the rivers of water the leaf will always be glossy and green.
(3.) Nor will the drought affect a well-rooted Christian. Some church-members are only flourishing during the heavy rains of a revival time. The rest of the year they are brown and barren. If pastors get sick of such periodical professors, how weary Jesus must be with them! But the joy of every pastor is that evergreen Christian who, when the community is as dry spiritually as summer dust, keeps his heart fresh, and his prayers fervent, and his hands open, and his daily life as beautiful as a palm-tree.
He never ceases to yield fruit. Every year is a bearing year. It is his fixed habit to attend the place of prayer, to give according to his means, to pay every man his due, to share, his loaf with the suffering, to stand for Christ on every occasion and before every company. He speaks out when cowards are dumb. He is “always abounding” in the work of the Lord. We go to such a man as we go to a generous old Yergalieu pear-tree in the month of September, and never come away empty. The ground under his boughs always has something sweet for our basket.
And when God shakes such deep-rooted Christians with severe trials, how the ripe fruits do rattle down. Blessed be the discipline which makes me reach out my soul’s roots into closer union with Jesus! Blessed be the dews of the Spirit which keep my leaf ever green! Blessed be the trials which shake down the ripe golden fruits from the branches!