Version has it) 'ye can do nothing.' _There_ is the condemnation of
all the busy life of men which is not lived in union with Jesus
Christ. It is a long row of figures which, like some other long rows
of algebraic symbols added up, amount just to _zero_. 'Without me,
nothing.' All your busy life, when you come to sum it up, is made up
of plus and minus quantities, which precisely balance each other, and
the net result, unless you are in Christ, is just nothing; and on
your gravestones the only right epitaph is a great round cypher. 'He
did not do anything. There is nothing left of his toil; the whole
thing has evaporated and disappeared.' That is life apart from Jesus
Christ.

II. And so note, secondly, the withering and destruction following
separation from Him.

Commentators tell us, I think a little prosaically, that when our
Lord spoke, it was the time of pruning the vine in Palestine, and
that, perhaps, as they went from the upper room to the garden, they
might see in the valley, here and there, the fires that the labourers
had kindled in the vineyards to burn the loppings of the vines. That
does not matter. It is of more consequence to notice how the solemn
thought of withering and destruction forces itself, so to speak, into
these gracious words; and how, even at that moment, our Lord, in all
His tenderness and pity, could not but let words of warning--grave,
solemn, tragical--drop from His lips.

This generation does not like to hear them, for its conception of the
Gospel is a thing with no minor notes in it, with no threatenings, a
proclamation of a deliverance, and no proclamation of anything from
which deliverance is needed--which is a strange kind of Gospel! But