Abiding in Christ

Jn.15:4 - Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.
Jn.15:6-7 - If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.

The word abiding carries with it much more than staying on the Lord’s side, much more than being doctrinally pristine, and much, much more than being so convinced of your own interpretive worthiness that the majority of your time is taken with chasing ravens and not chasing Christ. This world is no friend to our Savior and it offers no genuine help to anyone who seeks to abide in Him, so if we actually desire to abide in Jesus we must bow down because the door is low and the entrance narrow and the applause is silent. And it is no even trade to sacrifice the glory of His presence on the altar of pursuing others and their errors.

Abiding is living and breathing in Christ, not just doctrinally and positionally, but a tangible and experiential life that operates mysteriously within the very Person of the Living Christ. Learning about it will not suffice and hearing about it will not bring its reality, it must be entered into with a sacrificial hunger that refuses to be assuaged by any obstacles and it begins with a complete surrender to the Spirit in our thoughts, which is a difficult challenge to any of us.

We are so given to our perspective driven thought life that slips the reigns of the Spirit’s control and usually results in measured carnality. It is the unseen and protected playground of our unrighteous mental behavior that we have let so fester that we no longer even realize how offensive it is to the Spirit of Holiness who dwells and abides within us. Oh we don’t usually think of heinous acts of violence or immorality, but we can casually judge and demean others sometimes with a simple glance which immediately provides enough kindling wood for a very comfortable fire with which to warm our fleshly and self righteous minds. And if our minds are not crucified and turned over to God’s Spirit we will never fully abide in Christ and partake of Eschol’s fruit.

It is not enough just to crucify our minds, we must enter into an abiding with Christ facilitated by the Spirit of God. In Matthew 12 Jesus gives a teaching about a man who drives an unclean spirit from his mind and although he has swept his mind clean he hasn’t filled his mind with anything else. The Lord says that not only does the unclean spirit return, he returns with other more wicked spirits. Our abiding in Jesus is more than a mental housecleaning, much more. It must require a meditation and embracing of the Savior in all His fullness, and our abiding comes with the full knowledge of His Lordship over our entire lives and a manifestation of that knowledge.

Please do not get the impression that we can think about Jesus during the day and in that is abiding in Christ, no, this will go much deeper than simply thinking, this abiding must bear fruit. Jesus Himself says in a very serious and warning manner that any branch that does not bear fruit is first pruned in order to help the fruit bearing process. This is no benign metaphor by which our Lord is saying He will gently remove some things that have hindered the growth of fruit. This is a painful and sometimes savage pruning that removes the things that like vines have surrounded our hearts and become the objects of our fleshly love. Have you every attempted to remove vines that have infested shrubbery? It is a painstaking and tedious process that requires some cutting and ripping and when you think you’ve removed all of them you suddenly see more that had eluded your eyes.

And such is the pruning process of God’s Spirit, necessary but painful. And as in shrubbery these vines are feeding off our hearts and sapping the spiritual strength that rightly belongs devoted to the True Vine. It will take time and there will be things that have remained hidden and have entrenched themselves as parasitic strongholds in our hearts and minds. And when you prune a bush that has been taken over by vines you will begin to see empty places that were camouflaged by vines but now make the bush much less full. And while we submit ourselves to God’s pruning we must be careful to replace these hollow places with the meat of God’s Word and the Person of Christ. There is no easy way but the end is glorious in its honor to our Lord and Savior. Embrace the pain and offer it as a living sacrifice of repentance.

As serious as the pruning process is, if there is no fruit the Savior issues an uncompromising warning. He says in Matt.12:6 that if there by no fruit that branch will be cast into the fire. While others may attempt to dismantle the eternal implications of the Lord’s teaching it would do us well to consider all the possibilities of His Words, even the most distasteful and unnerving.

But let us return to those who desire to abide, not just avoid getting thrown in the fire. What does it mean to abide in Christ since not only are we commanded to do that very thing, Jesus said without Him we can do nothing. The key which unlocks the door to abiding in Christ is found in Matt.12:3 and Matt.12:7 respectively. Remember the man who had chased the evil spirits away from inside him? Well the Lord says that the way in which we get clean is through His Word. What power there is in God’s Word when it is received by faith, it has the power to clean the evil and depraved heart of a sinner. Just because we live in a day in which Bibles are sold in grocery stores, do not let the fact that the Bible is sold as merchandise mold our thinking into believing the Bible to be just a beneficial book surrounded by other self help books on the shelf. The Words of those scrolls, now presented in Gutenberg’s form, are spirit with the Creator and Redeemer’s power inherent in their essence.

These Words can cleanse the vilest heart and wash away the most grievous collection of transgressions from any sinner born of a woman. And the miracle of conversion is that it is the processional of God’s miracle working power but it is far from the recessional, it is the first step of a journey that will be filled with the manifestations of God’s power both visible and unseen. And these Word’s will clean away the dross and weights and sins from a believing follower of the Lord Jesus, and this is the prerequisite to abiding in Jesus, the True Vine. The Word of God is the cleansing agent that alone has the power to cleanse.

And as awesome a miracle as that is, remove now your sandals and listen to the Savior as He lifts the veil and gives us gracious directions about abiding in Him. In verse 7 Jesus says that if we abide in Him and His Words abide in us we have power with Him in prayer. What did the Apostle who Jesus loved tell us that Jesus’ pre-creation name was? The Word, which was with God and which was God. There is not just a connection between God and His Word, God is His Word. Oh the mystery of the written Word of God that has been given to us! Somehow by the miraculous working of the Spirit God takes the written Word and infuses it into our spirits and in that process He manifests Himself to us. Beginning with saving faith when the believer experiences a personal Bethlehem as Jesus is birthed inside his spirit via the Spirit, from that moment the Word must now be his life. Continuing the metaphor of the Savior’s earthly life the new born Christian grows in grace and the knowledge of Christ by the power of His eternal Word which is in actuality Jesus Himself. Growing and growing this believer continues to mature until, if he is passionate and unrelenting in his pursuit, he arrives at Calvary, as did the Son of God.

Perhaps you were mislead as you reach the cross, maybe you envisioned a different kind of abiding in Him. You wanted to go to the empty tomb first and experience His resurrection without having to visit Golgotha first. Oh no, there is no resurrection without the cross. And what is the cross to us today? It is being so changed by the power of the Word of God that we can say with Paul, “I am crucified with Christ nevertheless I live, but not I, Christ lives in me,” and with that reality comes the revelation that our lives are His and His life is ours.

Somehow over the years the church has lost the cross. Oh we still mention it and wear it as jewelry, but we no longer stress the sacrificial experience by faith that provides the avenue of death for ourselves and our fleshly appetites and desires. Embracing the cross is now limited to conversion and then is tossed off as one of the childish things. Nothing could be further from the truth, the cross must still be a place of cleansing and self denial for the believer, and without denying ourselves we cannot abide in Him. Much of what passes for abiding today is a counterfeit, and like being weaned onto low fat ice cream until real ice cream is too rich for our palates we have grown accustomed to a kind of low fat abiding in Christ.

We are used to having our spiritual commitment being a convenient part of our busy lives and it is usually the first part that is sacrificed when the time grows short. If a man reads a devotional book for fifteen minutes a day he is considered a devoted follower. Yes, he may be when compared with the measuring stick of today’s experience but he surely falls short of what the Scriptures declare as being a disciple of the Savior and indeed when compared with some of the saints of days gone by. When we stop for a moment, letting the cares of this world go, and we consider Who Jesus is and how He has drawn us into His life, should not seek to surrender to His life?

I take, O cross, thy shadow for my abiding place;
I ask no other sunshine than the sunshine of his face;
Content to let the world go by, to know no gain nor loss,
My sinful self my only shame, my glory all the cross.

The cross used to expose us to the wretches we are, but now it is misrepresented as a stepping stone for our earthly success. Abiding in some hedonistic definition of Christianity is not abiding in Christ, and in truth, abiding in Christ is rare today and its exhibition seldom recognized. Without the cross there can be no true abiding in Christ and the cares of this world, the shallowness of faith, and the lack of spiritual teaching hinder many from abiding in the Lord Jesus in whom are all the treasures of heaven and earth. Few desire more than the salvation of the cross, but when confronted with embracing the disciple’s journey of sacrificial faith inherent in the cross most turn aside. Jesus on the coss is believed, but our place upon our own cross is seen as fanaticism and surely not for today’s culture.

Oh come all of us who have believed on His name, embraced His sacrifice, and committed to follow Him for the rest of eternity, let us dig deeper in Him and shedding the works of our own hands let us abide in Him and Him alone. Forever.