Abide In Me

Abide in Me and I in you.  As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me.  I am the vine, you are the branches.  He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.
John 15:4-5 

     One of the things I have learned in my walk with God is that there is no doubt He is for us.  He wants the very best for us.  I have also learned over the years that what we might assume that means and what it actually does mean sometimes are very different.  Unless we learn to see from His perspective we will certainly lose heart somewhere along the way.

     We must come to understand the necessity of getting us to realize our nothingness apart from Him.  Yes, God is for us and because He is for us He will take us down. By that I mean He will use the "trouble" in life Jesus said we would have to His full advantage. How we respond to that is our choice, and our response will be according to how much we have renewed our minds through His word so that we know His heart, not just His commands. 

  Romans 8:28 tells us that if we love God and are called according to His purpose He causes all things to work together for our good....the good is defined in the next verse as being conformed to the image of His son. Jesus drew all of his worth and value from his identity in God the Father, as should we.  

      Apart from Him we truly can do nothing, all of our fruitfulness comes from abiding in the vine and He will remove every aspect of our self life in which we have put our hope or learned to draw our worth and value from to get us to learn this. The sad thing is that sometimes this process often causes us to misunderstand His dealings with us unless we have built an intimate relationship with Him and have come to trust His heart.  If not, what usually results is a pseudo Christian existence without the life of Christ flowing out because we were not willing to die to the false sense of worth and value we have continued to cling to even after coming to Him.  This in part is what Jesus meant when He said, “he who seeks to save his live shall lose it, but he who loses his life for my sake shall save it”.  Jesus is the Truth, the Life and the Way.  Any truth, life or way we think we may have found outside of Him is nothing but a lie and a deception taking us further and further away from the only one who loved us enough to die so we can know the Life that is truly life. 

Abide Poem   
Surrender