ABIDING IN CHRIST
There is so much that I cannot do. But I can abide in Jesus. I can stay close to my Lord if I really want to do so. I can build the kind of relationship with him where he is the most important person in my life—if that is really my desire. He will be my best friend. He will be the one I think of when I first get up in the morning. He will be my reason for living. The mention of his name will be the sweetest sound in all the world to me. This is the kind of relationship that is possible with Jesus, and it will be yours if it is really what you want.
And, on a more practical level, he will be the first consideration in every decision. He will be the one whose approval I am seeking. We will have a stronger desire to obey him and follow him than to listen to or seek the counsel of anyone else. Our relationship with Jesus will be the most real and the most consistent aspect our lives. When we open our mouths, people will not hear us, they will hear Jesus. When they observe our behavior, they will know that it is being directed by one more powerful than we. And the verdict that will be rendered concerning us, whether people think we are lunatics or saints, is simply “these people have been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).
You will know Jesus as deeply and as intimately as you desire. You will experience his closeness as strongly as you desire. In a manner of speaking, you will get as much of Jesus as you desire. Remember this, because the devil desires to make you believe that you can’t be this spiritual. That, though there may be those who walk this closely with him, you could never know him in this way. That is a lie. All it takes is surrender and desire, and you can know him as intimately as the apostle Paul.
Jesus in John 15:4 calls this life one of “remaining” in him (or as the KJV has it, “abiding”). What does it mean to abide in him? This must be a major part of the focus of our attention. In fact, if we do not understand this command, then nothing else we say will make a great deal of sense. And before we can even talk of remaining in him, we must talk of beginning this relationship. For the relationship spoken of in this text goes much deeper than just surface Christianity. It is a more intimate, passionate relationship than the Galatian Christians had. It is in, in fact, the very type of connectedness that Paul was trying to bring them into when he wrote the Galatian epistle.
The “carnal” Corinthians did not, at the time of Paul’s writing of the First Corinthian epistle, know this type of relationship. But it is the very life that he was writing to call them into. They had been baptized into Christ and were called by Paul “the sanctified in Christ Jesus” (1 Cor. 1:2). But in 3:1 he admits that, though he would liked to have talked to them like spiritual people, he could not for they were still worldly. It was to get them out of their worldliness and into the deeper Christian life that Paul wrote the letter.
My point, then, is that not every Christian enjoys the deep, intimate relationship of which Jesus speaks in John 15. There are many, many believers who have yet to “step across the line” or “move to the next level” or whatever cliché we employ to describe the matter and move into the riches of knowing him intimately. That life of experiencing his presence every day as strongly as we do on Sunday—many of us do not know what this is like. This does not mean that we are not true believers, for the Corinthians were. It means simply that we are not all that we can be or should be. That our relationship with Christ is still in the infant stage of carnality and we need to move to the mature stage of intimacy.
Dewayne Dunaway
