Abide in Me; a two way street - Day 3: Thirty Day Meditations to Abundant Life!

We want fruit. We want to matter. We want to overcome. We want to be victors. We want to live holiness. And so, naturally, we pray hard, read a lot and maybe fast like crazy. And yet in all this frenzy of activity, we miss out some of the most obvious facts and end up treating God as if He was both deaf and mute. Let me explain.

Courtesy of KRob2005, modifications by DR.

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. (John 15:4)

I can't tell you how unnatural a statement this is to our instincts. Bearing such fruit is arduous activity in Christendom. And because we are so keen to acquire said fruits, we act like busy bees, buzzing all over the place. And so when one bee sees another that is lazily meandering it's way in the sky, we chastise them in 'brotherly love' and tell them to try harder. And if one bee seems stuck in the mud, he's certain to get another loving 'warning' that he hasn't been truly trying enough. The answer of man to failure is always simply more activity, no matter how futile or meaningless it is. 

Abiding in Him, Jesus said, is the way to bear fruit, just as a branch abides in the vine. Does a branch have to try to abide in the vine? No! It's just there! It doesn't move. And speaking about moving, have you ever noticed how trees don't move? Yet trees are the longest living creatures, some of them on our planet have been around since before the first Christmas. Talk about fruitful, they've been around for thousands of years, a lot of time to bear tons of fruit.

And when you hear about abiding in Christ,  you immediately think of doing certain things. It's the way we've been trained as believers in Christ. Number one: read the Bible. Second, pray. Third, worship. Fourth, go to church. And so on. 

Now, please don't misunderstand me, all those things are great, but they are not what it means to abide in Christ... it might bring you into a different mental and emotional state so you start consciously abiding in Christ, but they are not the way one abides. I say this because the way we go about dealing with these 'devotional disciplines' of Bible study, prayer and worship would make one think that the God to whom we are attempting to get closer to and please through such activities, seems rather deaf and is certainly mute.

I can tell we think God is mute when we treat the written Bible as the only source of God's words. I can tell we think our Lord is deaf when people pray harder, louder and more frequently... perhaps if they just knocked enough, the doors of heaven would open! I most certainly know that we really think God is mute because when we pray we don't wait to hear Him answer the prayer. We just blurt our requests or whatever and then switch channels, ciao, bye, we're gone and He's there telling the angels "He hung up on me... again!" 

Friends, I just want to tell you, God, your Father, your Jesus, the Spirit of the Almighty living in you... He is so, so, so alive. He is always ready, always hearing, and, if you would allow yourself to believe, even always speaking, directly, to you. (On a side note, God bless the pastors, preachers and teacher of the church, who don't monopolize the word of God but rather tell those they influence that they are well able to hear and learn directly from their heavenly Father... these are true leaders, those that empower those under their wings, training them to be better than they).

So today, abide in the Lord. And as you do, be attentive to how He responds. He is actively listening to everything you are saying, interacting with you as you pray and worship and read the Bible. And then, let your spiritual ears open... He'll never leave you just hanging there. He will speak words sweeter than honey, dripping with grace, gleaming with love for you. 

What am I waiting for? That's why I desperately need. Abide!

This is day 3. Want day 2? Click here: The surprisingly simple secret of divine protection - (Day 2: Thirty day meditations to abundant life)

David Roiel

The Green Leaf Blog-Discover your inheritance!

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