#heisthevine

Sometimes in our Christian walk, we come across passages that can simply confound us. What is this passage saying? What does God want me to do in response to this passage? What does applying this passage to my life actually look like?

One such passage for me is John 15. There Jesus declares Himself to be the vine. He tells us that we need to “abide” in Him. Our abiding in Him leads us to produce fruit and the person who doesn’t abide in Him is thrown away, like a branch into the fire. The key question here is what does it mean to “abide”? Over the years I have heard many people talk about this and try to explain it. I have even taught a lesson on the topic of abiding, but I’ve always found myself lacking in true understanding of this word.

When we approach this passage and seek to interpret it accurately the word that is most often thrown out there, to aid in our understanding, is “remain.” The Greek word “meno” is rightly translated as “remain”, but I find it doesn’t communicate the full intent of this passage.

My application of John 15 has long been an intent to remain in Christ. This is not in the sense of losing or not losing my salvation (I don’t believe this passage is speaking to the issue of permanency of salvation), but rather in the sense of continually walking with Him. Given this understanding my end goal would be to simply walk with Christ, spending time with Him through Scripture and prayer so that I can be fruitful. However, I recently came across a picture that opened my eyes to the depths of what remaining in Christ can truly mean.

In John Ortberg’s book, Eternity is Now in Session, he writes “When we abide we make a home (our “abode”) in a place. We linger there, and our inner person gets shaped by our abode. We can abide in fear. We can abide in ambition. We can abide in anger. We can abide in lust. Or we can abide in God. The place where we abide is called ‘home.’" (pg 153)

John 15.4 says “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.” Applying Ortberg’s picture of abiding being the place where we make our home we get a deeper sense of what these verses mean. God has invited us to truly make our homes in Him. There are certain things in life that can become our homes, things that create in us an internal drive. Items or ideas that serve to create in us things we ought not to feel. We can become driven to create our home in a place where we don’t belong - fear, ambition, anger, lust, to name a few. When our home is in these types of places we will produce the wrong fruit. When we make our home in God we become transformed. Not only do we make our home in Him, but He makes His home in us (v. 5 whoever abides in me and I in him...). There is a merging of ourselves with God. I’m certainly not saying we become divine, but we gain unity with Him. Our will, purpose, and identity melts into God as we abide in Him, truly making Him our home. The more He becomes our home the more we become like Him. The things He values we start to value, the love and grace He shows start to be manifested in us. We become like Him - Christlike.

The beautiful byproduct of this abiding is we start to produce the right fruit. We can never produce the right fruit by our own effort, but when we have truly made our home in Him the right fruit is a natural byproduct. We can’t help but produce the right fruit because we are fully connected to the vine. When the branch is connected to the vine, which receives all the nutrition it needs from the ground, then it can’t help but produce fruit. Producing fruit is natural when we have truly made God our home.