So one of my favorite passages is John 15 talking about the vine and the branches, and it's something that comes to mind a lot when i think about spiritual matters. Tonight I was thinking about verse 4 where it says
"remain in Me and I will remain in you" (NIV)
or another phrasing i like
"abide in Me and I in you" (KJV)
That got me thinking, what does it mean to abide in Christ?
When i think about abiding, i think about living in, dwelling, making my home there. but I feel like most times my relationship with God looks more like a corner store than a house. I when I come in, I get what I need, maybe make some small talk, and leave. Some days it's raining, or I'm on the other side of town, so I don't come in at all.
Seems like a funny metaphor, but I think it's pretty accurate. My days might consist of a quick prayer, a brief quiet time, and then the rest of the day God gets put on the back burner. Even Sundays when I go to church, it's just a bigger block of time before I go my own way and leave God behind. I've got to deal with work and traffic and bills and chores and in all of these things, there's little or no thought or need for God.
This doesn't seem like what Christ is asking of us in John 15. or the rest of the Bible for that matter.
So I don't know if it's just the patterns in my life, or the way I choose to live in those patterns that keeps me from abiding in Christ. I don't want stop by, i want to be there for the long haul.
Any thoughts on how this should work? or examples of how you can abide in Christ throughout the day?
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1 comment:
Chair-a-me,
I think one main way that we can abide in Christ is to abide in his word. Obviously we can't be reading it constantly, but if we are committing Scripture to memory, then we will be able to dwell on it all day. One of my friends and I just decided to memorize Romans 12.
I dunno. What do you think you can do to abide in Christ daily and even minute by minute?
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