What does “abide” have to do with living successfully in an anxiety-saturated, hope-sapped world? What’s the pathway – what should be our focus?
Here’s a vital directive that can help us. It was given to us some 2,000 years ago on possibly the darkest night of the physical universe. Just hours before His gruesome death and ultimate sacrifice, our Savior and Elder Brother, Jesus Christ the Messiah, provided this deeply personal and powerful imperative command.
His directive is heightened by the fact that he was in full possession of the facts. He knew full well what was about to happen to Him, and, as the Bible records, it troubled Him. But His focus was elsewhere, like ours needs to be.
While Jesus knew he would soon experience searing pain, humiliation and death, he had been given a remarkably special gift.
What was that gift?
In Hebrews 1, verse nine, we read something that sometimes gets read right over. Quoting Psalm 45:6-7, we read from the New Living Translation, “You [referring to Jesus Christ] love justice and hate evil.
Therefore…your God has anointed you, pouring out the oil of joy on you more than on anyone else”
We may not think of Jesus Christ being a joy-filled person while on earth, but the Bible confirms that He had a special anointing of joy from God Himself. The spiritually driven positive outlook was part of Jesus’ ministry. What did that gift reflect?
What did that gift reflect?
The Greek word for “joy” (or “gladness” in some translations) is agalliasis – Strong’s G20 – it means “exultation, extreme joy, gladness.”
Let’s consider that Jesus Himself was given a special anointing of joy; a spiritual gift that helped Him fulfill His earthly mission. That anointing helped sustain Him right up to the end, when He became the ultimate sacrifice for us all.
Here’s where this gets very personal
Jesus Christ specifically wants to share that powerful spiritual anointing of joy with each of us, including anyone reading this. There is a specific way and means for us to receive this and other major spiritual gifts.
Let’s take a look in John the fifteenth chapter, where we’ll spend some time. It’s a very deep chapter, one that deserves careful study and application.
Specifically, let’s begin with verse 11, a very important promise for you and me. Here’s Jesus tells us: “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” The New Living Translation amplifies that to read: “I have told you these things so that you will be filled with my joy. Yes, your joy will overflow!”
Does that sound like you? Joy is something that should be evident in all of us. It’s a fruit of the spirit, the second so listed by the Apostle Paul.
Thankfully, Jesus explicitly and clearly tells us how to receive and partake of that spiritual gift of joy, and many other gifts as well.
Live Differently – abide
The critical point? We have to live differently.
Here is how our Elder Brother says to do it.
To find it, we just have to back up a few verses in John 15 and start at the beginning. These verse direct us how we are to live our daily lives.
In verse one, Jesus in His role as Messiah, speaking as One given authority to reveal critical information, our Savior says in a declarative statement:
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser.”
He does not say, “I am a like a metaphorical allegory, and my father is an anthropomorphic metaphor of a human farmer.” There are real-time specific roles and functions that Jesus and God the Father hold in each of our lives.
If we are to be true disciples, we have to be a literal spiritual branch, directly connected to Jesus as the life-giving Vine. What does that mean?
A few years ago, I spent a decade serving on the advisory council of the $2 billion Discovery Park operation at Purdue University in West Lafayette. At one meeting, a senior professor of agriculture presented a remarkable review of hydraulic pressure in plants.
Before your eyes glaze over reading this, let me say that the professor was pointing out that there was no separate pump to collect, segment and drive nutrients and water up the plant stem – the vine. There were many other functions of the vine, all critical to the life of the plant. All plants are truly living miracles in this function, although scientists would probably not use that word.
The vine would supply these nutrients so the offshoots – the branches – could bear fruit and also develop leaves for photosynthesis.
Separate the branch from the vine, she noted, and you have a condition that will result in the death of branch.
This process mirrors what Jesus taught in these last few hours before His death.
But Jesus adds an important dimension of His Father as an active vinedresser concerned with the spiritual health of His children. Jesus says in verse 2: “Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.”
Our personal relationship with Jesus the Son of God is definitely not going to be a static one. Even as we bear spiritual fruit, God gives us challenges and trials – referred here as “pruning” – to spur growth.
The result? Sometimes we grow at the speed of pain. God wants us to trust Him closely, so we can be placed in situations where our faith is tested. As James says, as we develop and apply perseverance, we produce sterling character.
That’s very difficult – perhaps even impossible – to achieve on a human scale. And that’s why Jesus gives us the solution.
Continuing His explanation of the purpose and role of Jesus as our life-giving Vine, He switches from the declarative to the imperative. In verse four, he tells what to do:
Abide in Me
“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.”
Continuing, Jesus expands this critical relationship: “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.”
“Nothing” is a big word in scripture. And remember, Jesus is delivering these critical instructions just before a galactic-level pivotal event. These are not instructions just for the Passover, but on a 24/7/365 basis for the rest of our lives.
The payoff – both in this life and in the next – is nothing short of huge.
The key point here and the main energizing takeaway, is Jesus imperative command to “abide.” If we “abide,” we’re in good spiritual shape. But there are many human physical and spiritual distractions that can get in the way of us abiding.
The apostle John loves the word context of “abide,” as he quotes Jesus using it several times in John’s Gospel and also in John’s letters. It’s critical to understand what this means.
The Greek word for “abide” was commonly used in the 1st century Greek world. The Greek transliteration is meno, Strong’s G3306. It means to “remain, dwell, sojourn, endure, remain as one, to wait for.” Sometimes it is translated “tarry,” which fulfills the “wait for,” or “remain.” Apart from being translated “abide,” the Greek word is used in different applications, appearing more than 100 times in the New Testament in varying forms.
But the context of “abide” in John’s account is critical for us, including both our daily life today and our life to come.
To abide represents a dynamic, ongoing commitment and process.
Jesus doesn’t command us to “one off” things. Repentance (which Greek word means to “think differently”) is an ongoing commitment and process. When we stumble or when we learn of something we need to change, we engage in a dynamic spiritual process, one that is led by God’s Holy Spirit.
When Jesus tells to abide in Him, that means we are to be engaged through our minds and lives all the time. He makes that clear in John chapter eight, verse 31:
“Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide [dwell, remain, endure] in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
There is nothing uniquely religious about the word abide. In the language of the New Testament, it is the ordinary word for “stay” or “continue” or sometimes “dwell.” Jesus meant: “Stay in me. Continue in me. Keep me for your dwelling.” It is the lifelong extension of seeking and engaging in a relationship with Jesus, our Elder Brother and soon coming King.
When you seek and obey God (as instructed by our Elder Brother Jesus), you are physically abiding with Jesus Christ, reflecting your surrender to God and your desire to be like Him. But truly abiding in Jesus Christ the Messiah and Son of God goes beyond this. When we abide – dwell closely with Him 24/7 – in Jesus Christ, we receive the capacity to bear spiritual fruit and to grow spiritually.
The Messiah lives in us!
Also, and this is vitally important, when we “abide” in Jesus Christ, He lives His life in us – he abides with us!
If we consider the element of “dwelling” we can see what this means more fully for us personally.
David wrote of this in a powerful way in Psalm 27. In fact, he put a very high priority for dwelling with God, as we read in verse 4:
One thing have I asked of the Lord,
that will I seek after:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord
and to inquire [or meditate] in his temple.”
Here’s an important point for you to consider. When David wrote Psalm 27, there was no temple. Solomon would not complete the physical First Temple until after David had died. The only “temple” prior to that was the tent of meeting tabernacle at Shiloh. David of course moved the Ark of Covenant to Jerusalem after defeating the Philistines, where it was sheltered in a tent and a temporary altar was set up for David to offer burnt and peace offerings.
To understand the context of this, let us consider that the physical temple (whether in the tent of meeting in the wilderness or the first temple of Solomon) featured three distinct areas. The Holy of Holies of course was where the Ark of the Covenant was kept. The ark had two cherubim covering the ark (and was covered with a blue cloth when travelling). God would speak to the Israelites from this physical location called the mercy seat, so it represented His Presence on earth.
So we can understand that David wanted to be close to God, living 24/7 in God’s presence. The Hebrew word for “beauty” here means kindness or delightfulness, and it also is one of the words used to signify God’s favor or even grace.
Like what Jesus commands to abide, David wanted a similar relationship. He wanted to live in God’s presence, which we should be desiring as well. We daily seek God through prayer, meditation and Bible study to get closer to that presence and have God – through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and Jesus Himself – nestled deeply in our lives.
A major part of abiding in Jesus Christ is keeping His commandments, including the ones He gave at Sinai when He served as the spiritual Rock guiding the ancient Israelites. As Jesus emphatically declared in John 15, verse 10
“If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.”
Through active obedience with understanding – following the example of Jesus who learned obedience through the things He suffered – we abide – DWELL – in the love of Jesus, thereby also having access to spiritual love from God the Father Himself.
Jesus says as much back in the 14th chapter of John, in verse 23:
“If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”
This command to abide, to be directly connected to God through Jesus Christ as the living and life-giving Vine is vitally important to you and me in our daily lives.
Mirroring humanly what David wrote, we want to be in the presence of – to dwell with – our husband or wife. We want a day-to-day, sometimes minute-by-minute relationship that we prefer. We may need to be physically apart from time to time, but we use cell phones, texts and other communication to stay in touch with the people whom we love.
We do it because we have developed a deep relationship that draws us physically together.
Living and abiding with God and Jesus Christ
The same is true of Jesus Christ and God the Father. We are commanded to abide – to desire to dwell – in a direct relationship with Jesus, which leads directly to a relationship with God.
What’s the unbreakable promise for doing this? As Jesus Himself declared in John 15:7: “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.”
If we indeed are dwelling – abiding in Jesus, drinking in the powerful words that He caused to be preserved, our prayers will be answered. As Romans 12:1-2 shows us, God’s will for us will be revealed to us by the transforming of our minds through the power of the Holy Spirit. We can therefore be aligned with both Jesus and God and pray according to that divine will.
To abide represents a dynamic, ongoing commitment and process.
When we abide and are connected to the spiritual Vine that is Jesus Christ, we will bear fruit. God will regularly move us out of our comfort zone and help us to produce even more fruit, preparing us with sterling character that will last for all eternity.
When we abide and dwell daily with Jesus, surrendering our lives through dynamic repentance and change, people will see emerging in our lives the spiritual fruit of “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” These are all spiritual gifts that reflect the quality and character of God.
Now, you may ask, how does one actually “abide” in Jesus and Him in us?
You probably already know the answer, but allow me to bring it up for review. There are three deliberate acts and focus that will help us to develop a close abiding relationship with Jesus Christ and God.
The first is to live and walk by faith.
Paul wrote to Romans, ringing down to us today: “For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”
As Peter tells us in 1 Peter 1:8 “Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory.”
There’s that special anointing of joy that Jesus promised that He would make available to us when we dwell and abide in Him.
We read in Hebrews 11:6 a familiar but critical verse: “without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.”
Inherent in this walk of faith is the willingness and commitment to trust God, believing what we just read that “he rewards those who seek him.” That’s a major part of abiding, of dwelling in, of living with Jesus and God.
The second part required to abide involves spending time.
How we use our time here on earth directly reflects the quality of life we will have. If we waste time, we reap the consequences. If we invest our time and energy in profitable activities, we will benefit.
If we want to abide in Jesus Christ, we have to be drinking deep of His revealed word. It’s no accident that a paramount title of Jesus is the Word. Scripture has power when it appears in our minds through study and meditation. Its power is indeed a mystery. Even as you today hear the words of scripture, God personally contours and shapes those words so they impact you personally. Everyone today will walk away with different things to work on, even within the context of what was read aloud.
Quite literally, we you read or hear scripture with purpose and intent, a miracle occurs. God’s Holy Spirit changes those powers into life-giving and life-sustaining power within your mind.
Abiding or dwelling with Jesus means speaking with Him and God our mutual Father. Jesus wants us to understand who and what God is, which character and purpose Jesus directly reflects. Paul prayed in Ephesians that the eyes of our hearts would be opened and enlightened so we would perceive and understand God the Father. Later in Ephesians, we read that God Himself wants us to understand the depth of love that Jesus Christ manifests. It’s amazing to consider.
But we have to spend quality time. That doesn’t mean that everything has to be an elaborate spiritual production where you’re on your knees surrounded by commentaries, laptops and various translations. You can simply pray regularly and silently – like right n0w – to help to abide with Jesus Christ and dwell in God’s presence.
Third, we learn how to abide and dwell with Jesus when we engage in deliberate and intentional action. These actions involve in actively surrendering ourselves to God through Jesus Christ, being willing to search out and break up fallow ground in our physical, emotional and spiritual lives.
We are instructed in Hosea chapter 10, verse 12: “Sow for yourselves righteousness; reap steadfast love; break up your fallow ground, for it is the time to seek the Lord, that he may come and rain righteousness upon you.”
As Jesus Himself declared time and again, we must obey God and keep His commandments. As God is love, those commandments are grounded in love. Their application improves our lives.
There is one that Jesus deliberately gave us in an imperative context. This is a must do. We find it in John 13, verse 34: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34-35, ESV)
We do this imperfectly, but the continued intent and active action must be there. We must aim high constantly, knowing that through the spiritual grace of God we will be strengthened and made complete.
Our deliberate acts of obedience and worship in keeping the Sabbath and the Holy Days present us with dual spiritual benefits. We cannot go more than a week without a physical reminder of the Creation and the coming Kingdom of God, spanning God’s purpose for us. That is strategically and periodically recalled to mind in the cycle of the Holy Days, each building upon itself to sketch out and magnify the awesome plan of God.
These days give us a framework for worship, service and praise to God – all attributes of actively abiding and dwelling in Jesus Christ the Messiah, and Him dwelling in us through the Holy Spirit.
So as we live our daily lives – even when we hear of discouraging reports of war and economic turmoil — let us seek to sustain that spiritual gift of rejoicing by learning how to more fully abide and dwell with Jesus Christ.
And in the weeks and months just ahead of us, let’s seize the opportunity to make this the year we truly abide in Jesus the Messiah, the one anointed with the oil of joy.
Interested in a video version? Watch this presentation by Michael Snyder on YouTube.
