04.11 | Abide
John 15:1-17
“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.”
John 15:5
I was recently interviewed on a podcast with a doctor. The doctor (a good friend, and a Christian), wanted to unpack the relationship between spiritual health and holistic wellbeing. His surgery approach this by attending to each patient’s physical, emotional, and spiritual health.
It’s a popular idea. Significant numbers of people now seek a kind of wellbeing that is not restricted to merely physical or emotional. Many people recognise that there is something intrinsic to their lived experience that happens on a plane neither described by the emotional nor the physical—a deeper sense of awareness, a wider sense of being, a deeper sense of self. It is kind of wellbeing that can allow a person joy in the midst of physical or emotional suffering, or peace in the face of physical or emotional strain.
But our discussion took this a little deeper. Because the wider view of our culture tends to view spirituality as if it were a compartmentalised and depersonalised aspect of our lives.
What does this mean?
We view spirituality as compartmentalised, because we view certain activities as ‘spiritual’, while other activities we view as unspiritual. We think we are attending to our spirituality when we go to church, or open our Bibles, or are sitting cross-legged in meditation surrounded by essential oil diffusions.
We view spirituality as depersonalised, because we think of spirituality as something that we do, or become, or experience. We talk of spirituality as if it were the mere crafting of inner depth and vitality—a wellbeing tool there to hone our lives to a more utopian version of the self.
And yet, into such a moment as this, Jesus comes and reorients our entire lives, with a single word.
Abide.
He is about to go to the Cross. He is about to leave His disciples to work out their ministry and purpose in the wake of the new reality that His crucifixion will unleash. They are about to find themselves responsible for a megachurch in Jerusalem and a church planting movement that will sweep Europe in a generation and will go on to reach the corners of the earth.
How are they to do this?
Abide.
The word means to live in, settle in, remain in. It has the sense of arrival at a place and then not moving on from there. As they have lived their lives from the epicentre of Jesus for these three years of their discipleship training, Jesus is telling them to go nowhere else.
This confronts our assumptions and dumbfounds our cultural ideologies — for ‘spirituality’, as articulated by Jesus, is not merely a compartment of the self, looking to get taken out for a little exercise from time to time. Neither is it a depersonalised experience—isolated and unrelational. Rather, spirituality is at core a relationship with the One who made you. It is thinking and feeling and doing all things and all activities from the nerve centre of our existence—a relationship of loving interactivity with the God who made us and invites us to participate in His eternal family. To be spiritual is not to know about Jesus or merely copy His ways: it is to know Him. It is to know Him personally. The truly spiritual person has allowed this relationship become the beating heart of our every moment and our every decision.
For this is what it means to abide.
Let Him reorient you today, for there will never be a day that you do not need this word. Let Him reorient you, that all the tasks, hopes, intentions, and fears, will not be worked out in the million things you want to do and control and fix.
But rather—simply, faithfully, consistently, and oh-so-fruitfully—they are to be worked out as we do nothing more greatly, than abide.
Reflect:
What does abiding more deeply in Him look like for me today?
Pray:
Lord Jesus,
I find it easier to become
Complicated:
I get busy, I take control, I try to fix.
And yet, Lord,
You invite me
To abide.
I find it easier
To run the ways of the religious and the exhausted—
Recalling you only occasionally,
And yet, Lord,
You invite me
To abide.
I find it easier
To do things for you and to talk about you
Than I do to truly sit with you,
And yet, Lord,
You invite me to abide.
And thus, Lord,
I come today,
To reorient my being around being
With you,
And to let my doing
Flow from you.
For without you I can do nothing of substance,
And yet, with you, and from you, and in you—
In the joy of freedom and love—
There will be much fruit.
And so, dear Lord,
I let go, simplify, and
Abide.
In Your Name,
Amen
Old Testament:
For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:
Ezekiel 10-12 | Psalm 123