[Real Life] Abide To AchieveUzorak

Good Soil

A story is told that a while back there was a school that had a fire. When the alarm went off, the kids thought it was a fire drill, so they were excited to miss class for a while. As they got out of their classrooms they realized that there was smoke coming through the hallways. They went out into the parking lot and teachers began to count noses. The principal then realized that some of the kids did not make it out alive. The principal and the teachers vowed to rebuild the school and set up a state-of-the-art sprinkler system so this would never happen again. As time went by, a janitor was walking around the newly remodeled school doing some inspections. He realized that even though they had a sprinkler system that could put a fire out at any moment, they had failed to connect it to the water source. They had everything, but no connection to the water! 

I give you that illustration as we talk about abiding because you can have everything, but if you are not connected to the water source, to Jesus Christ, nothing is going to work. Life is never going to satisfy you because sin can never satisfy. No accomplishment can satisfy. 

Jesus extends this invitation to us, “Abide in Me and I will abide in you.” 

To abide is to experience a restful residence and a desperate dependence. We rest in the Lord. We trust in God that He is the vine and we are the branches. We are just a conduit, a pipeline for His glory and for what He wants to do. It is not our choices that matter; it is His choices. We yield as the vine takes His glory to the fruit. We are just the branch that it comes through. We are desperately dependent upon Him and restfully resident in Him. He has made us clean. 

We are not encouraged to bear fruit, but to abide. If we abide in Christ, desperately dependent on Him, restfully residing in Him, then the fruit will take care of itself. If we focus on bearing fruit, we will not abide in Christ. We may die trying to bear fruit, and we won’t get to know Jesus any better in the process. It is in abiding that we find out who we are in Him.