Abiding in Christ

This was originally the Spring 2021 Women's Gathering Teaching at Frontline South. You can listen here!

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“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. 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. Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. 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. 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. If anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. 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. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. These things I command you, so that you will love one another.”

John 15:1-17

Today, we’re going to talk about how to cultivate an intimate relationship with God — the word Jesus uses is “Abiding”. We’ve likely heard this word before, we know we’re supposed to do it, and it sounds real fancy and religious when we say it. But most of us were never taught how to practically work this out in our real lives. So today, we’re really going to unpack how we abide in Christ, what abiding looks like, and what it means for us as daughters of God.

Brother Lawrence, a 17th century French monk, wrote in his book The Practice of the Presence of God:

“There is no sweeter and delightful life than that of continual communion with God.”

Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God

We want the women of Frontline South to, if nothing else, have deep roots in the love of God and an intimate friendship with Him. We do not need more women who know information about or serve around God. We need more women who abide and delight in intimacy with God.

So let’s jump into John 15. I want to draw our attention to the passive and active components in Jesus’s words. There’s a gift of grace to receive and an invitation to practice abiding. We’ll start with the gift, then spend most of our time talking through the practice.

REMAIN: The Gift of Abiding

The NIV and CSB translate “Abide” as “Remain” (Remain in me, as I also remain in you - vs 4). The Greek word is menō. It means to remain or abide, to not depart, to continue to be present. It’s less active — though no less a command, but it doesn’t require us changing our station or working our way into abiding. Notice who is doing the actions in these verses:

“He (the Father) cuts off every branch in me (Jesus) that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you…. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit.”

John 15: 2-3, 16 (NIV)

We see that the Father is the Vinedresser, carefully tending the branches. Jesus is the vine, lovingly supplying us everything we need to bear fruit through the Spirit. He picked our dead, broken branch off the ground and breathed His resurrection life into us. He lanced the trunk of His Vine and lovingly sewed our frail branch into the healthy flesh of His, and the same Spirit and Life and Power that flows through Him now flows through us.

We don’t start from a posture of white knuckling abiding in Christ; we start from recognizing we already abide in the Vine by grace — we are a “Branch of His planting” as Isaiah 60:12 says. That’s good news! There are some ways we posture our hearts to receive this:

Remember our dependence

We first receive the gift of abiding with humble awareness that without His love and common grace, we would cease to exist. In her book Humble Roots, Hannah Anderson puts it this way: “...without God we are nothing. Without His care, without His provision, without His love, we would still be dust.”

We cannot draw a breath, move a muscle, say a word without Him knowing it and providing for it. So, practically, how do we receive this gift? We remember our dependence.

Brother Lawrence says, “If we realized our need for the grace and assistance of God, we would never lose sight of Him, not even for a moment.”

Remain in this truth

After recognizing we are a branch connected to Christ’s vine by grace, we remain in this truth. We do not depart from it in our hearts, minds, and actions. More on this in a minute, because this is actually a bit of a practice too. But it’s important to note: all that’s required of us is to anchor our hearts here. Let your heart make its dwelling place in Christ’s sufficiency.

Rejoice in the gift of abiding through worship

Ultimately, the gift of abiding leads us to rejoice in worship. We didn’t jump up and down in front of our Vinedresser and beg to be grafted in. We didn’t plead our case of good works. Before you could do anything to earn or lose your place in the Vine, Christ lavished His love on you, died to cover the cost of your sin, and grafted you into the family of God. This knowledge should lead us to reverent and joyful worship.

The gift of abiding is: it’s grace freely given by God, not works of our hands. Our first invitation is to receive the gift by remembering, remaining, and rejoicing in the finished, life-giving work of Christ.

ABIDE IN RELATIONSHIP: Practice the Presence

When it comes to the practice of abiding, Brother Lawrence says:

“In order to form a habit of communing with God continually and committing everything we do to Him, we must first make a special effort. After a while, we find that His love inwardly inspires us to do all things for Him effortlessly.”

Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God

I am a proud dog mom to this ball of wrinkles. Winnie is a rescue, and when the volunteer dropped her off at my house, she explained how they potty trained Winnie. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but it marks my dog for better and for worse.

They used a method called “tether training” — they leashed her up and wrapped the other end around the volunteer’s waist, and walked around the house together. Anywhere the volunteer went, so did Winnie. If she tried potty in the house, the volunteer would stop her and take her outside.

Pretty quickly, I realized Winnie is a velcro dog. She’s the Ruth to my Naomi — where I go, she goes; where I stay, she stays. If I get up off the couch and walk two steps to pick something up, Winnie will awaken from the deepest of slumbers to meet me on the floor. She was trained to remain in the presence of her master. I cannot break this habit, nor do I really want to at this point.

And I think, like Winnie, we can train ourselves to remain in the presence of our Master. I think we can leash ourselves to His presence for a bit, learn the habit of inviting Him into everything (some tether training, if you will) and eventually, we won’t need the leash. It’s just who we are: we become women who abide in the presence of their Master and Friend.

In the passage we read, Jesus tells us to abide in His love, which is a relational invitation. But how do we have a relationship with Him in our everyday lives between loads of laundry, work, or grocery runs?

We’ll talk through practical ways we can practice conversational intimacy with our Maker. This is not an all-inclusive list of how to hear God in conversation, nor is it prescriptive. Start where you are, know we won’t become masters at abiding overnight.

To start, Jesus offers us guidance for loving God in Matthew 22:37: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

Just like in any relationship, intimacy with God is learned and grows deeper over time. It also requires our whole selves: mind, body, and soul. To abide in love, we start by loving God with our minds, which moves to our hearts, which then roots in our souls. The end goal of the Christian life is loving union with God and a constant abiding in His presence.

One caveat: We are dependent on the Spirit to move head knowledge to our hearts and then to our souls. We cannot sanctify ourselves; apart from God we can do nothing, and He who began a good work in us will bring it through to completion. If you need something to do: pray.

Ok, let’s dive into how we practice abiding. We’ll start with our minds:

MIND: Learn about God

A.W. Tozer said:

“What comes into mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.”

First, we learn about God, loving Him with our minds. Where do we learn about Him? The Scriptures. They are His self revelation to us — the tuning ground for learning the voice of God. It is where we learn His character and nature, and the tone, timbre, and sound of His voice.

Jen Wilkin says, “The heart cannot love what the mind does not know.”

Practical handles: Get in the Bible. Learn it. Commit it to memory.

• Read large chunks at a time (Bible Project or Chronological plan)

• Bible study: Get in the book and do a deep dive with some other women in this room.

• Meditate on and memorize scripture (Psalm 1)

We don’t outgrow this step. We come back to it and move through it constantly. We have an infinite God, and we could learn something new about Him every day for the rest of eternity and never see the end of Him. We’ll never stop learning, but we also don’t stop at learning.

John Calvin wrote: “For the Word of God is not received by faith if it flits about in the top of the brain, but when it takes root in the depth of the heart.”

There is danger in stopping at head knowledge, though it is oh so important and it informs and leads to our heart knowledge.

HEART: Listen for the voice of God in conversation

Relationships are built on communication. Sam Williamson puts it this way:

“It’s perfectly ordinary for you and me to talk about “normal stuff” with our friends. So why not God? He isn’t less of a person — He’s more of a person. He isn’t less interested; he’s more interested. And he has a better attention span.”

Sam Williamson, Hearing God in Conversation

God communicates to us first and foremost through His Word, but He also speaks to us through His creation and His Spirit. There’s a book I’ve found super helpful: Hearing God in Conversation by Sam Williamson. It goes into more detail about the topics I’m about to cover, but the gift of this book for me was: God wants a conversational relationship with His people. He wants to talk to me as I go about my day. He invites me to abide in His loving presence continually.

That was great news, but my honest follow-up question was: does God speak to me enough to have actual conversations? Once I opened my heart to the different ways God speaks, I found the answer is a resounding yes. I thought God only spoke in miraculous or loud, obvious ways, so, I missed His conversational whisper. He is already in everything we do; the more we learn to seek Him in everything, the more we will find Him.

Here are some ways we can recognize God speaking:

Hearing God in Conversation

• Responsive resonance: This is when our hearts know something significant is happening. It may feel like a burning, quickening, or sensing weightiness or importance. Maybe a scripture that resonates, or recognizing God’s sovereign hand in the story of our lives, like “coincidental” circumstances, lessons we’re learning, things we hear that stand out in our hearts. I’ve grown in sensitivity to this over time, as I’ve learned to trust my ability to hear the voice of God.

• Spontaneous nudging: Sometimes God prompts our hearts to pray or do something. You may wake up in the middle of the night or have a friend cross your mind. We can’t predict it, but sometimes He nudges us to pray or step into action.

• Direct words: Sometimes you’ll hear words in your heart. For me, this has never been auditory, but I’ll get a sentence or a phrase that kinda rattles around in my heart or bears a weightiness.

• Unexpected memories: Sometimes the Lord stirs up a memory so that we can seek healing or take action in some way. This happens to me often in therapy or while processing with friends!

• Pictures: Sometimes the Lord will put a picture or image in our mind. For our c-group, this happens when we spend time in listening prayer for birthdays. We’ll often get pictures related to scripture or something going on in their life.

• Recalled passages: God frequently brings passages to our minds at the right moments. This is especially true if we are ardent memorizers! The more we steep ourselves in His Word, the more this will happen.

• Visions and dreams: Like the first few points, sometimes we get dreams that hold a particular weightiness or resonance.

• God-shaped thoughts: When we feel empty, sometimes the Spirit shapes a beautiful (or maybe obvious) thought in our mind. Sometimes I have thoughts that are too sweet to be my own and the Spirit gently reminds me He speaks to me!

• Insight into Scripture: God speaks through the Holy Spirit to illuminate the scriptures to us! He teaches us about Himself and His creation through His word, and it’s a very important place to listen for His voice.

God speaks in so many different ways. We often try to limit a limitless God! He speaks while we are listening to music or a sermon, driving to work, processing with friends, disciplining children… He is in all and through all, and there are infinite opportunities to hear His voice and see His hand at work in our stories.

The problem isn’t always that He isn’t speaking (though He doesn’t always speak when we want Him to), sometimes it’s our failure to recognize and listen for His voice in seemingly ordinary things or in places we wouldn’t expect to find Him. There’s an invitation to open our minds to the Living God, whose ways are higher than ours.

“Our failure to hear God has its deepest roots in a failure to understand, accept, and grow into a conversational relationship with God, the sort of relationship suited to friends.”

Dallas Willard

Conversation is the point. We were designed to walk in the Garden with our Maker in perfect union. So how do we step into conversation with God? Here are just a few ideas to start:

Conversation with God

• Meditate on the scriptures: Spend time in a short passage. Bring your mind back to it throughout your week. Chew on it as you go about your day! If you have a reading plan, pray a verse or two that stood out back to God throughout your day.

• Be yourself: Share your honest thoughts with God as you go about your day — spoiler alert: He already knows them. Might as well open it into a conversation!

• Ask God questions: Just like you would a friend, ask Him about Himself, for wisdom, what He thinks about certain things. This creates space for us to listen, thus enter into a conversation! One trick Sam offers is occasionally taking questions God asks in the Bible and answering them for himself, as though God asked them of him.

• Brainstorm with God: Talk to Him out loud or in your heart about things you’re processing or working through. Ask Him silly, seemingly meaningless questions and see if you can get a sense for His opinion!

• Talk to him about a variety of things: Not just holy things. The depth of our relational connections is shown in the breadth of what we talk about. He is with you always, invite him into parts of your day you usually wouldn’t.

• Get curious: Follow those little thoughts that want to know more about Him. We need to allow our hearts to have questions about God and seek Him for answers. He might not answer in the way we think, but He always has something for those who seek Him. Cultivate a holy curiosity.

• Listening prayer: Sometimes, we need to lay aside our agenda and need to speak and just listen. Let God go first. Quiet your mind and heart before the Lord and just listen for the sound of His voice. We can do this for others too!

Before we can continually abide, we have to navigate what a relationship with Him looks like. Learning how to recognize and seek out His voice is a lifelong journey. If I could summarize all of this, I’d say: Listen. Do your best to remove expectations, and just receive with open hands what The Creator of Relationship has to offer.

The sweetest gift He offers us is moment-by-moment communion with Him throughout the day. There’s no prerequisites, just a loving offer to abide in His perfect love.

SOUL: Practice the Presence of God

How do we do this? Brother Lawrence offers us a simple picture:

“I worshipped Him as often as I could, keeping my mind on His holy Presence. Whenever I noticed that my mind had wondered, I brought it back to Him. I found this very difficult, and yet I continued in the practice, without feeling guilty when my mind wandered involuntarily. I make this my constant exercise all day long, whether it was the appointed time of prayer or not. At all times — every minute of every hour, even at the busiest time of my work — I drove from my mind from everything that was capable of interrupting my thought of God.”

Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God

This point is very straightforward. And if nothing else, hear this: The invitation is as simple and sweet as just bringing our minds back to God. Anytime we feel our minds drifting from God’s presence, we gently nudge them back.

We remember our dependence, remain in the truth of the gospel, and rejoice in Him! We invite Him into seemingly insignificant things, delight in Him throughout our day, ask Him questions and be open to whatever He has to say, however He wants to say it. Rarely does He show up, speak, or answer in ways we expect.

This is a practice. It is a slow, learned one. For me, it started with talks in the car. It’s grown to more moments throughout my days. I now love to imagine having dance parties with Jesus. (And I am convinced Jesus is a Justin Bieber fan too.) It’s fun, and I think it’s a practice of delighting in the humanity of Jesus.

We don’t always have to approach our relationship with Him somberly or only invite Him into the serious “holy” stuff. He is omnipresent; He is already in the joy as much as the sorrow of our lives. We often fear inviting Him into the playful parts. Jesus laughed! He danced at weddings. People called Him a glutton and a drunkard — He knew how to have fun (He did invent it, after all), and more importantly, He knew how to be a friend.

He is holy, and there are no doubt moments where we need to take our sandals off and bow our heads to the ground before our King. There are also times where we just need to walk in the garden with our Friend. (Or just dance with Him.) We have a multifaceted God — Scripture provides stories about fear and trembling in the Presence of God as well as deep friendship with Him. To have a healthy and mature faith, we need both.

It’s ok if this feels clunky or awkward at times.You will fail earnestly at this. Sometimes you’ll show up to have a normal conversation with your Father when what you need to do is fall on your face in repentance. Or you’ll show up on your face, and He will extend His hand to you and invite you up for a walk or meal with Him. Learning how to relate to God rightly is a lifelong endeavor, but it begins with listening and discerning what the Spirit is doing and saying.

So fail earnestly. Do it continually, learn, get back up, and grab His loving hand and try again. In Matthew 7, Jesus promises: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds.”

The goal of the Christian life is abiding intimacy with God

Whether you’re starting in receiving the gift of abiding or wanting to practice actively abiding in God’s presence, you’ll work out the nuances of this over time in the company of other saints. Abiding is the work of the Christian life. Together, we’ll learn how to better live with open hearts in the presence of God, listen to Him in middle moments, cultivate intimate friendship, and remain rooted in His love.

Women of Frontline South: We do not need more women who know information about God. We need women who abide and delight in friendship and intimacy with God.

Dr. Juli Slattery says this:

“You have longings to share your heart, soul, and body with another person because God made you a deeply relational and spiritual woman. Your greatest need for intimacy, however, is to know the God who created you.”

Dr. Juli Slattery, Sex and the Single Girl

So, I think where I will leave us today is with some invitations to abide in Christ wherever we find ourselves today:

To the woman who survived abuse and wrestles with the notion of being intimately known by God: He is safe, loving, patient, and kind. He is gentle and lowly in heart. He knows your trauma, He is grieved over it, He is with you in it, and He offers the blood from His very own wounds to cover you, heal you, and offer you wholeness— abide in Him.

To the woman whose relationships are disappointing and unsatisfying: you have a Friend who will never leave you, nor forsake you. He knows you better than you’ll ever know yourself, and He’s inviting you to know Him too. What a friend you have in a Jesus — abide in Him.

To the single woman overwhelmed by sexual desire or aching for a hand to hold: God wants to meet you in your deepest desire to be united in perfect love. Your will soul will find its satisfaction in intimacy with God. The arms of your First Love are open wide — abide in Him.

To the woman struggling with her sexuality: you are already fully known and fully loved by your Maker. Allow His perfect love wash over you and cast out fear. Bring all of you to His feet. It may take time, but know He is patient — abide in Him.

To the woman lonely in marriage: your soul’s deepest desires, the ones just beyond your husband’s reach, can only be touched by God. He offers you the love and intimacy that marriage can only be a picture of. He offers you the real thing — abide in Him.

To the woman in the throes of motherhood: you will find rest and satisfaction for your soul’s deepest needs in relationship with God. He offers you respite in the chaos, a support in times of trouble, strength for your weakness, and a close friend in your loneliness — abide in Him.

To the woman struggling through infertility or the loss of a child, who is acutely aware of the lack of little feet pattering across your kitchen floor: God offers you the sweetest comfort and a solace in your pain and longing. He wants to meet you in your heartache, share your sorrows, and offer love as a balm for your soul — abide in Him.

To the empty nester feeling the loudness of the silence, missing the chaos of mothering tiny humans, or unsure of what this next season looks like: God wants to keep you company, talk with you throughout the day, and be your closest friend. He will never leave you nor forsake you. He is unchanging, even in the midst of changing seasons of life. He wants to walk with you and offers you His steady hand — abide in Him.