⁴ “Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me.”

Fruitfulness the goal, abiding the process. It is popularly said today that the Lord does not command us to be fruitful, only to be faithful. While technically that pithy statement may be true in a very narrow sense, God does in fact want us to be fruitful. One of His last commands to the disciples was to be fruitful in making disciples (Matt 28:18-20). Granted the word “fruitful” is not used there, but the idea is clearly in focus.

The question really is, how does the Christian become fruitful? We cannot reach into our inner resources, within ourselves. We cannot dig deep enough, because we simply do not have the ability to be fruitful on our own. The analogy Jesus uses is so simple it needs no explanation. A branch does not have fruit-making ability , it must be fully connected to the plant stem. Our verse today is clear, we need to be vitally connected to Christ.

Now we have suggested earlier that Jesus is talking to His disciples, and therefore, that they are already part of the body of believers. As it were, they were already abiding with Christ, as they were with Him since His baptism and now at the end, in the Upper Room for His final meal. But they needed to learn about abiding “in” Christ, for that is what would produce the fruitfulness after He was physically gone.

So what does it mean to abide? And why does the abiding go both ways, Jesus abiding in them, and they in Him? We stumble when we try to substitute other words than the metaphorical ones. But abiding seems to have in view the relationship with Christ that is symbiotic. We have a spiritual dependence on Christ and we are His hands, feet and mouth. We draw our spiritual sustenance from Him like a branch draws sap from the tree. Like branches are the outward manifestation of the tree, we are the body of Christ, through whom Jesus is at work in the world.

Suffice it to say presently that this relationship is absolutely necessary to accomplish anything of spiritual note for God. We may accomplish a great deal in this world, including large church edifices, expanding moral influence and profound Bible teaching. But unless we are abiding in Christ and He in us, then we have no genuine spiritual fruit of the sort Jesus talked about. Like building a house on the sand, accomplishing great things without abiding in Christ will only result in the loss of those very things we spent our lives accomplishing.

Lord, I confess to You all the things I have done in my own power and will, without abiding in Christ. I commit to turning away from all that.