One of the most merciful gifts God can give us is a deep and acute awareness of our dependence on Him in everything.
Living the Christian life depends on our total dependence on God’s grace, which we receive through Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit. Jesus said this:
- “I am the vine.
- You are the sticks.
- He who remains in me and I in him bears much fruit; because without me nothing can be done.
- “(John 15.
- 5).
Every professing Christian agrees that we should remain in Christ, but our agreement is only important to the extent that we believe this is true. The less we feel our need for Christ, the less we will remain in Him.
If we’re not hungry, we won’t eat
Say? Because he is close to the kind of knowledge of our need for Jesus, which he wants us to have. It’s not just brain knowledge, it’s experienceal, like knowing we need food.
But it’s one thing to know that we need nutrients for our body when we haven’t eaten for 24 hours; knowing that we need nutrients for our body after devouring a bag of chips with a liter of soda is something else, we are unlikely to eat the foods we really need after satisfying our appetite with junk food, if we are not hungry, will not eat, especially the type of food we need most.
The same goes for spiritual nutrition: if we are not hungry for God because we eat spiritual waste, we are unlikely to want to eat the food we need most, the food of the vine.
If we don’t stay, we won’t survive
When Jesus gave us his command to remain in him, He did not give us a noble ideal to follow, as if it were an inspiring motto. Nor did he want to put this as an option for the most serious Christians, who aspire to a “Deeper Life”. What he meant was that we’d only survive if we stayed. Like physical nutrition, good spiritual nutrition is a matter of life and death. That is why Jesus continued to say in the following verse:
He who does not remain in me is thrown like a stick and dry; these sticks are collected, thrown into the fire, and burned (John 15:6).
These are serious words. Jesus was only a few hours away from the crucifixion. For his disciples, everything would change radically. Jesus would die, then be resurrected, then leave them, and ascend to the Father, and then send his Holy Spirit to help them continue their mission (John 16:4-15). They had learned to depend on him for everything. Now they should learn to depend on him for everything, without him being physically present.
His own survival would depend on staying in him (John 15:4), and with that he wanted to live (remember, believe, love, and reverse everything) for his words, rather than for his own natural perceptions (John 15:7), just as they had done. I believed in him when I was physically with them. They should walk by faith and not by sight, in a way that the world would find foolish and weak (2 Corinthians 5. 7; 1 Corinthians 1. 18-25); otherwise they would dry out and die.
This is no less true for us. Staying in Christ, our vineyard, is the only way to survive spiritually.
How God Increases Our Addiction
Now, if our survival depends on our permanence, and it is not plausible that we should remain in Christ when we feel our need for Him (hunger for the food that only He can provide), then what we really need is a deep and acute awareness of our dependence, this for everything. We must implore the vine and the farmer (John 15. 1) to do what is necessary to help us if we cling to the vine and test our connection to it, through the fruit we produce (John 15. 3-4).
How should we expect to feel when God responds to this prayer for a greater sense of dependence on Him?As always, we feel dependent: weakness and helplessness.
Feeling dependent is the opposite of feeling strong in self-reliance, just as hunger is different from the impracticality you feel after being saturated with soft drinks and chips Increasing permanence is the direct result of our greatest sense of need to stay. Most likely, the pammpano that feels its own helplessness remains in the vine and fears the death that separation will bring.
If we understand this, we will understand what Paul meant when he said, “From what I like about weaknesses, insults, needs, persecutions, anxieties for Christ. Because when I’m weak, I’m actually strong. ” (2 Corinthians God used these things to urge Paul to depend on the grace of Christ, rather than himself, and as a result Paul learned to be grateful for them.
And these are the things our Father-Farmer uses to uproot things that have not been successful and increase our dependence on the Son-Vigne (John 15:2). Because the difference between a pammpano that remains in the vine and grows strong and fruitful and a pammpano in which it does not happen, is the degree to which a pammpano knows (believes and feels) that outside the vine, can do nothing. (John 15:5).
Everything that’s needed, sir
We all cling (remain) to what we truly believe gives us life, and towards this Vine we will look more often for what we think gives us more life. For us, this vine must be Christ, staying there is a matter of life. and death. So let’s make this our prayer:
In any case, Lord, my awareness of my dependence on you on everything increases, so that I may remain continually in you by faith.