Tip #7: If you abide in me
‘If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatsoever you will,
and it shall be done unto you.’–John xv. 7.
IN all God’s interactions with us, the promise and its conditions are
inseparable. If we fulfill the conditions, He fulfills the promise.
What He is to be to us depends upon what we are willing to be to Him.
‘Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.’ And so in prayer the
unlimited promise, ‘Ask whatsoever you will,’ has its one simple and
natural condition, ‘if you abide in me.’ It is Christ whom the Father
always hears; God is in Christ, and can only be reached by being in
Him; to be IN HIM is the way to have our prayer heard; fully and wholly
ABIDING IN HIM, we have the right to ask whatsoever we will, and the
promise that it shall be done unto us.
When we compare this promise with the experiences of most believers, we
are startled by a terrible discrepancy. Who can number up the
countless prayers that rise and bring no answer? The cause must be
either that we do not fulfill the condition, or God does not fulfil the
promise. Believers are not willing to admit either, and therefore have
devised a way of escape from the dilemma. They put into the promise
the qualifying clause our Saviour did not put there–if it be God’s
will; and so maintain both God’s integrity and their own. O if they
did but accept it and hold it fast as it stands, trusting to Christ to
vindicate His truth, how God’s Spirit would lead them to see the Divine
propriety of such a promise to those who really abide in Christ in the
sense in which He means it, and to confess that the failure in the
fulfilling the condition is the one sufficient explanation of
unanswered prayer. And how the Holy Spirit would then make our
feebleness in prayer one of the mightiest motives to urge us on to
discover the secret, and obtain the blessing, of full abiding in
Christ.
‘If you abide in me.’ As a Christian grows in grace and in the knowledge
of the Lord Jesus, he is often surprised to find how the words of God
grow too, in the new and deeper meaning with which they come to him.
He can look back to the day when some word of God was opened up to him
and he rejoiced in the blessing he had found in it. After a time some
deeper experience gave it a new meaning, and it was as if he never had
seen what it contained. And yet once again, as he advanced in the
Christian life, the same word stood before him again as a great
mystery, until anew the Holy Spirit led him still deeper into its
Divine fullness. One of these ever-growing, never-exhausted words,
opening up to us step by step the fullness of the Divine life, is the
Master’s precious ‘Abide in me.’ As the union of the branch with the
vine is one of growth, never-ceasing growth and increase, so our
abiding in Christ is a life process in which the Divine life takes ever
fuller and more complete possession of us. The young and feeble
believer may be really abiding in Christ up to the measure of his
light; it is he who reaches onward to the full abiding in the sense in
which the Master understood the words, who inherits all the promises
connected with it.
In the growing life of abiding in Christ, the first stage is that of
faith. As the believer sees that, with all his feebleness, the command
is really meant for him, his great aim is simply to believe that, as he
knows he is in Christ, so now, notwithstanding unfaithfulness and
failure, abiding in Christ is his immediate duty, and a blessing within
his reach. He is specially occupied with the love, and power, and
faithfulness of the Saviour: he feels his one need to be believing.
It is not long before he sees something more is needed. Obedience and
faith must go together. But faith must be made manifest in obedience. Faith is
obedience at home and looking to the Master: obedience is faith going
out to do His will. He sees how he has been more occupied with the
privilege and the blessings of this abiding than with its duties and
its fruit. There has been much of self and of self-will that has been
unnoticed or tolerated: the peace which, as a young and feeble
disciple, he could enjoy in believing goes from him; it is in practical
obedience that the abiding must be maintained: ‘If you keep my commands,
you shall abide in my love.’ As before his great aim was through the
mind, and the truth it took hold of, to let the heart rest on Christ
and His promises; so now, in this stage, he chief effort is to get his
will united with the will of his Lord, and the heart and the life
brought entirely under His rule.
And yet it is as if there is something wanting. The will and the heart
are on Christ’s side; he obeys and he loves his Lord. But still, why
is it that the fleshly nature has yet so much power, that the
spontaneous motions and emotions of the inmost being are not what they
should be? The will does not approve or allow, but here is a region
beyond control of the will. And why also, even when there is not so
much of positive commission to condemn, why so much of omission, the
deficiency of that beauty of holiness, that zeal of love, that
conformity to Jesus and His death, in which the life of self is lost,
and which is surely implied in the abiding, as the Master meant it?
There must surely be something in our abiding in Christ and Christ in
us, which he has not yet experienced.
It is so. Faith and obedience are but the pathway of blessing. Before
giving us the parable of the vine and the branches, Jesus had very
distinctly told what the full blessing is to which faith and obedience
are to lead. Three times over He had said, ‘If you love me, keep my
commandments,’ and spoken of the threefold blessing with which He would
crown such obedient love. The Holy Spirit would come from the Father;
the Son would manifest Himself; the Father and the Son would come and
make their abode. It is as our faith grows into obedience, and in
obedience and love our whole being goes out and clings itself to
Christ, that our inner life becomes opened up, and the capacity is
formed within of receiving the life, the spirit, of the glorified
Jesus, as a distinct and conscious union with Christ and with the
Father. The word is fulfilled in us: ‘In that day you shall know that I
am in my Father and you in me, and I in you.’ We understand how, just
as Christ is in God, and God in Christ, one together not only in will
and in love, but in identity of nature and life, because they exist in
each other, so we are in Christ and Christ in us, in union not only of
will and love, but of life and nature too.
It was after Jesus had spoken of our thus through the Holy Spirit
knowing that He is in the Father, and even so we in Him and He in us,
that He said, ‘Abide in me, and I in you.’ Accept, consent to receive
that Divine life of union with myself, in virtue of which, as you abide
in me, I also abide in you, even as I abide in the Father. So that
your life is mine and mine is yours. This is the true abiding, the
occupying of the position in which Christ can come and abide; so
abiding in Him that the soul has come away from self to find that He
has taken the place and become our life. It is the becoming as little
children who have no care, and find their happiness in trusting and
obeying the love that has done all for them.
To those who thus abide, the promise comes as their rightful heritage:
Ask whatsoever you will. It cannot be otherwise. Christ has got full
possession of Them. Christ dwells in their love, their will, their
life. Not only has their will been given up; Christ has entered it,
and dwells and breathes in it by His Spirit. He whom the Father always
hears, prays in them; they pray in Him: what they ask shall be done
unto them.
Beloved fellow-believer! let us confess that it is because we do not
abide in Christ as He would have us, that the Church is so impotent in
presence of the infidelity and worldliness and heathendom, in the midst
of which the Lord is able to make her more than conqueror. Let us
believe that He means what He promises, and accept the condemnation the
confession implies.
But let us not be discouraged. The abiding of the branch in the Vine
is a life of never-ceasing growth. The abiding, as the Master meant
it, is within our reach, for He lives to give it us. Let us but be
ready to count all things loss, and to say, ‘Not as though I had already
attained; I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which I also
am apprehended of Christ Jesus.’ Let us not be so much occupied with
the abiding, as with Him to whom the abiding links us, and His
fullness. Let it be Him, the whole Christ, in His obedience and
humiliation, in His exaltation and power, in whom our soul moves and
acts; He Himself will fulfill His promise in us.
And then as we abide, and grow evermore into the full abiding, let us
exercise our right, the will to enter into all God’s will. Obeying
what that will commands, let us claim what it promises. Let us yield
to the teaching of the Holy Spirit, to show each of us, according to
his growth and measure, what the will of God is which we may claim in
prayer. And let us rest content with nothing less than the personal
experience of what Jesus gave when He said, ‘If you abide in me, ask
whatsoever you will, it shall be done unto you.’
Andrew Murray, from With Christ in the School of Prayer. Written in 1895.
Dwell in His secret place 