Abiding in Christ

"Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing." -Jesus in John 15:4-5. 

We sometimes begin our church services, prayer meetings, and worship events asking God to make us feel His presence in the midst of us. Often what we mean by this is that we want God to provide us with a positive emotional experience that will give us concrete evidence that He has been with us and that He has blessed us. We love the warm, fuzzy "mountain top" experiences we sometimes feel during worship and continue to pray for them to occur. It is easy to feel that God has not shown up or has not blessed us if we feel no emotional or easily perceivable change in us. Discouragement sets in and we feel that we have wasted our time. "Why hasn't God spoken to me after all this praying and seeking?" we ask. We pray for peace and receive none. We pray for direction in a specific area and receive none. We conclude that God has not spoken and He has not met with us.

But abiding in the presence and glory of Christ is far more than a positive emotional experience. It is more than receiving peace or clear direction when we pray. It is more than a perceived satisfaction that we have been in the presence of God. None of these things are wrong in and of themselves but they can become idols if we seek them above God Himself. They are not indicators of abiding in Christ.

Paul commands us in 1 Thessalonians 5 to pray without ceasing. At first glance, this is an absurd suggestion. We have thousands of thoughts every day that are completely unrelated to God. But what he is getting at is the idea of continuously putting the Lord before us and trusting in the reality of His presence in all circumstances. Through the power of His Spirit, God continues to sanctify us and make us more Christ-aware everyday until it is no longer a conscious effort to remain in Him. God wants to break us free from our emotionalism so that our trust and our focus is solely on Him. If we are not abiding in Christ, we can do nothing. He is the source of our joy, strength, and hope. He is the rock of our salvation which can never be moved. He is calling us out of our simple emotional ideas about God's presence into the glorious truth of His constant willingness to abide with us, regardless of the circumstance.

Rather than praying that God would be present with us, we should ask Him to change us and speak to us because of His constant presence. We should ask Him to teach us how to abide in Him and to show us that His answers do not always come through a positive emotion or a clear direction which allows us peace but through the communion of our spirits with His and the changing of our hearts, whether we consciously perceive it or not. Often, we are not made aware of the most profound changes that God's presence makes in us until God reveals it to us. This is not instantaneous and we should not expect it to be. Let us take comfort in the fact that if we ask God with humble hearts to speak to us and to abide with us, He always will, whether our limited understanding grasps it at the time or not.