In This Edition:
The Habit of Abiding in God
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The Habit of Abiding In God
“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.”
(John 15:1-11 ESV)
HOME
In this penetrating passage, John gives us a crucial insight into our life in Christ. I am the vine, says Jesus Christ; you are the branches. The vine—the stem—is rooted in life-giving nutrients and because of that, every branch that is vitally, organically connected to the vine is full of life. Do you see what he is saying? As Tim Keller reminds us, growth in Jesus is not only possible, it is inevitable! God’s life interpenetrates our life. Growth in grace, growth in Christ is supernaturally fueled by our connection to Christ. We are not just made of earth; we are made of heaven too, for we are born again, created in Christ Jesus, partakers of the divine nature to escape the decay of the world. “If you abide in me, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” Everything the branch needs—everything the branch could possibly want—is readily available and is constantly flowing into the branch as long as it is connected to the vine.
Keller says it another way: If a branch is not growing, with flowers blooming and fruit bearing, but the vine is healthy and life-giving, there can be only one explanation: the branch is not actually joined; it could be superficially joined; it could be cosmetically joined. But it is not actually joined. But if the branch is vitally, organically connected to a life-giving vine, then growth is not only possible, it is inevitable.
And the branch gets even more from the vine than life-giving sustenance. From the vine, the branch gets its identity. The branch gets its vitality. The branch knows where its from. The branch knows it is a part of the vine. The branch knows that where it abides is its true home.
I’m curious. Does the idea of “home” do that for anyone else? My wife was born and raised in the same home her mother was born and raised in. Her mother lives there still. You should see her face when our car pulls up to the farm. If I had a doctor with us, I bet they would confirm her blood pressure is a perfect 120 over 80. Everything just feels right. My family moved quite a bit when I was growing up. So there isn’t really any home that “feels like home” to me, but most of it took place in Southern California. So when I de-board in LAX and see the palm trees lining the highway, feel the warm sun on my skin and smell In-N-Out burger just across the street, I can’t explain the feeling to you—but everything seems right in the world. The “house” that actually does that for me, though, is in middle Tennessee. My grandparents house. They no longer live in that home—but it’s where we always went for Christmas gatherings. I can still smell the candied yams and pecan pie.
Home. Home is where extroverts show off who they are, and where introverts go to get recharged. It speaks to rootedness. Being from a place. It’s a part of who you are. Home is where you get sustenance and where you get your identity.
So here’s the question: Where is your emotional home? Where do you run to for comfort and to get a sense of yourself? Where do you go to get recharged? Where is it that defines who you are?
What if it was Jesus? And what if you were home all the time?
PRACTICING HIS PRESENCE
Nick Herman was just an average guy. He was a French soldier who became a disciple of Jesus and wanted to devote his whole life to Christ…so he joined a monastery and took on a new name: Brother Lawrence. Lawrence was not a priest; he was a dishwasher. That was his day job. But he was determined to make his whole life have one singular goal: from sunrise to sundown to practice the presence of God.
Lawrence wrote a book. It’s very short and only takes 30 minutes to read. It is called The Practice of the Presence of God. In this book, Lawrence explains how even while washing grime off dirty dishes, it was as if he was pulling up to the old farm, deplaning in LAX, or sitting at grandma’s house in Gallatin. Here’s what he says:
“The time of business does not differ with me from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were on my knees before the Blessed Sacrament.”
Do you see what he is saying? Every place, every day, every minute, every task, is easy, because it always feels like home. Why is that? Because Lawrence is always engaged in the practice of abiding in God.
How can the Apostle Paul tell all workers—regardless of what your job is or who your boss is—to work with all your heart, working for the Lord and not for man? How can he say that many a-spouse have been and can we won to Christ without a word, simply by watching how you experience life when they are around you? How can Paul say, from a prison cell no less, that in any situation he had learned to be content?
The answer is not that he and we learn to just try harder by doing more right things than wrong things. This is a new heart—a new way of living—that involves awareness that we are constantly receiving the life-giving joy of home, because we are always in the presence of God.
But this seems so much easier when God answers our prayers of need and gives us the comfort, the money, the peace, the safety, and the security that we ask for, right? Actually…no.
You see, what Brother Lawrence figured out—what Paul came to see there in the jail cell—was that practicing the presence of God does not depend on external circumstances; in fact, the fairer our circumstances, the less we even attempt to seek his presence.
And that’s why most of our spiritual practices or “spiritual disciplines” – habits Christians do to remind ourselves of the presence of God—are actually ways of doing less, not more; having less, not more; wanting less…not more.
It’s ironic, reminds Jonathan Storment: less is more. The way down is the way up. How do you overcome the temptation of materialism? You can either make more (to have more), or you can learn to want less. How do you fight the temptation to over-eat? Learn to want less. How do you find the secret to overcoming troubles in your marriage, or with a pesky neighbor, or a difficult boss? Take yourself out of the equation and learn to want less, demand less, expect less, all the while believing God gives more--more of Himself to you.
Storment offers this wonderful illustration. When you think you are on vacation on the beach, simple bad weather is enough to ruin everything about your day. But when you think you are in a storm shelter in the middle of a hurricane, something as simple as a can of beans, a generator for heat, and a warm smile can brighten anyone’s day. Shelters are like that. They don’t change the weather or even stop the weather; they shield you from it. Kind of like the presence of God. We think, do we not, that if we pray for God to show up, he’ll defeat our enemies, reverse our curses, and make everything rosy? But what if God showing up means he doesn’t remove our storms or ourselves from the storms, but instead, he prepares us to withstand the storms and to find the good, the joy, the beauty, and the peace that others find so hard to see within it?
Imagine, if at all times, we were to say “God is always before me” as our default setting! But that involves actually being connected, rooted, abiding in God. When we are connected, we sense his presence everywhere.
And when we do that, hearing his voice becomes second nature.
HEARING HIS VOICE
I have friends who tell me they hear God’s voice. Maybe their theology is wrong and my theology is right. Or maybe my theology is wrong but my antenna isn’t high enough to read it. But for whatever reason, I’ve never heard the audible voice of God. At least I don’t think I have. But that probably shouldn’t be a big deal.
Randy Harris is a friend who went on a spiritual retreat out in the woods. He was given this assignment: go out and find a rock. Sit on it, and wait to hear the voice of God.
Yancey says he found a rock pretty quickly. And then the silence began. Do you know what he heard? Nothing! What a waste. What a sham! He thought of all the reasons why this was a foolish assignment to begin with. That took up a good 20 minutes.
And then…well…then something happened. Did he hear the voice of God? Not exactly. Or, maybe yes but not in the way you might think. You see, after another period of silence, all the junk in his life that he was pretty good at keeping buried beneath the noise, the busyness and the hurry, came rising to the surface. And Yancey sat there confronted with himself…all the evil that resides within him. And he saw all the work that needed to be done in his life, and it reminded him just how much he needed the presence of God. And then it dawned on him, if it wasn’t for God’s abiding presence, he would have done himself in for sure by now!
There is a similar story told by Philip Yancey. He, too, went expecting to hear the audible voice of God. But what he came away with were thoughts, emotions, and reflections he would not have experienced had he not gone to seek the presence of God. He writes:
I heard no audible voice, yet at the end of the week I had to agree…I had heard from God. I’ve become more convinced than ever that God finds ways to communicate with those who truly seek him, especially when we lower the volume of the surrounding static.
The goal for the Christian life is to so safely abide in God that his presence, his voice, his will, and his ways are so easily discernable. It becomes second nature.
That is what Brother Lawrence was getting at. It’s what he, through the power of habit, was able to do.
THE POWER OF HABIT
Dallas Willard reminds us:
“The first and most basic thing we can and must do is to keep God before our minds. This is the fundamental secret of caring for our souls. Our part in thus practicing the presence of God is to direct and redirect our minds constantly to Him. In the early time of our practicing, we may well be challenge by our burdensome habits of dwelling on things less than God. But, these are habits, not the law of gravity, and can be broken. A new, grace-filled habit will replace the former ones as we take intentional steps toward keeping God before us. Soon, our minds will return to God as the needle of a compass constantly returns to the north. If God is the great longing of our souls, He will become the polestar of our inward beings."
This doesn’t come naturally. We need new habits.
And so, we challenge the culture of our day, the world in which we live, that gives us morning rituals (like look in the mirror and engage in negative self-talk, then listen to a talking head explain to you why your politics ought to determine which neighbors you will love and which you will hate today), daytime rituals (like make sure you let every driver who cuts you off know how you feel about it, and always act more hurried than you actually are), and evening rituals (scoff your food down and watch TV so you don’t have to deal with the real struggles and stressors in your family life). Instead, we adopt new practices, and engage in new habits. And they all are ways to orient our lives around abiding in the vine. All they are represent a way throughout the day to practice the presence of God.
FINDING HIS PRESENCE IN THE SUPPER
Can’t find time during the week? Consider right here, right now. This is Sunday, and Christ is present in the bread and the wine. There were lots of debates in church history about exactly if and exactly how Christ may be present in the bread and the juice. The debate was about whether or not Christ is present. But (as has been pointed out by others) perhaps there is a more burning question for us today: namely, if you and I are present. Christ says he meets us here. So why do still so often feel so far from home?
When we gather as an assembled people, when we take of the bread and cup, when we pledge our loyalty and allegiance to Jesus as Jesus people, we acknowledge that we are, in fact, new people. Let N. T. Wright’s words challenge you today:
When we celebrate Jesus’ meal we aren’t just whistling in the dark. Bread and wine are taken up in the Eucharist into God’s future purposes, and become to us vehicles through which we can taste the fact that there is a new world, there is new hope, there is a new way to live and we are part of it. And our brokenness and tiredness…and the long hours we have wasted doing our own thing instead of God’s thing, somehow fall away, and we become people of the new celebration, people of the new creation, people of God’s new world, which is a world of fresh light, fresh forgiveness, new starts, new hopes.
I’ll tell you someone who understood this: his name was Buzz Aldrin.
There he was, sitting in the lunar module on the surface of the moon. In a few minutes, He would step down, following Neil Armstrong to be the second man to walk on the moon. They were staring at this tiny blue marble that has been home to God’s gracious hand since the beginning of time.
Neil knew what words he was going to say: “That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.” But what would Buzz do? How would he mark this momentous occasion?
He knew what to do. Here is how he describes it in his own words:
“In an effort to remain calm and collected, I decided that this would be an excellent time for a ceremony I had planned as an expression of gratitude and hope….I settled on a well-known expression of spirituality: celebrating the first Christian Communion on the moon…. I wanted to do something positive for the world, so the spiritual aspect appealed greatly to me….
So, during those first hours on the moon, before the planned eating and rest periods, I reached into my personal preference kit and pulled out the communion elements along with a three-by-five card on which I had written the words of Jesus: ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit; for you can do nothing without me.’
I poured a thimbleful of wine from a sealed plastic container into a small chalice, and waited for the wine to settle down as it swirled in the one-sixth Earth gravity of the moon.
My comments to the world were: ‘I would like to request a few moments of silence…and to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way.’
I silently read the Bible passage as I partook of the wafer and the wine, and offered a private prayer for the task at hand and the opportunity I had been given.
There he was, 239K miles away from his house, and yet he could feel right at home, because nothing could mark the occasion of that new view, that first step, that trip that far toward heaven, than to simply acknowledge that I abide in Christ.
Can you hear him? Can you see him? Can you sense calm, joy, peace, and patience in all circumstances? Can you see the good in all things? Can you sense his presence? If not, perhaps you need to come home.
This is a sermon preached on March 9, 2025 at the West Side Church of Christ (Searcy, AR) entitled “The Habit of Abiding in God.” It is the sixth lesson in a sermon series called “Follow Me,” and the second lesson in the sub-series called “Be With Jesus.” This lesson is available to watch or listen, and appears on the Life on the West Side podcast (Season 4, Episode 55). Available on all podcast platforms.
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My name is Nathan Guy. I serve as associate professor of philosophy, theology, and ethics and as the director of the David E. Smith Healthcare Ethics and Human Dignity Initiative at Harding University (Searcy, Arkansas). I am also privileged to serve as preaching minister for the West Side Church of Christ in Searcy. I joyfully adjunct courses for the School for Professional Studies at St. Louis University and enthusiastically serve as chairman of the board for the Center for Christian Studies. I am happily married to Katie and am the proud father of Grace (who is 3) and Henry (who is wee). You can find more resources on my website over at nathanguy.com. You can also follow me (@nathanpguy) on social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X), Threads, Bluesky, and YouTube.