Abide: To live. To dwell. To settle. To put down roots. To remain.
Jesus tells us dozens of times, “Abide in Me.” To live with Jesus. To dwell with Jesus. To settle with Jesus. To put down roots with Jesus. To remain with Jesus.

In John 15:4-9, Jesus uses the example of a vine when telling His followers to abide in Him. When you are tending a grapevine (or any living and growing thing), you prune off the non-producing vines/branches. Otherwise, the plant will waste energy keeping those unproductive branches alive and your plant will have a much lower yield of fruit to harvest (or flowers to bud). Likewise, a branch that gets broken off and is no longer connected to the main plant will never produce fruit…it will die.

In verse 4, Jesus says “Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me.” We can never be fruit-producing believers if we are not abiding (living, remaining, putting down roots) in Jesus.

So what does it look like to abide in Him? To trust someone, you have to know them well. How do we get to know Christ well? By His word. We must be diligently reading and studying His word in order to know Him, trust Him, and abide in Him. If we don’t understand the character of Christ, we won’t understand how to trust Him with even the most basic necessities of living.

-Jenn