Eyes On The Road - Week 4
Daily Scripture Readings
Monday John 15:1-3
Tuesday John 15:9-17
Wednesday Ephesians 4:13-16
Thursday Ephesians 4:20-24
Friday 1 Timothy 4:11-15
Saturday Mark 10:42-45
Opening Prayer
Gracious God, help us to stay focused on Your call on Your church. Help us as we seek to grow in Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, AMEN.
READING:
In the Gospel of John, Jesus talks quite a bit about the opportunity we have to abide in Him. He particularly emphasizes this in John 15, where He compares the peace, rest, and rejuvenation that we find in Him to the symbiotic and life-giving relationship between a vine and its branches. As Jesus tells His disciples in John 15:4-5, “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” (ESV).
If anyone does not abide in Him, Jesus says, they will wither and be discarded, “thrown into the fire, and burned” (John 15:6). But connected to Him, they will thrive and ultimately have eternal life. In other translations, the word “abide” is translated as “remain” (NIV, NLT) or “live” (The Message), but the meaning is much the same. The word “abide” comes from the Greek menó, which according to Strong’s Concordance means stay, abide, or remain. Others liken the word to “dwell” or “rest.”
Abiding, or remaining, in Christ means believing, trusting, or welcoming Christ. It is fully attaching ourselves to Him and drawing our necessary life force from Him. The Bible talks about abiding in Christ throughout the New Testament. In John 6:56, Jesus tells the Jews in the synagogue that those who eat His flesh and drink His blood remain or abide in Him, and Him in them (this is much like the “living water” analogy Jesus uses with the Samaritan woman in John 4:10). In John 8:31, Jesus tells of the importance of abiding in His word. Jessica Brodie