Here’s a question for you.  What is the pathway to fully living the Christian life of holiness and obedience each day?

Jesus Himself answered this question for us in His final discourse with His disciples on the night He was betrayed.  In fact, Jesus explained different aspects of this pathway often, yet most Christians in the institutional church have little understanding of it.  The pathway of true Christian living is what Jesus called “abiding in Him as He abides in us.”

What does it mean to “abide in Christ,” or “remain in Christ?”  The abiding life was demonstrated for us by Christ Himself.  He lived this abiding life every day, and we have the record of it in the four Gospel accounts. 

Jesus, in John 14, stated that the words He spoke were not His own but were the work of God the Father Who lived in and through Him.  Jesus did not live or act on His own initiative or by His own strength or efforts. The life Jesus lived on earth was the life of God the Father lived in Him in place of His own life.

As Paul tells us in Philippians 2:5-8, Jesus laid aside the privileges and prerogatives of His divine life in order that He might live a fully human life.  Jesus laid them aside so that the life and works of the Father could be lived in and through Him.  In this way, Jesus remained continually in the life of God the Father. 

Jesus became the forerunner of the life He intends for us to live. Just as Jesus lived only by the life of the Father in Him, so we now are to live our lives not by our own will and efforts, but by the life of Christ lived in us by the Holy Spirit dwelling in us.   This is the abiding life of which Jesus spoke in John 15:1-8.  “Remain in me, as I also 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 you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.”

This life of continual abiding in the life of Christ and He abiding in us by His Spirit is our restored union with our God.  Jesus described that union in both John 14 and John 17.  As the Father lives in Him and He in the Father, so He in turn will live in us and we in Him. This restoration is the purpose of the New Covenant.  We can now live as the Triune God intended us to live, in union Him daily. 

Here is the only pathway to living the true Christian life – a continual, conscious, conversational connection with Him by His Spirit in us.  As we seek to live in this continual, conscious conversational communion with Christ, He brings His life to fruition in us day by day. 

As Paul stated in Galatians 2: “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live but Christ Who lives in me, and the life that I now live I live by faith in the Son of God Who loved me and gave Himself up for me.”

“Christ gives us His own holiness, being made unto us of God sanctification and redemption; and as He is, so also are we in the world.   He does not expect of us qualities that He is not willing Himself to impart.  He does not chide us for our failures and imperfections, but because we do not receive more of Him.” – A.B. Simpson

Image via author, Bob Marshall Wilderness and Flathead River, Montana