Abide

“Live in Me. Make your home in Me just as I do in you. In the same way that a branch can’t bear grapes by itself but only by being joined to the vine, you can’t bear fruit unless you are joined with Me. “I am the Vine, you are the branches. When you’re joined with me and I with you, the relation intimate and organic, the harvest is sure to be abundant.”
‭‭John‬ ‭15:4-8‬ ‭MSG‬‬

So, let’s be real. Do you ever feel like God is constantly asking of you? Do you feel as if He is looking over your shoulder expecting your best performance? 

Do you feel as though your life is a roller coaster of feeling loved one minute and feeling like you have to go out and be the world’s Savior the next? Does guilt weigh down the scales over grace? Do you wake up day after day feeling as if you have to do “for” Him or strive for moral excellency? 

Sounds like a heavy burden to bear to me. Actually, it’s a millstone around ones neck. And it’s not what the Christian life was meant to be like. It’s more like a sentencing of religious duties; lies the enemy uses to keep you from believing the truth that you are wanted where you are; wholly valuable, completely accepted and radically loved as you are. 

Just as the devil hissed those lies to Eve in the garden causing her to feel as though God was holding out some part of His goodness from her, so he tries to distort the true image of God and His nature in the same way today.

Beloved, performancism is a prison. One in which Jesus already opened the doors to and set you free from. Because Jesus’s perfect performance on the earth and on the cross was perfectly acceptable to Father God, you are now and always will be perfectly accepted as you are, without trying to achieve for Him. 

The Christian life was never meant to be about doing. It has always been about being His beloved. 

Stop trying to please God. Your Daddy is absolutely enamored by you. You are 100%, completely and totally pleasing to Him. Yes, without even doing a thing! 

How can that be you ask? 

Because Jesus came to be for you what you, in your sin-stained blood and flawed human state, never could be…so that you could become one with Him, reconciled and made righteousness in His perfect state! He became your sin and in Him, you become His righteousness!

Jesus did not die so that you could try to be good. Perfect Goodness Himself died so that you could take His identity, His goodness and enjoy intimacy with Him. He was and is what you could never be for yourself. 

You were dead. You are now alive in Him. The old law-stricken nature is gone. You are a new creation in Grace!

The Christian life is not about achieving for man or God. The Christian life is about abiding. It’s about receiving and remaining in His embrace; face to face. It is about a deep, true and real relationship with your very real God Who is continually and FREELY supplying every good you need and hope for. 

Healing, peace, prosperity, comfort, understanding, friendship, restoration, protection, compassion, endless kindness and unstoppable power is always yours APART from you trying to earn it or feeling as though you don’t deserve it. Jesus, The only perfect One, paid for it so you could possess it. Your part is to trust Him. And trust it’s already yours.

If you could for a moment, please picture a luscious green vineyard full of ripe grapes. Do you think those grapes got there because the branches strained and stressed trying to prove to the vine they could bear fruit? Nonsense!

The branches can do nothing for themselves. They are birthed from the source, the vine itself. It is the vine who supplies the branches. The branches simply ARE. The vine came first giving life to each branch. The branches simply receive from the vine. And if they fall to the ground, the vinedresser comes and gently lifts them up. 

And so it is with us. Jesus said, I AM the Vine. You are the branches…” (John 15:5). He didn’t say He was the vine and you were to try to be the branches. 

The reason it’s so hard for believers to believe that the resurrection life given to them is really a life of internal rest, is because the devil works so hard to get you to believe you have to work to earn it. 

But what if today, you decide to let every struggle go by being vulnerable with your Savior. What if you believed, in this very moment, He does not want you to do something for Him, but that He simply wants you and wants to do everything for you and through you.

What if you stop trying to achieve it all and instead start to receive it all. Just abide. Abide in His finished work. Remain in His love. Continue in your true Identity in Christ. Allow yourself to be lifted and held. Breathe. And accept the life-flow from the Source; the Lover of your Soul.

Fruit follows flow, when you let go.

“I am my Lover’s. I’m all He wants. I’m all the world to Him!” Song of Songs 7:10 msg

Resting In His Love,

Annalee Reyes