A devotional on John 15

I gave this devotional at the beginning of the month, for one of our Servant Partners assignments. The intended audience is my Servant Partners team, but I thought it would be good to share a little of what has been going on for me spiritually since the internship started...I just wish I could say I am truly living this way.

While we were in Manila, I felt a lot of confirmation in God’s calling on my life, a calling which will likely include living some place like Botocan. Edith and I kept saying to each other “I wish we could just stay”.

But of course, there were also a lot of fears of how we would really survive in the long run. I kept finding myself enumerating the practical changes I would need to stay longer: things like nailing boards over the rat-holes, having a bigger bucket in the bathroom and finding a husband who could kill cockroaches for me.

It wasn’t until debrief that I began to focus on the real question: what spiritually would need to change in my life for me to be sustainable in the long run.

And I think this question of sustainability applies not just to living in Manila or Cairo or Mumbai, but to living here in Los Angeles.

This month has been tough: trying to balance a 40 plus hour work week, time in community, studying Luke, team dynamics and homesickness. I have been much more in survival mode here than I ever was in the Philippines.

So the question of sustainability has become very urgent to me: I don’t just want to know how to survive and thrive in some future missions field. I desperately need to know how to do it now.

As I’ve wrestled with this question, I keep coming back to John 15. This is the chapter where Jesus compares himself to a vine, and us to branches. This time of year, I like to read it as a pumpkin vine, and we are the little branches trying to produce pumpkins. Jesus’ points out the obvious: the branches aren’t going to make any pumpkins unless they are connected to the vine. How could they, without any source for water, minerals, and energy. How on earth would a little branch produce a huge golden-orange pumpkin unless the vine was providing it everything it needs? If a branch was silly enough to try to produce a pumpkin without being connected to the vine, what would happen? Nothing. It would just lay there, rotten, brown and dead, maybe with a shriveled up flower molding at the end. It wouldn’t even be worth composting – just toss it in the fire.

So Jesus says “I am the vine; you are the branches. If anyone abides in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing”.

Of course I want to be a branch that bears abundant fruit. But so often I feel like the branch that is not connected to the vine, striving and striving to produce a molded flower.

In this passage there is one word that really jumps out to me as the key to sustainability. This key word is “abide”. Jesus repeats the word abide ten times in thirteen verses: “Abide in me, and I will abide in you…abide in me and my words abide in you…abide in my love…abide, abide, abide.”

To abide means to remain, to dwell, to belong, to live in and as a part of something. The branch abides in the vine by receiving all its sustenance from the vine and by producing fruit that glorifies the vine. The branch is completely dependent on the vine. In fact I suspect that most branches on a pumpkin plant don’t see themselves as separate entities at all – they are just part of the vine which is part of themselves.

Abiding in Jesus isn’t just about getting my needs provided for. Being sustained by him isn’t like getting a glass of water and a piece of bread from the kitchen. It is more like being an unborn baby – being bound by a pulsing umbilical cord to the one who not only supplies all me needs, but who surrounds me and comprises my whole universe.

This is certainly how I need to be sustained right now. There are too many challenges in my life to survive on stolen gaps of time ‘with God’, hastily crammed down my throat with my toast in the morning. I need an umbilical cord from God’s heart to mine, sustaining me throughout the day.

But I find myself still questioning: How? How do I abide in Jesus and allow him to sustain me this way? How do I re-identify myself as part of him, dwelling in him, completely dependent upon him?

Once again, I find myself trying to enumerating practical ways to make me abide better: things like getting up earlier so I can do more Bible study, seeking more accountability, memorizing scripture, or even cutting down my hours at work.

Yet none of these things, valuable as they may be, are how Jesus tells us to abide.

Jesus establishes our basis for abiding in his love for us. “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you, now abide in my love” We can be confident in being sustained because the love Jesus has for us is the same infinitely powerful love that sustains the Trinity itself. And, as Jesus states a verse later, the Love we abide in is that love by which he that laid down his life for us.

From this foundation, Jesus immediately moves into exhortation, answering the question of ‘how’ to abide. He states it pretty simply: “If you obey my commands you will abide in my love.”

Edith already talked a lot about the relationship between obedience and our love for God. But here Jesus focuses on the relationship between obedience and our love for others. He doesn’t let us sit around wondering what commands we are to obey. He spells it out “my command is this: love one another as I have loved you”. So the way we abide is by obedience, and obedience ultimately means loving one another.

This a radical shift from my usual way of approaching sustainability. I tend to think of obedience, especially in the area of loving others, as the thing I need to be sustained for...not the thing by which I am sustained.

Certainly in the past few months as I have gotten to know you, I have prayed often to love you all. And have at times found that love growing like a healthy pumpkin, and at other times, found only moldy flowers.

But I am not sure I ever really realized how much a difference loving you all would make in my own sustainability. I didn’t realize that in cooking meals or cleaning the bathroom, in listening to your stories and sharing your laughter, or in praying for you as I drive back and forth to Pasadena, I could find the key to my own abiding.

Loving you all is truly impossible, but so is growing pumpkins. The little branch of the pumpkin vine isn’t seeking to do the impossible, it is simply participating in what the vine is all about. And in loving you I am participating in, abiding in, what Jesus is all about. In some ways, it is a circular argument – loving you all both draws me to and comes through abiding in Christ.

To be perfectly honest, I am still in the first steps of learning what this means. I am still in the flower stage of this pumpkin growing process. Jesus clearly states that loving you will involve laying down my life, and that is a challenging thought. But I am also very excited, because this sustainability is not something I have to change on my own, but something that together we will receive as we obey Christ’s command and love one another. Let us not fail to produce fruit, let us not fail to thrive here in Los Angeles, let us not be dead branches thrown into the fire, because we failed to love one another. Let us together cling to our sustainer and urgently ask him for the love we need. Let us love one another as he has loved us.