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 ABIDING

Jesus spoke of us as His Father's vineyard. Jesus is the Vine and we are His branches. Except for all Messianic Jews who follow Messiah Jesus as Lord and Savior, the rest of those who follow Jesus were "grafted into the Vine." 

Those messianic Jews know that their salvation is just like that of Gentile believers. Salvation is a gift of God to be received in faith because of all He has done and finished in the Incarnation, life, ministry, sacrificial death, physical resurrection and His Ascencion, returning to the Father's Right hand.

The only reason I can "abide in Christ Jesus" is that He united me with Himself. I initiated nothing. I received by grace through faith all God has done for me in Jesus. He cut away my old nature (Colossians 2:11-15) and gave me a new heart and a new spirit, a new heredity, a new spiritual DNA. (Ezekiel 11:19-21)

God has caused me to stand before Him holy, blameless and beyond reproach. He has forgiven my sin as I believed Him. He has become Life within me, eternal life. What flows from the "Vine" into the "branches" IS the Life of the Vine. The branches have no other life but His life within them. The Holy Spirit has made us holy before God and is forging the Holiness into every aspect of life.

That thirst for God, that burning in the heart of everyone longing for home, a place of belonging where you can live what you were designed for by God, waiting on Him, learning to receive His love and have our love for God grow, learning to know Him, to hear Him and to respond...that is the essence of "abiding" in Christ Jesus.

The Holy Spirit reminds us, as He applies God's promises to our lives that we are kept by God, He has united us to Himself, and "abiding" is a supernatural state of being for the follower of Jesus Christ. We can and will "bear fruit" displaying the character and Person who united us to Himself. We need to remember that we DO abide in our Messiah, He is our home, our abiding place. 

He is Life within us, and we can trust the Lord with all of life. Abiding in Christ Jesus is not about some kind of human-grounded ability or striving to obtain what God has already given to us. We have no ability to save ourselves from sin and death and by no effort of our own are we able to "abide", make our home in Christ Jesus. The Lord wants us to affirm, embrace and abandon ourselves to the reality that Jesus Christ lives in us to live through us in the power of the Holy Spirit living out Resurrection life in us. He has caused us to live in Him...our Home.

We are new creations belonging to the Lord of all creation. Old things have passed away, and all things have become new. This is the work of God who reconciled us to Himself through the blood of the Lamb. That old "death" no longer has the right of rule or reign. Because Jesus is Lord, we are safe, free, empowered to live out a new way to be: God's design for us.

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