Living in Jesus, Abiding in Him (27)

 

“My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples.” John 15:8.

 

As we continue our reflections in the Upper Room, I’m going to ask us to extend our current passage, John 15:1 – 11, to include verses 12 – 17. As we do so, let’s remember that chapters and verses were not incorporated into the Bible until hundreds of years after the original books of the Bible were written.

 

While chapters and verses are helpful the way house addresses are helpful, I imagine they probably do more harm than good in that we tend to read the Bible verse by verse and chapter by chapter, rather than thought by thought and image by image. This means we don’t have to (though we should!) invest ourselves in discerning images and thought patterns the way we otherwise would, it means we tend to take chapter breaks as reading and thinking breaks and thereby miss the continuity of the inspired text.

 

When Jesus says that “If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you…” (15:7) what does He mean about His words? What does it mean for His words to abide in us? Peter writes, “…for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Peter 1:23). Do we see that Peter uses the word “abiding”?

 

When we drive by houses, we usually don’t know the people who live in the houses, we don’t know the people who abide in them. Now to be sure, there are cultures in the world, even in areas of the West, where this is not true, but it is true for most people reading this who live in high density settings. Even if we don’t know the people abiding in a house, there are times we can tell something about the inhabitants on the inside by what we see on the outside. There are also houses which have been abandoned, no one lives there anymore, and as the seasons change this becomes more apparent – how sad to mark the deterioration of a place that once contained life.

 

The Scriptures are concerned about what lives within us, about who lives within us, and about who we live within. Because we tend to focus on the outside of things and people, on externals, on the way things appear, we often miss the things that matter – the Bible teaches us that man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7; see also 2 Cor. 4:18).

 

Peter and Jesus tell us that God’s Word is to live within us. Peter describes this Word as imperishable “seed,” as living and abiding within us. No matter what our outsides may look like, within us is to be the very Life of the Word of God. When others encounter us, when they come to our “houses” of flesh and blood, within these houses they are to find the Presence of God and His Word.

 

In our extended passage of John 15:1 – 17 there are interwoven themes and images, and to be sure we find them throughout the Upper Room, and indeed in all of Scripture. The interplay of these images and themes, the way the Light shines through them is, I suppose, endless - just as the potential arrangements of the musical scale are endless. And so we read our passage again and again, we ponder our passage throughout our days and weeks and months and years, and we keep seeing Jesus, we hear Him, we touch Him, we are touched by Him, we speak to Him – we have koinonia with Him and with one another in Him.

 

What images, patterns, and themes are you seeing in the Upper Room? As you consider 15:1 – 17 what do you see? How do words and images play off one another? What relationships do you see?

 

Consider the idea of “abiding”. We began our reflections in John 15 focusing on verses 4 and 5, the nexus of the first movement. As you read 15:1 – 17 can you trace the idea of abiding? Don’t just look for the word, look for the image, for the idea. For example, in verse 16, in the NASB, Jesus says, “…that your fruit would remain…” The word “remain” is the word in Greek that the NASB translates as “abide” in other verses in our passage.

 

Do you see the idea of abiding leading up to Chapter 15? Do you see it in Chapter 14?

 

What about the image of fruit? Can you trace the image of fruit in our passage?

 

What other threads do you see in John 15:1 – 17?