Good morning. It is good to be here with you all. For those of you who are new, my name is Jim Bogdanowitz, but you can call me Jim. I am from California, but I live in Midlothian, Virginia.
You know, I do not know how they come up with themes for this conference. I mean, in one way I do know: they get together, they pray, and they seek the Lord. Then the Lord gives them something. I think we come by faith and step into this theme, this thought of abiding, and we say, “This is what the Lord is after. This is the mind of the Lord for us at this time.”
He wants to show us something that has to do with this theme of abiding, and He wants to draw us into something that is on His heart. A lot of times, we are so self-centered. We are thinking about what is on our heart and what we want from the Lord. I am not saying that is a bad thing; I am just saying that is who we are.
But I think it is a wonderful thing to start thinking about this: when this theme was given to these brothers and sisters here in Toronto, it was as if the Lord was saying, “This is what is on My heart. I want to express to all My children what is on My heart and what this means to Me. This is what I want out of this time.” This whole theme is based on the idea of abiding because it is on the Lord’s heart for us.
I want to read a few verses, and then we will pray and begin. The theme verse, which Victor read last night, is John 15:4.
Jesus is speaking to His disciples:
Abide in Me, and I in you.
As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine;
so neither can ye, except ye abide in Me.
Then I want to go back in the Gospel of John to John 1, not to the same verse that Victor read, but just beyond what he read last night, beginning with John 1:35.
Again on the morrow John was standing, and two of his disciples;
and he looked upon Jesus as He walked, and saith, Behold, the Lamb of God!
And the two disciples heard him speak, and they followed Jesus.
And Jesus turned, and beheld them following, and saith unto them, What seek ye?
And they said unto Him, Rabbi (which is to say, being interpreted, Teacher), where abidest Thou?
He saith unto them, Come, and ye shall see.
They came therefore and saw where He abode; and they abode with Him that day: it was about the tenth hour.
One of the two that heard John speak, and followed Him, was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother.
He findeth first his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, We have found the Messiah (which is, being interpreted, Christ).
Then I want to go to 1 Corinthians 1:30:
But of Him are ye in Christ Jesus, who was made unto us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption.
Let us pray. Our Heavenly Father, we want to thank You. It has been prayed earlier today that You have made a way for us to come to You. You have made a way that we can have fellowship with You, that You can speak to us, and that we can receive from You.
We want to stand in that way right now. We stand in that way, Who is Jesus Christ—a new and living way—where You can reveal Yourself to us afresh. Lord, we want to stand right in Your burden. Your burden is that we abide. We do not even know what that is, but it is Your burden, and we want to stand in it.
We ask that You will reveal to us the very things that are on Your heart, the things You want communicated to us. Reveal them, Lord, so that they will not be a secret to us or something that we say we do not understand. Let them be made very clear to us through this week.
We thank You that You are not just looking for this time to make everything clear. We thank You that everything provided here—discussion groups, workshops, and fellowship times in our dorms—has been provided so that You can make Yourself clear as to what You are trying to communicate to us, that we might find ourselves living in the good of it.
Lord, we thank You that You have not left us to ourselves, but You have given us Your Word and Your Holy Spirit. We entrust ourselves to You now, to the Spirit, and to the Word. Get across the things that are on Your heart. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So our theme is abiding. I am not going to give you a definition. I thought it was really interesting what Victor shared last night about a definition, and I want to steal some of that for my message tomorrow—because that is what preachers do; they steal from one another. Some of those things were very, very good.
I looked in a Greek dictionary, not an American dictionary, and I got part of what Victor said, but it was expanded even more to me. Still, I want to relate abiding to this one thing, even though it is more than this. I want to focus on the thing the Lord has put on my heart.
Abiding is this: it is a relationship. Even when the Lord Jesus talked about abiding in John 15, He talked about abiding as a branch abides in a vine. There is a relationship between the vine and the branch. The branch has to be in relationship with that vine in order to live and to draw forth all that the vine has for it. If it is outside of that relationship, it cannot receive.
This abiding is a relationship. But, as Victor was saying last night, it is not a surface relationship. It is not a superficial relationship. It is not an inconsequential relationship—one that has no effect on your life, on the things you do, on the things you think, or on the things you will become.
This relationship is going to have consequences. It is going to have an effect on your life, and it is going to be of value. This abiding relationship is a committed relationship. You are committed to knowing; you are committed to this Person; you are committed to this Vine.
It is a continuing relationship. It is not something that happened long ago, and then you are separated and call one another once in a while to say hi. No, it is something that continues.
But it is not merely a continuing relationship. We can have continuing relationships that are superficial. I have lots of those. I know many people with whom I have superficial relationships, and we continue because we are in contact with one another.
But this relationship that the Lord is talking about, the relationship He wants us to enter into, is not only continuing; it deepens. It is a deepening relationship. It goes deeper into us, and we are allowed deeper into the One with Whom we are having this relationship.
It becomes so deep that it becomes vital. In other words, it becomes something that we need. We look at it and say, “I need to continue to get to know even further this One with Whom I am in relationship.”
It is a two-sided relationship. It is fellowship. In 1 Corinthians 1:9, it says that we have been called into fellowship. Fellowship is basically a mutual giving, one to the other, in a relationship. I give to you all that I am, and you give to me all that you are.
Now, that does not happen all at once. But as we feel more and more free to give ourselves, becoming less afraid of what we have to give and what the other person thinks of us, we become comfortable. We are at rest with that person because we know that they are committed to us also. The fear factor is taken out of the relationship.
I remember the first time I was trying to show my wife—who was not my wife then—that I cared more than just as a friend. I put my arm around her, and all of a sudden she just tightened up. Wow. All of a sudden, fear came into me. Maybe she was not thinking the same way I was thinking.
But in this relationship, there is no fear of that, because we are assured of His love for us. We are assured of His love, and so we are able to let ourselves be fully known. He will also let Himself be fully known to us. It is a two-sided relationship.
This relationship is really the kind of relationship that marriage is supposed to be. Marriage is not a surface relationship. If you have a superficial relationship when you start your marriage, I will tell you that if you are committed to that relationship, it will not remain superficial. If it does, it will not last.
As you come into that relationship and there is giving from one to another, it becomes deeper, continuing, and then vital. Isn’t it interesting that when people have been married for fifty or sixty years, often when one spouse dies, the other soon dies also? Have you ever wondered why?
It is because they miss what was given to them in that relationship. It was vital to them. They needed it. When it is gone, they do not have that same will to go on.
It is the same thing for us. This relationship is to become vital, so that when He is gone, we cannot go on. We have to have Him. We have to be in that relationship with Him. It is like a marriage relationship, and it is like the relationship the Lord described between the vine and the branches.
In both passages from John that I read—John 15 and John 1—this idea of abiding is not a command. So you can relax. It is not, “You better abide.” It is a directive.
Do you know the difference between a command and a directive? A command is something you had better do. A directive is trying to direct you into something. It is trying to give you direction in your life. The Lord is saying, “I am trying to direct you into this relationship.”
When the disciples asked Jesus, “Where do You live?” He did not give them road directions. He did not say, “Go down I-95, get off at Courthouse Road, take a left on Lucks Lane, and then turn right.” He did not give them directions because this is something we really need to understand.
A lot of us as Christians are looking for directions to follow. We say, “Give me the plan, and I can follow it. Just give me the plan.” But then all of a sudden we are on our own, trying to do things by ourselves. The Lord says, “You cannot do that.”
In a relationship, you cannot have a relationship on your own. How many of you have a relationship with yourself? He is calling us and directing us into a relationship. He is leading us on into something.
As I said, when I put my arm around my wife, I got the hint that maybe it was not right. So I pressed her on it and said, “I do not know what you are thinking, but this is the way I am thinking.” Then she let me know. I will not tell you how she let me know—you can ask me some other time, maybe privately.
So abide is not a command; it is a directive. As we come into this relationship, what is its purpose? The purpose is that Christ can be revealed to us as more than what we think He is.
We have certain thoughts, and we think this is where it stops: this is what Christ does, and this is what He is. But He says, “You have to come into a relationship with Me, because if you do not come into a relationship with Me, you will never really know Who I am. You will never know the depth of Who I am.”
What He wants us to know cannot be shown all at once. We have to receive it little by little, just as we do with everything in a relationship. My wife could not have taken everything that I was all at once. It would have been terrible. She probably would never have married me. She found out little by little.
Little by little, the Lord worked grace into her to accept me for who I am. In the same way, we see Christ little by little. We are brought into this relationship little by little, drawn into it and directed into it, and shown little by little.
Now, I need to back up a little. There can be no abiding relationship unless you know Jesus as the Lamb of God. There is no way to come into the presence of the Lord and know Who He is unless you know Him first as the Lamb of God. That is really, really important.
It is not a kindergarten thing. Jesus as the Lamb of God is something eternal. It is not something that we needed to know at one time but have now moved past. When you look in Revelation, what do you see on the throne? A Lamb, as though it had been slain.
We must first see that He is the Lamb of God. I want you to understand how foundational this is. We were talking with Kathleen, who is suffering from cancer, and she was talking about her experience of suffering. She said, “My experience right now is that I am going up and down. It is hard for me because I am going up and down.”
That is our experience as we walk with the Lord. There are ups and downs, and some of the downs are very tough. But the Lord really has to reveal to us that His being the Lamb of God is eternal.
I will share one experience. There was a time when I went off and did what I thought I should be doing. I was on an airplane in New Zealand. You know where New Zealand is? It is right to the west of Old Zealand.
New Zealand is two islands: a little upper one and a long lower one, where they do the Lord of the Rings filming and things like that. It is really cool looking. We were flying between the islands in a prop plane that carried about thirty people.
How many of you, when you get on an airline and see propellers, get a little freaked out? “Is this going to make it? I do not know; it has propellers.” Anyway, we were flying in this plane in the middle of a storm.
It was like the rainstorm some of you came through yesterday—rain coming down really hard. We were in that storm, and the pilot did not know where he was. It was so cloudy, foggy, and rainy that he started to land. We were not even to the other island yet, and he began to land.
You should have seen everybody’s faces on the plane. Pale. I started to pray. What do you think you would pray? “God, save us! Help us!” But you know what I prayed? It was really weird.
My prayer was, “Oh Lord, I have not done anything for You. I am so ashamed, and I feel so far away from You.” That was where my heart was at that time.
It so happened that I had been reading a book explaining some Scriptures, The Normal Christian Life, which was explaining Romans 3–6. From that reading and from what was going on in my heart, the Lord spoke to me inwardly.
He said, “Jim”—He did not literally say Jim, but it was like He said Jim—“you cannot get any closer to Me than you are now.”
That is what the Lamb of God does. He makes it so that you cannot get any closer to Him than you are now. Because of what He has done, you are so close to Him that He can touch you, and you are so close to Him that you can touch Him.
It is really important that you understand that the work He has done has brought us into a place where we can now abide. We are first pointed to the Lamb of God because we need to know that the way has been made clear.
Once we know the way is clear, He calls us and says, “Abide.” He directs us to Himself. He says, “Come here.” Then, as we come into this relationship, there is going to be an enlarging of Who He is.
He is going to become more than the Lamb of God to us. He will always be the Lamb of God—praise the Lord for that—but He will become something more to us. That is what He is after.
We need to understand that this is not a command; it is a directive. Its purpose is that the Lord, the Father, might reveal His Son to us. We are called into this relationship with Jesus so that the Father can reveal Who Jesus is to us personally.
This is a personal revelation, not just something objective that we read in a book saying, “This is Who Jesus is.” It becomes so real within our own hearts, thinking, and experience that we find out Who Jesus is step by step.
Why did I give that verse in 1 Corinthians? Paul is saying, “This is what God has revealed to me. Christ has become to me wisdom from God, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption.”
I am not saying these are the only things Christ is, but Paul is saying, “This is what Christ has become to me through my abiding in Him.” When we are called into a relationship, we are called into the kind of relationship John and Andrew entered in John 1. We become disciples. We become learners of Who He is.
He calls us and says, “I want you to come with Me. I want you to be with Me.” As we read in our devotion this morning, He says, “Come, follow Me.” Follow Me does not simply mean playing follow-the-leader. It means, “Come with Me. Join Me in what I am doing, in what I am thinking, and in finding out what I am all about.”
We are not little ducklings following a mother duck. We are coming with Him into a revealing of Who He is and what He is all about.
How did the Lord Jesus show Himself to His disciples? What did they discover by being with Him? I want to look at these four things He became to them: wisdom from God, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption.
He became wisdom from God to them. The disciples did not see Jesus as a philosopher. That is what the world wants you to see: Jesus is on the list with all the philosophers and great teachers. But He is not a philosopher like the world’s philosophers.
He is not the wisdom of man trying to figure things out through worldly philosophy and saying, “I think this is what the world is all about.” He became wisdom from God, addressing spiritual matters, because the spiritual is reality. This world is temporal, but the wisdom He brings is eternal.
In Matthew 22:15-40, Jesus was tested by the Pharisees, Sadducees, and lawyers. They asked Him three questions: “Should we pay taxes to Caesar?” “In the resurrection, whose wife will a woman be if she had several husbands?” And, “What is the greatest commandment?”
When I read passages like this, I always put myself in the place of the disciples. What were they thinking when those questions were asked? What were they thinking when Jesus answered?
The question about taxes was really this: what is our relationship to the world? The Lord’s answer was that we live in both a temporal world and a spiritual world. We must give to the temporal world what is due.
When He looked at the coin, He asked, “Whose image is this?” It was an earthly king, and he was due what belonged to him. The world wants your labor. In order to live in the world, you get a job. The world provides a living, and you give your employer your labor.
We might say, “At my job, I am a slave.” Well, in one sense, that is true. The world wants your labor; it does not really care whether you love it or not. How many of you have been in a job or school that you hated? I have.
I remember when I was a carpenter doing foundations. I hated that job. I prayed for rain, because if it rained, the trenches filled up and I did not have to go to work. But in order to feed yourself and your family, you have to work. So the Lord says, “You are in this part of the world. Give it what is due.”
But He also says, “Give God what is due.” What does God want? God does not want your labor. God wants you. “I want your heart. I want your love.” That is what He is after.
In 1 John 2, it says, “Love not the world.” Serve where you have to serve in the world, but do not love it. Do not become caught up in what you think it can give you, because it cannot give anything eternal or lasting.
You might say, “Well, I died rich.” Yes, but you died. Can you take it with you, like the pharaohs in Egypt who put everything in the tomb? “Oh, good—I am dead, and I have all this stuff.” What good is it? It is worth nothing. But the eternal goes from this world into the world to come, and eternal life has been given to us.
Then the Sadducees presented their conundrum about the woman and her many husbands. The Lord was not a riddle solver. People come up with little conundrums when you are witnessing to them and say, “Figure it out.” But the Lord is not a riddle solver.
His wisdom was this: “You do not know the Scriptures.” In other words, the answer is found in the Scriptures. Not only do you not know the Scriptures, but because you do not know the Scriptures, you do not know God. If you knew Him, you would not be asking such a silly question.
Then someone asked, “What is the greatest commandment?” I think this was a heartfelt question. I would have expected Jesus to go to the Ten Commandments, would you not? But His answer was from Matthew 22:37-40:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
This is the great and first commandment.
And a second like unto it is this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
On these two commandments the whole law hangeth, and the prophets.
Neither of those statements is in the Ten Commandments. The first is in Deuteronomy, where Moses recounts what happened and gives the law again. There is this matter of God’s choosing Israel, and He tells them, “God did not choose you because you were great in number or something special. He chose you because He loved you.”
Then He says, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.” The other command is in Leviticus 19: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
We want directions. We want to know exactly how it is done. But the Lord is saying that if you see God in such a way that He captures your heart and you love Him, you will find yourself doing the commandments because you love Him.
It will be in your heart to do those things. You will find, as 1 John says, that His commandments are not grievous. You will delight to do His will. This is wisdom from God.
Then it says Christ became righteousness to His disciples. What do we mean by righteousness? We often think of righteousness in terms of actions—the right actions, the do’s of religion. “If you are righteous, you do this, do that, and do the other.”
The Pharisees were the champions of the do’s of religion. They had not only the things God wanted, but they added a whole bunch of other things. Instead of looking at what God considered righteousness, they established a righteousness of their own.
That righteousness began to diverge from the righteousness of God. You math people know that if you start at one percent off and continue in that direction, the distance gets wider and wider. Soon you cannot recognize God’s righteousness because you are caught up in what you think is righteousness.
Their righteousness had all sorts of loopholes. They could say, “Mom and Dad, I am sorry. I could put you in assisted living, but I gave all that money to God, so I cannot help you.” Jesus said that they had a righteousness with loopholes, and it neglected the weightier matters of the law.
The weightier matters are justice, mercy, and faith. These are what righteousness is all about. Jesus said twice to the Pharisees, when they complained that He was not righteous, “Go and learn what this meaneth, I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.”
In righteousness is the heart of God. Everything God has concerning righteousness comes from His heart. When He says to provide for your father and mother, that is part of being righteous: you provide for those related to you who cannot help themselves.
But the Pharisees had a righteousness that excluded the heart of God. It was simply, “Do this, do this, do this.” They got so caught up in doing that they forgot God.
The disciples looked at Jesus, and in all the things they saw Him doing, in the way He acted and the things He did, they saw in Him the model of righteousness. He was the standard of righteousness. The standard was Jesus Himself and the actions flowing out of His heart.
He ate with sinners because it was right. Why was it right? Because they needed a doctor. They needed to see what righteousness is. The other kind of righteousness kept people away from those who needed righteousness.
Righteousness can become, “Look at me. Look at the things I do. I am so righteous. People can see what a righteous man I am.” But that righteousness is just a bunch of do’s. There is no heart to it.
Jesus became to the disciples the model of righteousness. They did not see it in the Pharisees. He said in the Sermon on the Mount that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of God.
Then it says He became their sanctification. Sanctification is a hard word because it also means holiness. In a religious sense, this is how I came to think of holiness: how do you know someone is holy? You know they are righteous by the things they do. How do you know they are holy? By the things they do not do.
“I do not smoke, drink, or watch movies. I am holy.” This idea that sanctification is the don’ts of religion has to be put away.
The Lord was holy, but He was not holy merely because of the things He did not do. He was holy because He was fully set apart for a purpose. His purpose was to redeem man. That is why God sent Him into the earth. He was set apart for that purpose, and that is what made Him holy.
Sanctification or holiness means being set apart for a purpose. We think we cannot be included in a purpose unless we do or do not do certain things, and that this is what makes us worthy to be part of the purpose. That is not so, and you need to get that through your heads.
When you are called into a relationship with Jesus, that calling itself is sanctification. He is calling you apart to Himself and calling you apart to share in His purpose, to be about His Father’s business with Him. That is what sanctifies you. It is the beginning of your sanctification.
Then, as you walk with Jesus, that sanctification is perfected. It is like this: I have never been in the army, but I did get a draft notice once. I was disqualified. Bummer, huh? I was too good looking. They said, “We cannot kill a man that good looking.”
But when you are drafted and inducted into the army, you are set apart for that nation’s service. Then they train you. In the training, they break you down from self-sufficiency.
Some of my kids are going to military school, and they will be freshmen. Do you know what they will be called? Maggots. “You maggot, come here. Carry my books.” They break you down, and then they build you back up with a new identity.
You are no longer the maggot; you are a soldier. They give you a uniform. When the Lord called Israel out of Egypt, He wanted them all to be priests, but some worshiped the idol. So He called one group to be priests, and He gave them a uniform. You can read about it in Exodus 28.
On their uniform was a turban with a little gold plate on top, engraved like a signet. A signet is a ring showing that you have authority—you are acting in the authority of another person.
Anyone in the army wearing the uniform acts in the authority of the United States Army—or the Canadian Army. On that gold plate was written, “Holiness to the Lord.”
It was placed on their heads. I think it was there so they would know it first in their minds: by putting on this uniform and turban, “This is my holiness to begin with. I am called apart for something.”
It is the same thing for us. You put on a soldier’s uniform, and all of a sudden you know you are set apart. Because you are set apart, you have a different bearing. You are called into something greater, and therefore you find yourself acting up to that calling.
You do not act like the sloppy civilian you were because you have been changed into a soldier. How have you been changed? You have been brought into that training. You have been set apart and brought into training.
The disciples were the same way. They were sanctified first when they were called into relationship with Jesus. Then, through being with Him, they were trained. They would say, “Should we call fire down on these people because they are not with us?” The Lord would say, “You do not even know what spirit you are of.”
There was a corrective ministry from being with Him. It was not merely, “Do not do that.” Rather, by being with Him, they could see Who He was and what His heart was. Their training became, “I see Him, and I want to be like Him. I want to be of the same spirit as Him.”
They came under this discipline. They continued to follow Him, and their relationship with Him as Teacher became their training and perfecting. It brought them into maturity, into the fullness of who they were, and into the fullness of their sanctification.
Luke 6:40 says that it is enough for disciples to become like their teacher. In Acts 4, after Peter and John healed the man lame from birth and said, “Silver and gold have I none; but what I have, that give I thee. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk,” they were brought before the authorities.
The authorities looked at how Peter and John carried themselves before the Sanhedrin. They listened to their wisdom, and they noticed that they were unlearned men. How could unlearned men be so intelligent? Then they recognized that they had been with Jesus.
They had been abiding with Jesus. That was their testimony. The authorities noticed an authority in them that came from being sanctified and called into service with Him.
In sanctification, the disciples found that holiness was not something they achieved by doing certain things. It was found in being in relationship with Christ. Being with Christ brought sanctification and separated them to a service higher than anything they could have attained on their own.
Finally, it says that Christ became redemption to them. We like to look at things separately. We say, “I need to work on my Christian life. I need patience, so I will work on that facet. I want to look at righteousness, so I will work on that facet.”
But the disciples saw Christ’s wisdom from God in all their dealings with Him. They saw that He was righteous in all He did. They saw that He was set apart and that God had set Him apart to do something. They could look at these things separately, but then all of a sudden they had an epiphany.
They saw Him as all these things. In being all these things, they saw Him as redemption. You may say, “Isn’t redemption the forgiveness of sins?” No. The forgiveness of sins is the beginning of redemption.
The totality of redemption is a new creation. They saw in Jesus Christ a Man like no other man. He was not like the regular men they saw around them. Even the Pharisees knew He was different. They said, “Why did you not arrest Him?” And the officers answered, “Never man so spake.”
Nobody did the things that this Man did. All of a sudden, they saw a whole new humanity. They saw a humanity on which God had put His seal.
Remember the Mount of Transfiguration? That was God putting His seal on the Man Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ could have stepped right into heaven as the Man God wanted.
They came to the realization that Jesus Christ is redemption. They saw man as man ought to be. In seeing this, they began to understand, “This is what we are meant to be. This is what redemption is all about: to be like Him.”
Is that not in 1 John? When we see Him, we will be like Him—not like Him in His deity, but like Him in His humanity. All who have this hope, this expectation that this is what we are going to become, purify themselves.
There is a furthering of sanctification. You are called to be this, but as you realize this calling, you begin to step into the things that make it happen. This is redemption: the bringing of man into all of this—into righteousness, sanctification, and wisdom from God.
This Man, Jesus Christ, is able to lead us into all that He is by our abiding with Him. “Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me.”
Yoke with Me. Abide with Me. His burden is light, and He will give rest to your souls. This new Man, Christ, takes us alongside Himself and leads us in the way. We are yoked to Him.
When we cannot go by ourselves, we need Someone who has gone that way before. Christ is that One. We are brought into this relationship so that He can take us into all that He is to us. That is what abiding is all about.
He becomes all that we need for redemption in this relationship. His wisdom becomes our wisdom because we are yoked to Him. His righteousness becomes our righteousness because, yoked to Him, He leads us into His own righteousness.
His sanctification—His being set apart for a purpose—becomes our purpose and our sanctification. We are not led into the purpose of redeeming man, but into the purpose of becoming a new man.
We are called into this relationship because in it God wants to show us His Son. Then, out of this relationship, God shows His Son in us to others. That is what abiding is all about.
I want to end with this thought. We tend to think as individuals: “My individual walk.” I am not saying there is anything wrong with that, but abiding is bigger than the individual.
When Jesus first said, “Come and see,” He was not talking to only one disciple. Two disciples were following Him, and He said, “Come and abide.” In John 15, He had the eleven disciples with Him, since Judas Iscariot had already left.
The whole message about abiding was to the group as a whole, as well as to individuals. When I first started to follow the Lord, when I was captured by His heart, the Lord brought me into contact with others who had been touched.
Why? Because there is a fuller abiding in that. We see Christ in others, and it helps us go along in this abiding.
I remember being on a tour once, and I was the only Christian on it. I wanted to have communion, but there were no other real Christians on the tour. How do you have communion?
In communion, the family gets together and remembers the Lord together. I was in my room, and I bought a loaf of bread. I did not drink, so I got a glass of water, and I had communion.
In a sense, it was not what communion is meant to be. Communion is meant to be all of us remembering together.
When I got far enough away on that tour, I found out what I missed most. I had my individual walk. I was having my quiet time, and I was touching the Lord every day. But what I missed most was that little group, that little band of brothers and a couple of sisters whom I had known when we first started following the Lord.
I missed their fellowship. I missed being on the road with them—not on some road trip, but on the path with them, following Christ together.
So this abiding is not merely an individual thing. It is bigger than that.
The whole theme of the conference is to direct us into this kind of relationship—this abiding relationship. This is the Lord’s heart. This is the Lord’s heart for this time, and this is the Lord’s heart for this time in your life.
It is not merely for the conference, because the conference is just a thing. It is a vehicle. What the Lord is really saying is, “The desire I have in My heart is for this abiding with you at this time. This is My heart’s cry.”
Seeing that this is being offered to us, this is what we should be saying throughout our time here: this relationship is being offered to us. We are being directed toward this relationship. Everything in this conference is directed toward this very thing.
The purpose is that we would willingly—not coerced in some way, but willingly—enter into it. As we see what this relationship is, we will willingly enter into it, and in entering into it, we will find all that He is meant to be for us.
That is something you find out as you go. He is not going to hold anything back. If you are in this relationship, He will not hold Himself back from you. We hold ourselves back.
In 2 Corinthians 6, when Paul was speaking of their relationship, he said, in effect, “We are not holding ourselves back from you; you are holding yourselves back from us.” That is it.
The Lord is saying, “I am trying to direct you into relationship with Me—a relationship where I know who you are, and I am not bothered by it. So you can feel free to come to Me.”
It is not about how much you know, what you have done, or what you have not done. This is Who He is. He wants you. He is offering Himself to you, and He is looking for you willingly to come to Him so that He can show you all that He is to you and for you.
Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we want to thank You that You do not hold us at a distance, that You do not keep us at arm’s length.
How we thank You that You want us close to You. Your desire from the very beginning was, “I want a tabernacle among them. I want to dwell among them. I want them to know Me as I want to know them.”
Lord, we ask that during this whole week we would understand, and that it would seep into our hearts, that You are trying to direct us to Yourself—not in a religious way, but in a way that we would truly have a relationship and get to know You for Who You are and for all that You want to show Yourself to us.
Lord, we thank You. We give You the rest of this time for these things, in Jesus’ name.