In John 15:1-8 stands the well-known passage in which Jesus portrays Himself as the vine and His followers as the branches of that vine. Strictly speaking, He must mean that He is the trunk of the vine and we are the branches. He surely doesn't mean that He is the whole vine, both trunk and branches, and that we are also the branches, since that would hardly make sense of verse 2, where we are told that God prunes the branches that bear fruit. Pruning here symbolises God's discipline, and the perfect Jesus clearly needed no disciplining, so the metaphor, strictly speaking, must involve Jesus being the trunk of the vine.
In verses 4-7 Jesus instructs His followers to abide in Him as the branches of the vine abide in the vine, i.e., in the trunk of the vine. And in verses 4 and 5 He tells us that our abiding in Him is accompanied by His abiding in us. The picture here is one of great intimacy between Jesus and His followers, one in which He and each Christian are bonded to each other very closely.
In verse 4, Jesus tells us too that unless we abide in Him we cannot bear fruit, and this fruit should be interpreted broadly as symbolising everything that is profitable in God's service. Abiding in Jesus is therefore obviously extremely important.
Although the passage speaks only of abiding, and says nothing about greater or lesser degrees of abiding, it makes sense to think that Christians can actually grow in their ability to abide in Him. To argue that a literal branch cannot grow in its ability to abide in the literal trunk of the vine, and that therefore neither should we understand a symbolic branch (i.e., a Christian) to be able to grow in its ability to abide in the symbolic trunk of the vine (i.e., Jesus), would be to read more detail into the symbolism than is appropriate.
It is entirely reasonable, then, to think that Christians are able to grow in their ability to abide in Jesus. And in view of the fact that abiding in Him leads to bearing fruit, we can therefore conclude that the better we abide in Him the more fruit we will bear, i.e., the more we will be able to do for God.
So, how do we achieve this goal of abiding in Jesus more and more deeply? Well, there should be no doubt that the better we obey Him, the better we will abide in Him. We should therefore be asking Him to show us all in our lives that displeases Him, and as He reveals what we are doing wrong and we aim to put that right, we will be able to abide more deeply in Him.
As well as simply aiming to obey Jesus better, there is something else that I am sure can help us to abide in Him more deeply, which is to make it our goal to do everything we do with Him. In fact, in this passage Jesus Himself points us in this direction. In verse 5, after saying that our abiding in Him will lead us to bear much fruit, He actually says, 'Apart from Me you can do nothing'.
Every day numerous little problems, and some big ones, usually crop up in our lives. I don't know if you are anything like me, but I find that my initial reaction to a problem I face is typically to worry a little about it, then to try in my own strength to solve it, and then, if that doesn't work, to start praying about it. I think this is a probably bad habit that most Christians, if they are honest, often fall into.
However, it is surely true that the more we can get into the habit of doing everything with Jesus, the more easily we will avoid worrying and trying to do things by ourselves. Instead, we will move quicker to treating a problem as something that Jesus and we will overcome together.
Nor should we aim only to overcome problems with Jesus and in His strength. Jesus' words about not being able to do anything apart from Him in verse 5 suggest that we should be aiming to do all that we do with Him, whether or not there is anything difficult about it. Basically, our goal should be to treat everything we do as a joint venture with Jesus.
That is not to say that we should attempt to be constantly conscious in our minds of doing everything with Jesus. I think that would be unrealistic and would probably be exhausting. I just mean that deeper down, in our spirits, we should attempt to rest constantly in Him, and to do everything we do with Him.
It has to be true that the more we can get into the habit of doing everything with Jesus, the more deeply we will abide Him. And, bearing in mind the connection between abiding and fruit-bearing that I noted above, it is surely true too that the more we are able to do everything with Jesus, the more fruit we will be able to produce in His service.
I have been a Christian for over 25 years. I have a Ph.D. in New Testament from the University of Edinburgh. I am a UK national and I currently live in the south of Scotland.
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