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Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Remain in Him


“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5, NIV).


Jesus opened the door to all the resources of God when you accepted Him into your heart. You received His power. But for His resources—that power—to be real to you, faith must be exercised. When you surrender self, you become a conduit of what He has given. You allow the Holy Spirit to have control. No matter how weak or how unaccomplished you feel, when you allow God to work through you, then what you do is powerful. You need to remember this during days when you slide back two steps after climbing one. No day is a failure when you have surrendered it to God. His use of your surrendered day may not be apparent all the time, but it is real. 

Jesus is the vine, and you are the branch. He remains in you. He can’t take away the finished work of grace He died to give you. However, you can desert Him. You can remove yourself from the life-giving flow of His grace. But if you remain in Him, He promises that you will bear fruit. The fruit is not yours to produce. It is His. You are only the branch which carries the life of the vine to the fruit. You can’t bear fruit without His life flowing through yours. If you desire His life to flow through you, surrender self and stay connected to His resources. If you remain in Him, wanting only His purpose in your life, the Holy Spirit will not fail to flow through your life into the lives of others—changing hearts and bearing fruit.

Sometimes you feel powerless. You can never trust your feelings, but you can believe God's truth. He never leaves you. Self, however, often gets in the way, and pulls you from His presence. Do you realize that when you hold on to the least vestige of yourself, you have told the Lord that you are the vine? That is pride. Think of Peter telling the Lord he wasn’t worthy to have his feet washed. What appeared as humility in Peter was pride. Peter was trying to hold onto the last vestige of himself by saying he wasn’t worthy, and the Lord was asking for His total surrender. Pride. Self. Unworthiness. All are excuses. In surrender, you are gracefully broken by the Holy Spirit to receive the life-giving flow of the vine.

If you hunger to be a vessel of His love and His power, surrender your will to His. When self is out of the way, the Holy Spirit flows―unhindered by human limitation. If you yield to Him every day, then you remain a vessel of all that He is. The power of the Cross—His grace—flows through you so that others receive what you alone can never give―His love, His peace, His joy.  

© 2019 Lynn Lacher
www.lynnlacher.com/2019/02/remain-in-him.html



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