Audio Transcript

Today we look at one of John Piper’s favorite Bible texts on the Christian life. The text that I’m thinking of is 2 Thessalonians 1:11–12. Pastor John doesn’t talk about this text a lot, but when he does, you immediately sense its significance. He has mentioned it here on the podcast a few times. A while back, speaking of 2 Thessalonians 1:11–12, he said, “I encourage everybody to meditate on every single phrase in those two verses.” That was in APJ 1473.

And the text pops up on the podcast annually, in early January, whenever we talk about New Year’s resolutions. That’s because Pastor John calls it “the most important” text in the Bible on resolutions. That’s a claim he made in APJ 1415. And back in APJ 246, he called it “a theology of resolutions in two verses.” But this same text has year-round value because it offers us “eight steps of sanctification” (APJ 367) — eight indispensables for Christian living, as we see in today’s episode, in a great little sermon clip from 2012. Here’s Pastor John to explain 2 Thessalonians 1:11–12.

Let’s read these two verses again. “To this end” — and what he means by that in the preceding verses is “so that you will be able to marvel at the Lord when he comes.”

To this end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every resolve for good [or good resolve] and every work of faith by his power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

So, notice eight crucial things in those two verses.

1. Calling of God

There is a calling of God on and in every believer. Verse 11: “. . . that our God may make you worthy of his calling” — that is, the glorious destiny that he has for you, a destiny to be a part of his kingdom, and to be a part of and shaped by, glorified by, his glory. The easiest place to see that that’s what it means is 1 Thessalonians 2:12, which goes like this: “[We] charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.”

“Your calling is to be in the kingdom of God. Your calling is to share the glory of God.”

So, the calling of every Christian is that we will be destined — we are destined — and we’ll be there in God’s kingdom, and in his glory, perfectly someday. So your calling is to be in the kingdom of God. Your calling is to share the glory of God, as will be increasingly clear as we get to that part of these two verses. That’s number one, the calling of God.

2. Made Worthy of His Calling

There is a being made worthy of the calling. Verse 11: “. . . that our God may make you worthy of his calling.” So, that’s what God is doing if you’re a Christian. He’s making you worthy of his calling. Being made worthy of something doesn’t mean being made deserving of it — it means being made suitable for it, or being made fitting or appropriate for it.

If you know that the queen of England has decided to come and stay in one of the bedrooms of your house, your thought will be, first (probably), “I don’t deserve it, and the room certainly doesn’t deserve it,” which would be true. But what you mean by, “I must make the room worthy of the queen” is that she’s got the worth and the room needs some work. “I want to make the room suitable. I want to make the room fitting.” She’s already decided to come. It’s not about deserving her coming.

The Lord has put his favor on his people and said, “You’re going to be in my kingdom. You’re going to be my children. You’re going to be there glorifying me.” And then he goes about the business of suiting us out, fitting us for that destiny called being made worthy of our calling. That’s number two.

3. Good Resolves Fulfilled

There is a fulfillment, therefore — in the exercise of that being made worthy of the calling, there’s a fulfillment of our good resolves. Verse 11: “. . . that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every good resolve,” or “every resolve for good.” So, the Christian life is a resolving life. It’s a planning life. It’s a purposing life. It’s an intending life.

God has given every one of you wills. And he intends for you to use your will to make plans and purposes and designs and intentions and resolves, to do something right and beautiful and good every hour of your day. That’s why we have brains and wills, volition.

4. Power of God in Us

And the question is, how do those resolves become real — turn into deeds, get fulfilled? And that’s number four: by the power of God. Verse 11: “. . . that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power.” So our resolves become works by his power, and he intends to get the glory for the fulfillment of our resolves. And that’s why he makes himself the giver of the power. The giver gets the glory.

If you did your resolves in your own strength, you would get the glory, and you should. And if you depend on him to fulfill your resolves with his power, he gets the glory, and he should. And that’s the way he set it up.

And so, how do our resolves become acts? How does the resolve to do a right thing and not do a wrong thing become effective? God’s power, that’s how. So, the Christian life is a life of supernatural power coming in, moving out, and giving us the ability to fulfill our resolves.

5. Works of Faith

How do we tap into this power? How do we avail ourselves of the power? How do we depend upon the power? By faith. Verse 11: “. . . that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every good resolve” — every resolve for good — “and every work of faith.” When God fulfills, by his power, a good resolve, it becomes a work of faith. That’s the way I’m taking the connection between fulfilling a resolve for good and a work of faith: the power of God enabling needs to happen.

When the power of God meets you in your good resolve, it meets you by making that resolve become a work called now a “work of faith,” which shows how you tapped into that. Got it? It’s a work of faith — you could call it a work of power, it’s true. He’s just bringing you into the picture now. He’s already said God’s power fulfills your resolves and turns them into fulfillment — that is works, deeds, acts. And then he adds, “And those acts are acts of faith,” which tells me exactly what my role is in availing myself of divine power to fulfill the resolves I have in life — namely, I must trust him. I must trust his promise to give me power tonight, to fulfill a resolve I have when I go home.

That’s what I have to do: believe him; trust him. That’s the plug into the power. The outlet and the electricity is his power. And the plug is my faith. I trust you — click — power. That’s what faith does: it gets in, and power flows through it. And God has designed it that way because, when you’re a little child leaning on God for power to fulfill your resolves, he’s going to get the glory, which is where we’re going in just a moment — in fact, not a moment, a second.

6. Jesus’s Glory in Us

In this text, the name of Jesus is going to be glorified. Now we’re at verse 12. When God fulfills our resolves through our faith and turns them into works of faith, Jesus gets glory. So, verse 12: “. . . so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you.” So, when God’s power comes through your plug of faith and turns your resolves to do the right and to avoid the wrong into an act of faith, Jesus gets glory.

“All God’s power now, because of the cross and our connection with Jesus, is pouring on us for our good.”

Which must mean, since he hasn’t been mentioned yet in these two verses, that Paul is assuming that the power that he calls “God’s power” is power purchased and provided by Jesus, which is exactly what I argued for last week. When Christ dies, what he purchases for us is that God would now no longer be against us. His power is no longer devoted to our destruction, no longer devoted to our condemnation. All his power now, because of the cross and our connection with Jesus, is pouring on us for our good, not our destruction.

So anybody who knows the gospel — and I hope that last Sunday’s message hasn’t ceased to be real for you — would know that it’s so fitting that Paul would say here that Jesus’s name would be glorified. When God, by his power, comes into the life of imperfect people like me, who don’t deserve any help at all from him, and he takes my little puny, half-baked, vain resolves to do right, and he makes them happen to some measure of good, Jesus gets glory. That’s right. God gets glory too, but Jesus is named as the one who gets the glory. He purchased that awesome sanctifying event that enables us to fulfill our resolves.

7. Our Glory in Him

And we are glorified in him. So, he’s glorified in this process, and now it says we are too. So let’s read that again. Verse 12: “. . . so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him.” So, as he purchases and provides the power by covering all of our sin and providing all of our right standing with God, we are being conformed into Christ’s likeness, because our resolves for good are being fulfilled by faith in that.

And the effect is that we too are becoming glorious with his glory. “We all . . . beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to the next” (2 Corinthians 3:18). And oh for the day when that will be complete, in the moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, when we shall be changed — saved to sin no more. Hasten that day.

8. All of Grace

All of this is according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus. End of verse 12: “. . . so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.” It is all of grace — the grace of our Father and the grace of our Lord Jesus. The power that comes to us moment by moment to fulfill our resolves for good is the power of grace, the extension of grace.

Grace to Glory

So those are the eight crucial, indispensable, wonderful elements in verses 11 and 12. Let me try to sum them up. How do they work? Let me put them together in the order that they work instead of just the order that they come.

Paul ends with the beginning, right? At the bottom of the Christian life is grace, and everything moves up from that foundation. If there were anything we could do down here beneath this to get under it and make it happen, it wouldn’t be grace. That’s the meaning of grace. So grace is free, and it comes to us in our total undeserving, and it starts to do good things for us. And so, it’s all of grace. Grace is at the bottom of the Christian life.

And now, up from that grace, God’s power flows. And that power flows through your faith. If we were doing other texts, I could show you that the power, in fact, awakens that faith and then moves through it, awakens those resolves and then fulfills them. But all it says here now, which is all we’re going to talk about, is when you have a resolve to do right, and do good — to honor God, to love people, to kill sin — that resolve, if it gets fulfilled, gets fulfilled by the power of God.

And the way you tap into that power is by faith. And when you do, then Jesus is made to look glorious in your life, and you participate in the glorification of Jesus by becoming increasingly beautiful yourself — somewhat in this life, unspeakably in the life to come.

Audio Transcript

Happy Friday, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. As many of you can imagine, when one spouse gets saved and the other spouse does not, it leads to new tensions inside the home. Maybe you don’t need to imagine such tensions. Maybe this is your reality. At least five times, we have addressed these tensions on the podcast. (See APJs 397, 680, 1029, 1560, and 1690.) And this now includes today’s episode. It’s a question from a woman who listens to the podcast. Here’s her question: “Dear Pastor John, hello! Although I have always identified as a Christian, I just recently experienced the new birth as a married woman with children at age 34.” Praise God! “My husband, however, is not a Christian. Jesus has transformed my life. And though my husband has been supportive of me until now, he does not want me to be baptized. I feel the time has come for me to be baptized. But I don’t want to go against my husband’s expressed wishes either. Ephesians 5:22–24 says I should submit to my husband. First Peter 3:1 speaks of the influence of a wife’s conduct on her nonbelieving husband. But I am called by Jesus to be baptized. So should I go against my husband’s wishes?”

When all is said and done, my bottom-line answer is going to be yes. But for that act to be pleasing to the Lord, there is more that needs to be said, so let’s take a few minutes and think about this.

The uniform teaching of the New Testament, whether it’s Ephesians 5 or 1 Corinthians 11 or Colossians 3 or 1 Peter 3, is that husbands are to be the head of their wives the way Christ is the head of the church, and that wives should be in glad support of that leadership, that headship, which the New Testament calls submission.

So, I would define submission like this: the disposition of a wife’s heart and mind, for the sake of Christ, to give glad support to her husband’s leadership. And the reason I use that kind of definition — namely, a disposition of heart and mind to comply gladly with the husband’s initiatives and leadership for the Lord’s sake — is that those two aspects of the definition, the disposition and for the Lord’s sake, provide limitations on the absoluteness of obedience to the husband.

Two Limits to Submission

The first limitation is implied in the words “a disposition of heart and mind,” because you can have a disposition to comply even if sometimes, for godly, biblical reasons, you may not comply. In other words, there is a huge difference between a biblically submissive wife, who occasionally sees biblical reasons not to comply with something her husband expects, and a defiant wife, or just an egalitarian wife, who is resistant to the very notion that her husband has a God-given responsibility to exercise initiative and authority in their relationship. There’s a big difference.

“She is first and foremost under the lordship of Christ. That’s what it means to be a Christian.”

And the other limitation that my definition puts on absolute obedience to the husband is when it says that her glad support for the husband’s leadership is “for the Lord’s sake.” That’s really significant. What I mean by that is that she is first and foremost under the lordship of Christ as a Christian. That’s what it means to be a Christian. And then derivatively, not absolutely, she is under the leadership of her husband.

So Paul says in Colossians 3:18, “Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.” And Ephesians 5:22 says, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” Now both of those statements that connect submission with the Lord imply that submission to the husband is flowing from a prior reality that’s higher and more authoritative — namely, being in the Lord or having Jesus as your Lord.

Then Peter makes this connection most clear when he begins his section on submission — to state, masters, husbands — in 1 Peter 2:13. He says, “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution.” Now that’s huge. All obedience to humans is subordinated to obedience to Jesus, the absolute Lord. We do things for his sake, in submission to him, under his lordship.

Obedience to Jesus sends us into earthly relationships with the disposition to serve and acknowledge God-given authority. But that same obedience to Jesus limits our obedience because Jesus does not send us to be obediently disobedient to him. The words of Peter in Acts 5:29 fly like a banner over all Christian relationships: “We must obey God rather than men,” they said.

Obedience and Opportunity

So now, in regard to the decision of this wife to be baptized while her husband disapproves, here are several implications I would draw out.

Christ’s Command

First, when it comes to the command of Christ versus the command of a husband, the command of Christ will take precedence over the command of the husband when they’re in conflict, as they are here, it seems. This is what it means to have Jesus as your Lord. Baptism is a command of the Lord Jesus. In the Great Commission, Matthew 28:19–20, he said that making disciples of all nations included baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

“Obedience to Jesus limits our obedience because Jesus does not send us to be obediently disobedient to him.”

Baptism never became merely optional in the ministry of the apostles. There’s no evidence of any Christians in the early church who were not baptized. The assumption in all the Epistles is that Christians have been baptized. It belongs together with faith as an outward expression of our death with Christ and our resurrection in him to newness of life. That’s the first thing.

Her Disposition

Second, choosing to be baptized against the desire of a husband does not mean that a wife has abandoned her disposition of heart and mind to give glad support to her husband’s leadership. This exceptional act of non-compliance can be pursued without defiance and without anger, and with respect and affection, and with a longing expressed to her husband that he would see in her a loyal wife who delights to be responsive to his initiatives and leadership. But on this particular point, her greater allegiance is to Jesus and his call to be baptized.

Her Approach

Third, I would emphasize that she doesn’t need to be precipitous or hasty in her action, but for her husband’s sake and for peace and hope she can go slowly (it seems like she has) and pray and seek to help him understand, as much as he’ll let her. She does not need to give any impression that she’s acting irrationally, but that she has come to this decision carefully, thoughtfully, and would love to include him in the process — and, indeed, have him be a part of the event as well.

His Opportunity

And finally, by way of encouragement, even though this is a point of tension between her and her husband, it may turn out that by the conversations they have about the meaning of what she’s doing and why she’s doing it, that this would be one of the most clarifying things for him about the very meaning of Christianity. What does it mean that his wife is a Christian?

It may be that some of his resistance to baptism is owing to a very superficial understanding of what it is and what it really means to be a Christian. And this decision on her part may give her an opportunity to explain to him the profound reality of spiritual death with Christ and new life in the Spirit and all the implications of what it is to be forgiven and accepted and loved and indwelt by the Holy Spirit with the hope of everlasting life.

Few things will provide as clear an opportunity for a wife to make plain to an unbelieving husband what it means for her to be a Christian as for her to explain — in great detail, perhaps — what the greatness of baptism stands for. So I will pray that God gives you great grace and wisdom as you move forward, and that your husband will not only be agreeable, but someday join you in the life that baptism really stands for.

Today I want to try to help us experience prayer as the vocalization of abiding in Christ. When I speak of prayer vocalizing the experience of abiding in Christ, I have in mind three ways prayer vocalizes abiding.

First, there is the vocalization of our need and our desire to be attached to Christ, like a branch to a vine. I have in mind that first cry when God saved us by putting a taste for his life-giving, love-giving, joy-giving sap on the tongue of our souls so that we cried out, “Yes, Lord, yes. I want this! Make me yours. Fasten me to yourself, branch to vine, forever.”

And I also have in mind the recurring cry, when we feel like our branch is withering, that says, “Hold on to me. Keep me in the vine. Don’t let me go. Be my life. If there’s a disease in me, disenchanting me with the all-satisfying sap of yourself, then heal me, prune me, and cause your life to surge in me again.”

That’s the first way that prayer vocalizes abiding in Christ: it is both the first cry to become attached to the vine and the recurring cry to remain attached to the vine.

Second, there is the daily vocalization of our thankful, happy, desperate dependence — moment by moment — on his ever-flowing sap of life. This isn’t the desperate cry of, “Keep me!” This is the happy, thankful, expression of confident trust.

When I dropped my wife Noël off at the airport yesterday at seven o’clock in the morning, as she was on her way to her mother’s one-hundredth birthday, I pulled up by the Delta drop-off, took her hand, and prayed, “Father, Noël and I are so thankful to be your adopted children, with every amazing thing that this implies. We receive right now the promise that we can cast all our anxieties on you, because you care for us (1 Peter 5:7). We rest, we revel, in your care. We love being branches in the vine. Meet every need as Noël travels and as I go home to prepare tomorrow’s message. In Jesus’s name. Amen.”

That’s the second way that prayer vocalizes abiding in Christ: expressing thankful, happy, desperate, confident dependence — moment by moment — on Christ’s life-giving, love-giving, joy-giving sap.

Third, there is the vocalization of our longing that Christ’s life and love and joy would flow through us into living fruit — the longing that this fruit would course with the same life and love and joy that we have by abiding in Christ.

“God saved us by putting a taste for his life-giving, love-giving, joy-giving sap on the tongue of our souls.”

So when I got home from the airport, I got down on my knees in my study and said, “Father, would you help me now prepare a message for chapel tomorrow that would bear much fruit? Would you grant that all the life and love and joy of Christ that I have known throughout these decades of abiding would become life and love and joy in the lives of those who listen?”

Six Ways We Abide in Christ

My aim is to help us experience prayer as the vocalization of abiding in Christ, as (1) the cry to abide in the vine, (2) the day-by-day expression of joyful, confident dependence on the vine, and (3) the longing that we would bear fruit because of our attachment to the vine.

To do that, it seems we should spend a good bit of our time pushing into the reality of what abiding in Christ is. I am going to point to six ways we abide in Christ.

1. Receiving Life from Christ

Let’s start with the picture in John 15:5: “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” The picture is of the disciple of Jesus as a branch and Jesus as the vine.

So, the least we can say is that abiding in Christ is the experience of getting our life from Christ. The sap of life flows into the branch if the branch is abiding, remaining in the vine. If there is no attachment to the vine, then there is no life in the branch.

2. Remaining in His Love

A second way to describe the experience of abiding is to say that we remain in the love of Christ. John 15:9: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love.” So the life-giving attachment to the vine can be described as a love-giving attachment to the vine. The vine loves the branches. Love is flowing to the branches. The life that flows to the branches is the life of love.

So now the command “Abide in me” (John 15:4) and the implicit command “Abide in my life, which flows to you” become a little more concrete: “Abide in my love” (John 15:9). Essentially God is saying, “Keep on receiving and welcoming and enjoying and trusting and treasuring my love.” That is the experience of abiding in the vine.

3. Abiding in His Word

We can describe the experience of abiding yet another way. Abiding in Christ means abiding in his word, and his words abiding in us. John 15:7: “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you . . .” The phrase “my words abide in you” stands in the place where Jesus himself stood in John 15:4: “Abide in me, and I in you.” We see that “I, Jesus, abiding in you” becomes “my words abiding in you.”

“The experience of abiding in Christ is not only abiding in his life and love, but also in his word.”

And it is not just his words abiding in us, but us abiding in his words — just like we abide in him. According to John 8:31, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples.” So the experience of abiding in Christ is not only abiding in his life, and abiding in his love, but also abiding in his word. John says it again in 1 John 2:24: “Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father.”

I take this to mean that the life and the love that flow from the vine into the branches are communicated to us and experienced by us through the word of Christ. The life of Jesus and the love of Jesus accomplish nothing in our lives apart from the word of Jesus.

There are no incognito Christians. Wordless experiences — that is, experiences without any conscious connection with Christ — are worthless experiences. Christ gets no glory from human experiences that we do not know to be from Christ.

We know experiences to be from Christ because of the word of Christ. For he says, “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63). And so we respond, “You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). Therefore, we abide in Christ — we abide in his life and in his love — by receiving and welcoming and understanding and believing the reality mediated by the words of Christ.

4. Drinking from Christ

A fourth way to describe abiding in Christ is to see the connection between the branch drinking the life-giving sap of the vine and the soul-drinking Christ as the water of life or the soul-feeding on him as the bread of heaven. John 6:35: “Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.’” Coming to Christ so as not to hunger anymore and believing in Christ so as not to thirst anymore is the experience of abiding in Christ. Abiding is believing, understood as eating and drinking Christ.

“Prayer expresses thankful, happy, desperate, confident dependence on Christ’s life-giving, love-giving sap.”

Here it is again in John 7:37–38: “Jesus cried out, ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” Notice that thirsting for Christ, coming to Christ, and drinking of Christ are replaced with believing in Christ. So the experience of believing in Christ is thirsting for Christ and coming to Christ and drinking from Christ — that is, abiding in Christ like a branch abiding in the vine and drinking the all-satisfying life and love that are in it.

Therefore, we can describe the experience of abiding in Christ as believing on Christ, provided we give the term believing its full-blooded meaning from the Gospel of John — namely, believing is thirsting, coming, drinking, and saying: “This is the end of my quest. Here is life and love and joy.”

5. Savoring the Son’s Joy

That word joy leads to a fifth way of describing the experience of abiding in Christ. In John 15:11, after drawing out the implications of the vine and the branches, Jesus adds this: “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”

Be sure to understand this in connection with the picture of the vine and the branches. He does not simply say that because we are abiding in the vine, our joy will be full. What he says is that because we are abiding in the vine, his joy will be in us, and therefore our joy will be full. In other words, what the branch receives from the vine is the very joy of the vine: “My joy [will] be in you” (John 15:11).

Let me give you a taste of what this experience is from Galatians 4:6. Paul says, “Because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” Push into the reality of this. Think of it in terms of the vine and the branch. We are redeemed and made the legal sons of God by the death of Christ. And then he says that because we are his sons legally, God sends the Spirit of the Son — the Spirit of the vine or the sap — into our branch-hearts, shouting (krazō), “Abba! Father!” And how does the Son of God feel about his Father? He loves him: “I love the Father” (John 14:31).

That is, he takes infinite pleasure in the Father. He enjoys the Father. And he flows into our hearts, our branch, bringing that, being that, exulting in that. He does this, to use the words of John 15:11, “that my joy may be in you.” He flows into us, “That my joy in my Father made be your joy in your Father.”

So the experience of abiding in Christ is the experience of enjoying God by the Spirit of the Son of God enjoying his Father in us. If you find welling up within you the cry — spoken or unspoken, but real — that says, “Father! I need you. Thank you for redeeming me. Thank you for adopting me. Oh, how precious you are to me! I love you!” then guess what? You are experiencing the Spirit of the Son of God loving his Father in you. You are experiencing John 15:11, the joy of Christ himself becoming your joy, and your joy becoming full. You are experiencing what it means to abide in Christ.

6. Feasting on Calvary

Consider one last way to describe the experience of abiding in Christ. In John 6:56 Jesus says, “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.” The crucified flesh and the shed blood of Jesus are the wellspring of all the life and love and joy and words that we receive from the vine. To eat and drink at the cross is to get everything from the sacrifice of Christ.

In summary, I would arrange the first five ways of describing the experience of abiding in Christ like this:

First is the experience of the soul’s thirst and hunger drinking from Christ with satisfaction.
Second, as the branch drinks from the vine, it receives the life of the vine. No attachment to the vine, no life in the branch.
Third, as we drink from the life of the vine, we find it to be the life of love — Christ’s invincible love for us. And we rest in it and feed on it.
Fourth, as we drink from the life and love of the vine, we experience the joy of Jesus as our joy —the Spirit of the Son singing out his joyful love for the Father in our hearts.
Fifth, we find all of this mediated to us through the words of Christ so that his words become our life.

And finally, we discover that every benefit of abiding in the vine was secured for us by the crucified flesh and shed blood of Christ. And that sacrifice becomes for us the all-supplying bread and drink of heaven.

How Prayer Speaks

Now let’s revisit where we started, with prayer as the vocalization of this experience of abiding in Christ. There are (1) the prayers that vocalize the desire to abide in Christ, (2) the prayers that vocalize the daily reality of abiding in Christ, and (3) the prayers that vocalize the desire for fruit through abiding in Christ.

With Desperate Desire

First, there are prayers that vocalize the desire to abide in Christ. When Jesus asked the Samaritan woman at the well for a drink, she couldn’t believe that he, a Jew, would ask her. Then he says, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (John 4:10).

“You would have asked him” — this is where it all starts. There’s a sliver, a glimpse, of the life-giving vine right there in front of you, a glimmer of hope, and then comes an invitation: “Ask me. Just ask me.”

And many of us have responded: “Let me drink the living water. Attach me, Jesus, to yourself. Make me a living branch. Forever.” But if you haven’t tasted, haven’t asked to be grafted into the vine — this would be a good time. Vocalize to God your need and your desire to abide in Christ.

With Happy Trust

Then there are the prayers that vocalize the daily reality of abiding in Christ. These tell Christ — and tell the Father — that you trust him. Tell them that their love for you is your life and your joy. Tell Christ, in the presence of your spouse or children or friends, that his words are words of life to you.

Tell Christ that abiding in his love makes you glad. Say to him, on behalf of your family or your small group, and in their presence, “Jesus, your sacrifice, your words, your life, your love, your joy is everything to me. I taste them. They are my food and my drink. They satisfy my soul.” Tell him.

Do what the saints have done for millennia. Speak to the Lord of your trust. And tell him of the pleasures of abiding in Christ.

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;         my soul thirsts for you;my flesh faints for you,         as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,         beholding your power and glory.Because your steadfast love is better than life,         my lips will praise you.So I will bless you as long as I live;         in your name I will lift up my hands. (Psalm 63:1–4)

They feast on the abundance of your house,         and you give them drink from the river of your delights.For with you is the fountain of life;         in your light do we see light. (Psalm 36:8–9)

With Fruitful Zeal

Finally, there are the prayers that vocalize the desire for fruit through abiding in Christ. This is the goal of life and love and joy flowing from the vine — a kind of life and a kind of love and a kind of joy that has in it a happy pressure to expand, to increase, by becoming the life and love and joy in others. That’s what it is to bear fruit.

Jesus says in John 4:14, “The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” Yes, and more than a spring: “Whoever believes in me [abides in me, drinks from me] . . . ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water” (John 7:38). Or, as Jesus says in John 15:5, “Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit.”

This is the sap of the vine, the living water, the very life and love and joy of the Son of God, coursing through your branch-life and then miraculously increasing — your joy increasing — in the life and love and joy of another.

And Jesus says, “Don’t be passive about this. Make this the great passion of your prayer.” He says in John 15:7–8, “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish [for every kind of God-glorifying fruit], and it will be done for you. By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit.” Jesus is saying, “Ask me! Ask me for God-glorifying fruit!”

When Christ’s words abide in you, when his truth, life, love, and joy abide in you, you will be given a spiritual taste for God’s fruitful will, and you will pray with Spirit-given passion, “O God, make my life fruitful. Let me not wither in the hot blasts of worldliness. Do whatever painful pruning you must do. Grant me so to drink that I become a spring — yes, a river! — and a fruitful branch. Oh, let me never be content until my joy in you bears fruit in the joy of others in you. By this, Father, are you glorified — that I bear much fruit. Do it. Amen.”