(Living
“A” Life Versus “THE” Life – Part 5)
Even though God is the cause and effect of
transformation in your life, you have a vital part to play in order for Him to
live His life in you. Let’s look at John 15:5 to give you a better idea of what
that part is:
“I
AM the VINE, you are the branches; he who abides
in Me, and I in him, he bears much fruit…”
John 15:5a
Jesus is saying that as the physical
branch is designed to be totally dependent upon the physical vine for
life, you, as a spiritual branch, are designed to live totally dependent
upon God, the spiritual Vine, for life. The word “abide” is another word for dependence. It is important to understand at this point a
very key truth:
KEY TRUTH:
God created
man to be DEPENDENT upon Him.
His DESIGN
from the beginning was for YOU to depend upon Him.
The key word is “design.” God’s design
from the beginning was for Adam and Eve to live totally dependent on Him to
meet their every need. God’s design has not changed. You, too, are designed to
live totally dependent on God. Doesn’t it stand to reason that if God is
our Source that our part is to depend on Him to be our Source? That is why
Jesus uses the perfect example of the branch being totally dependent on the
Vine for life. Therefore, God’s design for you in Christ living His life in you
is:
Living with
an ATTITUDE of TOTAL DEPENDENCE upon God
as your Source.
Side
note: The word “bears” in John 15:5
does not mean “produce.” The word “bears” means “to carry.” The key point is
that the branch does not produce the fruit. The vine is the source for
producing the fruit while the branch is the agent through which the fruit is produced.
KEY POINT
As you walk with an ATTITUDE of DEPENDENCE
upon God, He, as your Source, PRODUCES in you His promises of freedom,
victory, healing, and
fulfilling
your SPIRITUAL destiny of being transformed into Christ-likeness.
To Further Understand Dependence, Look At How Jesus
Lived On This Earth
You may be wondering at this point what
dependence looks like. To gain a fuller understanding of dependence, let’s look
at how Jesus lived His life on earth. We need to first understand that Jesus as
the “God-man” laid aside His privileges of deity. We see this in Philippians
2:6, 7:
“He (Jesus) had equal status with God but
didn’t think so much of Himself that He had to cling to the advantages of that
status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, He set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status
of a slave and became human!” NLT (Parenthesis mine)
It doesn’t mean that at any time while
Jesus was on this earth that He was not fully deity. What it means specifically
is that Jesus laid aside His right to be co-equal
with the Father in order to live as a man. How then did Jesus live in regard to
His relationship with the Father?
Let’s look at three
scriptures that describe Jesus’s relationship to His Father:
“Jesus therefore answered and was saying to
them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son
can do nothing of Himself,
unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does,
these things the Son also does in like manner.’” John 5:19
“I can do nothing on
My own initiative. As I hear, I judge; and My judgment
is just, because I do not seek My own will, but the will of Him who sent
Me.” John 5:30
“Jesus therefore said, ‘When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He, and I do nothing on My own initiative, but I speak these things as the Father taught Me.’” John 8:28
“Jesus therefore said, ‘When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He, and I do nothing on My own initiative, but I speak these things as the Father taught Me.’” John 8:28
The common theme in each of these verses
is that Jesus said that He could do nothing
apart from the Father. In other
words, Jesus lived in moment by moment dependence upon the Father as His
Source while He was living on earth. What does it mean that Jesus was living
from the Father as His Source?
This means that Jesus was not functioning out
of His OWN
life and power but out of the life and power
of His FATHER.
Could this mean that the Father, not
Jesus, was the Source for all that Jesus accomplished while He was on earth? We
see the answer in John 14:10 when Jesus says:
“Don’t
you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me? The words I say
are not my own, but my Father who lives
in Me does His work through Me.”
What this verse is telling us is that it
was the Father’s life and power through Jesus healing the
lame, giving sight to the blind, and raising Lazarus from the dead. In other words,
Jesus lived dependently on the Father, with the result that the Father produced the miracles through Christ. Jesus’s life in
relationship to His Father was a perfect example of the branch-Vine
relationship.
If through Jesus’s dependence the Father’s
life and power flowed through Him to perform miracles, what could that same
life and power do in you if you walk dependently upon God? This leads us to the
following question:
If Jesus, as a man, lived in total DEPENDENCE upon His
Father as the Source with the result that the FATHER lived His life in and
through Jesus, then
HOW SHOULD YOU LIVE LIFE?
