Written by Lindsey Smith, Missionary Care Team Member
Call me a nonconformist, but when it comes to New Year’s Resolutions, I like to do things a little differently. Yes, I set a few goals for the year, but a practice that I’ve grown fond of over the last five years is praying that God would give me a word or phrase from the Bible to focus on for the next 365 days. This word then serves as an anchor that I can revisit each month.
In the past, my focus has been phrases like “cultivate faithfulness” (Ps. 37:4) or “be poured out as a drink offering” (Lev. 23:13; Phil. 2:17). For 2025, I was really hoping for something like “maturity” or “growth” because this past year has been filled with re-learning lessons I thought I had already mastered. However, as I continued praying and asking God to give me a theme, the scripture that kept coming up was John 15, the “I am the Vine” passage.
At first, I protested: “But Lord, that’s so basic! I want to progress, not go back to a passage of scripture that everyone knows. Abide? Really?” But, as these things often go, once I humbled myself a little and paused to meditate on John 15, I realized that the Lord wanted to meet me in a sweet way and teach me something fresh from this passage.
A quote had caught my attention a few months back from one of the Dwell Bible app devotionals. (Sidenote: If you aren’t using your free subscription, AJMers, you really should! It’s a great app!) The quote was: “Ancient Christian thought suggests that acquiring inner peace, or what St. Francis de Sales called ‘tranquility of heart’ is indeed the fastest route to spiritual maturity.”
This sent me on a journey of inquiring of the Lord: What is inner peace? How does one obtain this tranquility of heart that leads to this spiritual maturity? In a way, I believe John 15 was His answer to that prayer. Here are the verses that spoke to me the most:
4 Remain in me, and I will remain in you. For a branch cannot produce fruit if it is severed from the vine, and you cannot be fruitful unless you remain in me.
5 “Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing.
9 “I have loved you even as the Father has loved me. Remain in my love.
The word remain appears again and again, and I started to realize that while I had been hoping for some special instruction from the Lord for what more I could do to make spiritual gains this year, He was telling me to stop looking for ways to strive and instead rest in the place where He already has me planted. My favorite phrase from the passage is: “Remain in my love.”
Do you want to grow, mature, and see the power of God at work in your life?
Remain in Christ. Remain in His love.
What a restful, life-giving thought. As believers, we are already branches of the True Vine and we already dwell in the fullness of His love. Yes, there are practical things we can do to keep that reality at the forefront of our lives, like meditating on God’s word and His character, spending time in prayer, and fellowshipping with other believers. But none of these things bring us further into the love of Christ because we are already dwelling there.
When we live as if we aren’t planted in God’s love, we start believing that we can somehow work our way back into His favor, but that’s impossible. You can’t return to a position you never left.
One final thing I love about John 15 is the instruction Jesus gives to those task-oriented people like myself who ask: How do I remain in that love? How do I live with an understanding of what that looks like? Jesus answers: Keep my commandment… My commandment is: love each other in the same way I have loved you (John 15:10,12).
It’s quite simple, really. If we want to understand the love of God for us, we need to practice showing it to others. Maturity will come. Growth will come. Understanding will come. We need only to remain in Christ and remain in His love.
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