Remaining in Him

“Remain in Me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in Me.” John 15:4
John 15:1-8 is the well-known passage about the vine and the branches. We don’t need to guess at what the symbolism means, because Jesus tells us: “I am the vine; you are the branches” (John 15:5). Just as the branches of a vine are expected to produce grapes, so too believers in Christ are expected to produce fruit. This is the fruit described in Gal. 5:22-23 – the ‘fruit of the Spirit’: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. How do we produce this fruit? By remaining in the vine. Then the fruit will be produced automatically; we don’t need to strive at it.
We encounter people sometimes who claim to be ‘post-Christians’, that is, they counted themselves as regular Christians once upon a time, but now they have ‘moved beyond’ Christianity because of some higher spiritual or intellectual revelation. I don’t want to stir up the whole once-saved-always-saved debate. But whether these people have fallen away from the faith, or whether they were never saved in the first place, the fact that they say they have stepped away and cut themselves off from Jesus Christ means that they will not produce spiritual fruit. The only way to produce fruit is to remain in Christ.