Our small group has been studying John 15. If you aren't familiar with it, it's the part where Jesus says he's the vine, we are the branches and if we abide in him we bear fruit. I have for a long time felt that this section of scripture was really really important. If John 3:16 is "the" foundational verse on how to become a Christian then John 15 is "the" foundational verse on what's supposed to happen after you become a Christian.
The question of how to "be" a Christian has perplexed me for a long time. I'm a "If...Then...Else" kind of guy, after all I'm a computer programmer so I have to think like this all day long. If you do A, then B will happen, else C. If you read your Bible every day, you will be happy, else you will be miserable.
What has bothered me about this passage is that "If..Then..Else" thinking doesn't seem to capture what he is talking about very well. He says "If you keep my commandments you will abide in my love", which sounds like it might fit the "If..Then..Else" paradigm, so all you need to do is figure out what those commandments are and you are off to a happy life, right? Well you read a little further and he says "My command is this, that you love one another" OK, seems a little vague, but surely I can construct a "do list" on how to love someone.
But then it dawned on me that abiding in Jesus isn't really about faithfully keeping a do list, but more about a relationship with a living person. Jesus isn't asking me to wear myself out with a bunch of religious rules, activities, and standards (It didn't work out so well for the Pharisees did it?). He's asking me to live in intimate communion with him in a love relationship and to love those around me as an outflow of my friendship with him. The imagery of a vine kind of supports this idea as well. A vine branch doesn't really "do" anything other than abide and bear fruit. Maybe Jesus had this in mind when he chose the vine analogy.
So, to understand John 15 I think you need to throw out the "If...Then...Else" paradigm and think rather in terms of a love relationship. If you consider what it takes to love a woman well, you can "do" all the right things to mechanically love a woman, but if there isn't that genuineness that comes from the heart, it's going to ultimately fall flat. So, once again, it comes down to the issue of the heart. If you don't engage with God at the heart level, you can neither walk with him, nor know him..
So the question to ask ourselves is the same that Jesus asked Peter so long ago, "Do you love me?"
