Abide in Christ


I met my friend, Jaci Wightman, about 10 years ago.  The way she taught and lived the gospel prepared me for the rigors of betrayal trauma.  I recently took an online course from her that expanded my understanding of what I experienced during my recovery work and has also changed my future.  The course is available on her website at Jaciwightman.com. I learned to abide in Christ without knowing that was what I was actually doing.  Because of this course, I have been given the words to articulate it. Since I didn’t know what it was and exactly how to do it, I wasn’t abiding in Christ on purpose and consistently until recently. I hope you will patiently bear with me as I try to cover this section that is much newer to me than the rest of this book.

Christ said, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). What this means to me is that Christ has more for us than just coping or surviving through life---both the “big stuff,” but also the day-to-day challenges.  He is inviting us to have a deeper experience and begin to step into the fullness that He offers.

How does He do that?  When we learn to abide in Christ, it simply means that we allow Him to come with us into the details of our daily lives.  It isn’t just the pretty parts of our lives or those quiet moments that we must formally approach Him through prayer.  He isn’t a friend that we tuck away in some closet of our mind or heart and only visit Him every once in a while, or every day at best.  He wants more than a pop-in-relationship with you!  He wants to “dwell in your hearts by faith” (Ephesians 3:17)!

Start paying attention to the words “in you” in your scripture study.  They are everywhere in the standard works!  Christ is trying to tell us something about the kind of relationship He wants us to have with Him.  He wants more than a stiff relationship where we approach Him distantly.  He wants to literally come into our hearts and fill us and strengthen us with His power and love. “[He] knoweth all things which are to come: wherefore, he worketh in me to do according to His will” (Words of Mormon 1:7).

It reminds me of the Sacrament prayers.  We promise that we will always remember Christ and keep His commandments.  We are promised that we will have Christ’s Spirit to always be with us (see D&C 20:77).

And think about the beautiful abiding symbolism in the Sacrament!  Have you ever stopped to think about why we eat the bread and drink the water?  Why couldn’t it be something else? I believe it is so we can be reminded constantly about the intimate kind of relationship our Savior wants to have with us.  What happens to that bread and water once we swallow it?  It is in us!  It starts to literally become a part of us. The Savior wants to be in us.  We can learn to abide in Him as we begin to take Him everywhere we go.  Just as that bread and that water, Christ can be in us and become part of us.
I was recently reading the olive tree allegory in Jacob 5 and this jumped out at me. The Lord of the vineyard and the servant went out to check on the trees that they had replanted.  “...the servant said unto his master: How comest thou hither to plant this tree, or this branch of the tree?  For behold, it was the poorest spot in all the land of thy vineyard.  And the Lord of the vineyard said unto him: Counsel me not: I knew that it was a poor spot of ground: wherefore, I said unto thee, I have nourished it this long time, and thou beholdest that it hath brought forth much fruit” (verses 21&22).  We can be planted in the poorest of conditions, yet when Christ is the one nourishing us, we will be able to bear fruit regardless of what is happening inside of our own minds or outside of us in the circumstances around us.

And since we are talking about vineyards, let’s visit John 15.  Here the Savior offers powerful imagery as to what we are like when we try to cope on our own.  Think about a grapevine.  I have grapes in my backyard, so this explanation is easy for me to follow.  The vine is actually the trunk of the plant and the branches are the parts that come off it where the leaves and grapes are produced.  In verses 4 & 5 He says, “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.”

Think about that branch.  If it were to be separated from the vine, what could it do? Nothing!  It would shrivel up and die, right?  It can’t pop out one single grape when it’s separated from the vine. However, in contrast, as it opens its little cells wide to receive up all of the nutrients, water, and the sustenance from the vine, everything that is needed simply flows through the branch to produce the fruit.

Now, there are plenty of things that we could label the fruit as.  You can take it whichever directions you choose to. I first discovered this in a betrayal trauma context. Maybe the following hits close to home regardless of your personal circumstances. For me, it was the fact that I was doing crazy things in my unconscious attempts to create safety for myself.  I had intense emotions that were scary, embarrassing, and made me afraid to interact with others or leave my house because I felt like a ticking time bomb.  And on top of all of it, in order to cope with the effects of trauma, I was tempted to turn to things (and gave into them all the time). I knew I shouldn’t eat an entire bag of M&M’s or spend so much time on Facebook.

So, in a betrayal trauma context, I was trying hard to produce the fruits of “normal people” actions and behaviors.  I was trying to produce calm emotions.  I was trying to be good and not binge on chocolate or the other distractions I was turning to in order to cope with the pain. Maybe other wives would say that they can’t get what their husband did out of their head or they feel fine and then completely come unglued.  Again, maybe betrayal trauma isn’t in your past, but what fruits would you be trying to pop out instead of the effects of trauma, loss, or your own past experiences?

But can you see, that just like the branch, I cannot make the fruit appear?  Not on my own.  And that goes for any other kind of fruit---be it charity, compassion, humility---you name it.  I can’t do it.  But as I abide in Christ, as I learn to draw my strength from Him constantly from moment to moment, His working in me allows for the actions to naturally happen.  We will talk more in detail about a big way He can do this for us as we get to the root level solutions in the next chapter.

Even though abiding in Christ gives us strength, power, answers, and everything we need to be able to have a different outward manifestation because He has changed what is going on inside of us, that isn’t all He can offer us as we abide in Him. We need to go back to John 15.  The way Jaci explains this verse is that when Christ is telling us to keep Him commandments, it is the commandment of abiding in Him that He was just talking about earlier in the chapter. “If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love” (emphasis added).

So what He is saying is that not only will we reap all of these benefits from abiding in Him that we already touched on, but we will also be able to abide in His love.  We can be completely filled with His love all of the time.  That love fills us up in a lasting way that nothing else we were reaching for to push through or numb the pain ever could! And that love is not only beyond our total comprehension, it is beyond the limitations of running out or us outgrowing it somehow. We can learn to burrow deeply into His love.

Listen to what Paul says happens as learn to abide in Him and His love, “That He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that he, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God(Ephesians 3:16-19, emphasis added).

“Will [you] not receive the strength and nourishment from the true vine” (1 Nephi 15:15)?  He can offer something so much better and deeper than anything else we were turning to in order to cope with life in mortality! He is offering not only life, but life more abundantly!

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