Keys to Living Christ’s Abundant Life

PART TWO

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy;
I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

John 10:10

In Part One, we wrestled with the question of why so many of us struggle and muddle our way through our daily lives when Jesus promised us so much more—His Abundant Life. We discovered that the answer is found in the first part of John 10:10. When Jesus said, “I came that they may have life, and have it more abundantly,” He was contrasting Himself with “the thief.” Our enemy, Satan, is a thief who wants to steal our faith, kill our joy, and destroy our effectiveness. He is ruthless in his schemes to keep us from the abundant life our Savior came to give us. Two tools he uses to short-circuit us are unforgiveness and sin-management. If Satan can keep us bitter and keep us living our lives in our own strength, he can keep us tormented and disconnected from the Holy Spirit’s power. However, Jesus has given us two keys to keeping Satan defeated and us walking in freedom. The primary keys to the Abundant Life are to Forgive and to Abide. In Part One, we looked at forgiveness. Today, we will examine what it means to walk by the Spirit, a.k.a. Abiding.

Abide

I am the vine, you are the branches;
he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit,
for apart from Me you can do nothing.

John 15:5

But I say, walk by the Spirit,
and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh.

Galatians 5:16

“Most congregations of professing Christians today are saturated with a kind of dead goodness, an ethical respectability which has its motivational roots in the flesh rather than in the illuminating and enlivening control of the Holy Spirit.”

Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of the Spiritual Life

A second door of opportunity that we open for the enemy to keep us from experiencing the Abundant Life Jesus promised is when we don't choose to abide. Throughout the New Testament, we are called to stop living our lives in our own strength and start living our lives in Christ’s resurrection power. Jesus called it “abiding,” while Paul referred to it as, “walking by the Spirit.” Both terms describe the Abundant Life Jesus came to give us. The major theme in the New Testament is that we, through Christ’s death and resurrection, can now live Christ’s life, but only by His power. Knowing this, Satan tries to trick us into working harder rather than living dependently. Paul was pretty blunt about this in Galatians 3:1-5:

You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you,
before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? This is the only thing I want to find out from you:
did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law,
or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish?
Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected
by the flesh? Did you suffer so many things in vain—
if indeed it was in vain? So then, does He who provides you
with the Spirit and works miracles among you,
do it by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?

In the book of Galatians, Paul’s main emphasis is that the way we obtain our relationship with God is how we must also maintain our relationship with God. If we come to God in faith, we must walk with God by faith. If we couldn’t work our way into a relationship with God, what makes us think our self-effort will please him after salvation? Any attempt to do so brings us frustration and failure and cooperates with the enemy. The futility of trying to manage our sin in our own strength is the struggle Paul describes in Romans 7:14-25. Paul lamented, “The things I want to do I can’t pull off, and the things that I know I’m not supposed to do are what I find myself doing over and over again. My flesh is worthless, and I need help!” (Hebel paraphrase) We must grab ahold of the truth that our flesh is unredeemable and unfixable. The only thing we can do with it is die to it daily. As shocking as it may sound, God actually comes against us being successful in managing our sin or improving our flesh. He will not let us be successful because He knows that only out of our relationship with Him can we live the life He died for us to live. We must surrender our independence in order to live dependently on Him by faith. We have to give up our flesh life to live Christ’s life. Our only hope is to die to the flesh and live dependently on the Holy Spirit.

Our friend Mike Wells used to say, “All that Jesus did, he never did. The man who did everything did nothing so that we who could do nothing get to do everything.” Throughout the Gospels, Jesus continually said, “I don’t do anything unless my Father tells me to do it. I don’t do anything unless the Father empowers me to do it.” Being God, Jesus could have done everything in His own power. Instead, He chose to live a life dependent on the Holy Spirit, in submission to the Father, modeling for us, who have no hope of living righteously on our own, how to live a life dependent on the Holy Spirit. When we choose to live dependently, we experience the abundant life of Jesus as He lives through us. Whenever we try to make life work on our own by managing our sin, we trip a spiritual GFI (ground fault interrupter) that interrupts the Spirit’s power in our lives, which leaves us powerless against the schemes of the enemy who deceives us into a life of failure and frustration.

My mentor, Dr. Bill Lawrence, taught me that we are all one step away from the jungle, i.e., falling into our flesh life and disconnecting from the Holy Spirit’s power. Yet, the good news is that whenever we find ourselves living life on our own, we are one prayer of repentance away from the Holy Spirit’s power, one step back to abiding in Christ.

Whenever we find ourselves not experiencing the Abundant Life Jesus promised, the key to restoring our joy is to simply ask ourselves: Who do I need to forgive, and at what point did I stop abiding?

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