To abide on something is to make your home in it. It means that whatever that thing is, it is where you find your identity, your worth, your value, it is the place where you know you belong. Whereas living some place simply points to the physical location of your residence, where you abide points to the emotional, psychological, and spiritual place of your hope and your belonging.

So, when Jesus tells us to abide in Him, He is telling us to find our place of belonging in Him. He is telling us to find our identity in His love for us. He is telling us to find our worth, our value, and our acceptance in Him alone. Jesus is telling us that we are made for Him and that apart from Him we will never feel at home or at peace in this world. If you think about it, this is an incredible statement for Jesus to make, as it clearly means that He is the reason for our existence, God in the flesh.

But, when we abide in Christ it transforms our lives in two specific ways. First, when we find our identity, value, and belonging in Christ it humbles us and enables us to live life in a way that we see both ourselves and others rightly. Humility doesn’t mean that we think less of ourselves, but that we think of ourselves less, which makes space for us to think of others and their needs. Second, when we abide in Christ we gain an unwavering confidence in who we are because of who He is. When you realize you are loved, valued, and adopted by the Creator of the Universe then you understand there is nothing that anyone, or anything, in this world can add to or take away from that value. This enables you to live life free from the need to prove yourself or live up to the expectations and perceptions of others. The beauty of that is that when you don’t need anything from anyone then, and only then, can you truly love them unconditionally. You see, abiding in Christ is the only way we can actually become who God has made us to be all along.

Because we are made to bear God’s image, made to belong to Him and to one another, we have an innate desire to belong and be loved. In other words, it is hardwired in us to seek a home. God is love (1 John 4:8) and therefore love is our greatest need. However, because of sin, we all know the things we have said, done, and thought that we believe make us unworthy of love and unworthy of belonging. So, we go through life with this constant need to prove ourselves to others, a longing to show the world that we are worthy of love and acceptance. But, because we know ourselves so well, we also understand that a holy and just God would have to judge us for the things we have said, done, and thought. This realization causes us to run from God rather than to Him, and therefore, we look to created things to find that place of belonging rather to our Creator for Whom we were made.

Those created things continually disappoint and fail to give us that sense of worth, value, and belonging and cause that sense of shame and guilt to just grow and grow in our hearts. So what do we tend to do? We tend to chase after more of those created things because, somehow in our minds, we have bought into the lie that if a little of that thing failed us, then we just need more of it to satisfy us. This will never work. Not only because it fails to meet the reality of logic, but because we were not made to belong to created things, we were made to belong to Jesus.