Part 3 of 3- Just as I Have, Staying on the Vine: Abiding in a Post-Christian World
“If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.” — John 15:18
We’ve spent two articles inside one sentence.
In Part 1 we looked at what Jesus meant by remain in my love, that the Greek menō describes a residence rather than a mood, a place you live rather than a feeling you generate, and that Jesus made his own relationship with the Father the template for ours. In Part 2 we asked what commands he meant, and found that the answer isn’t a list but a person: love one another as I have loved you, a standard set outside us at the cross and made possible by an indwelling Spirit that Jeremiah and Ezekiel had promised centuries before.
Which brings us to the part I find most pressing, because I live in it and so do many of you reading this article.
What does any of that look like in a world that no longer assumes the vine exists?
The disciples went out into a culture saturated with gods. Mine is saturated with the conviction that there aren’t any. Most of my neighbors are not weighing Christianity against Islam or Buddhism; they aren’t weighing it at all. They have inherited a story in which faith is a private preference — fine for you, faintly embarrassing at work.
Jesus is not naive about this. A few verses past our passage he tells the disciples plainly that the world that hated him will hate them too (15:18). He puts the vine and the hostility in the same conversation, which ought to tell us something. Abiding was never advertised as a strategy for being well-liked.
So how do we live this out among people whose entire frame of reference differs from ours? How are we winsome to the person the Spirit is already drawing? I don’t think the answer is complicated. I think it’s costly.
What He Actually Called Us
Salt seasons, it makes what’s already there taste more like itself. It preserves; it slows decay. In the ancient world it cleaned wounds. Every one of those functions requires contact. Salt in the shaker isn’t doing anything. Salt works only when it dissolves into something that isn’t salt, and disappears in the process. That is not a picture of separation, and it is not a picture of a subculture with its own music and vocabulary and bookstores, however comfortable those are. I have spent a good portion of my life inside that subculture and can testify that the coffee has gotten much better and the dissolving has not.
Light dispels darkness, and notice that it doesn’t argue with it. Light also brings heat, and heat is what makes things grow. Neither function is coercive. A lamp doesn’t shout; it makes the room legible, and things start growing in it.
And then a city on a hill, the one we quote most and examine least. What does a city actually do?
It’s visible, which is where we usually stop. But keep going. A city is somewhere people go. It has gates. It trades, feeds, shelters, settles disputes, buries its dead. In the ancient world it was refuge, you ran toward it when trouble came. It was visible precisely so it could be found.
The visibility was never the point. The visibility served the welcome.
Which reframes the question for the church in a post-Christian West. It isn’t primarily “are we distinct enough?” We’re quite good at distinct. It’s whether we are findable, whether someone in trouble, or curious, or quietly desperate at two in the morning would know where to run, and would expect to be received rather than assessed on arrival.
Notice, too, that Jesus said city. Not citizen. Not a scattering of impressive individuals. The witness he describes is corporate, a shared life, visible at a distance, that you can actually walk into. This is the vine image again, seen from outside: branches are not independent operators who happen to share a supplier. They are one organism, and what the world sees is the organism.
The most persuasive thing about the early church was not any single Christian’s argument. It was that people could see a community loving across lines the empire said couldn’t be crossed, and had no category for it. That remains true. Your neighbor is unlikely to be argued into the kingdom by you alone; he may well be drawn by an ordinary congregation of people who did not choose each other and love each other anyway.
Translation Is Not Dilution
Which brings me to the harder thing.
Make no mistake: the answer is Jesus. There is no other, and I have no interest in softening that into something more palatable. But people have to be able to find him, and finding him usually means someone, or better, a people, speaks a language others can understand.
We are often unwilling to learn that language. Sometimes it’s fear that translating the gospel will dilute it, that if we drop the words we inherited we’ll lose what the words were carrying. Sometimes, honestly, it’s laziness. Learning a language is slow. It means listening to people you disagree with long enough to understand not just what they believe but why it makes sense to them; uncomfortable work, because it requires granting that their position has an internal logic. I am not naturally good at this. My instinct in a disagreement is to start assembling my rebuttal around sentence three, which is a wonderful way to win an argument with someone who has stopped listening to you. It’s easier to keep speaking fluently to each other on Sunday and call the incomprehension outside our doors faithfulness.
But translation is not dilution. It is the pattern of the incarnation, and it is the kathōs pattern from Part 1 doing its work again. Just as the Father sent me, so I am sending you (20:21). Sent the same way he was: not shouting down from a safe distance in a language of his own, but tabernacling among us (1:14), taking on flesh, learning a trade, speaking Aramaic with a Galilean accent, telling farmers stories about farming.
Every missionary who has crossed a culture knows this instinctively. What we’ve been slow to accept is that the West is now such a culture, and the crossing begins about four feet from where we’re standing.
One thing translation must never concede, though, is the frame itself.
Our culture doesn’t mainly reject Christian claims; it relocates them, out of the public world of fact and into the private world of meaning, where they can be admired and safely ignored. That relocation is not a neutral fact we accommodate. It is a claim, and we decline it. Either a tomb outside Jerusalem was empty on a particular morning or it wasn’t. If it was, that is news about the world, not a value that works for some people. The gospel is public truth or it is nothing, and the moment we let it be filed under preference we have conceded the only thing that made it worth translating.
There is a strange freedom in that. People can tell the difference between someone offering them a preference and someone telling them something happened.
Why the Order Matters
And here it loops back to the vine, because it has to.
Notice how Jesus sequences the Farewell Discourse. Abiding comes in chapter 15 before sending comes in chapter 20. Fruit comes before witness. That isn’t tidy arrangement; it’s cause and effect. Apart from me you can do nothing (15:5) is not pastoral encouragement. It’s a statement about what is metabolically possible for a branch.
Which means the fruit is what people actually see. Not our arguments. Arguments matter, and I’d defend that against anyone, but they are downstream. What the watching world meets first is whether this has done anything to us: whether we are less anxious than the people around us, freer with money, harder to offend, more forgiving than the situation warrants, unusually unafraid of death. That isn’t marketing. It’s fruit, the vine’s, not ours, and it is very close to the only credential this culture still recognizes.
The most missional thing you may do this week is stay attached to the Vine.
Not an argument you win. Staying attached, in an ordinary Tuesday sort of way, close enough to people who don’t believe any of this that they can taste the difference.
Salt has to dissolve. Cities have to open the gates. Branches have to stay on the vine.
Same pattern, all the way down.
That is not theory to me. I watched it recently in a friend I’ve known thirty years. He and his wife felt the Spirit nudging them toward something they hadn’t asked for and didn’t particularly want. They were reluctant. They said yes anyway. What has struck me since is not mainly what the work has become, though it has grown in ways they never engineered, but what has happened in them. They talk about God differently now. Nearer. More dependent. They stepped out in obedience and found themselves further inside the love they already had.
What This Costs
I should be honest about my own resistance to all of this. By temperament I want relationship without rules and intimacy without obligation. I suspect most of us do, at least on our more self-protective days.
My mother was killed in a car accident that never had to happen.
In the months after, I did what adult children do. I renovated her house so it could be sold. I paid down her debts, settled the taxes, filed the paperwork that reduces a person’s life to a column of figures. And I grieved, my second parent, gone, while holding a paint roller.
Somewhere in that season, praying through the estate, I sensed the Lord prompting me to tithe on the inheritance.
I had questions. Good ones, I thought. Wasn’t this already tithed on, by her, decades ago? Is an inheritance income? Does the principle even apply here? I was not, in that moment, resisting God. I was doing careful stewardship theology. It is remarkable how much a man can sound like a Bible scholar when what he is actually doing is negotiating.
Then, sometime later (I want to say I was standing in her kitchen mid-renovation, though I may equally have been eating a Wawa hoagie on the back step, and I have never been fully certain how much of the prompting was the Spirit and how much was the hoagie) I found myself praying something I had not planned to pray:
Lord, whatever this house sells for over the asking price, I’ll give half of it away.
I said it out loud. Then I said, under my breath, well, now God’s going to show me how he works.
The house sold significantly over asking. Our realtor was surprised. The broker was surprised. I was not, exactly, though I did sit down.
I don’t tell that story as a formula. God is not a vending machine, and I have obeyed him plenty of times with nothing whatsoever to show for it. I tell it because of what it did in me. In the hardest season I’d walked through in years, grieving, exhausted, doing the grim arithmetic of a life ending, obedience turned out to be the thing that brought God near. Not the thing I did to earn his attention. The thing that put me in the room where he already was.
That is what Jesus is describing. And it is why we would so much rather he had said just feel close to me than keep my commands. John 15:10 will not let us separate intimacy from obedience, because in the relationship Jesus actually has with his Father, the relationship he is inviting us into, they were never separate to begin with.
Good News, Rightly Heard
That is, in the end, remarkably good news.
It means obedience is not the toll you pay to acquire a love you don’t yet have. It is the path along which a love already given is enjoyed, deepened, and remained in.
Calvin’s old observation fits here: our obedience is not the cause of God’s love toward us but the fruit of it, the way abiding, once granted, gets lived out and sustained.
You do not obey your way into the Father’s love. You obey your way into staying there, the way a branch never grew itself onto the vine, but does, every single day, either draw on the vine’s life or wither from disconnection.
And this is exactly where fruit comes from. Not from our striving. The vine bears the fruit; the branch is the conduit. Which means the pressure we feel to produce something for God is, in the most liberating sense, misplaced.
Our job is to stay attached. His is to bear fruit through us.
It also reframes what the commands are actually for. They were never meant to make us compliant. They were meant to make us at home, safe enough, close enough, trusting enough to stay. Jesus tells us as much in the very next verse: “so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete” (15:11).
Obedience is not the opposite of joy. In this relationship, it is joy’s plumbing.
An Invitation
Just as he abided, we can abide. Just as he was loved and stayed loved through obedience, we are invited to stay loved the same way, not performing for a love we lack, but living inside a love already given, in the one way that keeps us there.
At twenty-two I was afraid of a kitchen table and a support letter. At fifty-three I found out what was on the other side of the yes I’d been happy to avoid for thirty years. I don’t think that’s unusual. I think it’s the ordinary shape of this thing.
And it’s the shape the watching world is actually reading. Not our certainty, our fruit.
So here is the question worth sitting with: where is Jesus inviting you into the next act of obedience—not to earn his love, but to discover more deeply the love in which you already stand?
Mike Harder is President of Concentric Global and the author of The Master’s Blueprint.
This is the final part of a three-part series on John 15.
Part 1, “Just As I Have,” explored what it means to remain in the Father’s love.
Part 2, “The Shape of Obedience,” examined what kind of obedience actually produces abiding.
