“If your presence does not go,” Moses responded to him, “don’t make us go up from here.”

Exodus 33:15 (CSB)

Sweet friends, one way that God confirms a message is from Him is through the use of multiple, seemingly unconnected, sources. One message that He has recently pressed on my heart is that more than anything we could make or do or say, He wants me – and you – to abide in Him.

As it is used in the Bible, abide means to remain or to stay. Perhaps the most recognized use of “abide” is in the King James Version (and others) of John 15:5 in which Jesus states:

“I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.”

I was listening to a podcast on “The Walk” this morning and the speaker, Aaron Shust, shared a verse from an old hymn that went like this:

“Nothing in my hands I bring. Simply to the cross I cling.”

Shust went on to explain that really, none of us have anything we can bring or do to impress God, and God doesn’t ask us to impress Him anyway. He asks us to love Him:

“He said to them, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, and all your soul. This is the greatest and most important command.” – Matthew 22:37-38 (CSB).

Last week when I attended the She Speaks conference online, several presenters spoke about the importance and the power of abiding in Christ. Two of their messages specifically continue to speak to my heart. I’ve paraphrased them below.

Suzie Eller: Joy is never found in the hustle. It’s found in the holy. Hustling without the holy leads us to the end of ourselves – to the point where we say, “I can’t do this anymore” – to which God responds, “I never asked you to do it by yourself”.

Gloria Umanah: Efficacy in our assignment is dependent on intimacy in our relationship with our Savior. You can have all the education and resources, but all your efforts will be trash if you don’t have the presence of God. Little progress with God is worth more than great progress without Him.

Then, the study my ladies group is doing focused for two solid weeks on developing an intimate relationship with God, a relationship that is real and personal.

Dear heart, I simply cannot escape the fact that the single most important thing that we can ever do is accept God’s invitation to have an intimate love relationship with Him. We cannot allow ourselves to become so caught up in the assignments that God has given us that we neglect our relationship with Him.

1 Corinthians 13:1-3 read, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.”

1 John 14:7-21 tells us that God is love. Without God, all our work really is trash, anywhere we go that He is not is a barren land.

Just as we read above in Exodus 33:15, if God isn’t in it (whatever it is), then we are far better off asking Him to let us stay wherever He is.

If your life has been all hustle and no holy lately, if your quiet time has been limited or non-existent in this season, if your frustrated by a lack of fruit in a ministry or project, may I encourage you to drop your head wherever you are and ask God to renew your love for Him, to teach you to abide in Him once more, to allow you to experience His presence more fully.

Beloved, God loves YOU far more than He loves what you can do for Him (which is really nothing if we’re honest with ourselves). Learn to abide. Remain in the Father, spend time in His Word, praising His name, listening for His special word to you. I can testify that your cup will refill, your lamp will burn brightly with oil once more.

Be like Moses, refuse to go anywhere without God.

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