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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Abiding Together podcast where we hope to provide a place of connection rest and encouragement for those of us living out the journey of authentic life in Christ, our passion and purpose.

We're excited to have you with us today. My name is Sister Miriam James and I am joined as usual by my lovely friends Heather Kim and Michelle Benzinger. Heather, how are you today?

I'm doing great sister. How are you?

I'm doing well. I'm in Phoenix, Arizona right now visiting some of our sisters where it's 5 million degrees at nine in the morning. So.

Like, well, I thought South Texas was hot but Phoenix and you guys taking a tool on other level.

I'm doing just dandy. I am on day two of like a fast slash refresh and I think I've drink in more water than is humanly possible right now.

And so but at least I can still have coffee on this.

I'm doing good but I think I had a lot of toxins in my body because things are just flying everywhere flying out every day.

Yeah, I know. Hey, wash it. Chris asked me last night is like, how do you feel? I'm like, well, I don't feel like I want to kill anybody. So that's successful. So yeah, you know, we're doing well.

Well, I'm glad you don't want to kill anybody because today we're going to talk about abiding. Okay. So our scripture verse. If you want to grab your Bible or scripture verse that we're going to use to guide our conversation is from John chapter 15 verses four and five where Jesus is talking to his disciples and he says this verse four and five.

Abide in me as I abide in you just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine. Neither can you unless you abide in me.

I am the vine. You are the branches. Those who abide in me and I am them bear much fruit because apart from me, you can do nothing.

I think a lot of us have heard these, you know, this is a very famous saying a very famous scripture passage and we think of abiding and we also think of striving.

And so today what we're going to talk about is the difference between abiding and striving and what Christ is calling us to in a relationship with him where he comes to abide in us and he's calling us to abide in him.

And Michelle is going to take over our discussion today and lead us on this journey of abiding versus striving. So Michelle, you want to kick us off?

Oh yes, prepare yourself. I'm leading. It's not the stable sister Mary.

Here we go. Yeah, just to start off like okay, we I think we throw the word abide around a lot.

But just to give us a print frame of reference, what it actually means like the definition of abide means to remain stable or in a fixed state.

And the in the Hebrew it means to dwell to encamp or in the Greek it means just to remain just to be, you know, where you are rooted and you remain and you dwell and just to be.

Okay, in a post the definition of striving, I love this. Striving means to struggle in opposition.

You know, like how we struggle in opposition, you know, like where you can tell there is a fight.

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