Attachment

Jesus gave a simple expectation of those who have become His disciples.  Remain in me.  The implication is that we might not...that it is not automatic for us.  The great deception that runs rampant through the Church is that we can only get so far with praying and then we have to "do something".  It is as if all the pronouncements of Christ on prayer were the ravings of a lunatic or the naïve expectancies of a child staying up late waiting for Santa Claus to come down through a chimney not built into the home.  We pray but not like Christ told us we could pray.  Of course we give it a shot and then when we get bored with it or frustrated by its "failure" we move on to more important business.    Prayer is not a means by which we achieve something, whatever that achieving might be.  Prayer is what makes something, something.  Unless there is prayer in it, what we do is chasing after the wind; fruitless harvesting.  Jesus, noted, "What good is it  for a man to gain the whole world yet forfeit his soul."  We mistakenly file this comment away as a final judgment saying when it isn't.  It is about life here and now.  If what we strive to gain has nothing of Christ in it, then we have cut out our soul then and there and cast it aside.  Do we not realize that our soul is Christ joined to us in a new personality that is born again?  If our Lord is not in our striving, if we are not so completely attached to Him in what we do that our "soul" is in it, then our striving is fuel for the fires of hell.    God expects us to be immersed in Christ at every moment because we can.  The bloody death of Christ makes it possible for us to be attached to Christ so completely that whatever we do is the will of God and whatever we achieve is good fruit. 

If you remain in me, and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you.  John 15: 7 NIV