John 15:16 · World English Bible
You didn’t choose me, but I chose you and appointed you, that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain; that whatever you will ask of the Father in my name, he may give it to you.
Being with Christ starts on His side. Grace, God's help given before it is earned, moves first, and the willingness to answer is that help already at work.
From the Orthodox reading below.
The same verse, read by 4 traditions.
ORTHODOX
Being with Christ starts on His side. Grace, God's help given before it is earned, moves first, and the willingness to answer is that help already at work. It frees people from the idea that they must climb to God on their own.
Being chosen means being sent. Fruit that remains is what death cannot take: mercy shown, patience kept, someone helped toward God. Asking in His name is more than a phrase at the end of a prayer. It means praying as one who belongs to Him and wants what He wants, and the Father gives what is asked.
CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY
The mind likes to believe it reached for love by its own cleverness, yet love was there first, choosing it before it stirred. This is a comfort, not a demotion, for it means worth was never something to be earned or lost. What such a mind is given to do is bring forth fruit, which is the natural increase of a life that has changed teachers from fear to love.
And this fruit remains, because what love produces does not decay as the ego's achievements do. A mind asking from that settled place receives, for it no longer asks for the world but for the peace it was created to hold.
Fruit: the lasting increase of a mind that has chosen love, the healing that spreads of itself and does not fade Father: the Source that gives without limit to the mind aligned with love
EGO & BEING
You did not decide to wake up.
Awakening is not an achievement of the personal will. Something deeper initiates it, and the ego arrives afterward to claim credit.
MANIFESTATION
The vine is your own consciousness, and the branches are the qualities you are aware of being. Fruit is the outer circumstance that grows from that inner state, and it lasts as long as the state is held. The friend is the man near the end of the dream. He is told the secret the slave never hears, that the whole of it moves from within outward and he is the mover.
To ask the Father in that name is not to petition a distant power. The Father is your own awareness of being, and the name is the nature you assume. You ask by wearing it. A man does not choose his awareness from outside. It is the very self that does the choosing, and it has laid on him the work of bearing his inner states outward. What you feel yourself to be, the Father brings forth as the fruit you live among.
Orthodox lens
If nothing you accomplished today were remembered, what would still be worth doing?
Ramakrishna said the breeze of grace is always blowing; it is for us to raise the sail. Even the raising is not a climb toward God but an answer to something already moving.
The useful tree gets cut down young. What lasts is not what is most impressive now but what quietly goes on growing when nobody is measuring it.
Marcus reminds himself that he was placed here for a work, not for his own comfort, and that the only question each morning is whether he will do it.
Free · No account needed
Lensightful opens every verse of the Bible through the traditions you choose. Save readings, ask a follow-up question, and get one verse a day.
Get Lensightful on the App Store
Orthodox
Christian Psychology
Ego v. Being
Manifestation