If you abide in me

John 15:7 If you abide in me and my word abides in you, you shall ask what you desire and it will be done for you.
Abiding is purposefully allowing God to take us along path of spiritual progress and purpose with all the ordinary things that happen to us. This is a process of faith, a powerful, active stillness, an acceptance of ‘what is’ that acknowledges the Holy Spirit’s work upon our yielded mind and spirit (Don’t scream at the darkness but allow light to enter instead). It is Presence Prayer (Abiding). This is a spiritual discipline for which we set time aside each day to develop the capacity to hear ‘the still small voice’

GOD’S LANGUAGE IS HIS ABIDING (meno) SPIRIT
John 14:23-24 Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home (mone) with him. He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine but the Father's who sent Me.
God gives us Scriptural and Situational Words.
God prepares a way of communication to speak to the world when there is something important for him to tell the world in its current era/age and circumstance.
1. God prepared the known world for 350 years of receiving the Greek language (Alexander The Great) so that when Jesus came the world could read the Scriptural message of the Gospel.
2. God prepared the world to hear the voice of the Abiding Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost when he communicated the Gospel to all the people gathered in all kinds of different languages.
3. God prepared all the dialects of China to receive the Scriptural Word through Mao Tse Tung who ordered the new Mao Script in the 1960’s so that all of China could read Mao’s Little Red Book. But it was not Mao’s intention to spread the Gospel. The new script impoverished the richness of the traditional language (only 8000 characters compared to the 50k of traditional Chinese script) but God used it for good, as millions of Bibles became accessible to the underground church (CUV is both).
4. The world is in an age of information overload at the moment. Scripture is embedded, globally. Now God is saying ‘be still and know that I am God’, and the language of his abiding Spirit is waiting to be heard. There is something about God for us to know other than, and beyond, our opinions and dogmatic teachings about him. Abiding is a place where our mind does not have to produce or achieve, but where our spirit can speak to God (1Corinthians 14:14).
My granddaughter does meditation at school every morning – Thinking about Jesus. Why? This was unheard of in my day. What is going on? Spiritual disciplines are being re-visited.
(2 Corinthians 10:5, Ephesians 4:19-23, Romans 12:2)
John 15:7 If you abide in me and my word abides in you… We have the Word abiding in us.
Romans 10:8 The word is near you even in your mouth and in your heart. (Ortiz ‘flyin’)

God is always near and Holy Spirit is always waiting to communicate. In Presence Prayer we learn to know that we are never alone. Presence Prayer (meditation) is also a practice of faith in yielding to the Holy Spirit’s work in transforming us into the image and likeness of God. Presence Prayer is not so much a method as it is a way of being in an attitude of openness to hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit. It becomes a way of life. (2 Corinthians 10:5, Ephesians 4:19-23, Romans 12:2)
We begin to see that our difficulties consist not of our slow progress in ‘getting there’ but rather of the challenges we face in simply ‘being here’, fully present, not buying in to any fear based scenarios, but into the faith based realities.