Fifth Sunday of Easter

Dear Friends,

“Remain in me, as I remain in you.” The Lord Jesus repeats this again and again throughout today’s Gospel. The Lord is expressing how intimately close He wants to be with us. He wants to be in complete communion with us, to abide with us in every moment of our lives. Jesus is inviting us into a personal relationship with Him in every time and every place so that He can share His own blessed life with us.

We tend to forget how vital this relationship is. We get distracted by the daily concerns and anxieties of life like exams, bills, or future plans. Believing we can accomplish it all ourselves, we become self-reliant forgetting the Truth that Jesus proclaims to us today: “Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing”. Do we trust the Lord’s love for us–that He is willing our ultimate good–so that we can “bear much fruit”? Do we humbly recognize our own littleness and inability to do anything without the loving grace of God?

O how freeing this is! For us to attain that which we seek we need only to abide with Our Lord Jesus. We do not have to achieve certain things or be someone we’re not to attain the eternal joy, peace, and happiness we seek. We simply need to remain in a deep, intimate relationship with Our Lord and allow Him to remain with us on the throne of our hearts, humbly recognizing our deep need and dependance on Him. We follow Christ as disciples and abide with Him. When we abide with Him, we receive a spirit of adoption revealing our deepest identity as His beloved child. Only then can we approach Our Father as a child and “ask for whatever [we] want and it will be done for [us]”, thus glorifying Him and bearing much fruit.

God Bless,

Claudio Hewgley