Our abiding in Christ today is different from our abiding in Him a year ago. More is required of us. Sins we practiced unknowingly a year ago are not permitted today.

The self-love in which we indulged a year ago is not acceptable today.

All victorious saints will recognize instantly the pattern we have just described. The Lord Jesus challenges us each day to a fuller abiding in Himself. He is purging from His own Body the sinfulness and self-seeking He absorbed when He first received us.

It may be true that the majority of believers are not abiding in Christ. They are continuing their acknowledgment of the facts of the atonement and resurrection, calling Jesus, Lord and Savior under the assumption this is their ticket to the life and world in which they will find themselves after they die physically.

The issue in the Scriptures is eternal life. Eternal life is not a place, it is a relationship to God through Christ. We have eternal life now. We are growing in eternal life, and our bodies will be raised into eternal life when the Lord appears. Salvation is past, present, and future.

Eternal life always is revealed in righteous, holy behavior.

The true Christians are those who are beginning to bring forth the moral image of Christ in their lives. The image of Christ is being manifested because they are giving their attention each day to abiding in Christ, to following Him carefully in overcoming the evil of the day. Being a saint is a full-time calling.

If we do not abide carefully in Christ each day but spend most of our time and strength on the things of the world, not abiding in prayer, in the Word, in fellowship with fervent saints, we will lose the all-important immediate contact with Jesus. Without realizing it we will grow cold. We still may be following our church procedures but we have left our first love. God is not in all our thoughts.

Christ no longer is emphatically first in our life. When this becomes true to any significant extent we are in danger of being removed from the Vine, removed from Christ. In what state, then, will we be when we die physically?

Christ receives us as we are when we come to Him as sinners.

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life. (John 5:24)

The traditional interpretation of John 5:24 is that if we make a profession of belief in Christ, believing in God, we never will be judged. The Judgment Seat of Christ will be a kind of sports awards banquet in which some get first prize, some second prize, and some honorable mention. We never will suffer pain and so there is no serious threat here.

This cannot be the true interpretation; for in John 15:2 we are threatened with the most terrible of fates that of being removed from the Vine. What, then, is the true interpretation of John 5:24, the interpretation that is in harmony with the entire teaching of Jesus and the teaching of Paul and the other Apostles?

To be continued.