Every follower of Christ eventually comes face-to-face with a choice too weighty to dress up.

Scripture states it plainly: “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life.” That’s not only about where you land after this life ends. It’s about how you walk with God today, and tomorrow, and the ordinary Tuesday after that. It’s a call to choose trust over fear. Obedience over comfort. Relationship over self-reliance.

That call has surfaced for me more times than I can count, usually in the moments obedience felt costly or clarity felt thin. Choosing life has rarely meant choosing ease. More often it has meant choosing to stay near God when moving forward felt uncertain, trusting that the staying itself was shaping something I couldn’t see yet.

Jesus said the same thing a different way: “Remain in me, and I in you.” That wasn’t a suggestion for the spiritually advanced. It was the foundation everything else stands on. “Apart from me you can do nothing.” Before we’re sent anywhere, before we serve anyone, before we go, we’re called to remain.

Most of us take the call to go seriously. We want to live faithfully, so we move quickly into service, or leadership, or mission. But it’s possible to go without ever learning how to remain. We move outward without staying rooted inward, and when things don’t unfold the way we hoped, discouragement follows close behind. We assume the failure is ours. Sometimes the truth is simpler: we heard only half the invitation.

Jesus never told His followers to go apart from Him. He told them to remain in Him, and promised that fruit would grow from that abiding. Abiding was never a delay to obedience. It’s the source of it. When we remain, obedience stops being an obligation and starts being an overflow.

I don’t think Scripture was ever meant to be preparation for real life. I think it’s where real life with God actually gets formed. When we learn to meet Him there, we learn how to remain. We learn how to listen, how to trust, how to walk with Him, long before we try to walk for Him.

Choosing life isn’t a decision you make once and file away. It’s a daily posture. It’s choosing, again and again, to return to Scripture, to community, to God Himself, even on the days you’re tired, or unsure, or disappointed in how the last one went. It’s believing that abiding comes before fruit, and that faithfulness will bear witness to what God is doing whether or not you ever see the whole picture.

There’s a real freedom in that, once it settles. You stop striving to manufacture results and start simply staying connected to the Vine. Growth happens on God’s schedule, by God’s power, mostly in ways we never fully see while we’re living them.

So if there’s one invitation left in all of this, it’s not complicated. Don’t rush past remaining in Christ in order to go do things for Him. Stay. Abide. Let Scripture shape your heart before it shapes your plans. Trust that as you meet God in His Word, remaining in Him will shape the life that grows from you.

The fruit belongs to God. Some of it we may see. Much of it we probably will not. Our part is not to manufacture it. Our part is to remain.

Choose life. Remain in the Vine.

And let God grow the fruit.

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This is Part 7 of 7, the close of the Encountering God in His Word series. Previous: Consistency Over Intensity. Start from the beginning: From Discipline to Delight.