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Our Real Life in Christ: Experiencing the Life and Quality of Faith Provided by Jesus Christ to Overcome Any Obstacle in Our Lives
Our Real Life in Christ: Experiencing the Life and Quality of Faith Provided by Jesus Christ to Overcome Any Obstacle in Our Lives
Our Real Life in Christ: Experiencing the Life and Quality of Faith Provided by Jesus Christ to Overcome Any Obstacle in Our Lives
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Our Real Life in Christ: Experiencing the Life and Quality of Faith Provided by Jesus Christ to Overcome Any Obstacle in Our Lives

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Its essential to uncover the current malady affecting the organized Christian Church today, not its structuring and not necessarily its organizational approach, but present to it His solution, which has never been hidden or even veiled in His Word, which is that we must return to the true roots of Christianity, which is founded on the individual discipleship of each member of His body, just as Jesus designed it and modeled it for us while He ministered on this earth. It passed the acid test of resiliency when it was mercilessly persecuted, as its disciples applied the principles as instituted and instructed by our Lord for all of us to display and to do. I encourage anyone to do a Bible search for the word disciple and believer and see firsthand that these words are not interchangeable or used in the same context when referring to a specific person whos known to be committed to our Lord, versus referring to a generalization in the third person to someone or a group whos aware about the existence of the real living God.

Gods remedy its still available today to anyone who truly desires to attain it and can decipher that its only through discipleship that a true believer is infected with the enthusiasm, zeal, and eagerness in the commitment to fulfill John 8:31 and Matthew 28:19, reaching to those around them who thirst and hunger for the things of God, and in that process, experience the life He promises we can live now. Its time to abandon, once and for all, the current practices of mass-producing supporters, and inscribe it into our minds that the Great Commission was not to make believers but to make disciples. The early church didn't churn out cheerleaders and advocates but bona fide disciples, taught and equipped according to Ephesians 6:1017, who then, as members of the body of Christ, led by example, transforming them into a formidable, most powerful and effective force the Roman Empire had ever seen. Again, I want to reiterate that I am not against the church, as organized by the apostles, but want to revolutionize it, where discipleship is the top priority and purpose for its existence. I am critical of the current organized version that has taken the place of the real church, that nowadays is wasting vast resources and investing them in huge entertainment amphitheaters, and often dilute, distort, and obscure the true message and method to attain this new life established by our Lord. Unless this change happens, we cant truly reach and change a lost world.

Our Real Life in Christ seeks to help those who are experiencing that gnawing sensation that there is much more to Gods Word than what is being offered by those weekly sermons in churches today.
LanguageEnglish
PublisheriUniverse
Release dateNov 21, 2013
ISBN9781491714737
Our Real Life in Christ: Experiencing the Life and Quality of Faith Provided by Jesus Christ to Overcome Any Obstacle in Our Lives
Author

M. Alberto Zelaya Aragon

M. Alberto Zelaya Aragon was born and raised in Central America, and saw firsthand the indomitable faith of his mother, who raised fourteen successful children against all odds. Now retired, he lives with his wife near Phoenix and has a blended family of five daughters and a son living in various states, as well as a large extended family in California and in his homeland.

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    Our Real Life in Christ - M. Alberto Zelaya Aragon

    Copyright © 2013 M. Alberto Zelaya Aragon.

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

    All scripture taken from the Amplified Bible

    Copyright © 1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1987

    By the Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

    iUniverse

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    Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

    Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

    Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

    ISBN: 978-1-4917-1471-3 (sc)

    ISBN: 978-1-4917-1472-0 (hc)

    ISBN: 978-1-4917-1473-7 (e)

    Library of Congress Control Number: 2013920809

    iUniverse rev. date: 09/29/2015

    Contents

    Preface

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction

    Chapter 1 The Kingdom’s Foundation

    Chapter 2 The Promise of a King

    Chapter 3 The Kingdom’s Constitution

    Chapter 4 The Enemies of the Kingdom

    Chapter 5 Dispelling Religious Myths about the Kingdom

    Chapter 6 The Kingdom’s Hub

    Chapter 7 The Life of the Kingdom

    Chapter 8 Attaining the Life of the Kingdom

    Chapter 9 Enjoying the Peace of the Kingdom

    Chapter 10 Constrains in the Daily Life in the Kingdom

    Chapter 11 Settling in God’s Kingdom

    Chapter 12 Citizenship of the Kingdom

    Chapter 13 Removing the Hurdles of Entering the Kingdom

    Chapter 14 Remaining in the Kingdom

    Afterword

    References

    Preface

    I would imagine that this narrative began on an evening in August 1975, when for the first time, I came face-to-face with the message of the Gospel at a Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship International in Boise, Idaho. Up to that time, I lived a conventional worldly life, where everything was relative, meaning I appointed myself as the arbiter and judge of what is right and wrong, independent from any higher authority. However, this attitude began to crumble after witnessing the birth of my first daughter in September 1974.

    To this day, I do not know my reason for being at this Businessmen’s Fellowship event, but certainly, it was not about having a guilty conscience or a wish to be forgiven. I was there for the sake of a friend and out of curiosity, because just a few years earlier, when I lived in the Bay Area, I came to know a network of people active in the occult, which reignited once more an interest in spiritual things I had acquired in my early life. These dealings reacquainted me with early memories of unsolicited encounters with the supernatural. Observing these people’s activities and outcomes validated for me, the existence of an invisible world that displayed a tangible power I had not seen in the church of my youth, suggesting the existence of a parallel universe known as the spiritual world.

    After the guest speaker finished a powerful testimony about how his life changed by coming to Christ, he asked if anyone would be interested in meeting Jesus and receive Him as Savior. After a brief internal struggle, I found myself coming to the platform in an uncharacteristic and rare display of boldness. This was against all the odds and in defiance of my pride, intellectualism, and cynicism towards all religions. Nonetheless, for some reason I felt touched and humbled by what I heard about this man called Jesus, whom I had seen and understood only as an icon in my Catholic school and church in my country of birth. This time, however, something stirred inside me that I could not explain that, like a jackhammer, rip to pieces the cement casing draped around my heart.

    After eleven years of living the religious life, I came to what I considered a dead end as far as having an actual spiritual life. Church life and activities became no more than another addition to an active social calendar in a busy life. Ever since that day I decided to drop the middleman and exited the religious life and mentality and started studying His marvelous Word for myself as instructed in 2 Timothy 2:15 for the last twenty-six years. As a result, I have found the missing link that personally and individually connects each believer to the Savior. This connection is how today, Jesus gives each one of us, not a sterile church life, but the same exact experience His disciples enjoyed with Him when He walked on this earth. It is from this vantage point, I now understand that if Jesus was to come today, He would find the spiritual environment in the same condition as the one He experienced among the Pharisees and Sadducees. This is the motivation behind the writing of this book—the hope of sharing this knowledge. This book avoids regurgitations from biblical experts or scholars; instead, it quotes the raw and unadulterated Word of God, offering proof of an actual life hidden from those who would rather pursue the religious life like those Jews who rejected the Living Word walking among them.

    Acknowledgments

    W ithout any doubt, to my Lord Jesus Christ belong my most profound thanks and praise for trusting me with this work. Further, I am grateful for the amazing instruction He has given me into His Word and for opening my mind to a new understanding about His redemption plan. For that reason, to Him, I fully dedicate this labor, as I know I could never write this on my own. To Him is due all praise, thanksgiving, and glory for an amazing year of understanding my Father, the Holy Spirit, and Him and their role in the life of every child of His. My thanks to the one teacher who truly revolutionized my walk with my Lord, Bob George, who single handed slayed the beast of legalism that kept me prisoner in the castle of religion.

    I would like to thank, from the bottom of my heart, my dear wife, Miriam, whom God sent my way to teach me patience and unconditional love by example. Thanks for taking no notice of the many hours away from other projects, and doing so without complaint or resentment, and for your words of encouragement and loving support of this work.

    To my daughters, Erica, Nereida, and Jesarah, and Kelle, their mom, who observed and bore the faults of my early walk in Christ. There are no words to express how proud I am for your accomplishments and for being your father and thus, validating Psalm 102:28 in my life. Thanks for accepting, understanding, and loving me, warts and all.

    Thanks to Bill and Sharon, Joe and Maxx, Dan and Sophia, and their children, for graciously welcoming and accepting me into the family. Your love and kindness has been a delightful gift, making life enjoyable when we are together.

    To Sean, Shane, Vincent, and Cooper, for being a part of my family and giving me the same quality of acceptance as the family, thanks for the love and support.

    To my brothers, sisters, and their children, who have likewise extended the same unconditional love, support, and acceptance, despite all those years of my being away as the black sheep of the family. Thanks for that gift of feeling loved and accepted despite the lumps.

    To my brothers and sisters in Christ in Boise, Idaho, too many to name but known to God, thanks for teaching me as a baby in Christ that His faith is up close and personal and that Jesus’ love always surfaces in our works. Thanks for your love and fellowship that always will be a part of my walk in Him.

    And last, but certainly never the least, to my fellow prisoners who are in Christ Jesus striving to reach the unreachable from those who are free. Remember to "Lean on, trust in, and be confident in the Lord with all your heart and mind and do not rely on your own in sight or understanding. In all your ways know, recognize, and acknowledge Him, and He will direct and make straight and plain your paths" (Proverbs 3:5-6).

    Thanks to all of you for being like the sun, wind and rain that have sculpted and fashioned my present life, making this work possible.

    Introduction

    A ny Bible student of scriptural prophecy identifies the word sea as being a symbol and a representation to describe the sum of human relations between nations and each other. This is relatively correct, as oceans are Earth’s source of weather upheavals, and in this sense, the sea resembles humanity as a whole. As marine creatures living in the deep get caught in tempests, so did I when I found myself ensnared in the turbulence of a homemade dispute; the seeds that germinated this book blossomed in the fall of 2009 as the result of a spousal outburst. It would take too long to describe the perfectly synchronized chain of events that led to a court appearance. The whole incident came in the form of two officers of the court abusing their authority by treating a misdemeanor as if it were a felony. Later, as I counseled prisoners in a prison ministry, I found this to be a common occurrence throughout the legal proceedings, where truth did not matter but ample funds for lawyers certainly did. As the tentacles of the Arizona legal apparatus altered my ordinary life, the inconsistencies and unfairness of this legal setting developed into an abuse of power. This soon became offensive to me—and to anyone with a sense of fairness and civility. Although it might be inspiring to highlight the intricacies of the God-incidences of this event, suffice it to say that I became a witness to the veracity of Romans 8:28 in my life. Up to this moment, this scripture was no different from any another that I had heard countless times, sitting in a congregation. But this time, I was experiencing it for myself.

    As I sat in a holding cell for hours, I finally reined in my fury and stopped asking Why me? I then asked the Lord to show my purpose for being in this place. His prompt response suppressed my natural inclination to get even with the people responsible for harming me. Little did I know that my choosing to dispense with the injustice of it and deciding in favor of the leading of God’s Spirit would bring a radical change in my attitudes and spiritual understanding. To that point, I’d been a committed Christian for over thirty-four years, thinking all was well with my soul. Nonetheless, this episode turned out more dramatic than the evening of my born-again experience. As God unveiled the plan behind the unfair treatment, I was able to find His purpose for the whole affair. Thus, the harm intended against me became an exceptional blessing; not only for me but for someone I’d never known or met before.

    It turned out that God used this ghastly experience for the sole purpose of ministering an inmate who previously had been Hindu. He had come to experience the loss of family and all assets after his arrest, and he had also lost the confidence and faith in his newfound Mormon religion when no one answered his pleas for help. Out of this experience, I subsequently felt drawn to a prison ministry, which further multiplied the blessings I had already experienced in comforting this precious soul.

    This was my first experience in a prison environment, and I was aware that each prisoner was a stranger, I asked Him to make sure that every word that came out of my mouth while counseling, would come directly from His Spirit. Up to that time, I never thought or considered how to practice Romans 12:1 in my life. This scripture pleads to us to "make a decisive dedication of your bodies [presenting all your members and faculties] as a living sacrifice, holy (devoted, consecrated) and well pleasing to God, which is your reasonable (rational, intelligent) service," and so, I trusted the Lord to accept and honor my request. From then on, I confidently expected that the Spirit, not me, would choose each word I spoke to each of those precious souls. The rationale for asking God this was to convey an individual message to each prisoner I counseled; thus, each conversation would be based on God’s knowledge about each heart in desperate need of hope and faith. The goal became not to be another ordinary prison counselor, moralizing in redundant homilies to desperate people who needed valid answers to real problems. My wish was to acquaint them with and help them to understand the Jesus of the Bible that I know—not the one who lives in a church but the one who lends a hand when we need it most; a Savior who aids us through the consequences of crimes and provides the power for leaving this place a changed man. The Lord demonstrated His faithfulness in fulfilling my petition, because what followed was an amazing demonstration of how the Holy Spirit ministers to those God loves and cares for, no matter who they are or where they live.

    As the ministry progressed and expanded to three other institutions, I came to the realization that as I ministered to hundreds of desperate souls, I was the one who benefited. This corroborated the veracity of Jesus’ words mentioned in Acts 20:35. It also makes one aware that, like those prisoners, the failures experienced by all in life are the result of our lack of knowledge about the tools the Lord has provided to every child of His through the Word. This lack of information is what places us outside His providence, because instead of trusting Him for everything, we end up practicing religion, which tends to become a poor substitute for the real life that Jesus gives to anyone who has believed since Pentecost day. An adopted religious life will not produce the fruits of the Spirit or include the power that Jesus promised in Luke 24:49. To their utmost detriment, most Christians have abdicated the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit for redundant religious opinions and ideas ever since paganism was Christianized in the early third century.

    Regardless of the preconceived ideas about Christianity today, the reality for most believers is that the spiritual atmosphere has not changed since the day Jesus went into the clouds. When Jesus ministered in Judea, the Jews had one of two options: hear Jesus’ words, obey them, and become His disciple; or reject Him, listen to the religious establishment, and play the religious games played by the Pharisees and Sadducees. If we look over the landscape of organized religion practices today, we see the same religious wares offered as in the days of Jesus. They include the same pious distractions but are now laced with entertainment, under the banner of Christianism instead of Judaism. Now here is the shocker: every believer of Christianity today faces the same set of circumstances and conditions that those Jews had, and the same two choices.

    In Jesus’ day, those religious Jews had only the written word in the form of the Torah, read and interpreted for the masses by those who could read in the temple and synagogues. In stark contrast, Jesus’ disciples had the author of the Torah in the flesh. They had the living Word, alive and active in front of them, speaking and rendering the spirit of the Word, not the letter of it like the religious establishment. This very principle is still in force today, where each believer possesses the Living Word in the form of Bibles and a living Teacher in the person of the Holy Spirit, re-creating the same conditions those Jews had as they followed and believed in Him (read Isaiah 54:13). These new converts of today also have a choice to reject God’s design and listen to organized religion that will also read and interpret the Bible for them. Christian believers, as a whole, have missed the fact that Jesus, besides being the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world, also modeled the Christian life that we are to live and duplicate after Pentecost, so that each believer would have the power to duplicate the same life He lived. He is clear in John 14:15–18 that He was replacing Himself with the Holy Spirit, so He could take His role, and conversely, we were to take the place of those disciples around Him. This is the only model upon which He would build His church, as mentioned in Matthew 16:18. He came to this world to reestablish God’s kingdom on this earth—at the spiritual level first and the physical when He comes back. That is the implication in His words to Pilate about not having a physical kingdom. Nonetheless, this spiritual realm is still here, open for anyone to enter as a true disciple. If one’s life has not been transformed in the same way as it was for those first disciples, then one need to have a serious conversation with the Lord, reassess the standing in Him, and strive to enter it per His counsel in Luke 13:24–25.

    This book took its shape from a collection of handouts written for prisoners so that they could keep something tangible to study the scriptures. These handouts gave them the opportunity, with nothing more than their Bibles and the Holy Spirit within them, to verify for themselves the reality of God’s promises. These visitations and learning of scriptures brought to the surface this narrative as the result of my wish to give the reader what I have discovered. It details the transition from being a mediocre believer in Christ, going to church—no different from a golfer going to a country club or belonging to a fraternity. Instead, once we become a member of God’s family, we are to grow into a disciple and start our new journey to experience the life He bought for us.

    As a born-again pupil who had attended many churches when I first met Christ, it is a mystery to me how an average congregation can attend a church, read their Bibles, and listens to their preachers yet manages to miss the clarity of the message and the admonition as to how difficult is to enter the kingdom of God. We interpret this unambiguous implication as if it applies only to the Jews and not to us. It’s as if we are to pretend that there’s one Gospel for the Jew and another for the Gentile. I certainly assumed the same and conducted myself in that way in my early years as a Christian. I had made the same mistake that millions before me did by delegating the ministry of Holy Spirit to pastors, teachers, and the church. In hindsight, as I recall that early period, it seems that most of the body of Christ is in a deep slumber by thinking that one is a bona fide Christian if one just "believes." While this act of intellectual assent to the truth of the Gospel may deliver one from God’s wrath on judgment day, the scriptures are explicit that it may not be suitable enough to enter His kingdom.

    As God laid this concept on my heart, I place it in yours. So the first thing to clarify is that this book is neither a how-to book nor a handbook with a set of instructions to bring you to a higher plane in your current walk with the Lord. Nonetheless, I am confident that a new chapter in the relationship will be the end product, should you choose to take on the challenge to pursue discipleship. You should be aware, however, that without the necessary mindset and behavior to back your decision, this evolution won’t happen for you. This book endeavors to bring attention to what God has said, about the tangibility of His kingdom that He has established on this earth. Jesus told us this much in Luke 17:20–21, where He discloses to us, "The kingdom of God is within you [in your hearts] and among you [surrounding you]. However, this kingdom is available only if you’re willing to accept Him as your Lord and obey and practice His commands as instructed in John 14:15 and 1 John 5:2. Now, once you agree to meet these two conditions, you can enter His kingdom at that very moment, and as you do, you must consent to His Spirit to take His rightful place and position as tutor and teacher in your life. It’s necessary for Him to counsel and guide you as to what changes you need to make to modify your daily life— this is how we maintain a constant fellowship with Him, which is indispensable if we are to subsist in the bounds of the kingdom while existing on this earth. Additionally, He will instruct you how you are to carry out the needed steps and conduct to bring to an end the inclination of being just a believer in Christianity and instead, develop into the disciple He intended us to be. An active pursuit of discipleship is the benchmark for being a subject of His realm. Once you are in it, you can achieve, not only a new level of intimacy in your relationship with our Savior, but a greater degree of self-control. This is when we come to experience that you are of God [you belong to Him] and have [already] defeated and overcome them [the agents of the antichrist], because He Who lives in you is greater (mightier) than he who is in the world (1 John 4:4). This transition from the ordinary to the extraordinary experience of a Spirit-led life in your daily affairs is what motivates us to Examine and test and evaluate your own selves to see whether you are holding to your faith and showing the proper fruits of it. Test and prove your-selves [not Christ]. Do you not your-selves realize and know [thoroughly by an ever-increasing experience] that Jesus Christ is in you—unless you are [counterfeits] disapproved on trial and rejected?" (2 Corinthians 13:5).

    This self-assessment is your indisputable gauge that measures your progression of becoming the disciple that you are meant to be. Discipleship should be the first ambition for anyone at the time of the decision to come to His cross and be reborn. Once you arrive at this new juncture, you can then enjoy what God had in mind right from the start for each of His children when Paul wrote:

    (For I always pray to) the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, that He may grant you a spirit of wisdom and revelation (of insight into mysteries and secrets) in the (deep and intimate) knowledge of Him, By having the eyes of your heart flooded with light, so that you can know and understand the hope to which He has called you, and how rich is His glorious inheritance in the saints (His set-apart ones), And (so that you can know and understand) what is the immeasurable and unlimited and surpassing greatness of His power in and for us who believe, as demonstrated in the working of His mighty strength (Ephesians 1:17–19).

    The maxim perception is reality is true of Christians as well, because the majority of believers’ conclusions about God’s plan of salvation are defined by whichever organized religion they happen to follow and not by the Word of God, spoken in person to them through Jesus’ appointed teacher and tutor, as defined for us in John 16:13. This book endeavors to expose the total outcome of the cross of Jesus Christ, as well as how salvation connects each one of us with God’s original covenant with Abraham. One must come to the understanding that we have an individual blood covenant with Jesus that’s a replica of His original covenant with Abram. As an accurate discernment of His Word unfolds in the mind as to what salvation means, our comprehension of how it affects and changes our life begins to unfold. As we detect this new aspect and its implications, we have new understanding about what Jesus is telling us throughout the Gospels. A lot of His words convey distinct associations to His disciples in defining His relationship with them as well as ours. One of these correlations is found in John 15:15 where He tell His disciples "I do not call you servants (slaves) any longer; for the servant does not know what his master is doing (working out). But I have called you my friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from My Father, and will be discussed in a later chapter. These inferences about the real outcome of His work were—and still are—adulterated and suppressed by the Christianization of the old pagan religion of Babylon in early AD 300, which introduced pagan worship, superstitions, and worthless traditions. This takeover became a Trojan horse inside the real church, giving us a counterfeit of what Jesus taught and established. We will also discover that His Word demolishes the claims of legitimacy of all three major religions of today that enjoy millions of followers, just by applying the unadulterated Word of God to each of their assertions that they speak" for God. Common sense and plain, simple logic, together with His Word, tear up their religious façade to show the true spiritual character behind their teachings.

    This book also explores the dire warnings made to us by Jesus Himself and confirmed all through the New Testament scriptures as to who is saved and who is not. After careful analysis of God’s Word in its original language, the alarming reality is that Jesus often said that only a remnant will be found worthy to escape the upcoming tribulation, conveyed in Revelation 3:10. These unsettling certainties have been whitewashed by organized religions’ teachings, traditions, and beliefs, but they become obvious when you study the Word through our teacher in its original context. This is the purpose for using the Amplified translation throughout the entire book as the scripture source. Nevertheless, the most startling slice of truth in writing this book came by studying and understanding the meaning of Jesus’ act of washing His disciples’ feet the night before His arrest and how He is still performing this work today to all His disciples so we can have an unassailable bond between the Godhead and us.

    If we are to experience the life He gave us, we must faithfully replicate the continuous union He had with His Father throughout His entire life. A true Christian is to imitate and duplicate this relationship with the Father, since He has provided to us every tool needed to do so. To do otherwise is to cut off our ties with Him, exposing our flank to the enemy, making it impossible to experience His life in ours. Satan’s concealment and obfuscation through religious trickery of this vital part of our redemption for our daily walk should be considered as a masterful stroke of genius to keep the body of Christ neutered and weak. This is exemplified in the display of the defeated lives of most of today’s Christians, as well as the absolute impotence of the church in influencing the mores of a rapidly decaying United States society.

    It is my sincere hope that readers will make the effort to read and verify for themselves each verse quoted here and that the Spirit of God will indeed flood their eyes, mind, and spirit with His light, for it is only through the advocate, not just attending a church, that we can get hold of the glorious promises and assurances given to believers and individually experience them, as promised by His Word to everyone who listens and obeys. He forewarned us as far as seeking man and not Him when He said, "Except the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it; except the Lord keeps the city, the watchman wakes but in vain" (Psalm 127:1) and even more clearly than this in Zechariah 4:6. Therefore, recognize that studying our builder manual should continuously be at the top of your priorities of your life, if we are to profit from His instruction and counsels. The Lord bolsters this principle in John 15:4–6:

    Dwell in Me, and I will dwell in you. (Live in Me and I will live in you.) Just as no branch can bear fruit of itself without abiding in (being vitally united to) the vine, neither can you bear fruit unless you abide in Me. I am the Vine; you are the branches. Whoever lives in Me and I in him bears much (abundant) fruit. But, apart from Me (cut off from vital union with Me) you can do nothing.

    Hence, let us begin the journey and examine

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