Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me (John 15:4).
If you have come to the place where you have entrusted your life to Christ, at the point of repentance and abandonment to Him (believing), something happened at the core of your being. The Spirit of God came into your life and baptized you into the Body of Christ. Here’s what Paul the apostle wrote:
12Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. 13For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink (1 Corinthians 12:12-13).
In some unseen mystical way, the Spirit dipped us, soaked and saturated us (that's what the word baptism means) into an organic union with Christ. Notice that Paul the apostle writes that it is not some Christians who are baptized by the Spirit, but all. Every Christian resides in the spiritual body of Christ. We have been made one in Christ. There is a spiritual union established between you and Christ and also with the rest of the family of God—your brothers and sisters in Christ. The Spirit of God maintains the connection with the Head of the Body, Jesus Christ. We are the arms, legs, hands, and feet of the organic union with the Lord. All Christians are in Christ Jesus, a phrase that is repeated 174 times in the New Testament (and its equivalents in Jesus, in the Lord, in the Son, etc.). In my younger days as a commercial fisherman, to catch fish on the bottom of the seabed the net had to be towed and connected to the trawler, nothing happened without the connection. The net was not effective in what it was designed to do unless it was connected to the boat, the power source that towed it along the seabed.
In our passage at the top of the page from John 15:4, we are told that unless we remain in Him and keep that ongoing organic connection vital, we will not bear fruit. Relationship and connection to Christ is the key. It's a bit like emailing or texting one another back and forth via the Internet or Facebook or some other program. Two people are connected by an invisible source, the Internet. In the picture of the vine, the Lord is saying that He has made a living connection with all who believe, a connection that is unseen but very powerful. There is a flow of life-giving spiritual sap from Him to you through a connection that brings forth fruit.
Let's think more about what Christ said: He is the Vine, and we are the branches. The fruit is not seen on the rootstock of the vine. The manifestation of the fruit of the vine is at the level of the branches. The fruit of the vine comes from a single rootstock, and what we are saying is that Christ, and the spiritual DNA of His life, flows into every branch connected to Him. Paul the apostle, in his letter to the Romans, used the same analogy when he wrote that us Gentiles were grafted into the rootstock of the covenant God made with Israel (Romans 11:16-20).
Jesus described His relationship with His followers this way: "I am the Vine. You are the branches." He did not say, "I am the foundation, and you are the upper floors." He describes our relationship with Himself as an organic union. He has so united Himself with us that He does not want to be known apart from us, or for us to be known apart from Him! He identifies with us. We are identified with Him. “For to us to live is Christ…” (Philippians 1:21a). Keith Thomas
Taken from the more complete study in the series in John: 30. Jesus, the True Vine