Journey Through God's Word

¹“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower.

²He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.

³You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you.

⁴Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.

⁵I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.

⁶Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.

⁷If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

⁸My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.

⁹As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.

¹⁰If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.

¹¹I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.

¹²“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

¹³No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

¹⁴You are my friends if you do what I command you.

¹⁵I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.

¹⁶You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.

¹⁷I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

¹⁸“If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you.

¹⁹If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world — therefore the world hates you.

²⁰Remember the word that I said to you, ‘Servants are not greater than their master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you; if they kept my word, they will keep yours also.

²¹But they will do all these things to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me.

²²If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin.

²³Whoever hates me hates my Father also.

²⁴If I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not have sin. But now they have seen and hated both me and my Father.

²⁵It was to fulfill the word that is written in their law, ‘They hated me without a cause.’

²⁶“When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf.

²⁷You also are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning.

¹What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?

²By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it?

³Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?

⁴Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.

⁵For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.

⁶We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.

⁷For whoever has died is freed from sin.

⁸But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.

⁹We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.

¹⁰The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.

¹¹So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

¹²Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions.

¹³No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness.

¹⁴For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.

¹⁵What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!

¹⁶Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?

¹⁷But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted,

¹⁸and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.

¹⁹I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification.

²⁰When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.

²¹So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death.

²²But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life.

²³For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

¹And so, brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ.

²I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready,

³for you are still of the flesh. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human inclinations?

⁴For when one says, “I belong to Paul,” and another, “I belong to Apollos,” are you not merely human?

⁵What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each.

⁶I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.

⁷So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.

⁸The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labor of each.

⁹For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building.

¹⁰According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it. Each builder must choose with care how to build on it.

¹¹For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ.

¹²Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw —

¹³the work of each builder will become visible, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each has done.

¹⁴If what has been built on the foundation survives, the builder will receive a reward.

¹⁵If the work is burned up, the builder will suffer loss; the builder will be saved, but only as through fire.

¹⁶Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?

¹⁷If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.

¹⁸Do not deceive yourselves. If you think that you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you may become wise.

¹⁹For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their craftiness,”

²⁰and again, “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.”

²¹So let no one boast about human leaders. For all things are yours,

²²whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future — all belong to you,

²³and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.