If we would truly live, we must abide
Empowered by our Savior Jesus Christ.
We are the branches, He, the one true Vine.
No other source of strength is there to find,
For thus the Savior said, “Abide in Me,
And let My living Word now dwell in you.”

Dear Jesus, if I cannot come to You
With reservations none, in You abide,
Then what, I pray, is to become of me?
For I am nothing. You alone are Christ,
And everything I need in You I find,
The source of all my life, the one true Vine.

Now drinking from the blood squeezed from that Vine,
The precious blood that on Golgotha You
So freely shed for me—indeed I find
The more I taste, I long more to abide,
For now I have a sense of what You, Christ,
Once suffered to redeem a wretch like me!

Such awful guilt and shame You bore for me!
I don’t deserve a place within this Vine.
By grace the Keeper of the Vine of Christ
Picked up and grafted my branch into You.
Now day by day I’m learning to abide
As every morning mercies new I find.

Such riches in Your Word I daily find;
On every page you’re waiting there for me.
I slowly learn the meaning of abide—
As branches cannot flourish without vine,
No more can I exist apart from You,
For I’m the Christian, and You are the Christ.

Yes, I’m the Christian, and You are the Christ—
No better correlation can I find.
My life is fully hid inside of You,
And I’m alive because You live in me.
A blessed branch I am of that blessed Vine
Because I’ve learned in Jesus to abide!

So Christ beseeches all: “Come unto Me,
And ever find your strength within the Vine,
As I in you, and you in Me abide.”

John 15:4  Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in Me.

Copyright © 2018 Angela Umphers Rueger – All Rights Reserved

Photo courtesy of  Igor Ovsyannykov on Unsplash

Scansion:
Sestina — 6 stanzas with 6 lines each followed by a tercet.
Rhythm and line length are not specified, but by choice I used iambic pentameter throughout.
Instead of rhyme, the stanzas repeat the ending words in a particular order as follows (where the numbers represent the word that appears at the end of each line):

Stanza 1– 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Stanza 2– 6, 1, 5, 2, 4, 3
Stanza 3– 3, 6, 4, 1, 2, 5
Stanza 4– 5, 3, 2, 6, 1, 4
Stanza 5– 4, 5, 1, 3, 6, 2
Stanza 6– 2, 4, 6, 5, 3, 1

Tercet:
Line 1: Word 2 appears in the 1st half, and the line ends with word 5.
Line 2: Word 4 appears in the 1st half, and the line ends with word 3.
Line 3: Word 6 appears in the 1st half, and the line ends with word 1.