Chapter 22: The Measure—How You Know You Are Abiding (1 of 2)

The Wrong Question

You will want to know: Am I doing this right? Am I really abiding? Is it working?

And in asking these questions, you turn inward. You start monitoring yourself. You start watching your own spiritual state. You start measuring your growth. You become the focus.

This is the trap. This is the turn away from abiding.

Abiding is not about becoming aware of yourself. It is about becoming aware of God. It is not about monitoring your own growth. It is about being lost in His presence. It is not about checking whether you are doing it correctly. It is about being so occupied with Him that the question dissolves.

The moment you start watching yourself abide, you have stopped abiding. You have made yourself the center. You have displaced God with self-awareness.

The Right Measure

The measure of abiding is not what you are noticing about yourself. It is what you are noticing about God.

Are you increasingly aware of His presence? Not aware of your own growth, but aware of Him? Is He becoming more real to you? More constant? More tangible? More the baseline reality of your existence?

This is what matters. This is the only measure that counts. When you abide, God becomes more visible. His presence becomes more familiar. His voice becomes more clear. Your awareness of Him grows.

And as your awareness of Him grows, something happens that is remarkable: your awareness of yourself decreases. You stop thinking about whether you are getting it right. You stop monitoring your spiritual state. You stop wondering if you are abiding. You are just... with Him.

God-Awareness Displaces Self-Awareness

This is the secret that changes everything: you cannot be occupied by both at once.

When you are occupied by awareness of God—by His presence, His voice, His will, His character—there is no room for self-consciousness. There is no room for self-monitoring. There is no room for the interior conversation about whether you are doing it right.

You are too occupied with Him.

Think of someone you love deeply. When you are with them, when you are really present with them, are you aware of how well you are loving them? Are you monitoring yourself? Are you thinking about whether you are doing the relationship correctly?

No. You are aware of them. You are present with them. You are lost in the presence of someone you love.

This is what abiding is. This is what it means to be occupied by the presence of God.

When you are truly abiding, you are not aware of yourself at all. You are aware of Him. His presence is so real, so constant, so tangible that it has become the ground of your existence. You are living coram Deo—before the face of God—and the only awareness that matters is His awareness.

How God-Awareness Manifests

So what does increasing God-awareness actually look like?

His presence becomes more real. Not mystical. Real. You feel held. You feel known. You feel the weight of being before God in a way that is constant, not occasional. It is not that He shows up sometimes. It is that you are increasingly awake to the fact that He is always here.

His voice becomes more familiar. You do not need to ask anymore: is this the Spirit or is this my own thinking? You know. Because the voice you are hearing—the leading, the direction, the conviction, the invitation—is coming from someone you know. Someone you have learned to recognize through practice. Someone whose presence is becoming more and more real.

His will becomes clearer. You stop needing to analyze and debate what God wants. You are so attentive to His presence that His will is becoming obvious to you. Not because He is spelling it out, but because you are learning to see the world through His eyes. You are learning to want what He wants.

His character becomes more visible to you. You are learning what it means to walk with someone holy. Someone true. Someone utterly trustworthy. And as you walk with Him, His character is transforming how you see everything else. His love is teaching you what love is. His truth is teaching you what truth is. His mercy is teaching you what mercy is.

His peace becomes the reality you live in. Not because you have achieved inner peace through technique, but because you are resting in the presence of the one who is peace. The peace of God. Not the world's peace, which depends on circumstances being right. His peace, which exists in the midst of any circumstance because it is rooted in His presence, not in your circumstances.

The Disappearing Self

And here is what is strange and beautiful: as you become increasingly aware of God, you become less aware of yourself.

You stop thinking about whether you are getting it right. You stop monitoring your spiritual progress. You stop wondering if you are abiding. You are too occupied with Him.

This is not dissociation. This is not losing your mind. This is the most sane thing you can do: to stop being occupied with yourself and to become occupied with God.

Paul wrote: I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. This is what he meant. The "I" that is self-occupied, self-monitoring, self-concerned—that has been set aside. And in its place, Christ. God-awareness replacing self-awareness.

In fact, if you are still very aware of your own spiritual state, still monitoring whether you are growing or abiding or progressing—you may not be abiding yet. You may still be occupied with yourself. The measure of true abiding is that you have become so occupied with God that self-awareness has largely disappeared.

What Happened to the Disciples

The disciples in the Upper Room are anxious. They are asking questions about their own future, their own status, their own place in the kingdom. They are self-aware. They are self-concerned.

And Jesus is teaching them to shift. To stop being occupied with their own spiritual state and to become occupied with God. To know Him. To remain in Him. To be so present with the Father through the Spirit that the self-consciousness dissolves.

When the Spirit comes at Pentecost, something remarkable happens. The disciples are no longer anxious about whether they are getting it right. They are occupied with the presence of God. They are so aware of Him that they are willing to die. They are so confident in His presence that external threats do not shake them.

This is what happens when you shift from self-awareness to God-awareness. The external circumstances do not change. But your interior reality transforms. You are no longer looking at yourself. You are looking at Him.

The Only Real Test

So how do you know if you are abiding?

Stop monitoring yourself. Stop asking if you are doing it right. Stop watching your own spiritual state.

Ask instead: Am I increasingly aware of God? Is His presence becoming more real? Is His voice becoming more familiar? Am I less occupied with myself and more occupied with Him?