Go Back to John 15

The governing question underneath this book — the question every chapter was written to answer — is whether the reader has been driven back to remaining in Christ.

Not back to a theological position. Not back to a set of correctly held doctrines about the nature of death and the intermediate state and the structure of Sheol. Back to the vine.

"Remain in me, and I will remain in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it remains in the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in me – and I in him – bears much fruit, because apart from me you can accomplish nothing." — John 15:4–5 (NET)

The relational knowing of John 17:3 is not a doctrine to be held. It is a connection to be inhabited. The branch does not know the vine by studying the vine. It knows the vine by being connected to it — by the sap that flows through the connection, the life that is not the branch's own life but the vine's life moving through the branch. The fruit that grows on the branch is not the branch's achievement. It is the vine's life becoming visible at the branch's extremities.

This is the present-tense eternal life that John 17:3 defines. Not primarily a future destination. A present connection. A mode of existing now, in this warm morning, in this accumulated grief and this unresolved history and this narrowing arithmetic, that is the beginning of what continues through biological death and the intermediate state and the resurrection and the new creation and whatever inexhaustible giving into inexhaustible receiving looks like across the dimensions of the eternity that lies beyond what any map drawn from inside time can fully describe.

The map is not the territory. The map is for getting to the territory. The territory is the vine. The territory is the knowing. The territory is the present moment of the soul in poverty of spirit, connected to the one who crossed the asymptote from the infinite side and descended into Sheol and came back out on Sunday morning with the keys.

Go back to John 15. Read it with the eyes this book has given you. Not the eyes that read it as a set of conditions to perform — the eyes that read it as the description of a connection that is being offered, that has been opened at enormous cost, that is available right now in the warmth of this morning, to the empty hands that the Beatitude describes as the inheritors of the kingdom.

The morning is warm. The flags are in the ground. The dead are remembered. The living are going home, carrying folding chairs.

And the one who holds the keys is alive.

Soli Deo Gloria

Memorial Day, 2026 Central Florida