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Growing up in a Christian household, my parents demonstrated what it looked like to love and follow Jesus. They also taught me and my brothers how to follow Jesus’ command to “remain in me.”

We faithfully attended church, enjoyed healthy prayer lives, regularly relished fellowship with other believers, blasted praise and worship music in the home, and established Bible reading as a practice as habitual as brushing our teeth. Through those early years, I prioritized God and remained in Him. As a result, He remained in me. I maintained peace, joy, and excitement for what God had in store for my life.

As life busied in my young adult years, however, I increasingly prioritized other things ahead of God: school, work, extracurriculars, relationships. I read my Bible less and less until I stopped reading it altogether. My prayer life perished, and I stopped attending church. What began as a slow drift ended in a life independent of Him. A void developed within me, and in that void, hopelessness, despair, and confusion flooded in.

While it took me many years to recognize how far I had strayed and to return to Christ in repentance, I humbly returned and remained ever grateful for His mercy and grace in that season of wandering.

As I reflect on that season, I recognize that no single event or radical change made me reject the faith or turn from my walk with Christ. Instead, it was a gradual shift that, over time, became an immense, life-altering shift. The cruciality of prioritizing Jesus and my relationship with Him every day is evident, and Jesus’ words remind me that only when I remain in Him will He remain in me. As He increasingly fills me through Bible reading, prayer, and worship, my life produces great fruitfulness, and He fills me with otherworldly peace and joy.

Remain in Christ and be filled by Him. God will quench your thirsty soul and satisfy your longing heart.