"...Jesus doesn't say "I am power cord you are the cell phone." He says, "I'm the vine. You're the branch." If you want life, there can't be any disconnect. Abiding is living in this constant awareness of total dependence. Abiding is what desperate people do who realize that they have no life, power, no inward resource of themselves.
When I think about abiding I can want to make it overly mystical. But it's not a special spiritual state that we work ourselves into. More than anything abiding is a posture of heart. It's opposite of self-reliance. It's the opposite of the "I can handle this" feeling. It is dependence and child-like faith that says, "All I have is Jesus and his life, death and resurrection for me." "
Joshua Harris, Abiding isn't complicated