He Gave...

 For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life." John 3:16

I recently heard Sheila Walsh exhort her listeners, professing believers, to actually "live like believers." Can we contemplate what she's saying and examine whether we really do?

I'm thinking that our concepts of what it is to be a "believer," and what it is that constitutes true faith in Christ have become greatly muddled in our day. Believing is not simply agreement with facts about the Father, Jesus Christ, the Bible, and so on. Believing something in our mind does not make it real in our heart and spirit. True belief comes from a result of our actually experiencing the facts, the truth, that is spoken of by Him in and through His Word. Faith is not the result of a determination to believe those facts, but the outflowing of our experiencing that truth through a living relationship with Him. A true believer lives out in their daily lives what it is they profess to believe in. It was said of the Pharisees, the Jewish religious leaders of Christ's day who rejected Him, that "they didn't believe the God they said they believed in." How many of us fall into that same description?

John 3:16 may well be the most quoted and known Scripture in His Word, but do we really know just what is being said in these words? These words in particular carry infinite power, "He gave His one and only Son." Can we be still enough to dwell upon what is being said here? Can we meditate upon the infinite riches given us in His Son, Jesus Christ? Have we even begun to understand the depths of what we have been given in Him? There is no end to the spiritual riches that are ours in Christ. We can never exhaust them, and in Him, they are ours. Someone said to the effect, "In view of all that we have been given in Jesus Christ, it must be a great scandal in heaven that we live as we do." To what degree have you and I contributed to that scandal?

There could be nothing more precious to the heart of the Father than His Son, Jesus Christ. Yet for us, who have never deserved such love, He was yielded up so that if we would receive Him and believe in Him, we would receive the endless riches of eternal life. Life that begins upon our receiving Him. Jesus Christ, fully God came into our realm and became fully man as well, and made a pathway, the only pathway, to the Father and life. By faith, we spiritual beggars, were made sons and daughters of the Father through a living faith. The reality of this should boggle our minds, but I fear too many of us haven't begun to grasp the wonder of it all. So we go on living like beggars when all the bounty of eternity is offered....but we can't see it and don't know it.

We live like orphans when He has called us His sons and daughters. We subsist on crumbs when He has provided His bounty. His Word says that He's placed eternity in our hearts, but we fail to live in His eternal life right now. The apostle Paul said that the God who gave us His only Son would also through His Son, give us all things. All things needful for life. Physical life, but even more, for spiritual and emotional life as well. Are we living in the wonder of His "all things."

He gave, and He gives. Do we live in this reality today? Are we living what we believe? If not, do we really believe at all?

Blessings,

Pastor O