What Believers Think

We have a wonderful and amazing gift from Jesus, because he's left us with his own personal messages. He's left us with his own personal instructions. He's left us with his own explanations of who he was and why he was there, and what he was doing. He's told us his own version of his relationship with God and how we can relate to God. This is direct from Jesus himself. That's the gift that he's given us.

And not only that, but we've got the testimony of a close friend of Jesus, who's written down all of the things, not all of the things, but a lot of the things that he heard Jesus say, the things he saw Jesus do. And he's given us an understanding of how he saw Jesus and what Jesus was like. And he's done it so that we can understand and believe just like he did. That's John's Gospel, a rich testimony of one of the best friends of Jesus, telling us what he was like and what he said and how you can become his friend.

And we've got stories and records from eyewitness people who were there with him, who spent time with him, who told us what he did and what he said and what it meant. We've got these rich resources given to us by Jesus and his friends in our own possession, in our own language, so that we can hear them and read them.

Now, the believers are the people who believe that, and they believe it to the extent that they know that the gift that God has given us is in the writings about Jesus, the Gospels, the New Testament (actually the whole Bible, but I'm focusing on Jesus here). We have got Jesus' own teachings and words and testimonies.

Isn't that a wonderful gift? Don't you think that's wonderful? In little books that everyone can read, And the people who believe Jesus read them, because that's how you believe Jesus. You listen to what he says. And the thing is, the more you read it, the more you want to know more, the more you read it, the more you listen to him. The more you come to know him, the more you want to know him.

And the stories are just so wonderful. The teaching us is so rich that you want to go back over it again and again. And for some of us, we can almost remember the whole of it. We can almost say it off by heart because it's so wonderful and so rich. That's what the believer is like. Because the believer is believing Jesus. They're believing what he says. They're eager to know him more and more. And so what's in their Bible is in their heart. What's in their Bible is in their mind. What's in their Bible is in their memory. They can recite it. They can remember the stories because they're not just great stories. They're about the person they love. And they've got their own testimonies, just like John had his testimony, about how they love him more and more, And how they want to know him more and more.

The believer is the person whose bible is falling apart because the spine is broken, because they've read it so much, or they've written all over it so much, they can't read it anymore. They've got to get a new Bible. They're the believers, the ones who really love Jesus and want to hear what he says.

But then when they do read it, some other problems appear, because sometimes when you read it and listen to it, you realize that he's telling you something that's not what you thought, that you think something different. And there's a problem, isn't it? There's a tension there, because then you've got to say, will I close the book and go away, Or will I struggle with this and maybe change my mind? That was the problem with the people in this story. They didn't change their mind.

And sometimes as we read it, we see he says something about how I'm behaving, and he's saying, I should behave differently. I could behave a different way if I was following him properly. And then I've got the same choice. Will I change my mind and my behavior, or will I close the book and go on and do something else?

Believers never stop believing, and they never stop changing their mind. And they keep on growing all the time, because the more they do it, the more they know Jesus. And the more they know Jesus, the more they love Jesus. And the more they love Jesus, the more they want to listen to him. And the more they want to listen to him, the more they want to spend time absorbing it. And when they've got a difficulty with it, they want to dig it out and maybe get someone to help them. Because the best thing in their life is Jesus. The best thing in their life is knowing him, because they're a friend of Jesus. They really want to know him. And they keep changing their mind so that more and more they're like Jesus.

What do you think?