In my previous post we looked at how the actions of one man, Adam, led to the condemnation of all mankind to death. We were dead in our trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1) but God, who is rich in mercy, and because of His overwhelming love for us, made us alive through Christ Jesus. Through the grace of God and by our faith in Jesus we have been given eternal life. Our true birth came the day we accepted Jesus as our Savior and our eternal life started at that moment, as death’s claim on our lives became void. Jesus told us exactly what eternal life is in His prayer found in John 17, here He says, “and this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3). To know God and to know Jesus Christ is eternal life. Once we accept Jesus as our Savior, the rest of our time on earth should be spent forming an intimate relationship with God through Jesus.
We tend to believe that we have to wait until our death to experience the eternal life that God has prepared for us. But that is not what Scripture says. Jesus tells us that knowing God and His Son is eternal life and Jesus also said that the words He spoke are “spirit and life” (John 6:63). So how do we know God and His Son? We know the Word. John 1:1 tells us, “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Jesus was with God in the beginning and all things were created through Him (John 1:3). Jesus is the Word made manifest in the flesh. Every word that Jesus spoke to us came from His Father and this is how we come to know Him. In John 5:24 Jesus said, “I assure you: Anyone who hears my word and believes Him who sent Me has eternal life and will not come under judgment but has passed from death to life.” We gain all that God has prepared for us in our eternal life through the Word and by believing in it.
Through God’s grace we have been given the opportunity to know our Creator and to take hold of all that He has for us. However, for many believers it may seem like a daunting task trying to understand God through His written Word, and for far too many of us our Bibles are only pulled out on Sunday, if that. God has already provided for this exact circumstance. In John 14:26 Jesus tells us that the Father will send us a helper, the Holy Spirit, who will teach us all things and remind us of all that Jesus said. The Holy Spirit is our helper, and it is through the guiding of the Holy Spirit that we walk in the eternal life God has planned for us. Romans 8:11 tells us that the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives in us, and when we live by the Spirit, the Spirit himself will bear “witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs – heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ…” (Romans 8:16-17).
We have been made alive to God through Christ and we are accepted in the Beloved (Ephesians 1:6). Our eternal life doesn’t start the moment we breathe our last breath in this life, our eternal life started the day we accepted Jesus as our Savior. We are heirs to all of God’s promises and we bring these promises to fruition by knowing God and His Son through the Word that gives life. God has given us a helper, the Holy Spirit, to guide us on this journey. We need only to believe.
Ephesians 3:16-21
I pray that He may grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power in the inner man through His Spirit, and that the Messiah may dwell in your hearts through faith. I pray that you, being rooted and firmly established in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width, height and depth of God’s love, and to know the Messiah’s love that surpasses knowledge, so you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to Him who is able to do above and beyond all that we ask or think according to the power that works in us – to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.