What It Means To Believe In Jesus

This is a contraversal topic and one that is extremely important. In Romans Paul does a beautiful job explaining to the Romans what it means to be a Christian. In Romans 10:9 he says that all that is required is that you confess with your mouth that Jesus is LORD and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead and you will be saved. But what does it mean to believe in your heart?

Is having the knowledge of the historical facts the same thing as believing? No, it certainly is not. If having all the knowledge and facts of truth does not change you into a creature who wants nothing more than to please God, because of His pure character; if having the knowledge and facts of truth does not make you fall to your knees in humble admiration of our LORD, realizing how disparately you need Him; and if having these facts does not create a desire in you to be more like Him, then it is not believing, it is just knowing. When you truly believe, the Holy Spirit transforms you.

When our minds and hearts are transformed by the Holy Spirit, we "put on Christ." Paul describes this dramatic change in our hearts and minds as Jesus Christ living within us. We "put off the old man with his deeds" and "put on the new man." We are "renewed" in knowledge and in the spirit of our minds.

"You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness" (Ephesians 4:22-24).

There are many Christians who are not setting good examples. They say they believe, but they have not changed into the new creature. This is obvious by their hatefulness, selfishness and disrespect toward others. This is why Jesus said that the greatest commandment was to love the LORD with all your heart, all your mind and all your strength; and the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. One acid test you can do for yourself to help you understand if you heart is like Jesus' is to reflect inward and ask yourself if you are following these two commandments. Is God first in all that you do? Do you have love in your heart for even your enemies?

The second acid test you should do to help you understand if you are truly saved, is to ask yourself if you believe that God has the power to heal you from your sinfulness. Christians easily get that God can heal cancer, but struggle with believing that He also has the power to heal them from their sin. This is what believing in Christ is about. Here is how you know that to be true. Every time Jesus healed someone He told them to stop sinning. Would Jesus tell people to do something if it were impossible? No, of course not! But it is impossible if you do not believe.

God gave us forgiveness before Jesus came. Abraham lied about Sarah being his sister, but he was still allowed to go to heaven. David committed murder and adultery, but was still allowed into heaven. So, Jesus didn't just come so we could be forgiven, He also came so we could believe. He came so we would have what we needed to fulfill the scriptures where we are called to be holy and perfect like our Father (1 Peter 1:13-16, Matthew 5:48).

Now, I would like to spend some time talking about why this is difficult to understand. Theologians call this the hiddenness of God. God chooses to reveal Himself to us when are hearts are in the right place, which is when we are willing to allow Him to have the authority in our lives. He does not allow us to see because we are wise. He does not allow us to see because we keep His laws. He allows us to see, when we give Him authority. He allows us to see when we are humble and childlike.

John 7:17 “Anyone who wants to do the will of God will know whether my teaching is from God or is merely my own.”

Luke 10:21-24 At that same time Jesus was filled with the joy of the Holy Spirit, and he said, “Oh Father, Lord of heaven and earth, thank you for hiding these things from those who think themselves wise and clever, and for revealing them to the childlike. Yes, Father, it pleased you to do it this way.

“My Father has entrusted everything to me. No one truly knows the Son except the Father, and no one truly knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the son chooses to reveal him.”

Then they were alone, he turned to the disciples and said, “Blessed are the eyes that see what you have seen. I tell you many prophets and kings longed to see what you see, but the didn't see it. And they longed to hear what you hear, but they didn't hear it.”

Psalm 145:18-20 The LORD is close to all who call on Him, yes, to all who call on Him in truth. He grants the desires of those who fear Him; he hears their cries for help and rescues them. The LORD protects all those who love him, but He destroys the wicked.

Jeremiah 29:13 If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me.

God chooses to open our eyes when our hearts are fixed on Him and His will in our lives. If we are still relying on ourselves and still consider that we are the authority, we will not be able to see God or truly believe in Him.

So, how do we learn to believe? How do we make our hearts childlike, so we are able to see God? The first step is to submit to God. Submission almost always precedes the knowledge of God, because He will not reveal Himself to you until you want to know Him for Him. God will not reveal Himself to you, if you are only coming to Him because you need something from Him. When you want to know God for God, because you love Him more than anything else, because you understand His power and authority in your life, it is that moment when He will open your eyes and allow you to see.

Seeing Through God's Lens

A beautiful young girl stood in front of a full length mirror, looking at her reflection. She stood approximately 5'4.5” tall and had a slim, toned build, weighing about 80 lbs. However, this is not what she saw when she looked at her reflection. Through her lens, she saw someone who was fat and ugly and she was certain there was no boy who could ever love her, because of how she looked.

What is going on here? This was the beautiful singer, Karen Carpenter. If you don't know who that is, do a YouTube search on the song We've Only Just Begun. Karen died because she had an eating disorder called Anorexia. Karen's lens did not see correctly. It had become distorted, causing her to view herself as fat. So, she stopped eating and eventually she died.

Our lens gets messed up because of the world we live in and all the sin around us. Children who experience the horrible act of being raped or molested, especially have this problem. Their view of who they are becomes completely destroyed by this act of evil. They grow up and learn to use alcohol or drugs to escape the horrible pain of who they are and what they have become. They try to escape their reality, because of how destructive this sin is to their spirit.

Women who are being abused by their husbands, go back to them again and again and continue to take beatings, which send them to the emergency room. In their minds hey don't believe they deserve any better. This hostile environment is their definition of love.

A little girl age 18 months, is molested by her babysitter. She has no recollection of this act, but she grows up and begins to cut her arms. She feels she has a demon inside her and she cuts herself to release it. She feels nothing, so she cuts herself because pain is better than feeling nothing.

A 16 year old girl has her virginity taken away by a man much older than her. She said no, but she was not strong enough to get away. He was a friend, she thought. She thought he really liked her and wanted to love her, but he only wanted to take her virtue and then discard her like a piece of trash. This little girl grows up wanting nothing more than to feel loved by a man. She makes horrible choices each time she decides to make a relationship commitment. She sees the man's character flaws, but makes exceptions and excuses for them, because she feels she deserves nothing that is good.

This is how destructive sin is to us. All sin is destructive like this, but I'm using the clear examples in order for you to see and understand. Sin always replicates itself. For the little girl who was raped, sin replicated to her and told her how guilty she was for letting it happen. The guilt festered and grew. She threw away years of her life doing drugs and dancing in a topless bar, because she didn't think she deserved any better.

Satan uses these opportunities to confuse us and distort how we see ourselves and the world. It is only when we view ourselves and each other through the clear lens of the Gospel that we begin to see clearly. If we do not understand God's Word, this is an impossible task.

So, here it is. What the Gospel of Christ is all about is this: God loved us so much that he sent His only son to die on a cross as justification or payment for our sins. God released His mighty wrath on Jesus, instead of those who deserved it - us. This is a picture of God's grace. We deserved the punishment, but He sent a substitute to stand in our place. Now, because of Jesus, we have the option to be forgiven and to live for eternity with our Father. This is a free gift, offered from our Father. All we need to do is believe and receive it.

There is no other religion like Christianity. All the others focus on what you DO. Christianity focuses on what was DONE for you. All other religions focus on a man who was wise and lived by good morals and character and then died. Christianity is God humbling himself enough to come down to earth and walk in the dirt along side of us to experience our suffering and temptations and then die on a cross receiving our punishment, so we could be saved. But the best part is that in three days, He rose from the dead, just as the prophecies had predicted nearly a thousand years before Christ's birth.

When you truly understand how much God loves you and all that He has done to save you, you can start to view yourself through His lens instead of you own. When this happens, you start to see the truth about who you are in Christ. The depression begins to vanish. The worry calms. The pills for sleep and anxiety are no longer needed. When you view yourself in the mirror, you see a beautiful and loving soul, who may not be perfect, but sure wants to be. When you look at others, you are no longer judgmental and hateful, focused only on their faults; instead, you are now loving toward toward them, because now you see their beauty despite their sin.

You begin to crave an understanding for who Jesus is and how He designed us to live. You act on this craving by seeking wisdom through God's Word. You begin to understand God's laws for our lives and you take steps to be obedient, because you love Him. You work to put God first in all that you do, because you understand that not putting Him first opens the door to all other sinful behavior. God begins to bless you greatly because of you love for Him and you find that the peace and love inside you feels so wonderful that you must tell everyone you know and love about this wonderful gift of Jesus.

The greatest gift is not just to be loved, but to be known and loved. This is what we all seek and it is what God seeks as well.

God's Design For Marriage

Marriage is a parable for our relationship with God. Your earthly spouse is to symbolize your relationship with your heavenly spouse – Jesus. When we enter into a marriage and make promises to love, honor and obey our spouse, we are also making these promises to God. God designed marriage a very specific way and it must follow His design in order to keep love alive.

In preparation for this marriage, God's design is that you wait and keep (or make) yourselves pure. This purity is not just your sexual purity, but your sexual purity is to symbolize purity of our mind, body and spirit.

This is where folks get a bit messed up. Father's teach their children to stay virgins, because they recall their own sexual promiscuity and they are mortified by the thought that a boy might do to their child what they did to girls when they were young. But this is the wrong foundation to use. When we focus on our own sins and use them as the teaching motivation, from the beginning of this teaching we are using a lens that is blurred and unclear due to sin. This creates lessons which are not clear to our children either. When fathers teach using this foundation, children will learn that keeping their virginity makes them better than other girls their age and their hearts get messed up. When this happens it creates children who may keep themselves sexually pure, but in doing so will look down at girls who are struggling with their identity, feeling unloved and making up for it by giving pieces of themselves away little by little to every boy who shows them attention.

We must use the parable of Christ as our bride to teach our children, instead our own foundation and sin. If we do this, we are preparing them properly by using the foundation of who they are in Christ and how He designed marriage.

The first two years of marriage will be the most difficult, because this is a time when the couple will experience what is called “breaking the backbone of selfishness”. During this time, God will teach the wife to let the husband be the leader and to trust God to sort it out when the husband's leadership is not Godly. A woman's natural tendency is to fix or take care of her family. This can get in the way of the husband being the leader in the family. What the wife needs to understand is that once she objects and gives her very logical argument, she must then let her husband make the decision for the family. This is what the Bible is teaching the wife when God tells the woman to submit to the leadership of her husband. Rest assured wives, when your husband makes a choice that is not Godly, God will deal with him. You role, however, is to lift up your husband and make him feel like a king by serving him in a very Godly way.

Husbands, God teaches that you are to honor your wife and to love her like Jesus loved the Church. Dishonoring your wife is the same thing as dishonoring God. If there is something in your live that is causing you to dishonor your wife, you should follow that like it is smoke from a fire. When you dishonor your wife, your prayers will not be heard (1 Peter 3:7), because as you dishonor your wife you also dishonor God. You must listen to her and care about her concerns. God created her differently from how her created you. She is more intuitive and more emotional, so she sees things differently. The best decisions will be made together as husband and wife. If you are not able to come to an agreement, it is your responsibility as the leader to make the decision for the family. You must rely on God to help you make these decisions. You must pray about them with your wife. Trust God to lead you, not each other. As the leader of the family it is your role to be the spiritual leader as well. You must be seeking understanding of God and His will for your lives. You must be doing this through the study of His Word.

When disagreements arise, you must never go to bed angry. Together you must look to God to fix your hearts and remove the anger and replace it with renewed love for each other. Work hard to serve each other. Men require respect and women require love. Do your best to fulfill the needs of your spouse on a daily basis.

I love making my husband feel like a king. One thing I do, which creates this uplifting feeling for him, is to rub his feet when he comes home from work in the evenings. I also make sure he understands daily that I am his servant. That does not mean that I am not his equal, because that is clear in 1 Peter 3:7. We should all practice serving each other, because that is what we are called to do by our Father in Heaven.

Sinner or Saint?

What the Gospel of Christ teaches us is – while we were still sinners, Jesus died to save us from our sin. Most people grasp this concept fairly easily; however, it becomes more difficult when we dig further and understand that now that we are saved, we are to be holy.

1 Peter 1:13-16 – So think clearly and exercise self-control. Look forward to the gracious salvation that will come to you when Jesus Christ is revealed to the world. So you must live as God's obedient children. Don't slip back into your old ways of living to satisfy your own desires. You didn't know any better then. But now you must be holy in everything you do, just as God who chose you is holy. For the Scriptures say, “You must be holy because I am holy.”

You see, the point that most people miss is that Christ died to break the power of sin over us. Jesus' death on the cross, represents the death of our sins – our sinful self died with Him at the cross. When He rose from the dead, this represents our holy self being resurrected with Him. In Christ, you are now a Saint. This is the whole and complete point of the Gospel of Christ. If we do not teach this, we are not teaching the truth of the Gospel of Christ.

God wants us near Him, but in order for us to be near Him, we must be holy, because a holy being can not be near sin. Consider what would happen if a piece of tissue paper came in contact with the sun. The tissue paper represents sin and the sun represents God. A sinful person would be disintegrated if they came in contact with such a holy God. This is why there was a perimeter around Mount Sinai and Moses was the only person allowed to cross it.

Consider two marriages. In one marriage your spouse tells you how much of a loser you are and that you are completely worthless. In the other, your spouse tells you that you are a king and worthy of royalty and they treat you like you are a king – serving and honoring you in every possible way. The spouse who tells you that you are a loser, makes you feel like one, but the spouse who calls you a king, uplifts you and makes you feel worthy. This is what God is doing for us when he calls us to be saints. That voice in your head calling you a sinner is not God.

But, I don't feel like a Saint; instead, I still feel like a sinner? All Christians struggle with this. Satan will continue to work to convict us, using our sinful nature to make us believe his lies. Our desires of the flesh will continue to call out to us, begging us to worship them instead of God. But the plain and simple beauty of the Gospel of Christ says – when we truly believe in Jesus, sin has no power over us. This is what it means to believe in Christ. We were slaves to sin, now we are slaves to Christ. We were worshipers of sin, now we worship Christ. We were sinners, but now we are Saints in Christ.

So, now we must start acting like one. Now that we believe Christ died to save us and made us holy, our new life begins. We must no longer believe satan when he says to us, 'you are still a sinner.' Believe instead, what Christ said about who we are as His disciples.

We will suffer due to our flesh calling out to us and tempting us with desires and pleasures it has for us, but we must not listen. We must take control of our flesh. When we give in to our flesh, we are saying to God – I prefer these pleasures over those you have for me. Rest assured, the pleasures of the flesh are nothing compared to what God has in store for us when we believe in Him. So don't short change yourselves. Suffering for doing what is good and what is right, will be greatly rewarded by God. Jesus shows us a picture of that very clearly on the Cross.

Satan will also tell you that you are only human. Again, he does this to keep us believing that we can not stop sinning. God is greatly offended when we make this statement. Your human part is the part that dies and goes back into the dirt. This is not the part you should consider at all. This is the part that satan works to control. The part of you that is like God and is more beautiful than you can imagine is your spirit, where God lives in you. This is the part you must focus on. This is the part that is very powerful. This is the part of you that has love and courage and beauty. Know that you were created to be like God and His spirit lives in you. When you believe that, sin will have no power over you.

As our sinful nature dies and our holy nature grows in maturity, satan will work to make us look down on others and judge them. Do not fall into this trap either. Always love the sinner as Jesus did and work hard to help them to see. We show our love for each other by washing each other and by serving each other, just as Jesus taught us in John 13.

From the descendents of Noah, God raises up a man called Abram (Genesis 11:10). Because Abram was blameless and righteous, God was very pleased with him. In fact, God was so pleased with Abram, He selected him to bring forth His beloved children of Israel.

In Genesis 17:1, when Abram is 99 years old, God appears to him. God tells Abram that if he lives blamelessly and serves Him, He will give him countless decedents. God continues to tell Abram He will give him nations and He changes his name to Abraham. This is referred to as the covenant God made with Abraham and the mark of this covenant is the circumcision (Genesis 17:11).

In this lesson, I want to study the character of Abraham and show you why God chose Abraham to bring forth the nations of the world. I want to help you see all of the truly good things about Abraham's heart, so you can have a deeper understanding of God.

The Bible shows how obedient Abraham was several times, but I want to focus on two acts of obedience for this lesson: the mark of the covenant and the sacrifice of Isaac.

When God made this promise to Abraham in Genesis 17 about nations being born through him, He gave him instructions on how He wanted to mark this covenant, which was the circumcision. After God gave Abraham these instructions on how to become circumcised, Abraham immediately performed this act on himself and all the men in his household. There was no hesitation. There was no argument. We don't give this much thought, because it is something that is done at birth for us, but Abraham was 99 years old when he was circumcised. And back then, there were no pain killers. This was a very impressive act of obedience!

The second truly amazing act of obedience Abraham shows us is in Genesis 22:2, is when God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Again, without question or argument, Abraham starts out toward the mountain with Isaac. As they get close to the place he is to sacrifice his son to God, Abraham tells his servants to wait – and “we will be back”. He did not tell them – I will be back, because he knew that God could not bring nations up through Isaac, if he were dead. Abraham trusted God. Abraham had faith that God would do what he had promised.

When they arrived at the spot where God had instructed Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham prepared an alter and placed the wood on it. He then tied up Isaac and laid him on the wood. Just as Abraham picked up the knife to prepare to kill his son, an angel called out to him and stopped him.

Genesis 22:12 – “Don't lay a hand on the boy!” the angel said. “Do not hurt him in any way, for now I know that you truly fear God. You have not withheld from me even your son, your only son.”

Then Abraham saw a ram caught in the thicket, which Abraham used as the burnt offering to God. God provided for Abraham and Isaac.

This story is a parable of Christ's crucifixion - the mountain represents Calvary, where Jesus was crucified and died for our sins; Isaac represents us, Abraham represents God, who is sacrificing his one and only son; the ram represents Jesus. Isaac was supposed to die, just as we were supposed to die for our sins, but God intervened and saved Isaac just like He intervened and saved us. God sent a ram to take the place of Isaac, but He sent Jesus to take our place.

The other very notable characteristic about Abraham, which God wanted us to understand, is shown in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18:16-33. Here, God tells Abraham that he is about to destroy these cities and Abraham begs God not to do it. Abraham is showing his love for the innocent people who may be among the wicked and he is desperately trying to convince God to think of them and spare the cities for their sake. In this conversation with God, Abraham is literally risking his life arguing with God to spare the few who may be innocent. God loves this characteristic in Abraham, which is another reason why He chose him to bring forth the nations.

Another thing we should take away from this story is a lesson in how to pray. In the initial conversation with God, Abraham asks for God to spare the city for fifty righteous and God says, yes. Then Abraham asks for forty-five and God says, yes. Abraham continues to ask and ask until he gets God to agree to sparing the two cities for only ten righteous. This is how we should pray. When you know your heart is in the right place, be unrelenting with your prayers to God. Keep asking until He says yes, but always finish with Your will be done, not mine. If you do this, you will be very pleasing to God.

This story is also a parable of Jesus, who not only risked His life to save the wicked, but actually died to save them. You see, in Sodom and Gomorrah, there was not even one innocent or righteous person who was deserving of God's grace, so the cities took on God's mighty wrath. At the Cross, it was the same, but it was Jesus who took on God's wrath instead of the wicked who deserved it. At the Cross, it was Jesus who begged God to forgive the wicked who were killing Him.

Luke 23:34 – Jesus said, “Father forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing.”

Why do you think God chose such an old man and barren old woman to bring forth the nations of the world? Because, God loves to select unlikely candidates so He can demonstrate His power through those who have faith in Him. This point is made clear in this story of Abraham and Sarah. God could not have picked a more unlikely couple to bring forth the nations of the world. But, the one amazing thing they had going for them was their faith and trust in God, which is God's only requirement.

Abraham is certainly a roll model for us! His story should help us understand that God is good and always keeps His promises. We must always put our trust in God, as Abraham did. Study God's Word daily and pray for wisdom. You will be surprised how He will bless you!