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About Jesus - Steve (Stephen) Sweetman
The
John 3:16 Believer
I maintain that much of Western
Christianity is Biblically illiterate. As
a result, we often reduce the meaning of Christianity's most famous
verse—John 3:16 to something far less than what Scripture actually
teaches. "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". The word "believes"
in John 3:16 is translated from the Greek verb "pisteuō,"
which simply means "to trust". It
does not
merely mean giving mental assent to something we think is true, which is
how "belief" is commonly understood today. Mere
mental agreement and heartfelt trust are not the same thing. Because trust is a matter of the heart,
Paul wrote in Romans 10:10, "it is with your heart that you believe (pisteuō—trust)
and are justified". Trust
is inherently relational. I
trust my wife. In the same
way, I trust my life to Jesus. In John 3:16, pisteuō
is a present
active participle. A
participle describes a state of being. Thus,
John 3:16 describes the one who has eternal life as a presently and actively trusting-in-Jesus person. Jesus
did not say that whoever mentally acknowledges His existence will have
eternal life. Rather, eternal
life belongs to the one whose identity is defined by trusting in Jesus. This trust is not self-generated. It
is the result of being born again of the Holy Spirit coming to dwell
within a person and making him or her someone he or she has never been
before. Trust becomes who he
or she is. Like all relationships, trust matures over
time. Our trust in Jesus
begins, as Paul wrote, "in accordance with the faith (pistis—trust) God
has distributed to each one of us" (Romans 12:3). In
other words, God Himself enables us to trust Him, because we are incapable
of doing so on our own. He
shapes us into people who are presently and actively trusting in Jesus. John 3:16 tells us that because we are
people who presently and actively trust our lives with Jesus, we have
eternal life. In my Sunday
school days, I was taught that eternal life meant something I would
receive after I died, but that is not what Jesus said, as we read in John
6:47. He stated plainly that
"the
one who believes (pisteuō—trusts) has eternal life".
Eternal life begins the moment
a person becomes a presently and actively trusting-in-Jesus person because
God's eternal Spirit lives within them. May this be your Biblically literate
understanding of John 3:16. More
importantly, may you be one who is born of the Spirit, someone who is
inherently, presently, and actively trusting in Jesus. If
that is true of you, then in the deepest spiritual sense, right now and in
real time, you already exist in the eternal
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