What a power packed text! There is enough good hearty instruction here to set souls free and deliver them again into the hand of the One to whom we belong. Long I have felt the importance and seen the beauty of this text. But today I stopped while reading over it. So many of the wonderful texts of the Bible are so familiar to us that we lose the deep healing and crucial instruction which they hold.
If you have been a Christian for some time, you for sure have heard many a sermon or various points of view directed at these important texts. This should be a wonderful thing with the design of building a tower or a shrine out of your life unto God, where each piece makes it stronger and more beautiful. But evil still reigns while we dwell in this world and the clever adversary thrives even in and around our religious settings. In fact, the Devil´s most urgent field of duty is not among the lost souls of the world, but those who pose a threat and have the possibility of being inside the fold of Jesus.
Therefore we find pillar texts which should form our lives and thinking, often lose some of their effect on us even through constant use of them. The only effective cure is to be alert and genuine and honest in our studies and take constantly the Bible to the Lord. If ever we should read or hear a sermon, we should never do these things alone. It is of essence that whenever we direct our attention to the Lord, we assure that we are with Him.
For example, you have a daily moment to read your Bible. If you go through the motions, take up the book, read as much as you usually do then get up again, pondering as you can, you could be losing all of the preciousness that the moment could have offered. Before you read, as you read and even after, it is extremely important that you go to the Lord, lift up each word for His examination and observation. We are receptacles and the instruction is directed to us, but we were never made or intended to do anything on our own. Self would have us believe otherwise, but we should guard ourselves and believe the scriptures when they tell us that Jesus must be our all.
Rather we should take any and all input we receive and run it through Jesus. Lift up the thought, the text or the concept unto Him. We should open ourselves so much to Jesus, that we hear nothing, feel nothing, think nothing, without it all flowing first to Him and from Him into us. Let us see ourselves as Jesus does when He likens us to a branch. All our nourishment comes from Him, the vine. We may see the rain and the soil ourselves, but if the nourishment does not come to us through Him, that it will not sustain us. By nature we live and are because He feeds us and keeps us in every way.
Now, when we take the familiar text of Jesus when He says that He is the resurrection and the life, we must guard ourselves from smiling and nodding our approval then brushing past the text as already assimilated knowledge. Rather let us go to our Lord, seek Him out and ask Him to walk with us for a moment in the garden of His wisdom and guidance. To open ourselves such, we allow the Holy Spirit to work freely in illuminating and healing in ways we cannot explain. What is more, the instruction is good, but the moments spent in His presence are priceless and all should be given to seek and cherish such times as these.
First He says He say that He is the resurrection. A man sure of his own powers of deduction could proudly say, ¨no problem, that means that Jesus has the power to give back life.¨ He would be correct but missing the whole because it is followed up immediately with, ¨and the life.¨ You see, if we do not run this text or any other, through Jesus first, what we do is separate the word from Him. We need to guard against this trickery and make any effort to avoid this mistake. Take those words again and run them through Jesus and you come back with a result that is not separate but connected to Jesus. He is the resurrection and He is the life. All is inside of Him and to find any of it we too must be in Him.
All things flow from God and return again unto Him bringing with them glory and honor and praise. This is the nature of things and never is anything separated to the point that it doesn´t need Him to sustain it.
This is why Jesus says that if we believe in Him, that we will live even if we should die. He is, and He is life and He is resurrection. To truly believe in Jesus, one must actually believe His instruction and it is impossible to believe and not be affected. This may be a good moment to distinguish between being mentally convinced of something by our human powers of reason, and belief. One is subject to many outward influences and limitations such as education and learned processes of weighing information. The other is not something that comes from our own effort nor accumulated resources. Belief is given to us from God. It is the better choice as it still gives all the credit to the vine from which we receive our nourishment.
Belief rests in the character and word of God. We may have nothing else to stand on, those of us who find ourselves exercising it. But we desire nothing more as it comes to us from the One we deem worthy. There are many tricks and deceits that have been handed down to us from our ancestors and from the churches, but few are so deadly as the cloud that covers our eyes and does not allow us to see the evil in standing on our human intelligence.
There is no doubt that true Christians are in fact intelligent people. But the smartest thing they or anyone can do is rest not on themselves but feed every moment from the nourishment of their Vine.
After Jesus says that He IS the resurrection and the life, He states that we should live even if we die. If you and I are receiving all our nourishment, if we take all of our thoughts, and our very life itself, only from that life which we find in Him, then it follows that death cannot touch us as it cannot touch Him.
This is how Jesus can make that wonderful statement that anyone who lives and believes in Him, will never die. I cannot hope that my words can instruct any other person. As I write things down, the Spirit is feeding me from the Vine. I am finding nourishment from the source and it is feeding me and directing me back upon the Lord. The most I could hope is that the Spirit finds an open window in another soul in which it finds receptivity and can come and commune there.
We speak with words of men but we speak of words of the Divine. No man can open the doors of understanding unto the Spiritual but we believe there is One who can. Those souls who feel a fire to seek and search in the hopes of finding and seeing with their own eyes, the things which the scriptures describe, will push forward with a strength that surges from a source deeper than one they possess.
These blessed souls, precious in the eyes of God, resist the trickery of our times and go straight to the source. They feel a fire inside that burns to know that source and that power. They admit that though they possess powers of intelligence or faculties, they would prefer to follow Jesus´s encouragement and take only that what comes from Him alone. These humble lambs are truly in the flock of the Good shepherd as they have sought to become familiar with His voice. They would follow that voice even if all of the world and all their families, friends and churches stood up to fight them.
It may be scary to think of stepping out of the norm in society or thought, but to look at such things you have to take your eyes off Jesus. To argue a point, even a point in scripture, you turn not to Him but to something else.
May we all learn to direct everything to Him always, that by doing so we honor and glorify Him. Let us live in Him. To find life in Him we speak of life far more everlasting that that life we speak of when we refer to those few years allotted to our walk here on earth. May we each learn to live and breathe in Jesus Christ right here and right now. This is to what Jesus was encouraging and teaching when he spoke the words of our text.
He who has ears to hear, let him hear. The one who would know, let him ask from the source and the giver of true knowledge. Here we are not perfect, but the one in whom we would trust and the one in whom we would find life, He is.
To God be the Glory and may Jesus live and reign in you and I today and for all eternity.
Amen
Scott W
Searching For Christ 
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