How to Know and Love Jesus Christ
Is your heart restless? Are you seeking a peace that you haven’t yet found? Saint Augustine once said, “Our hearts our restless until they find their rest in Thee, O Lord.” Jesus said in Matthew 11:28, “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Jesus is “rest” for all who would put their trust in Him. But how do we put our trust in Him?
What I must know…
There are a number of important truths that we must come to understand in order to know Jesus and His Gospel (Gospel means Good News… and there is no greater news than the promise of salvation and hope found freely in Jesus!):
God created humankind (us) in His image (Genesis 1:26). He created us upright and in relative perfection (relative, because it could change…and it did!). He placed our first ancestors, Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden and surrounded them with everything they could possibly want and more, with only one restriction—do not eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 2:17). Adam and Eve, tempted by the adversary, ate of the fruit and bore the consequences—sin and death entered into our reality and were passed down from then on to every generation of human beings (Romans 5:12). That sin caused us to be separated from God, restless and alienated from the only true source of Life. The story of the Bible is how we can get back into a relationship with our God—Jesus is the central character.
What I must accept…
The Bible insists that we recognize that we are sinners, both because we inherited sin from our forefathers and because we have sinned ourselves (Romans 3:23). Have you ever sinned? Told a lie, hurt someone, stolen, cheated, been angry, lusted, been greedy (see Romans 1:28-32)? Sin is rebellion against a perfectly holy God, in some sense a declaration of independence from Him—a declaration that is empty but devastating. As we see from the Garden incident, there are consequences to sin—death (Romans 6:23), both physical and spiritual, separation from God, forever.
But God, who is Love (1 John 4:8), did not leave us without hope of recovery and restoration. His love is too great and His grace too wide—He made a way possible. Jesus is The Way, The Truth, and The Life (John 14:6)—no one can come to God without Jesus. Jesus, who is God, took on humanity, body and soul, and entered into history to do something so magnificent it cannot be fully comprehended. He entered into our realm in order to take those consequences of sin in our place, as a substitute. He came to do a number of things, to live the perfect life that none of us ever could (Hebrews 2:17; 4:15), and to die the perfect and complete death, that we deserved (2 Corinthians 5:21). Jesus went to the Cross to take the punishment of our sins upon Himself—as fully human, He could act as our representative, as fully God, He could bear the full weight of the punishment and survive. The Cross, though the instrument of execution in the Roman Empire, has become for us the emblem of our only hope (1 Corinthians 1:22-24). Jesus lived a perfectly righteous life and died the “death of death” for us…in our place. But there’s more. As promised in the Word of God, Jesus rose from the grave victorious over sin and death, on the third day (1 Corinthians 15:4). The grave couldn’t keep Him and because of that, it cannot keep us! But how can this be ours?
Who I must trust…
John 3:16 wasn’t written to be shown at football games! It says, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” On the Cross, our sins were put on Jesus. In His resurrection, His righteousness is put onto us—if we believe, if we have faith. To believe in Biblical terms is to trust and rely on. If we trust that what Jesus says about Himself is true and that the work He did on the Cross was real, and that He did, in fact, rise from the dead—if we trust that all of that was done for us, the Bible says, we are saved. To trust truly means that we turn away from the things we used to trust (ourselves, this world…) toHim—this is what is meant by repentance, a change of mind, a U-turn in life (Matthew 10:28). Instead of relying on ourselves and our “goodness” to be right with God, we realize we have no “goodness” to rely on—only His grace and mercy (Ephesians 2:8-10), displayed on the Cross. When we get that truth, the Bible says the Spirit gives us new life and we are saved (born again, according to Jesus in John 3:3). Saved from separation from God, saved from death, saved into a whole new existence we call eternal life. Then we have found our true “rest.” Gratitude for His free gift then draws us closer to our Lord, to a life of obedience, and that, my friends, is only the beginning!
There is so much more to know and experience. If you would like to know more about this “rest,” salvation, and new life, please contact us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call us at 323-851-5265.
