Day 4 - Week 19 - 1 John 5:11 "And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son."

We've talked about the wonderful gift that God has given us and that it is ours to take hold of right now...but how does that gift come to us?  The second half of the testimony explains the way that God presents this gift to us...the gift is in His Son.  Coincidentally (or was it?), just when I had written this statement the song, "The Coloring Song" by Petra played on the digital station I had the TV set on.  The lyrics express the gift of life given by God through Jesus so well...especially the first two verses shown below:

Red is the color of the blood that flowed

Down the face of Someone Who loved us so

He's the perfect man, He's the Lord's own son,

He's the Lamb of God, He's the only one

That can give us life, that can make us grow,

That can make the love between us flow.

Blue is the color of a heart so cold

That will not bend when the story's told

Of the love of God for a sinful race

Of the blood that flowed down Jesus face

That can give us life, that can make us grow

That can keep our hearts from growing cold.

The gift of eternal life can only be obtained when you accept that it is given through the blood of Jesus, shed for us, to bridge the gap between God's holiness and our sinfulness.  When you accept Jesus as your Savior, your heart that is so blue and cold becomes vital and warm and full of the lifeblood that only the Holy Spirit can bring to us.  We become alive in a spiritual sense...in a reborn sense...not born of mortality, but born to immortality, becoming children of the Eternal God, our Father.

John 3:3-5 " In reply Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again. " "How can a man be born when he is old?" Nicodemus asked. "Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born!" Jesus answered, "I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit."

Until we come to the saving knowledge and belief that Jesus came to reunite us with God our Father and accept the gift of eternal life through Jesus, and be reborn with the power of the Holy Spirit living within us, we cannot "enter" the kingdom of God.  The KJV uses the word "see" instead of enter...the Greek word is eida, and listen to some of the definitions:

to perceive with the eyes

to turn the eyes, the mind, the attention to anything

to have regard for one, cherish, pay attention to

to know, i.e. get knowledge of, understand, perceive

When you substitute those definitions into the passage, doesn't it give you a different perspective?  With these definitions, the verse doesn't carry with it so much the fact that we won't get entrance into the kingdom of God without spiritual rebirth (which we won't), but also that until we are reborn as true children of God, we can't even begin to understand, or have any regard for, the kingdom of God.  It has no value to us, we don't care about it, we don't look to it as our home and we don't hold it up as our longed-for goal.

I love this earthly life I have been given, but I also long for the day when I will truly be at home, my real home, with my very real Father.  I can see it.