The turning point in being a follower of Jesus is when we “believe”.

What is it we’re believing?

• That God is crazy about us – His creation, unique from all other creation in that we are created in His image.
• That our sin – both the sin we inherit from Adam and our own – has created a separation between us and God. But God’s very first reassurance to us is that He has created a way back into relationship with Him – in Jesus.
• That through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection He has fulfilled all the requirements for our relationship to be restored with God the Father. He has done all of this on our behalf, for we could never accomplish this on our own.
• That we have been given the Spirit of God who provides us with moment-by-moment power, guidance, encouragement, understanding, comfort, and everything we need to know and love God and the people around us.
• That Jesus is right now with the Father interceding on our behalf.

Is it required that we understand all of this and every nuance of what this means? No, I’m learning new things about this every day. What it does mean is that we trust that Jesus was telling the truth about all of these things and that His Spirit is within us still teaching us and even giving us the faith we need to believe.

Jesus is clear that to “believe” is all that’s required of us for salvation (receiving God’s guiding, encouraging, teaching, comforting Spirit in this life and eternal life lived in the presence of God).

Yet, there are numerous times a day we will forget what we’ve believed about Jesus. We will return to trying to figure things out on our own.

Because I do the same thing in my life, I identifity with the man who says to Jesus, “I believe, help me in my unbelief.”

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