“Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Does anyone believe in me? Then, just as Scripture says, streams of living water will flow from inside him.” When he said this, he meant the Holy Spirit. Those who believed in Jesus would receive the Spirit later.” (John 7:37-39)
Does anyone believe in me?
That’s the question I never knew to ask myself. That’s the question I was rather ashamed to ask myself. I did everything that anyone has ever asked of me. Everything. Yet, I never thought or wanted to believe that faith in Jesus was ever an issue for me. I sang the songs and said the prayers. I attended, promoted and led the activities. They just seemed proof enough that I believed in Jesus. Did I admire Jesus? You bet I did. Did I admire some other folks as well? You bet I did. Jesus to me was just another person to admire. And no one had ever presented or given Jesus to me the way Bob Christopher did at Basic Gospel.
The Jesus I knew or heard of was the Jesus many had written about or spoken of. But the Jesus Bob Christopher presented to me was the Jesus he was living, not trying to live, but actually living. I’m not praising Bob like another great person to admire. Bob helped me cross over because he had already crossed and that made the most critical difference to me. He helped me believe in Jesus.
I spent years in the church, feeling comfortable with association, enrollment, membership, whatever you might call it. I believed to have been in the right place, being around the right persons, saying the right things. Yet, I never for a moment considered that Jesus alone was enough for me. I was scared, afraid that if I didn’t do the things that I would have no proof to show to anyone that I love God. That fear could catapult me into doing anything humanly possible.
If Jesus was to ask me such question back then, my answer would have been, “Yeah, but…”
Jesus said to me, “Do you believe in me?” With all I knew, I couldn’t honestly answer that question. I wasn’t sure. But as People to People retold the gospel, there in the gospel my heart truly received Jesus. Everything that Bob was pulling out of the gospel made so much sense to my heart that it made me realize how thirsty I was. I drank so much of the gospel, that I couldn’t stop drinking.
“Does anyone believe in me?”, Jesus asked. The question I hope you get to ask Jesus is, “Who is ‘me’?”
And the gospel alone will tell you everything about the “me” to not merely admire, but to truly and solely believe in and live in.
Jesus is the well of the living water, the Holy Spirit. 