---
title: "Meet Jesus"
author: "Justin Michael"
url: "https://meet-jesus.com/2/free-digital"
---

Section I – Preliminaries

So, you’re picking up this book for the first time, with what is either hunger or skepticism. Maybe even hunger and skepticism, if we are being honest.

Maybe you know Jesus a little bit. Maybe you know Him a lot. Possibly, you have never met Jesus at all. And you are probably doing what it is that I do every single time that I pick up a book and begin to read the introduction, thinking to myself, Is this book for me?

It’s a legitimate question. If you’re anything like me, you’re busy. No, not the type of busy that some people seem to wear as a badge of honor, but truly, your margins are low.

I have the privilege of being a husband to a tremendous wife and a dad to two amazingly beautiful girls, both of whom are under the age of three. As I write this, we are also expecting our third child, which we have learned is a boy (pray for us). Alongside these wonderful blessings that God has given to me to steward, I have the honor and responsibility of leading a young, growing church here in Dallas.

I tell you all of that to help this next statement make more sense: I don’t have a lot of time to give to things that don’t yield much return in my life. It’s very likely that as you are reading this, you and I might be in the same boat, with low time margins and looking for high  return on investment) wherever it is that we choose to spend our extra time. With that being said, I want you to know that I honor and respect your time and am grateful that you would spend a portion of one of your most valuable resources reading the contents of this book and taking this journey with me.

But let me just level with you from the jump. There is nothing that you can ever invest in learning more about Jesus and your relationship with Him that will yield a fruitless return in your life. Any investment made in Jesus is high yield.

Jesus says in Matthew 6:20, _“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.”_ Jesus wants us to understand that while earthly investments will fail and fade, every eternal investment made into our soul and relationship with Him is completely secure.

At the most, this book will transform your entire world. For you, the reader, I hope and pray that is the case. But at the least, as you finish this book, you will do so having become just a little more grounded in your relationship with Jesus and your knowledge of who He is. Which, in my opinion, nothing in this life is more valuable than that.

I love being a husband, a dad, and a pastor. But none of these things are ever more valuable than my relationship with Jesus. As a matter of fact, when I invest in my relationship with Jesus as the primary focus of my life, I actually become a better spouse, parent, and pastor.

Yes. Following Jesus, improves all areas of my life.

And just as knowing Jesus will improve your life as a spouse, parent, or leader… knowing Jesus will also improve every other area in your life if you meet Him and accept His invitation to follow Him.

I say all of this to say that no matter what, if you read and apply the contents of this book, and as a result choose to apply the biblical principles therein, everything else in your life will grow as a result.

Maybe you’re trying to figure out if this Jesus thing is for you. Maybe you’re a seasoned good ol’ saint of God who’s just trying to learn more about Him. Maybe you’ve been away from God for a while and you’re trying to navigate your way through the maze of life right back to Jesus. Either way, no matter what place in life it is that you find yourself picking up this book, there is one thing to be assured of… there is something in you that’s longing for, even if only just a little bit, to meet Jesus.

That in and of itself is enough reason not to put down this book.

What if He is who He says He is? What if He is who they say He is? What if, in the next few moments of reading this book, somehow you see Him in a whole new light that you never have before?

My friend, being that we are talking about the God of the universe, that’s quite a strong what if.

If you are approaching this book with apprehension or skepticism, let me attempt to help you overcome that for a moment if I can and explain to you why I am so convinced that this book is for you.

No, it’s not because I wrote it. But because this Jesus of whom I am writing about… the God who came to earth in human flesh, lived a sinless life, died an unjust death on a wooden cross, who rose from the dead three days later, and is now seated on the throne of God in Heaven… did all of that… just to get a chance to meet you and me.

If that has even the slightest possibility of being true—which I personally am convinced with every fiber of my being that it is—then this book is surely worth your time.

I wrote this book for our church. And what started out as an attempt to be a short devotional journey to help people meet Jesus quickly turned into this book that you are holding right now.

I’ll be honest with you. I don’t like to write. Judge me. It’s okay. I forgive you.

As a matter of fact, I have a story that my wife has grown weary of hearing (which I am including in this book just for her) that will make you feel really sorry for me. One day, as a sweet little second grader who allegedly refused to write in school (I say allegedly because I am pretty sure I was framed), my mother decided to continue the tradition of letting me open one Christmas gift a few weeks early, before the official arrival of the holiday.

It was the skates. THE skates.

The beautiful hockey ice skates that I had been eyeing for weeks at the sporting goods resale shop down the road. Lightly used, polished to perfection, perfectly broken in. I was ecstatic! That is until Mom said, “Now since you won’t write, we are going to get in the car and take them back.”

BRUTAL! T.K.O.

To this day, I can’t stand hockey.

If you love hockey, I’m sorry. Please have mercy on me. Some wounds just never heal.

But apparently, while my dreams of becoming the next great Mike Modano or Wayne Gretzky may have been crushed, I did start writing some, even if begrudgingly.

However, while I still don’t enjoy writing, I do enjoy Jesus, and if there is one thing that I will gladly write about, it is Him.

Usually, writing feels like a chore for me, something that you do in high school or college because you kind of have to do it if you want to pass the class. Maybe you’re one of those people who really does like to write, of whom, on this particular subject, I totally do not relate to but will gladly admire your position.

While writing for me is usually not my go-to plan for a good time, as I sat down at my iMac in the back room of our war zone house, with babies swinging from the ceiling (if you’ve had two under two, you get it) to write what was my best attempt at telling you about this Jesus who has captivated my life… I simply could not stop writing.

In fact, for as many days as it took to write this, I have desired to do nothing more than let the deluge of words that have come pouring into my heart come crashing out to you through the words on these pages.

I am captivated by Jesus.

Let me ask you… What if Jesus captivated your life, too?

Maybe He already has. I tell our church this from time to time, and I will repeat it here with you also… We usually don’t have a hard time talking about what we love.

You probably can’t get thirty minutes into conversation with me and not find out that I am an avid Southern Methodist University football fan.

Why? Because I love it. And we tend to talk a lot about the things that we love.

Give me a dead moment in conversation and I’m going for it! All in. The storylines, the things you never needed to know about SMU football until you met me. You’re getting it all. That is until my wife squeezes my knee under the table. Then, I will relent.

I’m kidding, but I can’t say this has never happened before.

This is kind of how this book came about.

This is just me, a young pastor from Dallas, talking about what he loves. And it is my hope and prayer for you that as you read this book, you are led to an encounter with Jesus that causes you to fall in love with Him too.

I feel like I need to say this at the outset of our journey together. That no matter what stage of life you are in, know this… there is not one person walking God's green earth who knows everything about the subject of this book. Certainly not me. As a matter of fact, the more I learn about Jesus, the more I realize how much more there is to learn about Him.

Growing in knowledge of the God of the universe is humbling. Or at least it should be.

I’ve never related to or understood people who try to communicate what they’ve learned about Jesus from a place of pride. The fact that we get to know anything about someone so powerful, majestic, and awesome should deeply humble all of us.

To be honest, spiritual pride is a signal that one probably knows about Jesus, but that they may not have spent a lot of time with Him personally in a while.

It’s one thing to know about Jesus. It’s an entirely different thing to know Him.

It takes a lifetime to get to know Jesus, and yet even then, Scripture tells us that _“For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known”_ (1 Corinthians 13:12).

That verse simply means that while we can see a lot about God… we can't see it all.

None of us are “professional” Jesus knowers. As a matter of fact, if you think you are, I have news for you.

Whatever it is that has driven you to pick up this book, I want to commend you for doing so. My heart is not to presume that I have anything special to say, except for what Jesus has helped me to know about Him through relationship, always in alignment with, and upon the foundation on His Word.

Whatever God has given to me, my hope is to translate it to you in the pages of this book the best that I can. 

My heartbeat is to come alongside you and to walk with you over the next couple of chapters as we explore what it means to truly meet Jesus.

Let me be clear. While this book contains a lot of information about Jesus, it is certainly not exhaustive. This book is like the entryway of a house, so please don’t stop here at the entrance when there’s so much more house to see if you just keep walking with Him.

My hope is that this book becomes more for you than just a book, but a living tool in the belt of your life, serving not only to help you meet Jesus but as a guide whereby one day, you might be able to help someone else do the same.

As previously mentioned, the purpose of this book is not solely to provide you with information about Jesus but rather to invite you into the true transformation that is possible through personal relationship with Him.

My commitment to you is that we will always stay within the confines of Scripture. While I will talk more about this in the first chapter, it is my position that the Bible is our baseline for all truth and knowledge of God. Therefore, we will go where the Bible takes us, and we will not go where it does not.

My encouragement to you is that you go through this book with someone. If you can, find someone that you can partner with to embark on this journey of meeting Jesus. Learning about Jesus is great when we do it by ourselves but becomes enriched when we do it with others.

Maybe you have a spouse, parent, child, other family member, friend, co-worker, or somebody else who you're close enough to who will agree to read this book with you. If so, tag them in, and let’s get going.

However, if you prefer to go through this book by yourself or don't have anyone that you feel comfortable enough to go on this journey with, I would like to invite you to go through it with me.

Alongside this book, I have recorded an audiobook as a companion. Not just so that you would have another option to navigate the contents of this book (as I really think this is a book that needs to be read methodically and meditatively if possible), but so that no matter what, you will have someone to embark on this journey with, even if it’s only me.

There will be places throughout this book where we will do a “word study,” which is where we take the English translation of the Bible and visit the original language from where the English text was translated. In doing this, we will be able to magnify the depth, richness, and meaning of the verses of Scripture that we are reading. Scripture is dense, deep, and full of so much great revelation. This process of unearthing deeper meaning of the words in our Bible is not an attempt to find “hidden” messages or even to discount the English translations of the Bible that we read, but to simply mine out the richness of the text provided to us in the Bible the best that we can. Writers choose certain words for a reason, as unique words convey unique thoughts. Examining the word choice of the writers helps us understand more about what they were trying to convey.

At the end of each chapter, a few reflection questions are included that you can use to journal on your own or to talk through with your discipleship partner if you are going through this book with someone. Alongside the reflection questions at the end of each chapter is a video that you can watch via QR code, where I will pray with you and share any additional information that may be helpful.

Again, we seek to not just approach this book with an academic mind to acquire information, but with a genuine spiritual hunger and humility, knowing that Jesus is so much more than a God to be known about, but a God to be known personally.

As you read this book, I want to encourage you not to skip ahead. Each chapter of this book has been written to be read progressively, layer by layer, unearthing truths that reveal who Jesus is and how we meet Him. Just like in building a house, it is important not to skip certain stages. Similarly, I would encourage you not to skip ahead as you read.

At the end of this book, you will receive a challenge to take what you know about meeting Jesus and help somebody else meet Him too. I encourage you, as you read this book, to prepare your heart to be open to accepting this challenge. Not simply because it comes from me, but because it is a challenge that comes from Jesus Himself, as we venture together toward meeting Him and then creating spaces for other people to do the same.

Before we go any further into this book, there’s a truth that I want to cement into our hearts, and that is that everything there is to be known about God is known through relationship. All of it. This is the means in which God has chosen to reveal Himself to humanity. And this is why it is of utmost importance that if we are going to know anything about Him, we start right here… in meeting Him.

In the next few chapters, we will dig deeper into the truth that what we know about Jesus comes through the Bible. And the only reason that we have the Bible is because God (once again) was in relationship with people who wrote things down as they were inspired by Him to do so.

Therefore, this book is not a book written to simply gain more head knowledge about Jesus or to gain academic prowess… but to help you gain real revelation, knowledge, and understanding of Jesus by means of meeting Him and knowing Him personally.

In its essence, this book is an invitation to relationship. Not just to learn about Jesus, but to know Him.

Who is He?
What did He do?
What is the point of His life?
What is this gospel thing?
How can I walk in this new life that Jesus talks about?

I want you to know from the outset of this book that God has more for you. Whether you are picking up this book as a non, new, or seasoned believer in Jesus, the fact stands. God has more for you.

Therefore, if the contents of this book are going to be of any benefit to us at all, we must approach it with the same humility, childlike wonder, and openness that Jesus spoke of in Matthew 18:3 when He said, _“Unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.”_

Simply put, if we are to truly learn who Jesus is, we must put back on the mind of that curious kid, filled with awe and wonder at life itself. Some of us are familiar with that kid who lives inside us. But for some of us, it’s been a while since we’ve interacted with our inner child.

Either way, let’s try to become like kids again for a second. Before the first time someone ever let us down. Before we ever knew pain. Before doubt became a regular guest in the chambers of our minds. Back when it was possible to freely believe… with no shame.

If you had a childhood that was full of hurt, pain, rejection, and more of the like, my prayer is that as you meet Jesus, you will allow Him to heal that hurt little kid inside you. He wants to.

Maybe, just maybe, then we’ll really and truly meet Jesus. All of Him.

I want to share an admission with you. As I am writing this book, I am thoroughly convinced that I have not experienced all that God has available for me. I hold to the same truth that I shared with you just a few moments ago. I personally believe that God has more for me, too.

I do not know all that God has to reveal to me, and I know that there is more to know of Him. This is what drives me to get up every day and walk with Him. This is what pulls me to learn more about Him and seek Him every single day. It is also what has driven me to write this book. A journey for the hunger-filled soul to meet Jesus and discover more of Him than you ever thought was possible.

I will reference this passage later in the book, but I will make mention of it now as it seems fitting to do so: In the Book of Ezekiel (a book written by a prophet in the Old Testament named Ezekiel), the prophet details an encounter that he has with God. In this encounter with God, the Lord shows him a vision. In this vision, an angel from Heaven comes to him and takes him to a river that is flowing out of the Temple of God.

The angel then begins to lead him out into the river, taking him a distance of what the Bible details as 1,000 cubits (if you are curious, a cubit was an ancient unit of measurement, roughly equivalent to the distance from a person’s elbow to the tip of their middle finger, say eighteen inches or so).

After this first 1,000-cubits journey into the river, Ezekiel details that the river’s depth had risen up to his ankles. Then, they went another 1,000 cubits, with the water rising this time to their knees. Once again, they ventured further into the river, and now the water was waist deep.

Then, and finally, as they took one more trek further into the river, they found that now they were in water over their heads, what Ezekiel describes as waters so deep that their feet could no longer touch the ground.

What is the significance of this story, and why am I telling it to you right now?

Because when the Bible talks about God’s Spirit, it often equates it to a river… likened to the one that Ezekiel saw. And just as it was with Ezekiel’s journey into the river, so it is with us in our journey to deeper knowledge of God. The further that Ezekiel followed the angel forward into the river, the deeper that the water became… and in like manner, as we set out to venture forward into deeper knowledge and experience with God, the deeper in Him that we will go.

I am here to tell you today that whatever you have experienced in and of God, there is more… something deeper... and all you have to do to experience it is just keep walking forward in faith.

No matter your starting point. Whether you are on the bank looking at the river, curiously considering if you’re going to take your first step in, out in ankle-deep water wondering if you are going to continue forward out to your waist, or you are all the way out in a deep place with God where your feet no longer touch ground… I want to ask you one question:

Will you journey a little further with me?

Will you embark with me on a journey where together we meet Jesus in a fresh, new way?

If so, let’s step in and step forward.

Section II – Context That Matters

Today, we embark on a journey to meet and know Jesus.

I know I’ve already stated this, but it simply cannot be overstated that making an effort to know Jesus is not just one of the most important things that you can do in your life; it is the most important thing you can ever do.

I commend you for getting to this place and taking the time to make this investment into your eternal soul. Only the life beyond this one will reveal the true value of the investment you are about to make during the course of this journey.


**Before we begin, I want to encourage you to take a moment and reflect on where you are today in your walk with God.**
- Are you standing on the bank?
- Are you ankle-deep in the water?
- Where do you feel that you are right now as you start this journey closer to Jesus?

Maybe, take a moment to note it in a journal or your notes app on your phone so that at the end of this time of exploration, you can reflect on the progress that you have made in meeting and knowing Jesus.


This chapter that we are about to dive into will serve as the foundation for the rest of this book. Each subsequent chapter after this one will build on this one as we seek to unearth the truths of who Jesus is and what it means to meet Him, layer by layer.

With that said, everything we discuss moving forward in this book will be rooted in Scripture—**the Bible**.

While we are thankful for church history and at times appreciate certain traditions that have come through it, we do not look to these things to define the baseline of what it means to meet Jesus and truly know who He is. Instead, we turn our attention to the Bible as our baseline and ultimate source of revelation and experience with God, not only of who He is but also how we get to know Him.


One of the foremost authors of the New Testament is a man named Paul. Paul was a disciple and apostle of Jesus—a primary leader of the church that Jesus started in the first century.

One day, Paul, while writing to one of his mentees, Timothy, delivered a few very important keys that we want to examine and lay into the foundation of this journey together.

Let’s look at the statements that Paul made to Timothy.

**The first statement is found in 2 Timothy:**
> _“But you must continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them, and that from childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness,” (2 Timothy 3:14–16)._


Here, we find Paul writing to Timothy, warning him that there would be people who would come along one day, imposters, who would try to deceive the followers of Jesus. In 2 Timothy 3:16, Paul tells Timothy that the only way to stay anchored in what is true, and therefore not be deceived, is to know that _“All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.”_

In this statement, Paul underlines the following points, which we want to take a moment to acknowledge, affirm, and briefly elaborate on:

**ALL Scripture is given by the inspiration of God, and not of men.**

Although men did put the Scriptures from pen to paper by their own hands, it was under the divine inspiration of God that these men even picked up pens and began to write in the first place. Peter, who was also an apostle, echoes this same sentiment as he writes in 2 Peter 1:20–21 that the prophetic writings of Scripture did not come to us by the will of men, but as holy men of God were moved by the Holy Spirit to write them.

**ALL Scripture is profitable for the following:**
- Doctrine: the teaching that we believe (more on this in a moment).
- Reproof: the act of pointing out what is wrong in our doctrine.
- Correction: the process of adjusting what is wrong in our understanding to make our comprehension of doctrine right.
- Instruction in Righteousness: the instructing of right ways through proper doctrine so that we remain walking on the correct path and avoid wrong ways in the future.


**In addition to this, just a few verses prior to the above admonition, Paul writes another very important truth for us all to consider in 2 Timothy 2:15.**
> _“Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”_

I cannot overstate how important this is for us to understand.

If there is indeed a right way to read and understand the Scriptures, then there must be a wrong way. And if there is a wrong way, we must be “diligent,” as Paul says, in our efforts to “rightly divide” the word of truth.

This is why we look to the Word of God as our foundation of truth instead of what someone has to say about it. Truly, the Word of God is capable of interpreting itself and needs no assistance if, indeed, it is the true Word of God. We will see this in action in just a moment.


This word “divide”, which Paul mentions in 2 Timothy 2:15, in the original Greek language in which it was written, means to “guide along a straight path.”

This becomes all the more illuminating and insightful when we take a glance at what King David wrote in the Book of Psalms 119:105, saying, _“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”_


See what I mean about Scripture interpreting Scripture?


The Word of God isn’t just our guide on the path but our light along the way.

While the Bible is a big book and can admittedly appear complex with lots of stories, subjects, characters, and more, it actually has one simple, clear, well-lit straight path guided by the Spirit of the very same God who inspired it—a path that leads to one central truth found in one central person: Jesus, who is both our God and our Savior.


Yep, it’s all about Jesus.


The Bible, from Genesis (which is the first book of the Bible) to Revelation (which is the last one), points to Jesus from start to finish. As far as the Bible is concerned, Jesus is the star of the show.

The Bible is about Jesus. Christianity is about Jesus. Everything points to and declares the truth of Jesus.


This walk with God and Christian faith is centered on the concept of meeting and following Jesus. Another way to express this concept of following Jesus is to “become a disciple of Jesus.”

Yet with so many different expressions and streams of Christianity, how can we be sure that we are truly living the life that Jesus has called us to live? How can we be sure that the stream of Christianity that we are in or are about to jump into is the right one?


This is a good and essential question.


“Is this supposed to be confusing?”
“Am I doing this right?”
“Am I walking down the well-lit, straight path, guided by the Holy Spirit? Or am I on some path paved by a group of people somewhere in the fourth century, for example?”

Thankfully, no, it’s not supposed to be confusing.

Yes, you can do this right and walk down the straight path that God has designed for all of us to meet and follow Him.

And yes, you can know for sure that you are following Jesus, instead of what people have to say about Him.


As someone said, we need to get this straight from the horse’s mouth. Except, no horses wrote the Bible. However, there is that one time that God did use a donkey to speak to someone. Don’t let anybody tell you the Bible is boring. LOL.

This is why we turn to the Bible. The Scriptures. The divinely inspired (meaning God-breathed) Word of God. Because everything that we need to know, not only about how to meet Jesus but also about who He is, how to follow Him, and more, is found in the Word of God.

Yes! It’s all in there!


Let’s face it, with so many denominations and branches of Christianity, unfortunately, someone or some group is bound to be wrong. That’s just life.

But you know what isn’t wrong? The inspired Word of God. The Bible.

And so, therefore, we turn to it alone as our basis of doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness… just like Paul instructed Timothy.


Since we are talking so much about the Bible, let’s break it down a little bit. Namely, the second half of the Bible called the New Testament, which is the last twenty-seven books of the Bible (sixty-six in total), where Jesus and His disciples come bursting onto the scene.

**The New Testament—which means New Covenant—is broken down into three main sections:**
1. The Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John)
2. The Acts of the Apostles (The Book of Acts)
3. The Letters to the Churches (Romans–Revelation)


Let’s begin by taking a look at the Gospels together.


In the Gospels, which are the first four books of the New Testament, Jesus, our perfect example, teaches and models to His followers how to live. After all, who better to teach humanity how to live than the one who created them?

You could say that these Gospels, which are the real-time accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus, are essentially written documentaries. Consider them as four different written documentaries from four different directors: “The Life of Jesus, According to Matthew,” “The Life of Jesus, According to Mark,” etc.


Not only do we have the Gospels, but Luke, one of the Gospel authors, also wrote another book known as The Acts of the Apostles, sometimes known as “The Book of Acts” or just “Acts.”

In this book, Luke provides a sequel of sorts to his Gospel, as Acts is basically “The Life of Jesus’ Followers and What They Did, according to Luke.”

In Acts, Luke records what Jesus’ followers did, and how they carried out the commands that Jesus gave them, living out His full expression in the earth as His disciples.

Acts gives us an opportunity to observe in real-time an account of the actions, lifestyle, and fruit of the church that Jesus started in the first century through His disciples.


This is important to know and a vitally important piece to the puzzle when attempting to “rightly divide” the Word of Truth.


Let’s take a look at a particular verse of Scripture found in Hebrews 2:3. This is going to be an important verse for us and will help provide some context for the following chapters as we endeavor to meet Jesus together and to know Him more fully according to the Scriptures. 

**Here is what the author of Hebrews writes:**
> _“How shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation, which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed to us by those who heard Him?" (Hebrews 2:3)._

The writer of Hebrews is making sure that we understand something critically important, which is that if we are really going to understand Jesus and the salvation that He brings to us through His gospel, then we are going to need to pay very close attention to what Jesus did and said in the Gospels, as well as what His followers (those who heard Him) did and said in the Book of Acts as they carried out His will in the earth in real-time.


If we are going to truly know what it means to follow Jesus and thereby be His true disciples, we must do things His way. And if we are going to do things His way, we must start right here… with what Jesus said and what His disciples did to confirm His words, showing us exactly how He intended for them to be carried out.


There is a lot more of the New Testament to read beyond the Gospels and the Book of Acts, but in order to read it properly and understand what it is saying, it is important that we launch into it from this proper contextual view of the Gospels and Acts.
- The Gospels are what Jesus said and did.
- The Book of Acts is what Jesus’ disciples said and did as they obeyed Him, going into the world, preaching the gospel, and making disciples.


It is from this perspective that we then can properly read and understand the rest of the New Testament. The letters (called “Epistles,” which is really just a fancy word that means “letters”) to the churches (the remaining books of the New Testament) are letters to the churches that were established by the apostles, teaching the disciples within those churches how to live as followers of Jesus beyond their initial conversion. The aim of these letters was to instruct and equip the disciples of Jesus in faithfully living as His followers in the earth, fulfilling His kingdom mission to make more disciples.


Before we conclude this chapter, I want to go back to a word that we referenced together, used by Paul in his writing to Timothy in 2 Timothy 3:16.

Doctrine.

What does such a word even mean?


Doctrine means “that which is taught.” It is a body of teachings which produces a particular perspective and thereby particular action.


Why is this important?

Because what we do is always rooted in what we believe. And what we believe comes by what has been taught to us.

Whether by a parent, a spiritual leader, a schoolteacher, mentor, friend, family member, author, podcaster, TV show host, or any other source of influence and information, we have all been taught by someone, most likely multiple someones. And the way that we live our lives is a natural byproduct of the teachings that we have received and therefore chosen to believe.

The word that the Bible uses to describe this concept is doctrine. Whatever it is of what we have been taught that we personally hold to and choose to believe.

Is this important? Yes. Because what we believe determines what we do and how we live. And if we are interested in living rightly and in accordance with how Jesus desires for us to live, it is vitally important that we make sure that our doctrine is solid, or as Paul says, “sound.”

As a matter of fact, as it pertains to the subject of the journey that we are on together in “meeting Jesus,” the writer of Hebrews makes the following statement, saying, _“He who comes to God must believe that He is”_ (Hebrews 11:6).


Are you beginning to see how important sound doctrine is?


We can’t even come to God without first having an introductory level of belief that He even exists in the first place. If we are to truly meet Jesus, we must believe what is right and true about Him. And first, we have to believe in Him at all.


But you see? Even that simple belief in Jesus is in and of itself a doctrine.

If we are going to meet Him and deeply know Him, we must know and believe what is true about Him… which Paul helps us understand, just as we have  learned together, this knowledge comes from the Bible.


And if you were curious if these comments by Paul were a simple one-off or maybe weren’t clear enough, he doubles down in writing to Timothy, again in 2 Timothy 4:1–4, further underscoring the need for sound doctrine, saying:
> _“I charge you therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who will judge the living and the dead at His appearing and His kingdom: Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching (meaning doctrine). For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth and be turned aside to fables” (clarification mine)._


To another young man whom Paul was also mentoring, named Titus, his message remains consistent as he tells Titus to hold _“fast the faithful word as he has been taught, that he may be able, by sound doctrine, both to exhort and convict those who contradict”_ (Titus 1:9), and to_ “speak the things which are proper for sound doctrine”_ (Titus 2:1).


What is the answer for Titus to continue walking in what is true? Paul says it is by holding fast to the sound doctrine he was taught and believed.


It is so important to know the truth. Jesus even says that knowing the truth will make us free (John 8:32).

But knowing the truth alone, in and of itself, is not enough. We must love the truth. We must develop the right atmosphere in our hearts to hold fast to what is true by loving it.


As we will see in the next few chapters, and as we have already begun to unveil, truth is so much more than information. Truth is a person. That person is Jesus. And He sends us the Spirit of Truth, which abides with and in us… leading and guiding us into all truth (John 16:13).

> _“Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life”_ (John 14:6).

If we are to meet Jesus, we must know and believe what is true about Him and then love that truth with all of our hearts. Receiving the words of the writer of Proverbs, in Proverbs 23:23, to _“buy the truth, and do not sell it.”_


**Reflection Questions:**
- What truths from this chapter do I need to believe?
- How do the truths from this chapter impact who I am and my personal identity?
- What are the actions that I need to take to live out and apply the truths from within this chapter?
- How can I use the truths from this chapter to help someone else?

So this Christianity thing. You’ve probably heard about it. Perhaps you’ve even been a Christian for years.

But what exactly is Christianity?

You’ve seen people proclaim to hold affiliation with this term, with John 3:16 stamped in their social media bio, and even worn as a patch on letterman jackets at school. Some put a sign in their yard, some place a cross over the mantle, and others go to even further lengths to try to express to those around them that they are a “Christian.”

But is that all it takes to be a Christian? To just call yourself one?

And what about this denomination thing? Tons of them exist, and they all claim to be right. Is Christianity really like ice cream? The same general construct, but with flavors galore to just pick whichever one pleases your palate?

For so many, Christianity seems to mean so many different things. But is it so many different things? If there is only one Jesus, and He is indeed the only “way” that He claims to be, then wouldn’t there only be one way to be a Christian?

Technically, the answer to this question is “yes.” But, not because I said so. It’s yes, because that’s what the Bible tells us. As a matter of fact, in the Bible, it’s Jesus Himself who says this.

Remember, everything we believe—which is our doctrine—must come from the Bible. So, let’s examine what the Bible says about being a Christian.

To truly understand what it means to be a “Christian,” we must go to the place in the Bible where anyone was ever called such a term in the first place.

**Where does this happen? Turn with me to the Book of Acts 11:26.**

> _“And the disciples were first called Christians at Antioch” _(Acts 11:26).

**It is important to understand a few things here:**
1. This term Christian in the original Greek language that this verse of Scripture was written, means “of Christ,” or “belonging to Christ.”
2. Those who were called Christians in this verse of Scripture were actively engaged “disciples” of Jesus.
3. The people who called the disciples Christians were not disciples of Jesus, but instead mocking those who were followers of Christ for the Christlikeness that was emanating from their lives.

In essence, these people were living like Jesus so convincingly that they were accused of it.

But what do these points have to do with this conversation? Everything. Everything, if in fact we are trying to understand what being a Christian truly means, according to the Bible.

These disciples of Jesus were embracing their call to “follow” Him. After all, this was the invitation that Jesus gave to all who desired to become His disciples, saying, _“If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me_” (Matthew 16:24).

Follow Jesus? What is that all about?

In order to understand what it means to follow Jesus, we first have to put ourselves into the mindset and culture of the people we are reading about.

Let’s time travel for a minute and settle into their cultural context to really understand and unearth what this invitation that Jesus gave to “follow” Him is even about.

In the first century, primarily in the Jewish cultural context in which the Gospels were written, there were spiritual teachers that people called “rabbis.”

That is pronounced RAAB-EYES.

These rabbis were explainers of the Scriptures, which, for them, was essentially the Old Testament of our Bibles that we read from today. This set of verses that these rabbis taught from remains the set of verses that Jews still refer to as their Scriptures today called the “TaNak” (pronounced TUH-NAH-K).

As teachers of the Scriptures and the kingdom of God, rabbis would need students. Without students, there is no need for teachers.

But someone couldn’t just become a student on their own. You had to be selected. And these students who were selected by a rabbi were called “disciples.” Those who became students of the way of life and the teachings (doctrine) of the particular rabbi who had invited them were to “follow” him. And this is exactly what the disciples would do. Follow.

We are getting somewhere together. Hang in there with me.

Disciples follow their teacher. This is what they do. But not in a directional sense alone, although this was also true, being that they would virtually live their life in close proximity to their teacher. This following was an immersion type of following that would plunge the life of a disciple deep into the life of his rabbi. Truthfully, their effort was to follow their rabbi in every possible sense.

When we look at the goal of a disciple, we get a solid picture of what this type of “following” really meant, with the end goal being to ultimately become like the rabbi they were following.

To walk, act, and think like one’s rabbi.

And while in many ways this was an educational relationship in nature, it was not in the same sense in which we understand education in our modern context. For us, students set out to school to sit under a myriad of teachers; these teachers teach certain subjects, and the end goal of this teaching is that each student will have proficiently learned the concepts of the various subjects that they have been taught. For us today, it is about gaining information and acquiring knowledge, which we are then tested on to determine the depth in which we have retained the information that we have learned.

The format of our modern education system puts a premium on information, and there is nothing wrong with this. It would be a failure to have set out to learn about something and in the end have learned nothing. But the education system of a teacher/rabbi with his disciples/followers, while certainly including the transfer of information, was rooted in transformation.

Yes, the goal was to learn what it was that the teacher was teaching, but not only to learn what the teacher was teaching… but to catch the lesson of the life of the teacher himself.

Learning information was valuable, but so was learning the way of the rabbi.

Hopefully, this explanation helps you understand more fully what the goal of a disciple of Jesus was all about: to become like and emulate the life of one’s rabbi or teacher. Of which, Jesus was.

Yes. Jesus was a rabbi. A teacher. In fact, in the Gospels, He was called “rabbi” fifteen times and “teacher” at least sixty times.

So now, let’s take that knowledge and place it within the context of Acts 11:26, where the disciples of Jesus were first ever assigned the term Christian in the first place. And from the perspective that we have just picked up together about disciples and rabbis, let’s endeavor to understand what it means to truly be a Christian.

The disciples of Jesus were trying to become like their master teacher, their rabbi… Jesus. They were trying to live in His ways, that the effect of true “following” might be produced in their lives, as they would begin to emulate their rabbi.

And boy, did they ever succeed.

To be a Christian wasn’t a term that they were seeking to identify with. Truthfully, the term didn’t even exist yet. They didn’t wake up one day and say, “I know what we should do! We should create a label for ourselves so that we can have a special title that everyone calls us! Yes! We will call ourselves Christians!”

No.

They weren’t in pursuit of their image or even remotely concerned about it. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t anywhere on their minds. The truth is, these disciples of Jesus had, in their hearts, already died with Jesus and been buried with Him (Romans 6:3–4; Galatians 2:20).

To them, they had no more image (more on this in Chapter 10, but don’t skip ahead). The only image they had was the one of their rabbi that was being formed in them as they followed Him. His image. Jesus. The one they were trying to follow. And they accomplished this with such a degree of success that the bystanders, the observers, the mockers of the way they were following ascribed to them this term: Christian. Those who were the disciples of Jesus Christ in Antioch.

Christians. Those “of Jesus.”

But how would anyone know? How were they to know that these people were indeed “of Christ”? Was it because they said so? Was it because they carried a certain symbol or identifying marker? No. Simply put, they were just successfully following their rabbi. Which, when done correctly, leads to one’s life being transformed into the image of the one they are following.

The fruit of their following was showing.

They were being Jesus’ disciples, following the way of His life and doctrine, and therefore truly becoming like Him.

Can I just drop a side note in here for you? You will always become like what you follow.

Okay, back on track.

They had become like Jesus. And for those in the crowd hurling what was intended to be an insult, they had no idea that the words that they were using to try to mock and cause harm would actually become the greatest confirmation that the disciples of Jesus could have ever received. 

They were doing this right.

I can imagine what the subject was at dinner that night as the disciples of Jesus gathered in their homes to eat and fellowship.

“Guys, can you believe it?! Were actually doing this right! They saw our rabbi in us! They saw Him! They saw Jesus!”

They were living like, talking like, being like Jesus and doing what He did when He was among them… and even greater.

Their true commitment of following Jesus produced in them the fruit of their entire pursuit… which was to become like Him.

If we are ever to truly become “Christians,” it will not simply be because we say that we are. It will not be because we have a fish on the back window of our car, John 3:16 stamped in our social media bio, a sign in the yard, or even because we “go to church” on Sundays.

If we are ever to become worthy of being accused of being “of Christ,” it will be because we have first, and yet even last, wholly become His disciples. Those who follow the way of their master teacher… Jesus.

The definition of success as it pertains to following Jesus and being a Christian is not what we produce in and of ourselves, but what through our submitted and abiding posture in Him as His followers, Jesus Himself produces in us. If we are to ever become transformed from what we have been into the image of who He is, bearing His fruit, it will not be because of the skill of our personal attempts, but because of His grace which works in us to bear good fruit that proves we are branches of the right tree.

Following is not about doing things for Jesus, even learning things about Jesus… it’s about becoming like Him. Then, and only then, does any of our “doing” for Him contain any significant value. Because when His image is truly formed in us, it won’t be because we have done it on our own accord and strength, but through the working of the power of His Spirit alone in our lives.

As you begin this journey, start with this in mind.

Let this mindset and perspective do an override on whatever you have thought before that being a Christian, a disciple, and a follower of Jesus means. Let your worldview be refreshed and reframed. Let your path be cleared by the truth of this revelation from the Word of God today.

In conclusion, consider the apple tree.

An apple tree can only produce apples if it is first an apple tree. Elementary, I know. But this is important.

Just like we had to learn the basics of 1+1=2 before we could ever begin to learn the complex concepts of trigonometry, we have to first learn the simple, elementary things about God first, before we can dive headfirst into the more complex things about Christ.

In the beginning of Scripture, in Genesis 1:11, after God makes the trees, He then states that every fruit tree would _“yield fruit according to its kind.”_

What does that mean, and how does that relate to this subject?

Simply put… Our fruit says what we are.

Fruit talks.

Daniel 11:32 says it like this: those who _“know their God shall be strong and carry out great exploits”_.

This is just another echo of the model that Jesus has laid out for us as we endeavor to become His disciples. Know Jesus, be with Jesus, become like Jesus. And as a result… through His empowering and grace alone, do the works that He did in even greater measure (John 14:12).

So… what does the fruit say? Are you "of Christ?”

We most certainly can be.

**Reflection Questions:**
- What truths from this chapter do I need to believe?
- How do the truths from this chapter impact who I am and my personal identity?
- What are the actions that I need to take to live out and apply the truths from within this chapter?
- How can I use the truths from this chapter to help someone else?

In our last few chapters together, we have been laying the foundation of having a true encounter with Jesus. If you are wondering when that happens, we have already begun. Let’s continue into this next chapter as we continue to lay the foundation.

Having examined what Christianity truly means, now we turn our attention to another central element that piggybacks on the revelation in Chapter 2, adding another layer on top.

In this chapter, we will focus on what it means to be Jesus’ first-century disciples in the twenty-first century… and why that really matters.

I mean, it is kind of an interesting predicament that we are in. Living squarely in the timestamp of the twenty-first century, all the while trying to follow this ancient way of Jesus that is found within a first century Jewish context.

Is that significant? Is it a moot point?

As we have already pointed out numerous times and reiterated (on purpose), there are so many different expressions of what people say being a follower of Jesus actually is, means, and looks like. I have given so much attention to this specific point thus far in our journey together because it is important that we do not settle for a form of following Jesus that does not resemble what we see in the lives of His disciples in the Scriptures.

While there is room for variance due to contextual and cultural differences, the heart of the matter is still the same, and the fruit of following certainly has not changed.

Are there going to be ways that Jesus speaks to us in the twenty-first century that may differ slightly from the first century? Probably so. But not ways that deviate from His doctrine, our direct obedience and fulfillment of His commands, or the types of spiritual experience, fruit, and signs that Jesus said would follow those who believe (Mark 16:17–18).

I mean no disrespect when I say this, but my grandma’s version of following Jesus isn’t my template. She was awesome and had a tremendous walk with Jesus, but her life was the fruit of the same template that I have access to today. Beyond grandma, I don’t want John Wesley’s, Charles Spurgeon’s, or C.S. Lewis’s version of following Jesus. I don’t even want my own.

I want His! I want Jesus’ version of following Jesus. The original blueprint.

Full stop. Period. End of story.

And yes, this matters… a lot.

As we learned in the previous chapter, there is only one Jesus. And this Jesus is the only way to God. And since there is only one Jesus, and thereby only one way to God, consequently there is only one way to truly “follow Jesus.” And that way is a first-century way that we read about in the Bible, carried out in our twenty-first-century culture and context.

There is a danger in attempting to become Jesus’ disciple without this frame of mind. Without this understanding, in our modern Christian context we might end up following followers of Jesus instead of Jesus Himself.

Have you ever played the game of telephone?

Yes, the game where everyone sits in a circle, and one person starts by picking a word and then whispers that word in the ear of the person sitting to their left. And then that person whispers what they heard from the person on their right into the ear of the next person, with the cycle repeating until the word makes its way all the way around to the last person in the circle, who then has the task of saying the word out loud. This generally generates quite a bit of laughter.

I used to love that game as a kid. Especially because at the end of every game, the word that the last person at the end of the circle would blurt out would often be hilariously different from the initial word that was given by the person who started the game.

If we are not careful to continue to refer back to the initial design of Jesus’ church and what discipleship looked like in essence in the first century, then we risk what happens in the game of telephone happening to us as disciples of Jesus today.

Oftentimes, the final pronouncement of the word given in the game of telephone will be a word that closely resembles the first one given in a phonetic sense, but often an entirely different word, carrying an entirely different meaning.

It would be a travesty for us to follow Jesus in a way that sounds and looks close to original, but when you begin to explore its definition, it is a million miles off course. Even a mile off course would be a total miss of the mark, especially when we have the clarity that the Bible provides us.

I am not suggesting that following Jesus is about perfection. But I am suggesting that following is about following. And when you lose sight of the path of the one whom you are following, the danger of ending up somewhere other than where they were trying to lead you significantly increases in probability. We all know that taking wrong turns leads to wrong destinations… which, on a journey as important as this one, we would all do well to desire to avoid.

Just like in the game of telephone, the process the message passes through has a probability of altering the meaning of what was initially given to be passed on. This is why just a few chapters ago I made the statement that while we appreciate church history and traditions, we do not look to them as our source of final authority for what it means to be a disciple and follower of Jesus in today’s present moment.

This observation is not to put doubt in your heart, but instead to bolster your commitment to the Scriptures above all else. God is powerful enough and faithful to preserve His word.

Paul didn’t tell Timothy that all tradition was profitable for doctrine. Very specifically, he said, “All Scripture,” which we thank God for preserving throughout history so that we may know with surety the way we are to follow.

The Scriptures are the template that never changes. They can constantly be pulled from no matter the culture or context that you find yourself in. They provide the recipe that, when referred back to, produces a beautifully baked chocolate cake every single time (I’ll explain the chocolate cake reference later).

While we may do our best to use Scripture as our baseline, instead of what people say about it… is the concept of following people who are also following Jesus wrong?

No! Most certainly not.

In fact, in 1 Corinthians 11:1, Paul instructs the church of Corinth (made up of a cluster of disciples of Jesus who were under His oversight and spiritual care) to _“follow me as I follow Christ.”
_
It is a good and godly thing to follow the spiritual leadership that God has placed in your life. And yes, you should have spiritual leaders in your life whose guidance you are actively following and oversight you are sitting under. But only if the scenario is as Paul described in the verse mentioned above… following them as they follow Christ.

We will take a moment in the following chapter to go more in depth on this subject and speak to the epidemic of shepherd-less sheep arising in the modern Christian movement. So pin that thought, we are coming back to it shortly.

Would it shock you to learn that there are quite a few mainstream doctrines and practices that are widely accepted in the general twenty-first-century Christian movement that are not found in the context of the first-century church or in the Scriptures?

There are, in fact, quite a few.

For example, in many churches across the world today, people are told that if they repeat a certain prayer, accepting Jesus into their heart, that in that very moment, they are saved.

This is often referred to as a “sinner’s prayer” or a “decision for Jesus.”

And while the desire to receive Jesus is great, and the reality of sinners praying to a God who is both able and desirous to forgive them is absolutely to be celebrated, this modern experience of simply praying a prayer, and boom, that’s it, I am saved… is not found in the Scriptures. Jesus instructed no one to do this, and there are no such accounts of this being done by Jesus’ disciples in the Book of Acts. Nope. No decisions for Jesus in the Bible.

This presents a dilemma if we are trying to follow Jesus, twenty centuries removed, in a context where a large swath of Christianity has been largely influenced by the proverbial game of spiritual telephone. Rather than looking to church history, creeds, and traditions to see what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, and somehow finding a way to get the Bible to affirm a particular way of thinking, we should go to what the Bible has to say for itself and adopt its expression as our own.

Here’s the truth: it doesn’t matter who says it. If Jesus didn’t say it, and His disciples didn’t do it, or it isn’t written contextually in the Scriptures, it is not authoritative.

This is why we must always turn to the Bible, where we have what Jesus said Himself and what His disciples both said and did, in alignment with His instructions.

Not only can we live as first-century disciples in the twenty-first century, but I’d say we ought to.

This continual reference back to the ways of Jesus and His disciples in the first century is a safeguard for us as we pursue to meet and follow Jesus today. When we use this as our baseline, point of reference, and template for meeting and following Jesus, it serves as a guide, helping us understand how we ought to function and live as disciples of Jesus, twenty centuries removed.

After all, if our aim is to become like Jesus, then making reference to Jesus Himself and the disciples that He trained and sent seems to make a lot of sense. Becoming like Jesus, who we read about in the Gospels, while using the template of the life of His disciples as an example. Examining the experience that they had with God and, in turn, pursuing to have that same experience for ourselves. Believing and proclaiming the same message that they believed and proclaimed, expecting to see the same demonstration of God’s kingdom and glory that they did.

The Bible isn’t meant to be read as mere history that can never repeat but as an example and template that tells us what is possible for us to see and experience in God ourselves… right here and right now.

As we said just a moment ago, our benchmark for Christianity is not what happened last century, last decade, or even last year... but what happened in the Scriptures. If we don’t believe this, then unfortunately, we will end up settling for a diluted version of Christianity that struggles to reconcile the lack of its present experience with the abounding one that we read about in the Bible.

Sadly, this is what so many people settle for today.

Don’t settle.

In my nature, I am a restorationist. What does that mean? I am in pursuit of restoring the reality of the experience of the first-century disciples as the present personal experience of all disciples of Jesus Christ right here and now in the twenty-first century.

Why? Because I am deeply convinced that the church that Jesus started is the church that He intended to continue. And while there are some who say otherwise, Jesus didn’t say it, nor did His disciples. And that is the point.

If our present experience with God today is not homogeneous with the experience of the disciples of Jesus that we read about in the Bible, then who is right? I mean, we both can’t be right, can we?

I would venture to say that since the Bible is our benchmark for life, truth, and more, if our experience is different from the experience that we read about in the Scriptures, in its essence, it is not those we read about in our Bible that need evaluation and adjustment. It’s us.

When we stop having the same experience with God that we read about in our Bible, we immediately begin living below God’s intentions for our lives. And why would we ever settle for that?

Far too often what happens when our experience doesn’t match that of the Scriptures is that we, instead of pursuing the more that Jesus has for us in faith believing, choose instead to change our doctrine—what we believe is possible—to match our experience.

This reality has happened all throughout church history. But we can’t settle for it. How can we, when we know that God has so much more?

Can I tell you something today that I want you to let sink to your core?

Your experience with God is completely connected to what you believe about Him and what you believe is possible in Him. Yes, your doctrine will either limit or propel your experience with God.

This is why people have sat in churches their whole lives, living in a lesser experience than God has available for them. Not even always because that is what they desire, but because this is what they were taught to believe. That what they are presently experiencing is all that there is to this Jesus thing. And thus, consequently, and unfortunately, they never experience more.

But there is more. So much more.

Will you enter into it?

Is that you? Are you the one that has been faithfully serving Jesus for years, all the while acutely aware of the stark disconnect between your personal experience with Jesus and what you read about as the experience of His disciples in the Bible?

Did someone put out the fire of your hunger with a cold bucket of water one day, telling you that what the Bible records that the disciples experienced was just for a time gone by? And that this was not anything for us to experience today?

If so, my encouragement to you is to believe.

Believe that there is more. And believe it enough to pursue it. That whatever you read about in the Bible can be your experience if you choose to believe it.

Believe that it wasn’t just an experience for Jesus’ church 2,000-ish years ago, but that it is the absolute will of God for you to experience right here, right now.

Accept nothing less.

God wants your experience to look just like what you read about in the Bible. I would even venture as far as to say that He is desperate for you to step into that reality. He is desperate for all of us to step into it. Because when we do, the church that He designed and intended to thrive and move throughout all generations, crossing all cultural barriers, will continue beyond the confines of the first century, thriving through the life of His disciples, right here in the twenty-first century.

God wants signs to follow you as you believe. God wants you to operate in the gifts of the Spirit. God wants to work miracles through your life. God has visions and dreams to give you. God has authority and spiritual power that He wants to cause to operate in your life, through His Holy Spirit. God wants you to share the gospel with every person you meet and see them experience the supernatural new birth that comes through responding to His gospel in faith.

We can and should have the essence of the same experience that the disciples of Jesus had and is recorded in the Bible.

Yes, we may live in a starkly different, technologically advanced society, but our experience with Jesus, of whom the Bible declares _“is the same yesterday, today, and forever”_ (Hebrews 13:8), does not have to be very different at all.

As a matter of fact, I would venture as far as to tell you today, it shouldn’t be.

The message they preached should be the one that we proclaim. With no difference.

The signs that followed them as they believed are the same ones that should follow us. With no difference.

The experience that they had with God is the same one that we should walk in. With no difference.

For the sake of purposeful redundancy, let me say it again. This is not just for the first-century disciples! But for the disciples in the twenty-first century and beyond!

Their doctrine. Their experience. Available. Through the very same Christ that was for them, is for you and me.

I implore you today, desire that, and settle for nothing less. Because truly, anything less is indeed just that. Less.

Believe that more is possible, and in faith begin to believe that God wants to fill your life to overflowing with His supernatural possibilities. And maybe, soon, somewhere in the near future, when you set out to read the Book of Acts, instead of once again reading pages of a personally unfamiliar narrative, you will find yourself reading stories by which you have become personally acquainted because their experience has now become yours too.

Will you choose to become Jesus’ first-century disciples in the twenty-first century with me?

**Reflection Questions:**
- What truths from this chapter do I need to believe?
- How do the truths from this chapter impact who I am and my personal identity?
- What are the actions that I need to take to live out and apply the truths from within this chapter?
- How can I use the truths from this chapter to help someone else?

In the previous chapter, we pinned a thought that we are going to open back up and address together: the need for sheep to have a flock and a shepherd.

Let me just pause right here to say this to you, whoever is reading this. It may not be the most popular thing to say, but popular isn’t always the filter for good. And sometimes what is good, and even right, runs contrary to what is popular. Regardless of how this next statement lands, we all need to hear it, myself included.

You and I need a pastor, and we need a church community that we are actively engaged in and known among.

“Easy for you to say, you’re a pastor.”

Yes. A pastor who has not always understood the gravitas and significance of having spiritual leadership and covering in my life, but I learned it eventually… with a couple of bumps, bruises, and scrapes, might I add.

I write this instruction to you as someone who actively is submitted to good and godly spiritual leadership, who is actively involved in my life.

I need this. You need this. We need this.

So before you think that this is a “do as I say, and not as I do” tactic that some manipulative leaders have deployed in the past to gain a following—which they have—let me first tell you that I personally adhere to the instruction that I am delivering to you. And second, let me clarify to you that I am not saying that I need to be the primary spiritual leader in your life. I am making no claims or appeal to be anyone’s spiritual oversight… but I am saying that someone needs to be.

While it isn’t the aim to cover this point entirely in this book, you must know this principle. Because part of following Jesus means following Him with others. This is an inescapable reality when we assess the lives of the disciples of Jesus recorded in Scripture. As far as the Bible is concerned, there is no such thing as following Jesus alone.

Let’s say that you’re living in the times of Jesus, and one day Jesus comes by your town, issuing to you His invitation, saying, “Follow me.” And let’s say that you accept this invitation. Upon acceptance, as Jesus turns to walk forward toward whatever or whomever He is headed to next,  there you are, following Him closely, moving as He moves, going as He goes.

But as you take a moment to look around you, you begin noticing something: you aren’t the only one who is following. As a matter of fact, as you look around you, you begin to notice that there is actually a cluster of others who have accepted His invitation and are following Him too, just like you are.

Never alone.

Why do I mention this? Because if you’ve been around this Jesus thing for any period of time, you’ve probably heard somebody say that they don’t need a church or spiritual leadership to follow Jesus.

And while there may be some that portray this type of life in Christ, in whatever version or stream of Christianity it is that they have chosen to subscribe to, when we turn to the Bible (our sole source for belief and practice), this concept is completely foreign. Plainly, this type of thinking is not one that comes from the Scripture.

There is not a single instance in the New Testament, either by example or instruction, that would teach or affirm the concept of spiritual isolation. There is no “it’s just me and Jesus off by ourselves” way of following.

If you are reading this and you are currently following Jesus alone, I want you to know that you are presently a sheep on the outside of the flock, and it’s not safe for you out there. I mean no insult when I say this, as my desire is not to offend you, but to use this occasion to express my care for you by telling you the truth, even if it stings a little. Above all, I want you safe. And yes, you may be a sheep that belongs to the shepherd off by yourself. And yes, He may come to visit with you from time to time. But please know that His intentions in doing so are to get you back into the safety of His flock, not to keep you outside of the cover of His care where the wolves roam.

As a matter of fact, in Luke 15, Jesus tells a story of a sheep who wandered away from the flock. In this story, Jesus says that the shepherd left the ninety-nine sheep that were safely secure in the flock to go find and reunite this one wayward sheep to the community of the flock and the safety of the oversight of the shepherd.

The point is this: Jesus may find you by yourself, but He never intends to leave you there.

It is always, in every scriptural scenario, the complete and total will of God that the Good Shepherd brings His sheep back into the communal life of His flock.

We need the spiritual community that the body of Christ provides us through the local church. And once again, while it is not the central point of this chapter, as long as I am still on this massive side note… you need a pastor.

While this topic is not primarily the point of this chapter, the subject is actually incredibly fitting being that we are talking about how the first-century disciples followed Jesus. So how about we further derail for a moment as we continue this conversation?

When we read the passage in 1 Corinthians 11, where Paul instructed the flock he had been tasked to shepherd and provide oversight to, this is exactly what he was demonstrating and communicating when he instructed them to “follow me as I follow Christ.”

This very writing here to the church in Corinth was Paul actively demonstrating what we call in our modern context the work of a pastor (a shepherd), which in the first-century-church context was called an elder or bishop.

Paul was an apostle, which without getting too deep into what that means, essentially meant that he was a primary leader in the churches that God was using him to establish through His Spirit, wherever the Lord would send him to do so. His apostleship gift was from God and meant that God would send him to plant and raise up new churches in new areas and people groups the gospel of Jesus had not yet reached. But as Peter, who was another apostle, points out in 1 Peter 5:1–4, it is the task of all primary leaders appointed by God to the churches to provide a degree of shepherding care to them (this is what pastors do, or at least this is what they are supposed to do) until the _“Chief Shepherd,”_ Jesus, who is the ultimate _“Shepherd and Overseer”_ of our souls, appears once again (1 Peter 2:25).

As a matter of fact, the context of 1 Peter 2:25 further solidifies our point when we read it in its fullness.

> _“For you were like sheep going astray, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls”_ (1 Peter 2:25).

Earlier in Scripture, God uses Jeremiah the prophet from the Old Testament to echo this exact same sentiment and clarify what is to be a true sign of the godly spiritual leadership that was to come, and in our current era is now here as he writes, _“And I will give you shepherds according to My heart, who will feed you with knowledge and understanding”_ (Jeremiah 3:15).

When we read these verses together, there is a certain harmony and interpretation that only God’s divinely inspired Word can reveal to us. That is this: that Jesus is the ultimate Shepherd and Overseer of our souls, and that He has given us shepherds (notice the lowercase here) after His own heart to work as conduits of His shepherding care and oversight in our lives… to do what the Shepherd did in Jesus’ story in Luke 15, restoring the sheep to the flock, and ultimately, the flock back to Him.

True shepherds who are given by God do not lord over God’s people, but they do recognize that God has given them the authority to serve as extensions of His care, providing safety, knowledge, understanding, nourishment, and more—ultimately serving as conduits of the ministry of Jesus to the flock of God which is His.

Unfortunately, it is true that in our twenty-first-century context, in some cases, pastors have become more like CEOs who speak on Sundays than true pastors who “shepherd the flock of God.” But while truly some have missed the mark, many have not. Don’t allow the small contingent of false leaders to ruin your ability to trust the care of those who are truly following Jesus.

Let me just throw this out to you today, say, as a nugget from my personal chicken basket: I personally know that I (myself) am spiritually healthy and aligned with God when I possess a desire to be in the community of the flock of God and under the care of a shepherd appointed by God. Maybe that will be of help to you, as a decent measure of your own heart, as it is of mine.

Let’s look at the first-century church for a second to see what is actually going on as it relates to this subject.

In the first-century church, as the church was forming, there were a few layers of leadership, which essentially were broken down into the following gifts/roles: apostles, bishops, elders, and deacons.

I know you may be wondering where all of this is going. I thought I picked up this book to learn about Jesus.

We are. I promise. All of this is going to make sense and serve you well as you not only meet Jesus but make the decision to become His follower. Hang in there. This is important to know.
The apostles were those who were gifted and sent by Jesus into new territories and people groups to bring the message of His gospel and kingdom. Their task was to help people meet Jesus, encourage them to become His followers, and once they converted, equip them to help others to do the same (this is called ministry). Ultimately, in all of this, the goal was to do the will of God and thereby establish the kingdom of God so that it may be on _“earth as it is in heaven”_ (Matthew 6:10).

Of these disciples, the apostles would train up and establish ministers who would take on varying roles in and among the churches of God, such as bishops, elders, and deacons.

Bishops helped oversee the churches that were started by the work of the apostles. These churches were connected together in a relational, spiritual network associated with the leadership and sphere of authority of the founding apostle. The founding apostle  would function as a bishop among them, overseeing the church or churches within this sphere/network as a team with the rest of the trained and appointed bishops, while possessing unique authority among them.

The elders were what we call in our modern context “pastors.” They provided, in teamwork with the bishops, the shepherding care that the disciples within the churches needed. These elders taught, led, and cared for the disciples in the churches that they were tasked to steward.

The deacons were helpers. They were servant leaders in the churches who assisted in various tasks that were necessary for the function of the church to continue, providing essential ministry assistance through gifts of helps, administration, and more.

As you can see, there is a very clear theme with all of this. In the first century, a team ministry structure worked together in harmony and was designed to provide oversight and covering, guarding and shepherding the disciples. In the safety of this structure, disciples were protected from rogue leaders, false teachers, and more threats that might pose harm to them as sheep within the flock of God.

Is it really important to say all of this? I think so. Here is why I feel so strongly about this: If we are going to truly meet Jesus and become His disciples, we must acknowledge that there is no biblical context to do so by oneself and outside of the context of being within the structure provided by spiritual leadership.

We need others, and we need leadership.

I know that message is not popular everywhere and with everyone. But as it pertains to the Scriptures, it is popular with God, and as ones who desire to closely associate with that popularity, it must become a message that is popular and received among us.

We are all sheep following our Shepherd… Jesus. We are all underneath His care and oversight. But Jesus has tasked some of the sheep in the flock to dual function as undershepherds of His shepherding care, serving as conduits of His leadership and covering to the flock.

There is a reason for this. When a sheep gets isolated, it gets in danger.

A shepherd guides a sheep to water for drink and green pasture for food. A shepherd guards the flock from predators and dangerous terrain that comes with the journey.

Isolation and shepherd-less living bring spiritual danger, a lack of spiritual nutrition, and direction for the spiritual journey of life.

The Bible tells us that _“we are like sheep that have gone astray_ (Isaiah 53:6).

What does that mean?

It means that without a shepherd, this is what sheep do. They wander off. They venture into personal danger and paths that are not conducive for safety on their journey.

In Matthew 9:36 (KJV), Jesus talks of shepherd-less living in a negative sense. Jesus comes upon a group of people, and when He sees them, Matthew records that He viewed them _“as sheep without a shepherd.”_

Seeing the people in this condition caused Him to be deeply moved, because as a shepherd, He knew that as long as they were shepherd-less, they would be without help when danger would surely come.

As we have observed, in the church that Jesus started in the first century, there were no shepherd-less sheep. And as a matter of fact, it mattered very much to Jesus that His flock (His disciples) had a shepherd.

**There are two realities of the first-century church that Jesus started that we need to review:**
1. It isn’t Jesus’ desire, will, or plan for sheep to be isolated from the true community found within the body of Christ.
2. Jesus cares deeply that His sheep have shepherding care and oversight via truly appointed spiritual leadership.

I bring this up here, as we discuss living as first-century disciples of Jesus in our modern twenty-first-century context because there is an epidemic right now of isolated and shepherd-less sheep, as well as sheep who do not know how to discern false and self-appointed shepherds from true shepherds who have been appointed by God.

Let me just say this as clearly as I can, with the Bible as my footing:

There is no biblical pattern for following Jesus alone and outside of true spiritual oversight.
There is no biblical pattern for following Jesus outside of being led by God-appointed spiritual authority and in community with the body of Christ, through the local church.


This is the will and plan of God, evidenced not only by Jesus’ words but also by how His church operated and functioned in the first century.

Let me also state this: Man isn’t your covering. If he were, that would be quite the faulty covering. Instead, Jesus is our covering, and He has provided us a structure in which He facilitates that covering in our lives. We then must make the choice to step within the construct in which Jesus provides His covering. We step into that covering when we get in alignment with the covering system that Jesus has designed and deployed in the church.

Are you isolated? This is your call to find a flock and get in it. Are you shepherd-less? This is your call to find one and begin following their lead as they follow Jesus.

**Reflection Questions:**
- What truths from this chapter do I need to believe?
- How do the truths from this chapter impact who I am and my personal identity?
- What are the actions that I need to take to live out and apply the truths from within this chapter?
- How can I use the truths from this chapter to help someone else?

In chapter two, when we jumped into what it means to be a Christian, we learned that the only way to truly be a Christian is to first and foremost become a disciple of Jesus.

Discipleship is a term that is used to describe the process of being and becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ. As we have learned in previous chapters, this is exactly what Jesus is calling us to be and become. To be His disciples. Those who follow His way.

This process of being and becoming a disciple of Jesus is truly a journey for a lifetime. But just because it takes a lifetime doesn't mean that it has to be hard, complex, or near impossible with zero immediate results. God can produce dynamic transformation in your life faster than you can blink your eyes three times and shout “hot dog.” He is God. Don’t minimize this reality or try to downplay what God can do in your life. 

Remember what Paul wrote in Ephesians 3:20, where he tells us that God _“is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us”_ (Ephesians 3:20). What power? HIS POWER!

Exceedingly abundantly. Exceedingly means “more than.” Abundantly means “more than enough.” Now, lock this in your heart and never let it go: God’s power that is at work in your life is able to produce more than whatever is more than enough... far beyond whatever it is that you can even request of Him or conceptualize in your mind.

Think about that for a moment. Don’t just pass over it. Let this reality of God become real to you. Believe it. Embrace it as your doctrine, and let the limitations of your mind dissolve into the possibilities of faith in Jesus. He can literally do anything!

Every day with Jesus is a day spent walking in miracle territory. Instead of wondering what may go wrong today, what if you began to think about what God might do today? Instead of, when things go wrong (and they will), wondering how in the world you are ever going to get out of whatever struggle it is that has come upon your life, think, I wonder how God is going to show up in this situation?. Have faith. Believe. And when you do, you’ll notice far more God-activity in your life than ever before. Why? Is it because God is now all of a sudden able? No. It is simply because we have chosen to believe.

Remember… what we experience with God is often limited by what we believe about Him.

But don’t just take my word for it. Take Jesus’ Word. Let’s take a brief detour for a moment to talk more about all of this.

**I love the statement that He makes in Matthew 7:8–11:**
> _“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!”_

Jesus can. Will you ask?

**Here’s another amazing statement about Jesus that I hope ignites your faith:**
> _“So Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what was done to the fig tree, but also if you say to this mountain, “Be removed and be cast into the sea,” it will be done. And whatever things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive’”_ (Matthew 21:21–22).

Amazing.

The apostle James, however, brings a balance to this. Not a contradiction. A balance. And he did so because then just as there are so many today some were trying to abuse the words of Jesus to mean something that they don’t, as if Jesus is somehow a genie in a bottle ready to grant your three greatest wishes. That is simply not the case. Here is what James says:

> _“Yet you do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures”_ (James 4:2–3).

James is helping us understand something and bring greater understanding to what Jesus said in Matthew 7 and 21, and Paul explains further in Ephesians 3… that God is able to do anything that we ask, but He will not do things just so that we can fulfill our own personal will. As a matter of fact, God is able to do anything, as long as it fulfills His will and purposes in our lives and in the earth.

God can do anything, but He will not do what He does not want to. Only what accomplishes His will.

**Teaching His disciples how to pray in Matthew 6, Jesus include a statement that helps even further explain this when He tells them to pray in this way:**
> _“Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”_ (Matthew 6:10).

Jesus is helping His disciples understand that what they are to go before Him in prayer asking and seeking is for His kingdom to come, and His will to be done, among them and in their midst here on earth as it already is in Heaven. Whatever is true in Heaven, which exists at the will of God, they are to pray for that heavenly reality to become earthly reality. But how? By praying according to His will.

Even Jesus, in His humanity (He was fully man and fully God all at the same time), understood this when He prayed in the Garden at Gethsemane, after asking for something that was 100 percent His personal human will, by finishing His prayer with _“nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done”_ (Luke 22:42).

This was a picture of Jesus suffering as a human. And it was the will of God for Him to do so. As God, He was able to deliver Himself, but as a man, He had to submit to the divine will of God.

I want to make a brief sidebar here and say this while we are on the subject: there will be times that you ask for something, and God may not do it. Even something that you want or feel very deeply that you need. Does this mean that God is not able? No. It means that God is not willing.

Why?

Because God is sovereign. He knows all things, sees the end from the beginning, and from His perspective sees things differently than we do.

Sometimes it is the will of God that we walk through a hard thing. Just like Jesus needed His disciples to pass through a storm and in fact led them into it on purpose in Luke 8 to help build the depth of their faith and trust in Him, Jesus will at times allow storms to come into our lives to produce greater faith and trust in our hearts toward Him.

Above all, _“we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.”_ (Romans 8:28)

Pay attention to the key words in this statement from Paul.

All things work together for the good of those who love God, for His purpose.

All things. Good. His purposes.

Once again we are reminded that everything is for His purposes. Even hardship and suffering that we may walk through. I have often said this to our church, and I am not sure if it is original or I heard it somewhere, so if you are somehow the originator of this quote, please forgive me for not giving you credit: “It’s not always good while it’s working, but it’s working for your good.”

**Paul says this in Philippians 3:**
> _“that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if by any means I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.”_ (Philippians 3:10–11)

Paul is saying that meeting and following Jesus will include both amazing power and immense suffering. But the suffering is meant to produce within us the working of His great power, and ultimately, the complete salvation of our souls.

Some people think that the only thing that God wants to give them is a gift, provision, deliverance, and more of the same. But what if I told you that God sometimes wants to just give you grace for the trial?

Because Paul was becoming so enriched in revelation from God, the Lord provided Paul a trial that would serve as a means to keep him humble before God and others so that Paul would not try to take personal glory from God in the depth of these revelations that God had given him to share in his ministry with others.

Let me just say really quick that pride is a huge stumbling block for us in our walk with God and ought to be avoided at all costs.

The Bible says that _“God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”_ (James 4:6). In fact, pride was intricately involved in the fall of Lucifer (the guy that is often referred to as “Satan” or “the devil”) who was expelled from his place in Heaven as a high-ranking, beautiful angel of God.

Wild, huh?

**So back to Paul. He deals with a “thorn in the flesh” as he called it that God has given to him. Here is what Paul says about this “thorn”:**
> _“Concerning this thing I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me. And He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness’”_ (2 Corinthians 12:8–9).

Pay attention to this closely. Paul sought deliverance, but God gave him grace.

There will be times that you ask for one thing that you think you need, but God will give you whatever thing it is that He knows that you need.

**All of that can be summed up in this one passage of Scripture written by the pen of Isaiah the prophet:**
> _“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts”_ (Isaiah 55:8–9).

So ask, seek, knock. Pursue the more of God that is available to us in faith. Even when that means the complete sustaining grace of God that is available for us as we walk through trial. And in all things… believe. All things are working for good, for those who love God and are the called according to His purpose.

**Reflection Questions:**
- What truths from this chapter do I need to believe?
- How do the truths from this chapter impact who I am and my personal identity?
- What are the actions that I need to take to live out and apply the truths from within this chapter?
- How can I use the truths from this chapter to help someone else?


Section III – You Can Meet Jesus

It is my personal opinion that discipleship can be distilled down to these two elements: to “Meet Jesus,” and to “Follow Jesus.”

This is the simple path that I see in the Scriptures. A clear path that centers and hinges on Jesus alone. A path that starts with Jesus and ends with Jesus. One where He is the starting line, the finish line, and the path along the way.

Truly, Jesus is all in all.

If those who “follow Jesus” are those who have accepted His invitation to become His disciples, then it would make perfect sense that before one could ever be in a position to receive such an invitation from Jesus, that person would first need to “meet Him.”

This is, after all, the natural progression that every disciple who has ever become a follower of Jesus goes through. First, meeting Jesus. And then, choosing to accept His invitation to follow. This is not just a different and unique process that we go through in modern times when attempting to become disciples of Jesus, but the same process that every person in the Bible who became His disciple also went through.

But what does it look like to meet Jesus? I am glad that you asked. After all, finding the answer to that question is probably why you picked up this book in the first place.

There are numerous accounts of people meeting Jesus in the Gospels, as well as in the Book of Acts. But in the Gospels, those who met Jesus did so face-to-face. Naturally, since Jesus was here on earth walking in human flesh, He could be touched, heard, seen, and interacted with in physical form.

However, this dynamic changes when we get into the Book of Acts. Not a bad change. A good change. A God change that the Lord Himself willed to take place and designed Himself. A little God twist, if you will.

The twist was that while the disciples in the Gospels met Jesus in person, physically face-to-face, those who were to meet Jesus after He ascended into Heaven in the Book of Acts and beyond would still meet Him “face-to-face,” but through the Holy Spirit.

“Wait. How does that work?” Glad you asked.

Once Jesus had ascended into Heaven and could no longer be physically beheld with natural eyes, the way people interacted with Him changed. 

Even after Jesus was gone from the earth, removed from our physical presence, people still kept meeting Him, and even more so than ever before. That’s right. More people met Jesus in the Book of Acts through His Spirit than ever met Him in the Gospels in person (this is a part of that genius God design element that we just referenced).

And by the way… people from all over the world, from every culture, background, language, and people group are still meeting Jesus this way today.

This means you can too.

“Okay, that’s cool and all. But how can I meet someone I can’t see?”

Good question.

I get it, and I’m glad that we can address this question together. 

To do this, let’s rewind a little bit to learn a concept from the Book of Genesis that will launch us headfirst into this truth: that we can meet Jesus face-to-face through His Spirit for ourselves.

Back in the Book of Genesis, when God created humanity, He did so to have a creation that would walk with Him and have fellowship with Him through the presence of His Spirit.

I want to take you briefly to a particular verse of Scripture in the Book of Genesis that will highlight something that I believe will become vital to truly understanding that we too can really meet Jesus.

In Genesis 3:8, we jump into the middle of the story where humanity has fallen into sin. This is a particularly ugly part of the story of God’s relationship with His creation.

God made man for fellowship, for communion, for closeness. But now, Adam and Eve have disobeyed God. They have sinned. And this sin that came by way of their disobedience to God has now placed them in a condition that has disrupted the purity of their likeness with God, which was their intended created state. Now, having put their mark on God’s image, they have introduced impure attributes to the image of God…and in doing so, no longer reflect the holiness of the image of God that they were created in. And here it is that they find themselves, as a result of their sin, and for the first time ever in their lives… experiencing the emotion of shame.

They had never experienced shame before because they had never done anything to put themselves in a position to step outside of alignment with God’s image and His design for their lives. But now, sinning against God caused them to become dramatically aware that the consequence of their direct disobedience to God’s commandments carries much more weight than they possibly ever could have imagined.

This is where we jump into the story: right after Adam and Eve sinned.

A new day has dawned in Eden, and here comes God, moving through the Garden like usual, in search of His creation to spend some time with them in fellowship.

But this time was different. Drastically different, in fact. Whereas in times past, God would easily find Adam and Eve out and about in Eden, this time, they aren’t in their usual spot doing what it is that they usually do. As a matter of fact, because of the immensity of the shame that has now come upon their lives, they are hiding in the trees.

**The Bible describes the scene as follows:**
> _“And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden”_ (Genesis 3:8).

God had given Adam and Eve trees as a source for food. Of these trees, He had told them that they could eat and enjoy the fruit of any tree they wanted, except for one. That was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

And this was their sin. They didn’t listen. They ate from the tree that was specifically forbidden by God. And now, filled with shame, they have attempted to hide among the trees that God had given them as provision to sustain and nourish them. Rather than enjoying the good things that God had given them for nourishment, they were using the trees as cover for the shame of their present sinful condition.

I want to just pause right here to highlight something that I think could be helpful for us, as we ourselves are often prone to fall into sin and experience shame for ourselves.

Notice where it is that Adam and Eve go once shame has gripped their hearts. They go to the trees.

Up until this point, before sin entered the picture of their lives, the Bible tells us that they walked the Garden of Eden freely, completely unashamed.

In this unashamed posture of life, they enjoyed closeness to God and the benefit of the trees that God had given them. But now, rather than walking in their purpose to have fellowship with God, they are found using what God had given them as cover.

How often is this true of us?

Let me answer. Often.

I’ve not only seen this; I have lived it.

When we live in a way that is not reflective of God’s image, sin enters, we become disobedient to His ways, and shame begins to push us from the covering of God’s presence. And what do we often do? We hide. We try to cover ourselves up. And sometimes, we even do so with the good things that He has provided.

If you are new to this Jesus thing, this part may not make sense to you yet, but as long as you keep walking with Him, I am sure that one day it will… so file this one away.

Shame and sin cause us to run from His presence in search of cover. Instead of the liberty of His presence, bound by the shame that comes by sin, we oftentimes try to hide in the trees ourselves. And this is the religious temptation that many people fall into who are trying to walk with God but fall into sin. When sin comes, and it will, we run away from His presence and into the trees.

Trees are given by God. They are good. But they aren’t meant for cover. Yet often, we as humans who have a proclivity to stumble often do exactly what Adam and Eve did in using the good things that God has provided as a source of cover for our shame. Not only is this not the will of God, but the trees meant to supply you can’t suffice to cover you. After all, it wasn’t trees that God used to cover their shame.

What are the trees in your life? Ministry? Church attendance? Serving others? Giving?

“Wait. Aren’t those good things that God wants for us?”

Absolutely. And so were the trees. But not when they are being used as cover.

Just like the fruit trees of the Garden, they were good things that God created to help fulfill Adam and Eve’s purpose and design, not to be sufficient places to hide. That was what His presence was for: to hide them. Yes. And it worked. How do we know? Because up until this very moment of sin, the presence of God had done such a good job of covering Adam and Eve that they had no idea that they were unclothed and naked in Eden. As a matter of fact, Scripture alludes to the reality that they were naked and unashamed.

Why?

Because His presence was their cover.

But just like Adam and Eve, when sin enters our lives and we begin to feel the absence of the familiar cover of His presence because we have stepped outside of likeness and sameness with Him, we too can try to hide in the good stuff.

You can use serving others and good deeds as a way to cover up the sin in your life. You can use ministry and impacting lives in either the limelight or the background as a cover for sin. You can try to circumvent the shame of your inner world with doing good things for God. You can show up to church and check the boxes of involvement in the community of faith by putting on your game face, all the while your inner world is crumbling in shame.

This is the human disposition in response to the shame that comes from sin. But my friends, our own cover, even among the things that God has created and deemed “good,” is a farce. It simply won’t work. The only thing that can cover us is God. And the real covering that God has designed for us is the covering of His presence.

When living free of sin in the presence of God, Adam and Eve had no awareness of their nakedness, but now, having sinned, they are starkly aware that they are naked and are completely ashamed.

The presence of God was no longer their covering because the sin in their heart had pulled them out from alignment with the Godlikeness that they were created with.

The Bible even tells us that they tried to take leaves from the trees and manufacture a covering for their nakedness. But just as it was with them, it is with us: every single attempt to cover up our shame with our own efforts will always come up short.

Are you in shame right now? Maybe you’ve been away from God and you’re hiding in your own version of cover, but deep in your heart you know, This isn’t enough, and it’s not working.

Maybe you are in ministry, or faithfully serving others in the community of faith, going to church every Sunday… but sin is in your heart, and you are tired of hiding in the trees. Maybe you are not living for Jesus at all, but deep down inside you know that something in your soul isn’t right… and that there has to be something more for your life.

Yes. There is.

His presence.

Don’t run from it. Don’t hide from it. Run into it.

You are about to find out in the next few chapters that God has provided a way for us to be covered by His presence once again. Because there is only one thing that can truly remove the shame in our life, and that is turning to God Himself, face-to-face.

Now, I want to focus on one particular word in this story that I believe will open up our understanding to the true depth and connection with God that is available for all of us today.

Presence.

> _“Adam and his wife hid themselves from the **presence** of the Lord”_ (Genesis 3:8).

This word, presence, in the original Hebrew language which this passage was written, literally means "face."

Yes, face.

Knowing this, we could also read it this way:
“Adam and his wife hid themselves from the face of the Lord.”

Why is this significant, and why am I taking the time to point this out in this chapter? Because, as we have already pointed out, God is a Spirit, and spirits are invisible. Yet, it was the “face” of this invisible Spirit that Adam and Eve in shame hid themselves from in Eden.

You see, every day up until this one, Adam and Eve had the privilege of standing in and interacting with the presence of God extremely close. But somehow, this interaction with God, who is a Spirit, was just likened to interacting with another person… just as intimate and real as if they were talking together “face-to-face.”

**Moses, later on in Scripture, had this very same experience with God. The Bible has this to say about Moses’ interaction with God in Exodus 33:11:**
> _“So the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend”_ (Exodus 33:11).

This revelation plays a huge role in explaining how we too can meet God, who is a Spirit we cannot see, face-to-face. This is precisely how we meet Jesus today for ourselves and is exactly how people all throughout the Book of Acts and beyond in human history, up until this present moment, have met Him too.

Soon, in the chapters to come, we will dive deeper into the significance of Jesus’ life, as it pertains to restoring us once again to the design of that delightful life lived in His presence… similar to the one that Adam and Eve so freely enjoyed in Eden before falling into sin. But before we go there, I want to help solidify a truth in your heart today. And that is this…

Jesus wants to meet you, face-to-face, through the presence (face) of His Spirit.

Believe it. It is true. You can meet Jesus…

And yes, we are finally at that part of this journey together…

Even though Jesus isn’t here in physical form, you can still meet Him, just as you would meet someone like me. In fact, I would even venture that this face-to-face encounter that God provided for each and every one of us is an experience that far supersedes the reality and significance of the ones that we have with each other.

How amazing is that? This Jesus that we read about in the Bible is not some inanimate, non-relational, distant God who is unable or lacking in desire to be engaged. Not Jesus. Nope. He is a living, present God to be experienced right now. Spoiler alert.

That’s the whole point, and it’s exactly what He desires.

He isn't just a man that we can read about in a book who did great things. He isn't just a prophet who walked the earth two thousand years ago. He isn’t just a good man who lived a good life. What separates Jesus from all other men and every other god that has ever been proclaimed is that He is a God who can be known, felt, and intimately experienced… right here, right now.

In fact, that’s His entire M.O., and soon in the coming chapters, we will begin to see the lengths that He went to ensure that our meeting Him could become a reality.

In the event that you are puzzled by how we can interact with Jesus through the Holy Spirit, or are simply curious how in the world that is even possible, in the next chapter, I want to take a moment to walk together through a brief Bible study on the very subject. Let's keep going and walk through the Scriptures to see how this is possible.

**Reflection Questions:**
- What truths from this chapter do I need to believe?
- How do the truths from this chapter impact who I am and my personal identity?
- What are the actions that I need to take to live out and apply the truths from within this chapter?
- How can I use the truths from this chapter to help someone else?

As we walk through the following verses of Scripture, layer by layer, we are going to unearth some very important truths about Jesus. This process is one that the prophet Isaiah describes in Isaiah 28, as to how we receive and unveil revelation from God… _“precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little”_ (Isaiah 28:9–10).

I want to encourage you to read this next part slowly, maybe even a few times over, spending time to let the revelation of these concepts through God’s divine Scriptures settle into your heart and mind. Yes, that also means that for those of you who are listening to this at 2x speed, like I would be doing, should drop it down a little for the next few moments.

I would also highly recommend to you that you stop right here for a moment and ask Jesus to illuminate His living word to your mind as we begin to read His truths.

Ask for Him to send His Spirit to you to breathe revelation into your heart as we together unearth the deep revelations of who He is through His Word. Prayer is so important when it comes to studying God’s Word. We need Him to help us understand Him.

Paul writes along these lines in 1 Corinthians 2:14, saying, _“the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them because they are spiritually discerned.”_

That doesn’t mean that we natural people can’t know God. It just means that we can’t know God without His help. The word discerned in 1 Corinthians 2:14 in the original language means “seen, discovered, or distinguished.” All of this means one thing: we need His Spirit to help us see and discover who He is.

So let’s downshift together for the next couple of miles of the journey… setting our cruise low, rolling down our windows, getting ready to enjoy ourselves as we take in the scenery of Jesus.

**The first passage of Scripture that we will begin to walk through together is John 14:16–18. Let’s dive in.**
> **“And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever — the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you”** (John 14:16–18).

In John 14:16–18, Jesus has been preparing His disciples with the understanding that He would not be remaining with them forever in physical form. Soon, He would go away. And in His efforts to help them understand this reality, Jesus tells His disciples that once He has gone away (meaning His ascension into Heaven) that He would be sending them a helper. He called this helper “the Spirit of Truth,” a Spirit who Jesus says they would abide with forever.

**In the very same conversation found in John 15:1–6, scrolling just a few verses past John 14, Jesus goes on to give His disciples a little more insight about Himself and about the relationship that they would have with Him once He was no longer with them. Let’s read this passage together:**
> _“I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit. You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing”_ (John 15:1–5).

In this passage, Jesus begins to teach them an important concept by using an illustration from nature.

Jesus tells them that He was a “vine,” and that they, His disciples, were the branches of that vine. And just as natural branches are required to abide in natural vines for life… they too, as spiritual branches, would need to abide in Him to experience true life in Him… the vine.

But how could they abide in Jesus if He was soon to leave the earth?

They were abiding with Him right now, but Jesus is pointing out that soon they would abide in Him. The only way that this would be possible is if Jesus was more than just a man… but also a divine Spirit.

Is that true? Let’s keep reading to find out.

It’s no mistake that Jesus begins to teach His disciples about the principle of abiding in Him immediately after informing them that He would soon be sending them a Spirit they would _“abide with forever”_ (John 14:16). It is also no mistake that He craftily chooses to conclude His remarks about this Spirit that He says is soon to come by saying, _“I will come to you.”_

But this brings up some questions.

Is this Spirit of Truth that Jesus says would be coming to help and comfort the disciples another Spirit apart from Jesus? Or was this Spirit of Truth, in essence, the Spirit of Jesus, that is the Spirit of God that was in Jesus, that was to come and abide with them forever?

Let’s keep reading and allowing Scripture to interpret Scripture.

Even just a few verses prior to the one that we started off reading in John 14:16–18, in John 14:6 Jesus makes another very important and revelatory statement about Himself. In this statement, He sets up the context for His comments in John 14:16–18 about the helper and Spirit of Truth.

**Here is what He tells them:**
> _“I am the truth”_ (John 14:6).

That is a bold, and powerful statement!

So just before Jesus tells them that He would be sending the Spirit of Truth, which He follows up by saying that He Himself would be the one that comes to them… He also tells them that He is the truth…

A few verses later in John 14:26, Jesus gives even further clarification and context regarding the Spirit that He is talking about, as He tells them that this very Spirit is _“the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name”_ (John 14:26).

Okay. So, the helper and Spirit of Truth is the Holy Spirit, sent from the Father, in Jesus’ name.

Got it. Let’s keep moving.

Jesus goes on further to tell His disciples that they already knew this Spirit He was telling them about… and that this very Spirit of Truth was presently dwelling “with them” and would soon be “in them.”

Wait. So, they already knew the Spirit of Truth that Jesus said was soon to come to them? How is that even possible unless this Spirit had already been with them the entire time that Jesus was?

Truly, up to this moment, all that the disciples knew of Jesus was that He was “the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

We know this because a decent stretch of time before the scene that we are reading about in John 14, one day Jesus asks His disciples to tell Him who they believed that He was. And in response to this question, Peter, one of His disciples, replies, saying, _“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”_ (Matthew 16:16).

Then Jesus, in response to Peter’s reply and claim, calls him “blessed.” He goes on to tell Peter that this revelation which has come to him is not a revelation that has come from any man, but from God Himself.

This becomes incredibly interesting when you begin comparing Jesus’ response to Peter’s revelation of His identity, in that it has come from God and not from man, to the comments that Jesus made about the Spirit of Truth that was soon to come, when Jesus says of this Spirit… _“the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you”_ (John 14:17).

Could the revelation of Jesus’ identity that came from God alone to the disciples be the same source of revelation Jesus said they already knew the Spirit of Truth? Could this make more sense of Jesus’ statement in John 14:6 that He was the truth? And could this coincide with Jesus’ cap-off to His comments in John 14:18, after telling His disciples about the Spirit of Truth that was coming to them… that He was the one who was coming?

Was the Spirit in Jesus the Spirit of Truth?

At that time, the world couldn’t see the truth of who Jesus was. Only those to whom the Father had revealed this truth, could see it and understand.

This Spirit of Truth who was unknown to the world was well-known to the disciples. They had received this truth as revelation from the Father (God). But this brings us to another interesting moment, where just a few moments prior, in the same conversation that Jesus is having with His disciples in John 14… right after He has told them that He was the truth, and just before He tells them that He was sending the Spirit of Truth… that one of the disciples asks Jesus to show them or reveal to them who the Father is, to which Jesus plainly replies, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).

Was the divine Spirit that was in Jesus, the Spirit of Truth, the helper that was coming to them? Was the Spirit of God that was in Christ, the Holy Spirit that would soon fill their hearts? Was God, who is a Holy Spirit, and is our Father, in Christ?

According to Scripture… Yes.

After all, Colossians 2:9 says that _“in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily,”_ that is, in bodily form. Even just a few verses prior to that statement, in Colossians 1:19, Paul reiterates and once again echoes the very same truth, _“For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell.”_

What does all of that mean? That whatever and all that God is, is fully and entirely revealed in the manifestation of Jesus. God, in human form, _“who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”_ (2 Corinthians 4:6).

Why is this important to know? Because when you know who Jesus is… that He was not simply just a man or a part of God revealed to mankind, but that He is the full revelation of God to humanity… this doctrinal belief changes everything about how you see and experience Him. Because truly, when you meet Jesus, you are meeting and experiencing GOD. The singular, indivisible, eternal Holy Spirit, revealed through the revelation of Jesus.

To cap off His comments about this helper and Spirit of Truth, Jesus tells His disciples that He would not leave them as spiritual orphans (as those without a spiritual father) but that He Himself would come to them. The apostle Paul refers to this same concept in Romans 8:15, saying that through the Spirit of God, we too can receive spiritual adoption, no longer being orphans… just like Jesus said. How amazing is that?

Let’s keep going.

Now, we turn our attention to Jesus’ words to His disciples in Luke 24:49, where He continues teaching His disciples about the same Spirit He was discussing in John 14. Except here, in Luke, He adds another layer to “what” and “who” this Spirit is, as He calls it _“the promise of the Father.”_

**Let’s read what He says:**
> _“Behold, I send the Promise of My Father upon you; but tarry in the city of Jerusalem until you are endued with power from on high”_ (Luke 24:49).

Standing before His disciples, having risen now from the dead, and getting ready to finally lift up from their physical presence into Heaven, Jesus informs them that He is about to send this Spirit to them and that in order to receive it, they would need to go to Jerusalem and wait there until this moment was to take place.

I want you to notice something here. Jesus says that He would send the Spirit. Jesus was going to send the promise of the Father.

“But I thought that He said that the Father was going to send the Spirit in His name?”

Yes. But what is His name?

Jesus.

And who did Jesus say was in Him? Who was it that was seen at the very same time someone beheld Jesus?

The Father.

Is this beginning to make sense? I hope so.

Jesus is the full revelation of the Father. Because Jesus is “God”—in human form. Not a portion of God. All of God—the fullness of the Godhead—was in Christ, bodily. Jesus is the Father, _“manifest in the flesh”_ (1 Timothy 3:16).

I think that Colossians 2:9 provides tremendous foundation for sound theology regarding who God is. That whatever God is—and indeed, he is much bigger than we can understand—is fully revealed in Jesus. It’s all in Jesus.

This is why when you pray, all you need to do is pray to Jesus. Because all that God is, and all who God is, is both revealed and made accessible, through Jesus Christ.

Eventually Jesus would ascend into Heaven and become seated on the throne of Heaven, at the right hand of God (Hebrews 10:12). And when this would happen, Jesus would send the Helper, the Spirit of Truth, which is the Holy Spirit, and Father, who was _“in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself”_ (1 Corinthians 5:19).

We actually read about this moment in the Bible. The moment that the Holy Spirit is poured out on the disciples in Jerusalem that Jesus said would happen, in Acts 2:1–4.

Let’s take a brief glance at it.

The disciples of Jesus were assembled together in a prayer meeting, in the upper room of a home in Jerusalem, doing just what Jesus had asked them to do… wait on Him to send the Spirit. When all of a sudden, it happens.

The Spirit that Jesus said was coming, that He was to send to them, was poured out upon them and entered into their hearts… just like Jesus said. Let’s read the account of this moment in the Book of Acts together.

> “When the Day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. Then there appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire, and one sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 2:1–4).

I am still thrilled every time that I read this. The significance of this moment is huge.

Immediately following this momentous experience in Acts 2:1–4 of being filled with the Spirit of God, a crowd gathers to see what is taking place. As this happens, Peter seizes the moment. He stands up and begins to preach to them, explaining to them what is taking place. As he does this, he makes a very clear statement. He tells them that JESUS was the one pouring out this promise from the Father among them, which was His Holy Spirit.

He only knew this because this is what the Spirit had revealed to him––which Jesus, being the revelation of that Spirit in human form, had also taught him.

We’re almost there; hang tight.

Writing to the church in Colosse in Colossians 1:26–27, Paul declares that this experience of receiving the Spirit of God, which Jesus talked about in John 14 and Luke 14, and we have now observed having been poured out among the disciples in Acts 2, is _“Christ in us” “the hope of glory.”_

> _“The mystery which has been hidden from ages and from generations, but now has been revealed to His saints. To them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles: which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” _(Colossians 1:26–27).

Later in his letter to the church of Rome, Paul also writes in Romans 8:9–11, that the Spirit of God that dwells in us (which his audience had already experienced and personally received just like they did in Acts 2), is the same Spirit of God which was in Christ… the very same Spirit that raised Jesus up from the dead.

> _“But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.”_ (Romans 8:9–11)

Why is this significant? Because Paul goes on to share that if the same Spirit that was in Jesus, which raised Him from the dead, also dwells in us, that we too will be raised up with Christ at His return to abide with Him forever.

This is the same return of Jesus that Paul describes in 1 Thessalonians 4:13–14 and Titus 2:14, as our _“hope”_! Which makes all the more connection to what He wrote in Colossians 1:27: that Spirit of God which was in Christ is now Christ in us and is the _“hope of glory.”_

> _“But I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus”_ (1 Thessalonians 4:13–14).

Finally, in Ephesians 1:11–14, Paul writes to the church in Ephesus that this Holy Spirit of God, which is the very Spirit of Jesus, is the guarantee of our inheritance that God has prepared for each and every one of us as His children. An inheritance that we are to receive in full when Jesus returns for us, gathering us to Himself… for all eternity, _“to the praise of His glory.”_

> _“In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will, that we who first trusted in Christ should be to the praise of His glory. In Him you also trusted, after you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation; in whom also, having believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, to the praise of His glory”_ (Ephesians 1:11–14).

**Let's quickly review these truths from the Scriptures that we just have read together about Jesus:**
- The Spirit of Jesus is the Spirit of Truth, the Helper, who comes to us, to be in us, which the disciples already knew.
- The Spirit of Jesus is the vine that we, His branches, are to abide in.
- Jesus’ Spirit is the Spirit of Adoption that will not leave us orphans, but reconcile us back to God, as adopted sons and daughters.
- The Spirit of Jesus is the Holy Spirit who fills our hearts.
- Jesus is the one who sends and pours out the Holy Spirit.
- Jesus’ Spirit is the promise of the Father.
- Jesus’ Spirit within us will raise us one day from the grave to meet Him and be with Him forever in Heaven.
- Jesus’ Spirit in me is the guarantee of my inheritance as a son of God, which is to dwell with Him one day forever in Heaven.
- The Spirit in Jesus is the Father, who we see, experience, and interact with, as we behold Jesus.
- All of God is revealed in and through Jesus.
- We behold the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ.

Okay. Bible study over. What did we learn?

We learned that the Spirit the disciples received in the Book of Acts on the Day of Pentecost, was a not a different Spirit of God, but the same Spirit of God that was in Jesus––the Holy Spirit.

It’s important that we walked through that quick Bible study because, as we stated in Chapter 1: whatever it is that we believe about God will determine what of Him we actually experience. And the fact is, we will rarely ever experience more of God than whatever it is that we first believe that we can.

My hope is that the Scriptures have helped you believe that you really can meet Jesus through His Spirit, face-to-face. And that this has helped you understand more fully who Jesus is and how we interact with Him through His Spirit.

Ever since Jesus poured out His Spirit on humanity, people all throughout the Book of Acts and beyond, throughout every generation, ethnicity, location, social status, and people group have met and are still meeting Jesus all over the world through His Holy Spirit.

And yes, you can meet Him too.

**Reflection Questions:**
- What truths from this chapter do I need to believe?
- How do the truths from this chapter impact who I am and my personal identity?
- What are the actions that I need to take to live out and apply the truths from within this chapter?
- How can I use the truths from this chapter to help someone else?

Section IV – Meet Jesus

So, are you ready to meet Him?

My prayer is that the last few chapters have opened your eyes to know that not only is meeting Jesus possible… but that Jesus wants to meet you.

How about we meet Jesus right now?

Wherever it is that you are as you are reading this chapter, you can meet Jesus right there. Whether in your car, in the break room at work, in the living room of your house, sitting down at a park bench, in your dorm room, at the library, in a coffee shop, or anywhere else that you may be, I want you to know that you can meet Jesus anywhere.

Yep. That’s right.

“I don’t need to be at church to meet Jesus?”

No, sir.
No, ma’am.

While you can, and should, meet Jesus at a church gathering, whether that be in a house, sanctuary, venue, coffee shop, or more, you don’t need to be in a church or at a church event to meet Jesus. While we are on the subject, and while I have said and stand by my comments that we all need a pastor, you don’t need a priest or a pastor to facilitate your meeting with the Lord. All you need is to believe that Jesus is, reach out to Him, and know that as you move toward Him in faith, He will respond, moving Himself toward you. I promise. He will.

But it’s not just me that promises. The Bible has a thing or two to say about it, too. Take these few testimonies from the Bible on the matter:
> _“The Lord is near to all who call upon Him”_ (Psalm 145:18).
> _“Draw near to God and He will draw near to you”_ (James 4:8).

Meeting Jesus involves three important pieces:

Encounter Jesus’ presence through the Holy Spirit (we just read about this).
Hear His gospel message, the good news of our salvation through Jesus.
Respond to His gospel in faith, being born again.


In the following chapters, we will talk more about pieces two and three. But right now, let’s focus on number one together: encountering Jesus’ presence through the Holy Spirit.

Ready? Let’s meet Jesus.

**Step 1: Let’s repent, together.**
Repentance is a big word that simply means to turn around… to do a 180º. This is the term they use in the military when they are marching and then suddenly, they pivot to go the other direction. This often happens at the command of someone shouting, “REPENT”! In response, everyone turns.

In a few chapters, we will learn more about the significance and essentiality of repentance as it pertains to receiving the new life that Jesus has for all of us, but for right now, let’s just get a brief grasp on it.

Repentance is where we approach Jesus humbly and honestly. First, we acknowledge that we are lost and helpless without Him. We confess that we are sinners and that we know we need Him to save us and forgive us for our sins. We express remorse and sorrow in our hearts for living our lives following our own way, and not His, as Scripture says in 2 Corinthians 7:10, that _“godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation.”_ Jesus has invited us to follow His way that brings life. But if we are going to experience His life that comes from His way, we first have to reject our own. In doing so, we get to reject our way that leads to death and embrace His way that leads to life. The Bible says that there is a way that seems right to man, but the end of that way is death (Proverbs 14:12), but Jesus, who has invited us to reject our ways to follow His, says that He has come that we may have life, and life more abundantly (John 10:10).

In this act of repentance, we confess our sinful condition to the only One who is able to save us from it, and we ask for Him to supply us with the grace of God that provides us with the ability to receive His salvation through faith.

Are you ready to repent? Let’s do it together.

Take any amount of time that you need right here, and from the genuineness of your own heart, tell Jesus your own version of the above.

Confess your sins.
Tell Him that you want to follow Him and His ways.
Ask for His grace that leads to salvation.

Make sure to verbally speak these words to Jesus. I promise you’re not talking in a vacuum. Jesus is hearing every word that you speak. He has been waiting on this moment for a long time.

Ready? Go.

(Take this time to repent.)

**Step 2: Let’s Meet Jesus!**
Now that we have repented, we are postured toward Jesus with His grace extended to us. You’ve already begun the process of meeting Him, but now we are going to take another step toward Him.

Here’s what we are going to do. It’s very simple; just follow along.

First, we are going to lift both of our hands up to Jesus like a funnel, symbolically posturing ourselves as open and ready to receive Him right into our hearts.

Next, we are going to lift up our faces to Jesus, and for the next sixty seconds (and however long after that, if you want to continue), just begin to tell Him how much you believe in Him, need Him, and are thankful for what He has done to make it possible for you to experience His presence and love. Say it in your own way, and again, make sure to say it out loud. Jesus loves to hear your voice. And please know, you don’t have to have the perfect words. Jesus isn’t looking for that. What He is looking for is your sincerity.

As you talk to Him, you’re going to begin to feel Him. Maybe this will be the first time that you have ever felt Jesus, or maybe the first time in a long time. Either way, rest assured that what you begin to feel is truly Him.

As you talk to Him and begin to feel His presence, lean into it, letting your heart continue to pursue Him. Remember, there’s always deeper in the river… just how far are you willing to let Him take you?

Ready? Go.

(Take this time to encounter the presence of Jesus.)

Did you feel Him? What did His presence feel like? Did you sense the warmth of His presence? The feeling of His love? Something you have never felt before, or haven’t felt in a long time?

My friend, that is Jesus.

I want to be very clear with you right now. You need to know this: You can encounter Jesus like this and more every single day of your life. As a matter of fact, Jesus would love nothing more.

If, as you walked through the above steps, you didn’t feel anything, I would encourage you to find a place to get alone and declutter your heart and soul and then go back and repeat the process. Go get alone with God. Maybe go outside and sit under a tree or find a park bench to sit down at. Maybe get alone in your car with some worship music lightly playing. Wherever that space is that you know you can really get away from the barrage of life, push away the cares of life, quiet your soul, and dial in your focus to seek and truly meet Jesus.

It can happen, and rest assured, not only can it happen… but it will.

Sometimes we just have to clear our minds of the clutter of life and the stresses that come along with it. The way that we live nowadays can be so emotionally frying. Our radical pace and hyper-connectivity can certainly hinder our ability to approach God as His carefree children and truly experience the depth of His presence that is available to us all.

In my thirty-one years thus far of life, I have learned that Jesus wants to meet with me far more than I want to meet with Him, and that sometimes life and the cares that come with it just seem to get in the way.

Sometimes, the hindrance is a lack of genuine repentance in my heart. If you feel that is the case for you, I would encourage you to repeat step 1. But sometimes it has nothing to do with that; instead, it’s just the overwhelming pressure of life. The stress, anxiety, pain, shame, guilt, and more of the same that seem to be ever so regular these days with news headlines blaring, tensions among people, FOMO, etc.

It may be important here to remember that it was the intensity of the emotion of shame that caused Adam and Eve to hide themselves from the presence of God. And just as shame hindered them, so can it hinder us. But not just shame. There are a lot of emotions that can get the job done.

**If this describes you, let me encourage you to believe that God has truly forgiven you, and that there is nothing you can do that can separate you from His love, which is available to us all (Romans 8:35–39):**
> _“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written: ‘For Your sake we are killed all day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.’ Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”_ (Romans 8:35–39).

If the cares of life are clouding your mind, take a moment and do what Peter says in 1 Peter 5:7, _“casting all your care upon Him,”_ truly believing that _“He cares for you.”_
> _“Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time, casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.”_ (1 Peter 5:6–7)

And no, just in case you are thinking it, you are not defective. You are human. Jesus created you and knows you better than you know yourself. Just drop your guard and run into His arms like a kid does to their parent when they don’t know where else to go or what else to do. You will find safety, security, and comfort in the arms of your Father, which we learned just a little bit ago is Jesus.

Some reject the notion of having an encounter with God by calling it emotionalism, as if God isn’t the one who created us as beings designed to encounter and depend on Him, with emotions. We don’t reject the idea that there is emotion involved in encountering Jesus. Instead, we lean into it. God designed us to experience Him through our emotions. Those who discount spiritual experience because it involves emotions do so while neglecting the reality that God, who made us to connect with us, also made the very emotions that we possess.

Emotions are His genius, not ours.

In addition, a world without emotion is a world void of connection. Emotion is needed for romance, companionship, friendship, maternal and paternal bonds, and more. So, why would we discount spiritual experiences that come with emotions, as if that somehow diminishes the connection with our Creator?

Emotions don’t cheapen spiritual connection; they were made for it.

And when we cast our emotions on Jesus, throwing ourselves fully and freely into Him, emotions and all, we will experience Him more freely than ever.

So laugh, cry, shout, jump, dance, sing… whatever your soul longs to do in response to God. Why? Because you’re His creation, and He loves to see you act like He made you.

You can meet Jesus anytime, anywhere, anyplace.

Just ask David, king of Israel, who said in Psalm 139:7–10, _“Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend into heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the morning, And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, Even there Your hand shall lead me, And Your right hand shall hold me.”_

**Reflection Questions:**
- What truths from this chapter do I need to believe?
- How do the truths from this chapter impact who I am and my personal identity?
- What are the actions that I need to take to live out and apply the truths from within this chapter?
- How can I use the truths from this chapter to help someone else?

Section V – Hear, Respond, Be Born Again

You can experience the presence of God just like we did together and in even greater measure every single day of your life.

Let’s turn together to Ezekiel 47. I brought this up in the introduction, but I want to revisit it again right now.

In Ezekiel 47, God shows Ezekiel a vision. In this vision, God shows him a river that is flowing out of the Temple of God. This river is a prophetic picture of the Spirit of God; yes, the same one that we interact with and also fills our hearts, the same one that you felt just a few moments ago. In this vision, God takes Ezekiel from standing on the bank and looking at the river all the way out into its depths, where his feet couldn’t touch anymore. Ezekiel went from a place of observation, to limited experience with control, all the way to experience without any control at all.

This is a beautiful illustration from God, displaying what we can experience with Him if we are willing to go just a little further, day by day.

Each day with Jesus is a fresh new opportunity to take another step toward Him in faith and experience more of Him each and every day than we did the one before. And the further that we go, with the more that we experience, requires us to relinquish step-by-step control as we go. But that makes sense why repentance is the first step to meeting Jesus. I have to repent of my own desire for control to truly and deeply experience the depths of His flow, surrendering by the step to the strength of the current.

We have already learned so much about Jesus, but there is still so much more to learn. What do you say that for the remainder of this chapter, we just keep learning?

Cool? Okay, sweet… Let’s keep going.

It’s so important for us to know Jesus. After all, if we are going to follow Him, it would make sense that we need to know who He is, right?

Just as it is with any relationship, the more you get to know someone, the more that you learn about them. And often, as you learn more about them, you learn that there is way more to this person you are meeting than you initially thought.

It’s the same with Jesus.

As we meet Him and begin to discover deeper about who He is, we begin to see in even greater measure the meaning of His life and gospel message. It is truly, incredibly difficult to share the gospel of Jesus without also talking about who He is. In this chapter and the one to follow, we will endeavor to do both.

To really dive into who Jesus is, just like we did in Chapter 4, we will need to do another quick rewind to the Book of Genesis.

In Genesis, the stage is set. It is God, alone, by Himself, moving over the face of what was the unformed nothingness that in just a few moments would become the earth that we inhabit today. And somewhere between the reality of the nothingness and the beautiful creation that we live in and behold today… He speaks.

God speaks…

"Let there be…” And there was.

Simple as that. Whatever it was that He said… simply just became. What was never there before, all of the sudden, just from the sheer power of His spoken words alone, would simply materialize into being. At His word, the formless nothingness became form and substance. And from the immense darkness came light as He spoke it into being. As this continued, so also came the sun, the moon, the earth, water, plants, animals, fish, birds, and every other element of nature and life.

And He liked it.

Everything that God made, He really enjoyed.

We know this because after He had finished making a particular thing, when He was done with it, He would call it “good.” He made the plants, and they were “good.” He made the birds, and they were “good.” He made the animals, and they were “good.” But although God had made so much “good,” He had not yet made all that He would call “good.”

Next, God would set His sights on creating mankind.

That’s us, by the way.

So God grabs a handful of dirt from the earth, and from that handful of earth, He begins to form and fashion from it the Creation of man. Once He is satisfied with the form of man from the dirt, He then stoops down and begins to breathe into the lungs of His creation. The Bible calls this the breath of life.

**Here’s how the Bible details the scene:**
> _“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being”_ (Genesis 2:7).

Now all of a sudden, man is alive. He is a living, breathing soul… the final creation of God that earns the description “good.”

But while man is created by God just like everything else around him, man is unique among the creation of God. While everything else that God made was truly “good,” man is the only one of the creations that has been made in the “image” of God. As a matter of fact, all of the creations that was made up until God formed man were made for man and to sustain man.

Yep, look around you.

Notice the creation of God: the trees, water, birds, animals, sky, clouds, mountains, and more. Then, pause to think to yourself for a moment. God loves humans so much that He made this for us to enjoy, to inhabit, to manage, to thrive within, but most of all, to glorify and worship Him. Creation wasn’t just to enjoy. Part of the beauty of God’s handiwork in Creation was to cause man to worship and to seek Him. God’s creation doesn’t just sustain mankind, but serves as a means to reveal Him to us (Psalm 19:1; Romans 1:20).

This leads us to our next point.

God’s intention for creating man wasn’t just to make him from the earth and for the earth. God’s purpose for man was far greater than that.

God made man for God Himself.

God made man for fellowship, for connection, for interaction… to be worshipped and adored by His creation. This is the true reason that man was created… to know God and to be known by Him.

Let’s briefly discuss the place that God made for man to live.

When God made man, He placed him in a very specific place called Eden, which means “a place in the presence of God.”

From the very beginning of time, woven into the context of our creation, is this truth: that we were made to be with God, living within close proximity to Him.

That is… in His presence.

It feels important for me to make a slight footnote right here, highlighting mankind’s created context in the presence of God.

God made man in and for His presence, and from within this specific context, God would provide for man everything that he would ever need to not only survive but to thrive.

In the presence of God.

There is, simply put, no other way to thrive as a human being created by God than inside of the contextual atmosphere that we were made in and for… His presence.

His presence must be our abode. Our place of dwelling. The place that we set up camp and refuse to move from. Like when Moses said to the Lord in Exodus 33:15, _“If Your presence does not go with us, do not bring us up from here.”_ In other words, “If You aren’t with us, I don’t want to go.” It is this same posture that we ourselves must take if we are to truly thrive in our souls.

We must have this priority: His presence over everything.

Let's illustrate this a little bit.

Imagine for a moment that you have a peach tree, smack dab in good ol’ Georgia. A thriving one. The kind that has the big juicy peaches that drip off your elbow when you eat them at peak ripeness.

Can someone get me a peach, please? LOL.

Let’s say that we take this amazing peach tree, thriving in the climate of Georgia, and we attempt to transplant this tree to a brand-new climate. Let’s say, Alaska.

The peach tree would surely die.

It would wither, it would struggle, and it would certainly, in very short order, cease not only to thrive but to even live at all. Why? Because the atmospheric elements of Alaska are not conducive for a peach tree that was designed to survive and thrive in Georgia.

Just as you wouldn’t take a peach tree to the tundra and expect it to survive, likewise you cannot take your soul outside of the presence of God and expect to live within the abundant life that Jesus has promised to each and every one of us (John 10:10).

Okay, back to the story.

God makes man to know Him and be known by Him. But as we read earlier, man runs into a very significant issue. He disobeys God. He sins.

When God placed man in His presence, He gave him very specific instructions. One of which was to not eat from one tree, that is, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. But here came the cunning serpent, the devil, who through temptation convinced Adam’s wife Eve, and thereby Adam, to eat the fruit that God had forbidden them to eat.

Man’s direct disobedience to these instructions by God, which was sin, brought about a significant dilemma for not just Adam and his wife Eve, but for all of mankind that was soon to come through them. And as a result of their sin, Adam and Eve were removed from the presence of God.

No more Eden.

But why? Lean in here for a second, because we are about to learn another significant key about God, right here:

God cannot fellowship or share space with what is not like Him. At least not without the thing that is not like Him becoming completely consumed by Him. Literally, vanquished.

Adam and Eve’s situation is really bad and, certainly on the surface, looks like a very hopeless situation for all of humanity. I mean, how can we thrive apart from His presence? We can’t! And because of this truth, death has now become a reality. And life, which at one time was effortless in Eden, now outside of it, becomes extremely difficult.

Although this sounds entirely hopeless, it is not. Let me explain to you why. It goes back to one quick but significant detail, found in the story of the Creation of man in Genesis 1:26–27. When God makes man in His image.

Let’s answer this question together. When God made man in His image, what image did He make him in?

As we learned earlier, God is a Spirit. We see this from the opening scene of the Bible as the Spirit of God is found moving over the face of the waters, even prior to Creation. The Bible also tells us that as a Spirit, God was invisible. And yet, you mean to tell me that, somehow this invisible God has an image? How? And if that is true, what image?

This is where the story gets really good.

The Bible says of Jesus that He is the begotten Son of God. John 1 tells us that He is the Word of God… which is the mind, plan, and heart of God, manifest in the flesh. A few verses of Scripture later in John 1:18, John says that Jesus has fully revealed God to us. Hebrews 1:3 tells us that Jesus is _“the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person.”_ 2 Corinthians 5:19 gives us the insight that when Jesus came to the earth, it was God who was in Jesus, reconciling the world to Himself.

Scripture reveals to us that Jesus was God who took on the form of a man for the purposes of redeeming His creation that has fallen into sin, and thereby away from God, becoming alienated from His presence and design for their lives.

Uniquely, as it relates to the question of whose image Adam was made in, Colossians 1:15 tells us that He, meaning Jesus, is the image of the invisible God. And that in Him dwells all the fullness of God, in bodily form (Colossians 2:9).

Finally, Scripture declares to us that Jesus was the lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8).

Let’s take a momentary detour to talk about this lamb slain thing. What’s that all about?

This point in particular is unique and important because, in Scripture, after the fall of man and their subsequent expulsion from Eden, God tells His people that in order to temporarily cover the penalty of their sins and thereby delay, or push back, the impending judgment which was due to them for their inability to pay this fee, they would need to shed the blood of an innocent animal sacrifice.

But don’t miss the point. It wasn’t about the animal.

The animal was a prophetic symbol, pointing forward into the future where the eventual Lamb of God would come to take away the sins of the world (John 1:29). This Lamb of God would become the final sacrifice, once and for all, for all of humanity. The blood that was to be shed of this eventual Lamb of God would be perfect and sinless, and thereby sufficient to pay the sin debt owed by all people, a debt which could only be paid by death.

This Lamb would be slain on a new altar, which would come in the form of a cross.

Before God ever made man as His creation, formed and fashioned in His image, you must first understand that He had already made up in His mind to die for humanity. The decision to cover the sins that His creation had not yet even committed was already made. Before God ever picked up a handful of dirt and began sculpting, God already had formalized His plan to redeem His creation. Because of this, God chose to make Adam in the image of the man that He (God Himself) would eventually become to redeem him.

Yes. You’ve got that right. God made man in the image of the begotten Son that He would one day become in order to redeem His creation… Jesus.

Did you know that you were made in the image of your Redeemer?

Your Creator made you in the image of your redemption. Think about that for a second. Redemption is in your DNA.

The very framework of who you are, to the smallest breakdown and complexity of who you are, you, quite literally, were made to be redeemed.

Let that reality sink into your heart for a moment as you read this. Maybe even pause and take a second to look in the mirror. Maybe pull out your phone and turn the camera on selfie mode and just look at yourself for a moment.

I want you to look at what God has made.

Maybe you see the self that you have grown tired of seeing. Maybe you see the self that you don’t think has any worth. Maybe you see the self that you at times wonder if it will ever be good enough for anyone or anything. But maybe, you could see something more. Maybe you could see what Jesus sees when He looks at you: that you were made for God.

I want you to look at yourself and tell yourself this: “I was made to be redeemed.” And then I want you to receive those words.

Let that truth sink deep down into your heart. Don’t just say these words because you feel like I am making you. Speak this truth until the words coming from your mouth begin to form something new  in your heart, moving beyond fictitious hope,  into your true and present reality. 

Let this truth inform your emotions about yourself and the life that God Himself has given you, and then watch your soul begin to lift up toward hope as you settle into the reality that Jesus made you, just for Him.

Oh, and by the way, He calls you “good.”

It would be absolutely fitting right here, as you take this moment to pause and dwell on this truth from God’s Word, to repeat what we learned in how to meet Jesus.

Lift your hands, lift your face to God, close your eyes, and begin to declare the truth of what you now know. That you love Jesus, and Jesus loves you back. Thank Him for being so thoughtful, kind, loving, and gracious. Let His love wash over you and the confidence of His truth fill your heart.

The Bible tells us in 1 Corinthians 15:45 that Jesus is the second Adam. And as the second Adam, Jesus came to reverse the curse of sin and death that resulted from the sin of the first Adam.

He came to finish a job that we could not.

Through the life of the first Adam came death. But through the death of the second Adam, Jesus, came life (more on that soon).

Im hoping that little by little, line by line, you’re beginning to see the picture.

Jesus is God in human form, come to redeem mankind, which is His creation made in His image. He is the Redeemer and the Savior of humanity. He is the only supreme God. Not a second God. Not a lesser version or form of God. He is not a person sandwiched within other Gods. He is, as the Scripture says, _“God manifest in the flesh,” in whom “dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily”_ (Colossians 2:9).

He is the one who when we get to Heaven, we will see seated on the throne, just as the disciple John did when God showed him the throne room of Heaven in Revelation 4:2, as he saw _“a throne set in heaven, and One sat on the throne”_ (Revelation 4:2).

That one is Jesus.

The full revelation of the Father. The Son of God in redemption. And through the selfless sacrifice of His life for us, we now experience the joy of His presence through His Holy Spirit.

**Reflection Questions:**
- What truths from this chapter do I need to believe?
- How do the truths from this chapter impact who I am and my personal identity?
- What are the actions that I need to take to live out and apply the truths from within this chapter?
- How can I use the truths from this chapter to help someone else?


So, we have learned that Jesus is God, manifest in the flesh to redeem us, His creation. Which for us is really good news. And interestingly, that’s actually what the term gospel even means.

**The Gospel = GOOD NEWS.**

In this chapter, we are going to talk about the gospel of Jesus Christ, what it is, and what this good news means for us.

In the previous chapter, we laid out a pretty dense foundation for the conversation that we are about to embark on today. So, let’s do what we always do when attempting to learn more about God: lets dive into the Bible to learn what it has to say about the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ.

In his first letter to the church in Corinth, in chapter 15, Paul writes to them with the goal of detailing the gospel of Jesus as clearly as possible. I would say that this is probably a great place to start. So, let’s dive in and read what he has to say:
> _“Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures”_ (1 Corinthians 15:1–4).

This is the gospel.

Simply put, this good news is the true story that God was manifest in the flesh, taking on the form of His fallen and lost creation (that’s us), living a sinless life, dying a death that He didn’t deserve to cover for our sins on the cross, being buried in a tomb, and then three days later rising up from the dead, leaving behind Him an empty tomb where there once was a corpse.

In doing this, Jesus proved to all who became witnesses of His resurrection that His victory over the curse of sin and death that entered into the world through the fall of the first Adam in Eden was now secure.

This is the good news.

We learned in the last chapter that Jesus was God manifest in the flesh. But let’s examine what God did as God in human form to bring this “good news” to our doorstep.

As we have already detailed: on the cross, Jesus took all of the judgment and all of the penalty for all of the sins that we deserved to pay by death and placed it on Himself. All of the sins of humanity, paid for in full by the sacrifice of Jesus, the Lamb of God.

We made a purchase through sin that we could not afford. But Jesus picked up the tab so that we could walk free.

Through what Jesus did in sacrificing His life for us on the cross, any wrong that I have ever committed and would henceforth ever commit was completely atoned for by Jesus.

In doing this, Jesus flipped the narrative for His creation, turning what once was hopelessness into pure, accessible, unadulterated hope through Him and His gospel. Without this perfect sacrifice of the sinless life of Jesus, there was no one that could meet the requirement to fully pay the fee associated with the price of our redemption.

This is the ultimate display of mercy, of which the Scripture says, _"triumphs over judgment"_ (James 2:13).

Let’s look into this a little bit more as we seek to understand the power of Jesus’ life, death, burial, and resurrection, and what it means for us.

In a previous chapter, we pointed out that until Jesus came to be the final sacrifice for the sins of humanity, in order to temporarily atone for (that’s just a big theological word that means “to make amends for”) the judgment due to mankind for its sins, an offering in the form of an animal sacrifice had to be made.

This sacrifice was officiated by what was called a “High Priest.” This High Priest, on the “Day of Atonement” (the day on which this sacrifice was to be offered to God), would facilitate this sacrifice on behalf of the people, making an offering to the Lord.

The sacrifice was to be made on what was called “the altar.” The altar was a piece of furniture just inside the entrance of a temporary structure that God had instructed His people to build, called “the Tabernacle.” This tabernacle was the place that God would meet with His people, albeit imperfectly, and at arm’s length.

In the Tabernacle, there was a final room in the tent all the way at the end, the last room in the back, which was called the Most Holy Place, or the Holy of Holies. This was a sacred room where God’s presence would dwell in His pure Holiness. And it was only the High Priest who, when he had gone through the proper ritual process of cleansing, could be granted access to enter in.

After carrying out the sacrifice on the altar and then going through this ritual process ordered by God in the Tabernacle, the High Priest would be taken by what many believe was the divine, supernatural assistance of God, through what was called “the veil.”

This veil was a thick, door-less fabric that served as a wall, separating the Most Holy Place from the rest of the Tabernacle structure. This veil ensured that the pure, unadulterated Holy presence of God remained separate from unholy humanity.

This was an act of mercy.

In this “Most Holy Place” dwelt a singular piece of furniture called “the Ark of the Covenant.” This Ark was a wooden structure made of gopher wood and was overlaid with gold.

Inside the Ark were three items that God instructed His people to place inside of it, all of which were symbolic examples of God's active covenant with His people: the Ten Commandments, Aaron’s rod that budded, and a pot of manna.

On top of this Ark were two sculpted angels (cherubim) facing one another, whose wings arched over the top of a small seat that rested on top of the Ark of the Covenant. This seat was called the Mercy Seat.

This Mercy Seat was extremely important, and for the purposes of this conversation, will help us unearth the meaning of what true mercy really is and how the gospel of Jesus was the complete and total fulfillment of God’s mercy toward us all.

When the High Priest, after making the sacrifice on the altar, having passed through the rest of the ritual process to get beyond the veil and into the Most Holy Place… once in the Holy of Holies, he would approach the Mercy Seat and apply the blood that was taken from the animal sacrifice back on the altar in the outer court to the top of the Mercy Seat.

At the very moment that this act would take place, as the shed blood of the sacrifice was applied to the seat of mercy… God would respond to such an act of obedience and faith by pushing back once again the impending judgment that was to come upon all of His people for their sins.

Mercy in the Old Testament was delayed judgment. But in the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross, which was a typification of the altar, by shedding His sinless blood as a sacrifice offered up to God on behalf of His people, this sacrifice did not just delay judgment. But for all who would by grace receive salvation through Jesus through faith in His gospel, this sacrifice would quench judgment completely and entirely.

That my friends is the mercy of God, found in the gospel.

Back to the High Priest.

As we have just seen, the High Priest was a type of mediator. And the job of the High Priest was to facilitate the process of atonement for the sins of the people, standing in a place of mediation between them and God.

This is significant as it pertains to understanding Jesus and His gospel, because in Hebrews 4:14, the Bible tells us that Jesus actually became our _“great High Priest,”_ by whom we obtain mercy.

> _“Seeing then that we have a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need”_ (Hebrews 4:14).

In 1 Timothy 2:5–6, Paul also writes that _“there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom for all.”_

**In Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth, he writes the following very insightful truth:**
> _“Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation, that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself”_ (2 Corinthians 5:18–19).

On the cross, Jesus, who was God in the flesh, reconciling the world back to Himself, was not only the sacrificial lamb on the altar but also the High Priest and mediator, applying the blood to the Mercy Seat.

He was the sacrifice and the one making the sacrifice—all at the same time.

This is why He could so boldly declare in His earthly ministry that, _“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me”_ (John 14:6). Because He knew who and what He was, and what He had come to do… as the Lamb of God, High Priest, and mediator.

I hope that through this picture, you are beginning to see how powerful this gospel message actually is and how significant it is for us. That it is not only good news to hear but good news to experience.

The gospel is powerful. And the gospel is accessible.

It’s not just good news because of what happened two thousand years ago, but it’s good news because of how what happened two thousand years ago is still actively producing something amazing in the right here and right now.

We will talk about this part more in the next chapter.

**Reflection Questions:**
- What truths from this chapter do I need to believe?
- How do the truths from this chapter impact who I am and my personal identity?
- What are the actions that I need to take to live out and apply the truths from within this chapter?
- How can I use the truths from this chapter to help someone else?


In the previous chapter, we learned what the gospel is, but in this chapter, we will begin walking down a road that leads us to understand how we can personally experience the “good news” of Jesus for ourselves. Hang on for the ride; this is really good news!

To begin our conversation on this subject, we will jump into the last portion of Luke’s Gospel account in chapter 24. It is here that we find Jesus reconnecting with His disciples after His resurrection.

Luke tells us in the Book of Acts that immediately after Jesus’ resurrection from the tomb, He was seen by His disciples for a period of forty days. During this time, the Bible tells us that Jesus spoke with them and taught them of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God (Acts 1:3).

Now, we learned a few chapters back that Jesus was not to stay with them forever in physical form. Soon, He would ascend into Heaven, no longer being with them… but through the Holy Spirit that He promised to pour out upon them, He soon would be in them.

This experience of the infilling of God’s Spirit into their hearts would prove to be an essential element of their experience with God as it relates to both personally experiencing the gospel of Jesus as well as the carrying out of His mission in the earth as His disciples.

This is an amazing moment in time, as Jesus is wrapping up His final teachings on earth to His disciples, instilling in them everything that He feels they need to know before He ascends into Heaven.

There was absolutely no way that Jesus was going to leave His disciples without clear instructions. So Jesus spends His time within this forty-day window diligently teaching, equipping, and giving instruction to His disciples for what was to happen next.

While the reality of the gospel had been established, with Jesus having died, been buried, and now being risen from the grave… the message of the gospel had not yet been proclaimed to anyone.

But this was all soon to change.

Let’s take a moment to walk through and examine, bit by bit, a critical passage of Jesus’ final words to His disciples in Luke 24, as Jesus has just concluded this forty-day stretch with His disciples prior to being _“carried up into heaven”_ (Luke 24:51).

We are going to break down Jesus’ words here into four parts in an attempt to more fully understand the important words that He is communicating.

Let’s turn to Luke 24.

> _“Then He said to them, ‘Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. And you are witnesses of these things. Behold, I send the Promise of My Father upon you; but tarry in the city of Jerusalem until you are endued with power from on high’”_ (Luke 24:46–49).

**There are four elements in this address that Jesus is giving to His disciples that we want to highlight and focus on. Let’s examine them together.**

**1. “Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day” (Luke 24:46).**
- In this statement, Jesus is declaring to His disciples that His gospel is the fulfillment of written prophecy; and in saying this, He further cements the truth that for His purpose to be fulfilled in the earth, it was necessary for Him to experience the suffering of a brutal death on the cross, rising from the dead on the third day.

**2. “and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem” (Luke 24:47).**
- Here, Jesus is communicating that not only was it necessary for the foundation of the gospel to be laid through His life, death, burial, and resurrection, but that it would be just as necessary that the message of the gospel be preached and proclaimed to all people.
- It would be through the proclamation of His gospel that people would receive a chance to respond to the good news of their salvation, experiencing both the power and effect of the gospel of Jesus for themselves.
- Not only is Jesus telling them that this opportunity to hear the gospel and respond to it would be necessary, but He is also telling them the specific location that all of this was to transpire for the very first time… “among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.”

**3. “And you are witnesses of these things” (Luke 24:48).**
- Jesus informs His disciples that they would all see the things that He was declaring to them come to pass with their very own eyes.

**4. “Behold, I send the Promise of My Father upon you; but tarry in the city of Jerusalem until you are endued with power from on high” (Luke 24:49).**
- Now comes Jesus’ final words recorded by Luke in His gospel account, which were both informative and also instructional. First, that He was about to send the promise of the Father upon them. (We covered what this is in Chapter 3.) And second, that in order to receive this promise, they would need to wait in Jerusalem until they received the Holy Spirit.

These four elements are critical to pay attention to, as they set the framework in which the Holy Spirit will be poured out upon humanity for the first time following Jesus’ resurrection. It also points to the first time that the gospel message would be presented to the world.

Jesus’ words to His disciples not only lay out where all of this was to take place, but how it was to happen, and what the call to action would be as a result of the hearing of the gospel message.

As we have discussed previously, Luke not only wrote the Gospel of Luke, but he also wrote a Part II to his Gospel, a sequel if you will, which we have already referenced numerous times together: the Book of Acts.

Luke wrote these two accounts of Jesus’ life and the life of His disciples to a man named Theophilus. It is important to note that the end of Luke’s Gospel letter to Theophilus and the very beginning of His second letter, the Book of Acts, have a slight overlap.

In Acts 1, Luke adds some more details to the end of Jesus’ life and ministry on earth just before He ascended into Heaven, meshing with chapter 24 of His first letter, the Gospel of Luke.

Let’s briefly read a portion of the opening segment of Acts 1 and let it bring more confirmation to what we just discussed, and shine more light on what Jesus was saying to His disciples at the end of Luke 24.

**Here is what Luke writes in Acts 1:4–8:**
> _“And being assembled together with them, He commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the Promise of the Father, ‘which,’ He said, ‘you have heard from Me; for John truly baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.’ Therefore, when they had come together, they asked Him, saying, ‘Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?’ And He said to them, ‘It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.’”_ (Acts 1:4–8).

In this passage, Jesus’ words help us more fully understand the core points He shared with His disciples in Luke 24. Jesus wanted His disciples to wait in Jerusalem because from that place, He would send the promise of the Father, which is the baptism of the Holy Spirit, very soon. Additionally, Jesus points out that this baptism of the Holy Spirit would fill the disciples with the supernatural power necessary to be His witnesses in the earth, fulfilling His purpose and calling in their lives to go _“make disciples of all nations”_ (Matthew 28:19).

It was necessary for Jesus to live, suffer, die, be buried, and rise again from the dead. Without this, there would be no gospel message to preach. This was and is the gospel. If all that Jesus had done was just suffer and die, that would be no more than any other man has ever done, or yet even could do. But what separated Jesus from the rest of men (and His good news from any other person’s good news) was that He was more than just a man. He was fully God. As man, He died. But as God, He rose from the dead. While mere mortal men die and stay dead, Jesus’ resurrection is proof that He was more than a mortal man.

If Jesus doesn’t get up from the grave, the gospel message is not good news at all. As a matter of fact, it was Jesus’ triumphant resurrection from the dead that proved, and still proves even to this present day, that He alone is God.

The resurrection of Jesus is not something just to read about. It is a reality to be experienced. An experience which, in just a few short days, all of Jesus’ disciples would partake in for themselves, as they would all be filled with the Holy Spirit, which is the same Spirit that was in Jesus, raising Him up from the grave. Soon they too would experience the resurrection themselves, being filled with the Holy Spirit… God in them… Christ in them… the Hope of Glory (Romans 8:11; Colossians 1:27).

This personal experience of the resurrection of Jesus is the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which equips all disciples of Jesus with the power necessary to fulfill His mission in the earth.

**Just as it was necessary for Jesus to suffer and die, it was also going to be necessary that this gospel be preached, and that all who hear its message would respond. A response Jesus said would include the following:**
1. Repentance
2. Remission of sins in His name (the name of Jesus)

**And that all of this would take place…**
1. In Jerusalem
2. Among all nations

**And that the disciples themselves would personally witness it.**

**Then…**
_"when He had spoken these things, while they watched, He was taken up, and a cloud received Him out of their sight. And while they looked steadfastly toward heaven as He went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel, who also said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will so come in like manner as you saw Him go into heaven’” _(Acts 1:9–11).

**What do the disciples do now?**

They do what they have been doing for the last three or so years that they had been following Jesus. The only thing they knew to do: obey Him and follow His instructions.

So off they go, returning _“to Jerusalem with great joy”_ (Luke 2:52).

**Reflection Questions:**
- What truths from this chapter do I need to believe?
- How do the truths from this chapter impact who I am and my personal identity?
- What are the actions that I need to take to live out and apply the truths from within this chapter?
- How can I use the truths from this chapter to help someone else?


Remember back in Chapter 1 when we read Hebrews 2:3? I think it is important to bring that verse of Scripture back up now… as next, we are about to see this verse in action and use it to examine exactly how it is that we receive salvation.
> _“how shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation, which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed to us by those who heard Him_” (Hebrews 2:3).

At this point together in our journey of meeting Jesus, we have encountered His presence, heard His gospel, and the salvation that it brings. But now, we will begin to add another layer to the journey… as we observe together how we respond to and freely receive the salvation that Jesus’ gospel provides.

Let’s take a moment to have another quick Bible study, examining a few of the key things that Jesus said about salvation in the Gospels. We want to pay close attention to what He says, as soon we will examine in the Book of Acts how the disciples of Jesus confirmed what Jesus taught with great accuracy.

**Salvation is a New Birth**
> _“Jesus answered and said to him, ‘Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.’ Nicodemus said to Him, ‘How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?’ Jesus answered, ‘Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’”_ (John 3:3–7).

Here, Jesus is secretly meeting with a Pharisee named Nicodemus. Being a Pharisee, Nicodemus was supposed to be in opposition to Jesus, and it would not have been a good look for Nicodemus to be seen spending time with Jesus. In this secret meeting, Jesus tells Nicodemus that in order to see and even enter into the kingdom of God, he must be “born again.”

Nicodemus is confused, wondering how in the world he was supposed to, as an adult, re-experience birth. But Jesus clarifies to Nicodemus that this new birth that He is talking about is not simply a do-over of a natural birth, but a new spiritual re-birthing for the soul of man. He then goes on to tell Nicodemus that this new birth includes the birthing of water and spirit. And in the event that Nicodemus was at all unsure about whether or not this new birth was something important or essential, Jesus caps off His comments with a lock-tight statement, saying, “You must be born again.”

**Salvation Would Include Repentance & Forgiveness of Sins in His Name**
> _“And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem”_ (Luke 24:47).

As we have already covered, just prior to His ascension, Jesus tells His disciples that when He pours out His Spirit, there would be the accompanied preaching of repentance, along with the proclaiming of an experience that would provide forgiveness of sins _“in His name.”_ Of this name, Acts 4:12 says, it is the _“only name under heaven, given among men, whereby we must be saved.”
_
**Belief & Baptism**
> _“And He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned”_ (Mark 16:15–16).

Here, within the context of Jesus commissioning His disciples to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature (living person), Jesus identifies that there was going to be a necessary response to the preaching of His gospel. The gospel was more than just something to simply hear, but something that must be responded to in faith. And we know that faith requires action to prove that it is real and alive (James 2:14–26).

In detailing the type of response that would be necessary upon hearing the gospel, Jesus does not point to mere mental assent or the act of verbal confession alone as a proper response to His gospel. Instead, He points to true belief, evidenced in the immediate response of water baptism in His name, which is to be born of the water (John 3:5).

Mark 16 then goes on to detail the following words of Jesus on the back half of verse 16: that those in turn who do not believe would be condemned, meaning to be judged. Notice that Jesus does not include baptism in the inverted negative repetition of His first comment. For example, He did not say, “he that believes not and is baptized not will be condemned.”

Why?

Because baptism is the proper response to true belief.

Simply put, those who do not believe have no need of being baptized; therefore, in the negative repetition of Jesus’ statement, it is necessarily omitted.

**The Baptism of the Holy Spirit & Power**
> _“…wait for the Promise of the Father, “which,” He said, “you have heard from Me; for John truly baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” “But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you”_ (Acts 1:4–5; 8).

> _“On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’ But this He spoke concerning the Spirit, whom those believing in Him would receive; for the Holy Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified”_ (John 7:37–39).

**In the above two passages, Jesus shines a light on what He refers to as the “baptism of the Holy Spirit.”**
- This spiritual baptism is a promise from the Father for all who believe in Him as the Scripture has said. (Remember, there is not only water involved in this new birth, but spirit as well.)
- This Spirit was to become available to all humanity once Jesus was glorified (meaning that He had ascended into Heaven and sat down in a place of power and authority).
- This experience of the baptism of the Holy Spirit would be like a drink of living water that quenches the deepest thirst of the soul. And when received, it would be like a spiritual river flowing out of the innermost being of one’s heart (more on this in just a moment).

**They Will Speak With New Tongues**
> _“And these signs will follow those who believe: In My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues”_ (Mark 16:17).

Immediately following Jesus’ instructions that those who believe must be baptized, He begins to list a set of signs that would follow those who believe. In this list of signs, Jesus tells us that all who believe _“will speak with new tongues.”_

Now that we have spent a moment reviewing a considerable amount of what Jesus has said about salvation and the experience that it provides, let’s turn our attention to those who heard Him and walked with Him—His disciples—and see how they confirmed to us what Jesus said.

Now that Jesus has ascended into Heaven, the disciples have returned to Jerusalem, just as Jesus instructed them, and are now awaiting the promise of the Father to be poured out upon them: to be born of the Spirit into the kingdom of God.

Uniquely, at this particular moment in which all of this is transpiring, there is a particular festival going on in Jerusalem, called the “Feast of Pentecost.” On Pentecost, Jews from all over the world, from all nations scattered abroad, would return home to Jerusalem fifty days after the Passover to commemorate the moment when God made His covenant with Israel.

However, none of them had any idea what monumental moment was about to take place during the time of this year’s Pentecost feast. On this year’s Pentecost celebration, as they were to be celebrating God’s covenant with them, Jesus was going to make good on His covenant, but this time, by bringing a new covenant to them… but not only to them. This new covenant would stretch _“to all who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call”_ (Acts 2:39).

This special day of Jesus pouring out His Spirit on humanity during the Feast of Pentecost would become the birth date of the new covenant and the launch of the New Testament Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is exactly what happens.

Let’s tune into what Luke records in Acts 2 to see firsthand how all of this unfolds. I know we have already read this passage, but let’s read it together again.

> _“When the Day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. Then there appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire, and one sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance”_ (Acts 2:1–4).

This was not just some passing casual moment or phenomenon, but this was a monumental moment in history for all of humanity. From this moment forward, everything would change for all people everywhere who would hear His gospel and choose to believe.

The Holy Spirit has been poured out just as Jesus said. The Helper. The Spirit of Truth. The baptism of the Holy Spirit. Through the Spirit, Jesus has now come back to His people and fulfilled what He told them that He would do. He would not leave them as orphans but would send the Holy Spirit. He would come to them and not just be with them but be within them.

This is the baptism of the Holy Spirit that Jesus told them they would receive _“not many days from now,”_ as they have indeed experienced the infilling of the power from on high, and the rivers of living water that Jesus spoke of are now flowing out of their innermost beings (John 7:37–39).

This moment on the Day of Pentecost, as Jesus pours out His Spirit, was the fulfillment of His promise to come to them in John 14:18 when He told them that He would once again come to them. This Pentecost moment was the answer to the longing of Jesus’ disciples to be reunited with Him, their God, face-to-face, through the Spirit.

Can you imagine? You have been walking with Jesus for three years, you have learned that He is God, and then all of a sudden He tells you that He is going to leave? The heartbreak of the disciples must have been palpable. But the heartbreak didn’t last long, quickly turning into joy when they learned that not only would He one day return for them and gather them to Himself to dwell together forever in Heaven; but that if they would just go wait in Jerusalem, He would come be with them once again, but this time within them.

I want to make note here before we progress that this is what Pentecost is: the full expression of Jesus among us.

What did it look like for Jesus to reunite with His disciples through His Spirit? What did it look like for them to meet Jesus once again, and for all who had not yet known Him to meet Him for the first time? It looked like what happened on Pentecost. On the Day of Pentecost, Jesus both made good on His promise and responded to the longing of His for reunification with their God by pouring out His Spirit.

I want to make a clear statement here that will be like a line drawn in the sand for those who desire to defend their present experience with God as all that there is to be experienced of God, while for others who long to take another step deeper and further into the water, it will be an exciting and hopeful invitation.

Okay, here it goes.

If we do not have this same experience among us that the disciples of Jesus had on the Day of Pentecost, we do not have His full expression in operation among us.
And Peter backs me up.

> _“For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call”_ (Acts 2:39).

This is not something that is “for the Pentecostal denomination.” This is for everyone. And if this is what Jesus said I should experience, and what the disciples of Jesus experienced in the Bible, then I must experience it too, for myself. You too.

Everything that Jesus said would happen did. And it did so just like He said it would. But this is not the end of the story. The story is just getting started. What has just happened in Jesus pouring out the Holy Spirit on His disciples is just the beginning of what was to unfold on this momentous day called Pentecost.

There was more that Jesus had spoken that was yet to be fulfilled and confirmed by His disciples.

Because of the Feast of Pentecost currently taking place in Jerusalem, _“there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men, from every nation under heaven”_ (Acts 2:5). And when these people heard of the ruckus that was going on down the road, they went to see what was transpiring among them.

I mean, wouldn’t you?

When they arrived, they “were confused,” because when they strolled onto the scene they began hearing people speaking in the native languages of their lands from which they had just journeyed to get to Jerusalem for the Feast of Pentecost.

Some were _“amazed and marveled,”_ while others were _“perplexed, saying to one another, ‘Whatever could this mean?’”_ (Acts 2:6–7; 12).

Alongside the interested were “others mocking,” as not all were impressed by what was taking place, saying that those who were experiencing this power of God from on high were _"full of new wine”_ (Acts 2:13). Basically, they were accusing those who were being filled with the Holy Spirit of being drunk.

But of course, Peter—who had received from Jesus the keys to the kingdom of Heaven in Matthew 16:18–19—was not going to let this slide without bringing clarity as to what was taking place in their midst, and using it as an opportunity to proclaim Jesus’ good news to all who would listen and hopefully believe.

So Peter immediately stands up, bold and full of the Holy Spirit, and begins to declare to all of the people that what they were observing was not the drunkenness of men, but instead was the fulfillment of what the prophet Joel had written many years ago in the Book of Joel chapter 2, saying, “It shall come to pass in the last days, says God, that I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh;” and that _“whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved”_ (Acts 2:17, 21).

Devout Jews, who likely knew this prophecy from Joel very well, perked up their ears and leaned in to hear what else it was that Peter had to say about this unusual spiritual occurrence that was transpiring around them.

As soon as Peter had their interest, he preached the gospel of Jesus Christ to them for the very first time after Jesus had ascended into Heaven.

He tells them that this Jesus they had both seen and heard had been crucified and died. Now this part many of the hearers were aware of, but what Peter was to say next came as news to them all… as he continued to preach to them that this death that Jesus experienced was not the end of His life… because God had raised Him up from the dead. And now, what they are witnessing, which some of them had considered to be drunkenness, seeing and hearing people speaking in other languages that they had never learned before on their own accord, was the very promise of the Father that Jesus had now poured out upon all who would believe.

As soon as Peter preached this message of the gospel to them—Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection—the Bible explains that _“when they heard this, they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Men and brethren, what shall we do?’”_ (Acts 2:37).

When they heard what Peter had to say about the gospel of Jesus, they were convicted. Have you ever felt this before? Maybe you can identify with what is going on in those who are hearing Peter preach.

Maybe right now, your own heart is feeling a tug toward God, a deep sense within you that is compelling you to take a step in faith toward Jesus. It is a feeling in your soul, deep within the seat of your conscience, that you need to respond to God, and to do so urgently. Maybe you have felt this before, but just didn’t know what it meant, or even what to do with it.

That’s okay. Neither did they. And this is why Peter begins to share with them the set of words that follow next, as he is about to tell us exactly what to do with the conviction that we feel, in response to the gospel message of Jesus that we’ve heard.

In response to this question, “What must we do?”… Peter, having the keys to the kingdom of Heaven, and having been taught by Jesus for three years, and even forty days after His resurrection, stands up with the other eleven disciples of Jesus Christ and begins to speak.

But before we listen to his words, I want us to pay attention to two very important elements. First, if what Peter was declared was wrong, then someone among the other eleven disciples of Jesus would have spoken up. All these men were so serious about living for Jesus and proclaiming His good news that they all (minus John) died as martyrs for Jesus and His gospel. I say that to reiterate the significance of Peter’s words here. What Peter is about to say has the unified backing of the rest of those who Jesus has taught and trained. In what Peter says next, he is about to give us very clear instructions, as one of (and in unity with) _“those who heard Him.”_ Confirming to us how to respond to the gospel of Jesus and experience _“so great a salvation”_ in Jesus (Hebrews 2:3).

**Here is what Peter says:**
> _“Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit”_ (Acts 2:38).

Does this confirm what Jesus said in Luke 24:47? Let’s take a look.

> **Jesus:** “and that **repentance**” (Luke 24:47)
> **Peter:** “**Repent**” (Acts 2:38)

> **Jesus:** “and **remission of sins** should be preached **in His name**” (Luke 24:47)
> **Peter:** “let every one of you be baptized **in the name of Jesus Christ** for the **remission of sins**” (Acts 2:38)

> **Jesus:** “to all nations beginning at Jerusalem” (Luke 24:47)
> **Peter:** This message, which preached on Pentecost, certainly fits the bill.

_**It does.**_

Just like Jesus said, the gospel message was preached, repentance was called for, forgiveness of sins through baptism in the name of Jesus Christ (His name) was proclaimed, and the outpouring of the promise of the Father, which is the baptism of the Holy Spirit, a promise for all people… was not only received in convincing detail, being confirmed to us through Peter and by the affirmation of the rest of the disciples of Jesus Christ who heard Him.

This is the fulfillment of Jesus’ life, ministry, and mission. To restore His creation, once again, to His design and plan for them all along. The same one that Adam and Eve once had with Him in Eden. To have fellowship with Him. And now, as a result of Jesus’ gospel, we too can dwell in that delightful place of the presence of God… which is no longer a place in which to live, but a person Who lives within us. Christ in us, the hope of Glory.

**This gospel message is for you. It’s for me. It is for all of us. All we have to do to receive it, and in faith-filled obedience respond, just like Jesus said, which Peter confirmed.**
1. Genuinely repenting and turning to Jesus as a result of belief in His gospel.
2. Being baptized by immersion in water, in the only saving name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our sins—being born of the water.
3. And allowing Jesus Himself to fill us with the baptism of the Holy Spirit… being born of the Spirit, which is a promise for all who God draws to Himself.


**Have you repented and turned to follow Jesus?**
If not, take a moment right now as you are reading this and do it. Tell God how truly sorry you are for the sins that you have committed in your life, acknowledging how much you really need Him, and make a commitment to make a 180º turn in your life… no longer following your own ways, but His… desiring to become a true follower of Jesus.

**Have you been baptized in the name of Jesus?**
If you have never been baptized, very specifically, with someone saying “in the name of Jesus Christ,” calling on the name of the Lord at your baptism, you need to be baptized in Jesus’ name according to the Scriptures. Many have been baptized in water, having Jesus’ command of Matthew 28:19 verbally repeated over them at their baptism saying “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” but Matthew 28:19 was not a formula to repeat; it was a command to obey.

**Have you been filled with the baptism of the Holy Ghost?**
If not, I want you to know that this is a gift from God. You do not have to earn it or work for it; all you have to do is believe and receive it by faith. You can receive this gift from God anywhere, anytime.

Maybe Jesus will pour out this gift on you right now!

If you believe and are ready to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit, lift your hands right where you are, lift your face to Jesus, and begin to tell Him how thankful you are for His gospel, His love, and His gift of the Holy Spirit which He has promised to you.

As you do this, you will begin to feel Jesus, and when you do, just continue to speak to Him, and He will fill you with the Holy Spirit. You will know this as you will begin to share in the same experience that the disciples of Jesus did in the Book of Acts, as you begin speaking in a language that you yourself have never learned, as the Spirit alone gives you the ability to do so.

**The same experience that the disciples of Jesus experienced on Pentecost is a promise for YOU!**

**Reflection Questions:**
- What truths from this chapter do I need to believe?
- How do the truths from this chapter impact who I am and my personal identity?
- What are the actions that I need to take to live out and apply the truths from within this chapter?
- How can I use the truths from this chapter to help someone else?


Section VI – Now What?

Our merciful God became like us so that through His gospel, He might make us like Him once again.

He became the sacrifice that we couldn’t make ourselves so that we could be restored through Him, once again, to fellowship. To be returned to His image and likeness, providing us access to that face-to-face, Edenic closeness that we were once made for.

This is the whole point of meeting Jesus.

To encounter Him, hear His gospel, and respond to it, being born again.

This is what Paul means when he writes, _“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new”_ (2 Corinthians 5:17). All through Jesus.

I want to have you read the following verses of Scripture that Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:17–21, just to let this fully sink into your heart right now.

> _“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation, that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him”_ (2 Corinthians 5:17–21).

This is the power of meeting Jesus!

When you meet Jesus, who is the image of God, God manifest in the flesh, you are meeting, through Him, all that God is!

Through Jesus, we have access to God who is our Father, through His Holy Spirit.
This is why meeting Jesus is so much more than a coffee date with a friend or a casual lunch hangout with a co-worker. It’s not like meeting a new friend or anyone else in the community.

It’s so much bigger than that.

Meeting Jesus is meeting our Creator, who has become our Savior. The same one who made the world that you and I live within. The same one who fashioned the stars in the sky that we often marvel at. The same one who dwells among the galaxies in the cosmos. He has made Himself accessible to you and me.

I still can’t get over that. I hope you don’t either.

But meeting Jesus always leads somewhere, as Jesus is always calling us deeper into the river, closer into relationship, and further along His way and His path. As He, who is the light and guide along the path, invites us just another step closer, and just a little bit deeper.

This is why those who meet Jesus and receive His invitation to “follow Him” must choose to accept His invitation. Because meeting Jesus, while it is monumental and deeply significant, it’s just a toe dip into the water of all that He has available for us.

We can even look to people in the Scriptures, such as a man many refer to as the rich young ruler, who met Jesus, but because he was unwilling to follow Jesus in the specific ways that Jesus was requiring of him, he lost out on the opportunity. Not because Jesus withheld it, but because he chose to not follow (Mark 10:22).

Those who meet Jesus and receive the opportunity to experience the transforming power of His gospel by being born again and becoming new creations in Christ have the opportunity to be restored into the image of God that they were created in, by following Jesus and, as we discussed in Chapter 2, becoming like Him.

This invitation that Jesus gives us to follow Him includes three key ingredients that we all must make sure to carefully observe.

To unearth these three ingredients, we must turn to Luke’s account of Jesus’ invitation to follow Him, found in Luke 9:23, where Jesus tells us what we must do if we are indeed to _“come after Him”_ and be His disciples.

> _“Then He said to them all, ‘If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me’”_ (Luke 9:23).

Truly, if we are going to follow Him, we must follow this recipe.

If not, while we may be following something or someone, maybe something that someone heard from someone, it may not truly be Him. As we learned earlier in the book, if we don’t follow Jesus, Jesus’ way, we may be in danger of following religious patterns produced through a game of spiritual telephone, instead of truly following Jesus Himself.

So therefore, if we want to live the life Jesus is inviting us to live, we must carefully follow His recipe.

Have you ever baked a cake?

Often, the difference between being pleased with what you pull out of the oven and not is whether or not you followed the recipe.

What you put in is what you get out.

If you set out to bake a chocolate cake, but in preparing the cake for the oven, you leave out the single key ingredient of chocolate, then when you go to retrieve your cake from the oven, you will be sadly disappointed to realize that all you have made is just a yellow cake.

Just as every ingredient matters in baking a proper cake, so does it, in even greater measure, matter that we include all  the ingredients of following Jesus in our journey of attempting to do so.

**The ingredients?**
1. Deny yourself.
2. Take up your cross daily.
3. Follow Him.

Those are the ingredients if we want to pull out the right cake, which ultimately is to become like Him.

When we keep this in mind, the first ingredient of this recipe that Jesus gives us makes all the more sense.

If I am going to become like Him, I have to cease my attempts to be like me.

I have to deny myself as Jesus said. And in this denial of myself and my personal image and likeness, I prepare myself to take on His.

Skipping over this key step, as so many often do, is one of the main reasons why people are disappointed in the cake that they pull out of the oven after having tried to become disciples of Jesus.

Why?

We set out to bake His flavor of cake, but we didn’t take out ours.

If we want to look like, be like, and live like Jesus, if we want the finished version of the proverbial cake of our lives to taste of the flavor of Christ, then we mustn’t ignore the vital step of removing ourselves from the recipe.

That’s the first ingredient. But let’s look at the last one.

We must “follow” Him.

But this means following Him. Not a version of Him that we think He is satisfied with. Not a model of Him that we heard about from someone else, who heard about it from someone else, who also heard about it from someone else.

We must follow Him according to the way that He has detailed to us in the Scriptures, whereby we also see His disciples live out this very same way in real time.

True following leads to becoming. And this is where, as we discussed in Chapter 2, real Christianity finds its footing.

You may have noticed that I skipped over the middle ingredient, which is to take up our cross. This was not on accident. I did so on purpose, as it is my personal opinion that this particular ingredient, is key to linking our attempts of self-denial, to the possibility of truly becoming like Jesus as His followers.

Without this central ingredient of taking up our cross… while there can be self-denial, there will be no becoming like Jesus. Why? Because we didn’t take up our cross.

But what does that even mean?

The cross, as we have learned, is the mechanism by which Jesus was executed. It was two pieces of wood, fixed together, perpendicular to one another. On this cross, the executor would lay down the subject that was to be executed, affixing the person to the structure of the cross, and then lifting the cross up off the ground for him to hang from and be tortured until their eventual death.

Sounds brutal? It was. The cross was brutal. There is no way around that.

And can I be honest? This was by design. I must break it to you that the cross didn’t stop being brutal. I know that now, in the current mainstream Christian context, the cross has become a symbol of triumphant victory in much of the world. And it is. There is no denying that. Jesus conquered death at the place of its own power. He used an instrument of death to secure life. All of this is absolutely, unequivocally true.

But the cross is still the cross. An instrument of execution.

Many who became subject to the cross as a means of execution would, by the end of their execution, be in such bad physical shape that they would be hardly unrecognizable.

This is exactly what happened to Jesus.

In the Book of Isaiah, the prophet issues a prophecy about Jesus and the sacrifice that He was to make one day to redeem all of humanity back into fellowship with God. In this prophecy, he makes a very interesting statement that I want to key in on here together for the next few moments.

> _“His visage was marred more than any man”_ (Isaiah 52:14).

Let’s break this down briefly.

That word visage means “appearance or form.” That is Jesus’ image. And the word marred means “to ruin, to destroy, or to disfigure.” That is what happened to Jesus’ image on the cross.

This prophetic writing from Isaiah is pointing to a moment where the Messiah would be subjected to some type of process that would completely ruin His image.

Just like would happen in the Old Testament with the sacrificial animal on the Day of Atonement, Jesus Himself became the dismembered living sacrifice for us all.

In doing so, He allowed His image to be marred (literally “ruined”) on the cross, so that you and I could once again have access to God… just like Adam did all the way back in Eden.

But this attempt at restoration of fellowship would be null and void if there was no true pathway of restoration for humanity to get back into the “image” and “likeness” of God.

I’ll explain.

As we learned earlier in this book, if man isn’t like God, he can’t be close. Remember, this was the premise of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden in the first place. They were no longer holy as He was holy. They were no longer pure as He was pure. And therefore, their lack of purity and holiness, among He who is purity and holiness, created a situation where He could no longer share space with them. As He cannot purely exist with what is not like Him.

**The Bible says it this way:**
> _“What fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? And what communion has light with darkness? And what accord has Christ with Belial? Or what part has a believer with an unbeliever? And what agreement has the temple of God with idols?_” (2 Corinthians 6:14–16).

**Paul goes on to also say…**
> _“For you are the temple of the living God. As God has said: ‘I will dwell in them and walk among them. I will be their God, and they shall be My people. Therefore, come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord. Do not touch what is unclean, and I will receive you. I will be a Father to you, and you shall be My sons and daughters, says the LORD Almighty.’ Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God”_ (2 Corinthians 6:16–18, 7:1).

In these verses, we see highlighted the themes of God’s desire to have fellowship with us as His children, but in order to do so, we must first come out of what is not like Him.

But where we could no longer become like Him ourselves, He became like us.

When we could not atone for our wrongdoings and our sins, He became the perfect atonement for it all. When we could not find a suitable sacrifice to completely pay for the penalty of our own sins, He became the perfect sacrifice, taking the penalty of our sins upon Himself.

This cross became the altar where the spotless Lamb of God was slain, becoming the final suitable sacrifice, the sacrificial Lamb of God, slain for the foundation of the world, which takes away the sins of the world.

All of this, so that we could have access once again to God, having a pathway back to His image and likeness.

But how?

By following His recipe.

Denying ourselves, taking up our cross daily, and following Him.

We can make a lot of sense out of the first and the last ingredients of the recipe. But often, it’s the middle one that really trips us up.

> _“Take up your cross daily.”_

Why is this one so hard?

Because while there is some pain in self-denial, there’s a lot of pain on the cross in the middle.

There was pain in Gethsemane when Jesus fully submitted to the cross that He knew was soon to happen. Even so much so that the Bible tells us that He sweat great drops of blood, as His body, under extreme stress, experiences hematidrosis, a rare physical phenomenon that occurs when the blood vessels which supply the sweat glands, rupture under extreme physical or emotional stress, allowing blood to exit along with sweat.

But the real pain was coming on the cross.

To deny myself, I must recognize that my image isn’t like His, and thereby reject it.

To follow Him, and thus become like Him, I must take up my cross. I must allow, just like He did, my own visage (image) to be marred beyond recognition (literally ruined). Then and only, can His image be formed in me.

Jesus doesn’t compete with our image. He doesn’t want to share space with it. He wants to ruin it. Not in some sadistic way. But out of mercy. So that He may form His perfect and holy image in us… that we have fellowship with Him, once again.

Jesus sacrificed His image on the cross, to give it to us. And thereby, I must also sacrifice my image on my own proverbial cross, to truly receive His.

This often missing link is a central key to the return of God’s people to true fellowship with Him through Christ, who is the image of God, uniting us to Him in holiness, through restoring us once again to His image and His likeness.

This taking up our cross is the dismembering of our image to an unrecognizable, irreparable form.

It is exactly what Paul meant when he wrote in Galatians 2:20, _“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”_

Oftentimes, those who meet Jesus and then, in turn, walk away from Him after their initial encounter with Him and His gospel, returning to their old way, old image, and old nature, is rooted in somehow missing the key of the work of the cross in their lives. The often missing ingredient.

If we are to follow Jesus, all roads lead to Him, but all by way of the cross.

Skipping the cross means that though you may have denied yourself at one time, you did not allow the cross to ruin the image that you denied. And thereby, very easily, we can then return back to the form of old selves that existed before Jesus’ good news had great effect in our lives.

My friend, if we are going to truly live this full and abundant life with Jesus, we must first allow the work of the cross in our life to have its full effect. And then, as Jesus says, we must visit this cross daily, allowing our image to remain ruined so that His image can truly be formed in us.

Paul understood this when he wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:31 these three words: _“I die daily”_

At the cross, Jesus let His image be ruined so that through Him, we may once again be remade into the same image that the first Adam was made in… who was made in the image of the second Adam that was to come… Jesus.

We must allow our visage to be marred daily on our own cross as we embrace the voluntary self-destruction of our own image… which is often the missing link to truly having His image formed in us once again.

Then, and only then, can we “be holy,” as He is holy. Coming out from likeness and sameness with the world to instead walk in sameness with His difference. Holy as He is Holy. And thereby, once again, walking in the daily, close, intimate, face-to-face fellowship that is available with our God.

**My friend, don’t skip the cross.**

**Reflection Questions:**
- What truths from this chapter do I need to believe?
- How do the truths from this chapter impact who I am and my personal identity?
- What are the actions that I need to take to live out and apply the truths from within this chapter?
- How can I use the truths from this chapter to help someone else?


What a journey we have been on together!

My prayer is that on this journey, no matter where you began from, you have learned something new about Jesus that has changed your life and that you have been able to know Him more than you did before you ever picked up this book.

I pray that whether you began this journey standing on the bank of the river or out in the water up to your waist, that now you are standing even if just a little deeper in the river of God than you were before you’ve ever been.

Now, as we close, I get to tell you one of the most important things that I can tell anyone who has truly met Jesus.

And that is this…

Those who meet Jesus create spaces for others to do the same.

That’s right! You can lead someone to have the very same experience that you have had with Jesus. And as a matter of fact, this is exactly how we fulfill God’s will and purpose in our lives.

Helping others meet and then become followers of Jesus is central to the purpose that Jesus has for each and every one of our lives. If you are looking for your purpose or your calling, this is it. Look no further.

And for that matter, nothing that God will ever call you to do additionally from this point will ever get in the way of this call. As anything that God may call you to do here and out will be a means to further support and fulfill this foundational call that He has given to all who have met Him.

In fact, this has been God’s strategy since the beginning of His church.

I’ll prove it to you! Or, rather, we will let the Bible do the proving. I’ll just read it with you.

Just before Jesus ascended into Heaven, He gave His disciples a commission. And that commission was to _“Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature"_ (Mark 16:15).

Simple enough, right?

Essentially, what Jesus was saying was… those of you who have met me... I am sending you out to go create spaces for others to do the same.

“Me? Lead someone to meet Jesus?”

YES! You can. And God is telling you to go do it.

As a matter of fact, God has given you supernatural power to do so!

This is exactly what Jesus was saying in Acts 1:8 to His disciples when He said that they would _“receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon” them, and that they would “be witnesses to” Him “in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth”_ (Acts 1:8).

Jesus was saying that when we receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit, He was, through that experience, going to give us everything that we needed to help other people meet Him too.

**Meeting Jesus has a twofold purpose:**
1. To reconcile you back to Himself.
2. To empower and send you out to help others experience the same.

This is what people who have met Jesus do. Full stop.

Or, at least, in Jesus’ eyes, are supposed to be doing.

I know that there are some streams of Christianity that don’t call for disciples of Jesus to embrace the missional call that Jesus gave in Mark 16 and Matthew 28, maybe as radically as I am in this book. But do we really want to dilute the purpose that Jesus has for His church, just to satisfy our present comforts?

Let me just reference briefly a writing from Paul in Ephesians 4:11, where Paul writes that the reason God has supplied the equipping gifts of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers to the church… was _“for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry”_ (Ephesians 4:12).

Yep. You read that right.

The saints (which if you have been born again, you are) are to be equipped to do the work of the ministry.

What ministry?

To create spaces for people to meet and follow Jesus.

**Jesus was so seriously burdened by this that the only prayer request that He ever made in the Gospels was this one:**
> _“The harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest”_ (Matthew 9:37–38).

This is Jesus’ plan to save the world.

To enlist and empower those who have met Him to create spaces for others to meet Him too. And then, those who have met Him, in turn go out to create spaces for others to meet Him.

Repeat, repeat, repeat.

This is how the disciples in the Book of Acts, without the assistance of modern technological advancements such as the internet, the telephone, email, social media, streaming, and more _“turned the world upside down”_ (Acts 17:6).

Because one person who met Jesus turned around and helped someone else do the same.

There is a special supernatural assistance and grace from God that will surely come into your life as you fulfill Jesus’ commission to help other people meet Him and become His followers.

Jesus will help you. His Spirit is within you. He will give you the words to say, the places to go, and highlight the people to talk to.

In the Book of Acts 4:33, Luke writes that _“with great power the apostles gave witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And great grace was upon them all”_ (Acts 4:33).

Power? What power? That is the power of the Holy Spirit! And as they put this great power to its function, being witnesses of the resurrection (which is the gospel of Jesus), God poured out great grace upon them all.

The word great here in the original Greek language in which Luke penned it means “mega” or “loud”! When we partake in Jesus’ mission to help more people meet Him and, in turn, be transformed by His gospel, and ultimately become His disciples who follow Him, we become eligible recipients of the great grace of God for the task.

Will you do it?
Will you accept Jesus’ call?
Will you go out into the harvest fields that Jesus declared are _“white, ripe and ready for harvest”_ and help somebody meet Him? (John 4:35).

If you do, I want to warn you. You won’t be able to stop. And your life will be filled with an abundance of joy, peace, hope, and the continual overflowing presence of God.

Again, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Now, my final words to you in this journey together.

Mold grows in the dark, and algae grows in stagnant water.

Jesus’ invitation to meet and then follow Him is an invitation to _“walk in the light as He is in the light”_ (1 John 1:7), and to let the river of God’s Spirit, which is His _“rivers of living water,”_ flow out of our hearts (John 7:38).

This is your moment to let your light shine and to let the river of God flow through you!

This missional life in Jesus, of helping others to meet Him, is part of the recipe that keeps the flow moving and the light from being hidden.

As you live this way, in helping others meet Jesus, you will truly discover what it means to have met Jesus yourself and having become His disciple.

A Christian. A true first-century disciple in the twenty-first century. A true follower, and disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So, take whatever tools and knowledge that you have gained from this book and help someone else meet Him as we all participate together in Jesus’ kingdom mission to see **His kingdom come and His will to be done on earth as it is in Heaven** (Matthew 6:10).

**Reflection Questions:**
- What truths from this chapter do I need to believe?
- How do the truths from this chapter impact who I am and my personal identity?
- What are the actions that I need to take to live out and apply the truths from within this chapter?
- How can I use the truths from this chapter to help someone else?


Section VII – Bonus

As we have seen in our study of Scripture throughout the course of this book, baptism by immersion in water with the invoking of the saving name of Jesus Christ, is essential for all who believe in Jesus.

We who believe must be baptized, and we must do so in His name: “Jesus.”

This is the biblical record, proven by the actions of the disciples of Jesus Christ in the Book of Acts, as they went forth to obey Jesus’ commands… as every example of water baptism found within the confines of Scripture is carried out in “Jesus’ name,” or the “name of the Lord” (which is Jesus).

The greatest question that arises then is usually one that comes with reference to Jesus’ words to His disciples in Matthew 28:19, where Jesus told His disciples to _“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”_

The question usually looks something like this (and is a valid question to ask): “If Jesus told His disciples to baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then why did His disciples seemingly deviate from that command?”

First, we have to acknowledge what Jesus said. Yes. He absolutely told His disciples to baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but was His command a formula to be repeated? Or a command to obey? If it was a formula to be repeated, then yes, the disciples of Jesus would absolutely have been (based on their action in the Book of Acts) deviating from His command, but if His words were a command and not a formula, then could it have been just that the disciples were simply obeying Jesus?

When Jesus’ disciples went forth to obey the command that Jesus gave them in Matthew 28, they did so by baptizing believers in the name of Jesus, calling on the name of the Lord at baptism.

Is this error? Were the disciples directly disobeying Jesus? Or were they obeying Him?

No, no, and yes.

Jesus told His disciples to _“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” _(Matthew 28:19), and that is exactly what they did. Jesus said to go baptize in the _“name.”_ So they did, in the name of _“Jesus.”_ Why? Because they knew what name He was talking about. He had spent copious amounts of time teaching them, pre- and post-Resurrection, and they had received great revelation from God about who Jesus was (Matthew 16:17).

Later on in the epistles, Jesus’ disciples wrote the revelation that they understood from God: that God was in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:19), and that in Him (Jesus) dwelt all the fullness of God in bodily form (Colossians 2:9). They knew that when they saw Jesus, they were looking at the Father because the Father was in Him (John 14:9–11). They knew that He was the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15) and the express image of the invisible God (Hebrews 1:3). They knew (because they wrote it) that He was the Son, and His name—the name of the Son—was to be called _“Jesus”_ (Matthew 1:21). They knew that He had told them that the Spirit was going to be sent “in His name” (John 14:26). They knew the writings of Isaiah that prophesied about His coming declared Him, the Son and Messiah, to be the _“everlasting Father”_ (Isaiah 9:6).

So, with this understanding, when Jesus looks at His disciples and tells them to go baptize _“in the name”_ (singular) _“of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,”_ He meant to go baptize in His name, which is the “name” of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Uniquely, Father is not a name; neither is Son, or Holy Spirit for that matter. These are all titles, descriptions of roles and attributes, but none of them are names. So then, what is the name?

**Jesus is the name.**

> _“Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved”_ (Acts 4:12).

To go a layer deeper, the Bible tells us in regards to baptism that we are buried with Jesus at baptism into His death (Colossians 2:12; Romans 6:4). This is important for us to acknowledge as we seek to understand the necessity of Jesus’ name as it relates to baptism. How? We know that the Father, which was the divine Spirit of God within Jesus, didn’t die; if He had, the gospel has no power. God did not die. As we have already covered, Jesus was fully God, but also fully man. As a man, Jesus died, but as the eternal Spirit and Father of all creation, which was within Him, He did not die. The flesh of the man Jesus died, but the Spirit of God that was within Him—the fullness of God (Colossians 2:9)—did not die. This is why the Scripture says that _“there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom for all”_ (1 Timothy 2:5–6). God did not die, but the man in whom He became to redeem us, the mediator and High Priest, did, as He became the sacrifice which atoned for all of our sins, and God raised Him (the sacrificial lamb of God—the man Jesus Christ) from the dead.

Here’s my point: the Bible helps us to understand that the Father didn’t die. And the Bible also tells us that we are _“buried with Jesus at baptism into His death” _(Colossians 2:12; Romans 6:4).

If the Father didn’t die and wasn’t buried, and we are baptized into Jesus’ death, being buried with Him at baptism, then we can’t be buried with someone who hasn’t died and been buried. And since the Father, who is the eternal Holy Spirit, did not die, how can we be baptized into a death He did not die? Simply, we can’t.

It was _“God”_ who _“was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself,”_ the _“one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom for all”_ (2 Corinthians 5:19; 1 Timothy 2:5–6). Jesus. Of whom the Bible says that _“there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved”_ (Acts 4:12). And _“in Him,”_ Jesus, _“dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily”_ (Colossians 2:9).

Father, Son, and Spirit are not names, but titles, just as I am a father, a son, and a pastor, but my name is Justin Michael.

I carry the titles that I do because of the roles that I fill in relationship with those who are connected to me.

Remember when we said that all we know about God, we know through relationship? This is another example of that. We know God as our Father in creation and spiritual adoption, as Son in redemption and salvation, and as the Holy Spirit in relational interaction as His children with Him, who is our Father. But His name is Jesus.

If you walked into a crowded room and shouted “Father,” I am sure that any man with kids would turn and look to see who was calling them. If you shouted “Son,” any male would perk up. If you shouted some other descriptive of your choice, you might even get a narrower response than the first two. But if you came into a room and called out “Justin Ryan Michael,” odds are, there is only one of me. And since you called me by name, you have now invited my attention to you.

This is important to know because we know that the process of dunking in water is not what washes our sins away, but it is the calling on the name of the one who can wash our sins away and inviting Him to participate that makes this covenantal act of obedience possible to remit sins because Jesus is invited into the water with you to remit your sins.

**We must be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.**

The Bible says that He is _“the mystery which has been hidden from ages and from generations, but now has been revealed to His saints. To them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles: which is Christ in you, the hope of glory”_ (Colossians 1:26–27).

Jesus.

If baptizing in the name of “Jesus” was a deviation from Jesus’ intention in Matthew 28:19, then we would be unable to trust anything else that the disciples of Jesus did from that point forward, as every baptism that they would have performed, as recorded in the Bible, was done in Jesus’ name. If this was a deviation, then they most certainly would not have confirmed to us what was first spoken to us by Him (Jesus—Hebrews 2:3). However, since we can clearly see that the disciples were obeying Jesus instead of repeating Him, we can with great confidence trust that this is exactly what Jesus desired to take place and even had instructed His disciples to do.

Let’s take a look at a moment in Acts 10, where Peter is found preaching the gospel to the household of Cornelius (more on this story in a moment).

**Let’s read what he says:**
> _“God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him. And we are witnesses of all things which He did both in the land of the Jews and in Jerusalem, whom they killed by hanging on a tree. Him God raised up on the third day and showed Him openly, not to all the people, but to witnesses chosen before by God, even to us who ate and drank with Him after He arose from the dead. And He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that it is He who was ordained by God to be Judge of the living and the dead”_ (Acts 10:38–42).

Now, pay attention to this last line that is recorded of the gospel message that Peter preaches to them just before the Holy Spirit falls on all of those of Cornelius’s  house who believed: _“To Him all the prophets witness that, through His name, whoever believes in Him will receive remission of sins”_ (Acts 10:43).

We just learned through Jesus’ words in Mark 16 that those who believe and are baptized will be saved. We also learned through Peter’s message in Acts 2, on the Day of Pentecost, that baptism is for the remission/forgiveness of sins. And now, Peter provides even further clarity to baptism, saying that even the prophets of old pointed to a coming salvation for all who would believe and receive remission of sins “through His name”—JESUS!

Then why do so many people not baptize in Jesus’ name? Good question.

As Scripture shows us, and we have already discussed at length, baptism in the Scripture was exclusively done in the name of Jesus. This truth is not only confirmed in Scripture, but also in historical accounts as well, as it wasn’t until the second century that baptism began to be widely embraced by many as to be done in the repetition of Jesus’ words in Matthew 28:19 instead of the obedience of it—in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Why was this changed? There are a number of reasons, yet it is not the purpose of this book to dive deep into those reasons. I would encourage you to take a deeper look into this subject on your own for further study. But regardless of whether we explain why it happened, we know that it did. And this is where we refer back to the game of telephone that we discussed early on in this book. When there is not a hardline commitment to refer back to originality, things have a high tendency to change.

This move away from baptism done in the name of Jesus was direct disobedience to the command of Jesus in Matthew 28:19 to go baptize in the _“name,”_ as proven by the actions of the apostles in the Book of Acts. It is still disobedience today. This was a massive deviation from what Jesus intended and what was the norm of the first-century church. But not only was this direct disobedience to Jesus and a massive deviation from the norm of the first-century church, it was also a direct disobedience to a command issued by the writer of Hebrews, who said:
> _“Therefore, leaving the discussion of the elementary principles of Christ, let us go on to perfection, not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, of the doctrine of baptisms”_ (Hebrews 6:1–2).

The writer of Hebrews, which was written in approximately ad 60, gave specific instructions: do not re-lay the foundation of the doctrine (which we have learned means teaching) of baptisms. Don’t deviate from what we have been doing. Don’t try to make another stab at this. But they did. Scripture is clear on that, as we have observed together.

So, what do we do?

We do what the first-century church did. We baptize and experience baptism for ourselves “in the name of Jesus Christ.”

**The Bible is clear as to what baptism is:**
- A command (Acts 10:48)
- For the forgiveness/remission of sins (Acts 2:38, Acts 10:43; Luke 24:47)
- The proper response to belief (Mark 16:16; Acts 8:12–13; Acts 18:8)
- Burial with Jesus into His death (Colossians 2:12; Romans 6:4)
- New Testament covenant with God—circumcision of the heart (Colossians 2:10–14; Romans 2:28–29)
- To be done invoking the covenant name of Jesus (Acts 2:38, Acts 4:12; Acts 10:48; Acts 19:5)
- Inclusion into the body of Christ (not the local church, but the global community of faith—the spiritual body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:13)

Since we know what baptism is, according to the Scriptures, we can declare with accuracy then, what baptism is not. And we should.

Above all, remember: our experience must match that of the experience we see within the Bible, and in the Bible, every disciple who believed was baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. So should we.

If you have been baptized, and it was not done in Jesus’ name… I want to encourage you, and challenge you, to become re-baptized in Jesus’ name, according to the Scriptures.

After all, there is no other valid and authoritative source for proper doctrine than the Scriptures. And if every record of baptism in the authoritative Scriptures, which are profitable for doctrine, is done in the name of Jesus, then I must be baptized or re-baptized in His name. No matter who isn’t, and no matter who says otherwise.

We must be filled with the Holy Spirit, just like the disciples of Jesus were in the book of Acts.

What took place on the Day of Pentecost was not some one-off experience. But rather is the same experience that is available to all of us today. Jesus promised this to all of us!

To bring more clarity and assurance to all of us, that this experience that the disciples had on the Day of Pentecost was not just a one-off moment, but an experience to be had for all people.

Let’s take a look at Acts 10, where the Holy Spirit is poured out upon a man named Cornelius, a Gentile. At this moment, the Jews thought that this new covenant that God had made, and this experience that they had in Acts 2, was only for the Jews.

But God sent an angel to Cornelius, telling him to send for Peter, who was presently located in Joppa. And when this angel visited Peter, who was coming out of prayer, having just seen a vision from God that related closely to this task, Peter complied to go to  Cornelius’s house.

When Peter arrived at Cornelius’s home, he began preaching the gospel message, just like he did on the Day of Pentecost. And here is what the Bible says happened next…
> _“While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit fell upon all those who heard the word. And those of the circumcision who believed were astonished, as many as came with Peter, because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out on the Gentiles also. For they heard them speak with tongues and magnify God. Then Peter answered, “Can anyone forbid water, that these should not be baptized who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” And he commanded them to be baptized in the name of the Lord. Then they asked him to stay a few days”_ (Acts 10:44–48).

Notice a few key things.

Firstly, while Peter was preaching, the Holy Spirit fell on all of them who heard the word. This is indicative of the state of their openness and reception of the word that Peter was preaching. Essentially, the Holy Spirit fell on them as they believed.

Secondly, the Jews that were with Peter were astonished because Jesus had poured out the gift of the Holy Spirit on the Gentiles also. But, notice, how was it that they knew that the Holy Spirit had been poured out upon them? _“For they heard them speak with tongues and magnify God”_ (Acts 10:46).

That was the sign. It was how they knew.

And to double down on that truth, thirdly, Peter went ahead and began asking if anyone could forbid water to these Gentiles to be baptized, _“who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?”_

Well, how did they?

> _“And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance”_ (Acts 2:4).

From here, Peter commands those who have believed and received the Holy Spirit, just as Jesus said, and just like they did, to be baptized in the name of the Lord. That’s Jesus.

In Acts 19, Luke details an encounter that Paul has with a certain group of disciples. In this encounter, Paul asks them quite the question: _“Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?”_ (Acts 19:2).

Imagine that for a conversation starter.

“Hey, my name is Paul. Nice to meet you. Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?”

But this is important for us to make note of, being that these disciples were indeed believers… but they had not yet received the Holy Spirit. In a follow-up question, Paul asks them, “Into what then were you baptized?”to which they replied that they had been baptized into John’s baptism, which was preceding the gospel and void of the name of Jesus that saves. So what does Paul do? He re-baptizes them in Jesus’ name. Why? Because they needed to be baptized like Jesus taught, and the rest of the disciples were modeling… “in the name of Jesus.”

We all need to be baptized in the name of Jesus, but we also all need to receive the baptism of the Holy Ghost.

**“But don’t I receive that when I confess and believe?”**

While there are many who teach that today, the Bible does not teach it. Let’s reflect back on Paul’s first question to these disciples for just a moment.

> _“Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?”_ (Acts 19:2)

If the answer to this question was an unequivocal “yes” that receiving the Spirit of God came at the moment of belief in Jesus and His gospel, if mere mental assent was the means of transmitting the divine Holy Spirit of our great and powerful God into our hearts, then why would Paul ask such a thing? Unless… we do not receive the Holy Spirit instantaneously by belief alone.

**We see this same scenario in Acts 8:14–16:**
> _“Now when the apostles who were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them, who, when they had come down, prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit”_ (Acts 8:14–15).

Samaria had received the word of God. They had believed. But they sent the apostles to them, that they might pray for them so that they would receive the Holy Spirit:
_“For as yet He had fallen upon none of them. They had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus”_ (Acts 8:16).

They had believed. They had even been baptized. But they had not received the Holy Spirit.

The Bible provides no conclusive evidence that the mere act of mental assent is what draws the Holy Spirit into our innermost being. In fact, it provides more evidence that this is not the case. Belief is essential to receiving salvation by grace, through faith, but the act of mentally fixing ourselves on a truth is not what saves us in and of itself. We are not saved by the act of our belief in Jesus; we are saved by the Jesus that we believe in. We believe in Him, and in saving faith, by His grace alone, we obey Him as we respond to His gospel message. That is not works; that is saving faith.

The baptism of the Holy Spirit is essential, and it is a promise for all of those who believe. But we can’t fill ourselves with the Holy Ghost. None of our actions, not even the most great and noble of them, can procure this holy moment in our lives. It is only by His grace alone that Jesus fills us with the Holy Spirit. We don’t have to work for this promise; all we have to do is simply receive it by faith.

Through the enabling of His grace, I can believe, repent, and even be baptized in His name, but I cannot fill myself with the Holy Spirit. Only He can do that. And He has promised us that He will.

I would encourage you to go read through the Book of Acts for yourself, as you begin to see all of the realities of Jesus’ experience that He has available for all of us who will believe.

**And don’t forget what Jesus said in Mark 16:**
> _“He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will follow those who believe: In My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues;”_ (Mark 16:16–17).

It is important for me to say this here, as to break through any confusion that you may have about this subject, and that my words are not misconstrued… tongues is not the Holy Spirit. Tongues is the evidence of the Holy Spirit. Tongues, simply, is the biblically normative initial evidence and sign that the Holy Spirit, which Jesus has indeed poured out upon you, is now living within you.

As He fills you with His Spirit, tongues will come as a sign, as Jesus said, _“they will speak with new tongues”_ (Mark 16:17). And while tongues may be the initial evidence of the Holy Spirit filling you, don’t forget that the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23) is the evidence that the Holy Spirit remains at work in you.

There are far too many tongue talkers who have no fruit. This only proves that while they may have the Holy Spirit… the Holy Spirit does not have them.

Many people today teach that the proper response to the gospel of Jesus Christ is to accept Jesus into their hearts by praying what is commonly referred to as a “sinner’s prayer” or making a “decision for Jesus.” And while this act of praying to accept Jesus into one’s life should be celebrated as an act of faith and a response to the gospel of Jesus through repentance, this is not the method or means by which people in the Bible received salvation. Please know that by no means do I desire to demean or invalidate any experience that you may have had with Jesus up to this point in your life. But as we have already said chapters ago, we cannot, and must not, settle for an experience with God that is not completely validated by and modeled in Scripture.

**We are not advocating here for tradition… we are advocating for fidelity to the Scriptures.**

I pray that my comments here will be received by you, the reader, as ones that are only filled with passion, love, and fidelity to the Scriptures. As you have heard me say leading up to this, my desire is to see you and I have an experience with God that is biblical and matches the one that we observe in the Scriptures. If you have prayed a sinner’s prayer or made a decision for Jesus, I commend you. I commend each and every step of faith that you have taken toward Jesus. But I also must tell you that this is not all that is needed when responding to the gospel of Jesus Christ by faith.

The act of a sinner’s prayer is not one that is found in the Scriptures but rather is of new-ish origin. In early evangelical movements in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, preachers would often lead seekers of Jesus in prayers of repentance. This continued in the nineteenth century, gaining popularity into the twentieth century, where many churches, denominations, movements, and preachers began to adopt the method of a repeat-after-me prayer that would procure salvation. And while again, I do not seek to demean anyone who has done this in good faith, I must tell you that this is not what Jesus instructed us to do, nor is it what His disciples did in confirming Jesus’ words through their own preaching.

While some may say that once you have prayed a sinner’s prayer or made a decision for Jesus, you are saved. Jesus does not say that; His disciples do not say that; and we have no biblical account of such activity.

What am I trying to say?

Simply, if you have given your life to Jesus and have repented… amazing! But you are only standing in ankle-deep water and have not fully experienced all that Jesus and those who heard Him said and modeled about salvation. It is time to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of your sins and to receive the promise of the baptism of the Holy Ghost.

**The Bible is clear on the subject that we must be filled with the Holy Ghost, which is the Spirit of Christ:**
> _“…if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His”_ (Romans 8:9).

**The Bible is also clear to show us that we do not receive the Holy Spirit when we make a decision to believe:**
> _“For as yet He had fallen upon none of them. They had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus”_ (Acts 8:16).

Jesus is clear that baptism is a response of true belief, and just a few verses prior to this one, Luke records that these believers who had been baptized had _“received the word”_ (Acts 8:14).

All of this to say: You and I need to be filled with the Holy Spirit, and that does not happen when we merely make the decision to believe.

If you have at some previous time in your life accepted Christ into your heart by making a decision for Jesus or praying a “sinner’s prayer,” I want to celebrate with you the step of faith that you made toward God. Thank you for taking what you know and putting it to use! But as we have learned in the contents of this book, we must do things the way of the Scriptures, and there is always deeper for us to walk in God’s truth, no matter where we find ourselves in life. And sometimes that means allowing the truth to confront our present experience with God and lead us to a more aligned, deeper connection to the truths of God’s Word.

That isn’t condemnation or judgment, but a hope-filled opportunity to step deeper into the water, one of which we all should be joyful about.

We aren’t saved by our motives or our efforts; we are saved by following Jesus’ instructions. And we confirm what those instructions were by observing the actions of His church that He started in the first century in the Book of Acts.

**This reminds me of a man named Apollos in Acts 18. Here is what Luke writes of Apollos:**
> _“Now a certain Jew named Apollos, born at Alexandria, an eloquent man and mighty in the Scriptures, came to Ephesus. This man had been instructed in the way of the Lord; and being fervent in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things of the Lord, though he knew only the baptism of John. So he began to speak boldly in the synagogue. When Aquila and Priscilla heard him, they took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately”_ (Acts 18:24–26).

Notice, Luke portrays Apollos as _“an eloquent man and mighty in the Scriptures.”_ Now, the “Scriptures” that Luke makes reference to is a reference made prior to the formation of what we know now as the composition of the Christian Bible, as many of the books within it were either being or still yet to even be written (aka, Luke’s account of Acts that we are reading right now). This reference of Scriptures was to the TaNaK, the Jewish composition of the Scriptures, what we know as the Old Testament, which would have been the received “Scriptures” of the era in which Apollos was living.

Luke is very complimentary of Apollos. I think that this is important for us to recognize. It is not Christlike to make a mockery of or demean anyone who is doing their best to follow Jesus with what they know. Apollos was learned in the way of the Lord (which is Jesus), was fervent in spirit, and also spoke and taught accurately the things of the Lord. Luke made sure to point all of this out, but there were things that he was lacking, both in his experience and in his knowledge, which Luke also made sure to underscore.

Luke’s inclusion of these details helps us tremendously. Apollos was learned, fervent, and accurate with the Scriptures, having a significant lack in his knowledge, and a humble, hungry heart that responded positively to someone pointing out that while he had quite a bit, Apollos didn’t have it all.

If you are someone reading this book who has yet to have repented, been baptized in Jesus’ name or received the Holy Spirit like the disciples did in the Book of Acts, Luke’s comments reveal to you that you are an Apollos. And Apollos needs to be challenged and provoked to take another step deeper into the waters of truth with joy. My prayer is that this book can help serve you, like Aquila and Priscilla served Apollos, humbly, yet with the confidence of the Scriptures alone, explaining to you _“the way of God more accurately”_ (Acts 18:26).

I pray that as you read this, you respond like Apollos. There is no record of Apollos getting mad. There is no account of Apollos rising up in offense saying, “Are you saying I am not saved?” There seem to be, at least according to scriptural record, no “you’re not the judge” comments or any other comments from a place of defense coming from Apollos. Instead, there is nothing. Nothing except the disciples receiving Apollos and the continuation of his ministry, indicating that he was humble, hungry, and receptive to the words Aquila and Priscilla had given him to more accurately lead him in the way of Jesus.

This should be the posture of all  our hearts. If someone shows us something in the Word of God that is true, even if it runs completely contrary to our experience and tradition, we ought to receive it with joy and gladness. We ought to say “yes,” because anything that leads me further into the river of God, any truth that aligns me further with Jesus and His kingdom, is something that is good for me—even essential.

Only those who possess pride are unable to depart from their traditions to fully receive all that God has for them. And the sad thing is, for those in this position, they truly have become their own God, and the limiter of what God can be, do, and even say in their lives.

May I make a brief plea to us all? Let’s not let that be our story. Let’s be like Apollos.

How do we truly accept Jesus? Just like Jesus said and His disciples confirmed.

**Encounter His presence, hear His gospel, and respond to it, being born again of the water and the Spirit, which Jesus said is a “must” (John 3:8).**