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Jesus and Eternal Life
'I have come that they might have life, and have it to the full.' (John 10.10).
Some readers unfamiliar with the Christian faith might react in puzzlement at these words. For many people looking in from the outside, the Christian life seems like an apparently interminable list of ‘Thou shalt nots’, about as fulfilling as reading the telephone directory! So what does Jesus mean by the ‘life’ he is talking about? I may be full of life at present, but so are the weeds in my back garden! What is it that makes me different?
In fact, Jesus is talking about a completely different kind of life here from anything we might be familiar with, transcending time and space and occupying an entirely different dimension. Indeed, if he is correct, the life we are experiencing now is just a drop in the ocean compared with what we were really made for! Unlike our natural ‘life’, which stops at the point of death, the true 'life' that he describes is something unconstrained by time, something that goes on forever.
How, then, can we receive such life? Two thousand years ago, a man called Nicodemus asked the same question. Jesus replied as follows:
'Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again'. (John 3.3 NIV)
We might compare our present situation to an unfertilised human egg. Such an egg could not be described as ‘alive’ in any real sense of the word -
At the moment that egg is fertilised, however, it is made ‘alive’ in a real and lasting sense. While outwardly it may appear no different, a complete genetic code for an entirely new human life has, in a split second, been laid down. What was once destined to begin and end its ‘life’ inside the mother’s body is now able to have an existence far beyond the place where it began.
In our natural state we are like that unfertilised egg -
In truth, such a future is completely beyond our ability to imagine or understand, any more than an unborn child could have more than the most fleeting glimpse of what lies beyond its mother’s womb. Just as, for that unborn baby, the constant pounding of its mother’s heart might seem all that there will ever be to life, many have concluded that what we experience in our physical universe is all that there is or ever will be.
An open door?
However, the Bible shows us that through Jesus’ death for us on the cross, we have access to a greater and higher reality. He alone could achieve this for us because he alone, as fully man and yet also fully God, could connect the otherwise unbridgeable realms of earth and heaven, and thus win for us the eternal destiny that we will otherwise lose forever.
But what stops us from entering heaven as we are now? The Bible warns of a contrary force acting on our lives -
Could you describe yourself as having been born again? Are you simply living out your natural life, or have you received the gift of eternal life that comes through surrendering yourself fully to Jesus Christ? The Bible says,
In him was life.....He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him ..... But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.’ (John 1.4-
Jesus himself left us in no uncertain terms: ‘Unless anyone is born again, he cannot enter the kingdom of God’. He invites all of us to come to Him now and receive that life for ourselves. Only then can we fulfil the true destiny and purpose for which our lives have been prepared from before the beginning of time, with no limit to the horizons that God may open up for us.
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