A Story, or a Person?

It’s not every day that you have an eye-opening revelation about yourself, but that’s exactly what happened to me the other night during a Bible study program I’m currently attending.

I recently wrote about how my personal prayer life developed, and that will forever be a central part of my testimony and relationship with God.

The other night at Bible study, however, showed me there is another mega-theme to how I came to experience a “living” Savior.

We were watching a short DVD when the speaker, trying to make a point about learning to listen and obey God, slightly changed the order of words around in a scripture passage.

The passage was from John 14:15, where Jesus says, “If you love Me, you will keep My commands.”

The speaker, illustrating his point, read it, “If you keep My commands, you love Me.”

It’s amazing how just changing the order of a couple of words in a sentence can – not so much drastically change the context – but certainly change the way we go about understanding what is being communicated.

That’s when my revelation occurred – kind of like that feeling you have when you finally remember the name that bugged you all day because you couldn’t remember it.

“That’s it!” I blurted out (in my mind of course).

You see, I’ve been asked many times how my life has been able to change so much in the past few years.

And though I could point to a lot of things that have directly affected me during that time, discovering this one thing seemed to instantly put the puzzle together for me.

All the years I had been attending church prior to my “change” were spent only doing the “right things,” but not much had really changed in my heart.

Despite regularly attending church, Wednesday night dinners, Sunday school and volunteering for Vacation Bible School for more than nine years, I was simply going through the motions.

So what happened that could possibly change me so drastically?

One simple quote.

“It’s hard to live FOR God until you learn to live BECAUSE of God.”

The moment I heard this quote and the meaning behind it, I never thought about religion, church, family, friends, others – you name it – the same ever again.

Even though I didn’t grow up in a church-going family, I knew the “story” just like everyone else, “Jesus died for the forgiveness of our sins on the cross.”

Although it is truly the greatest story ever told, so many of us only ever allow ourselves to think about it like that…as just a story.

Don’t get me wrong, just the story can inspire us to do great things because of His great teachings about life and love.

Then again, so could Gandhi.

It wasn’t until I stopped focusing on the two-dimensional Jesus (the red words on the thin pages of a thick book) and began meditating on the three-dimensional Jesus with actual skin, bones and hair that He finally became real to me.

We tend to only think about Jesus as the standard picture we’ve all seen hanging in church.

But if we truly let our minds wander in the reality of Him, we can then begin to see Him in a new light.

The Jesus I know sweated when He was hot, shivered with chill bumps when He was cold and felt that weird tingling sensation when His foot fell asleep.

The Jesus I know had an occasional headache, leg cramp and was annoyed by hiccups.

But, most importantly, the Jesus I’ve come to know has helped me understand that I am a sinner, and in order for me to live with Him for eternity He had to suffer and die for me.

Yet, at the same time, He loved me so much He was willing to do whatever it took to do it.

Knowing this brings new meaning to the pain He felt when the Roman soldiers savagely beat Him.

Realizing this allows me to almost sense His eyes wincing as the nails were being driven through His hands and into a splintery wooden cross.

Please understand, my intention here is not to point out gory details to incite some sort of a guilt trip, but instead to simply explain how my life was transformed.

I think most all of us really just want to experience a relationship instead of a religion, and what helped me the most was to let Him saturate my very senses.

And the moment I began seeing Jesus as a real, living and breathing person, that is what really changed me – but from the inside out.

So, with all due respect to the speaker I was listening to the other night, I’ll just stick to the way Jesus put it, “If you love Me, you will keep My commands.”

Because honestly, it is only through my relationship with Him that I no longer even think about “doing the right things” or living a certain way anymore.

Oh, it’s not that I don’t struggle like everyone else from time to time, I still do.

But I will tell you this…I no longer try harder FOR Him.

I simply believe harder BECAUSE of Him.