Yesterday, I mentioned that our faith in Jesus must rely on biblical evidence and personal experience.  By far the more important of the two "proofs" is biblical evidence.  Yet, even when we believe God's word is true, until we have experienced God's love, power and salvation first hand, we won't live much differently and we won't be the living "bibles" and "Jesus to other people" God calls us to be.

Let me be specific­--We may accept, believe and know the Bible is true, that God created the universe and everything in it, that He created human beings in His own image and called us of all His creation to be fruitful and multiply, to subdue the earth and to have dominion over it.  We may know the first humans turned away from God, bringing sin into the world and destroying the perfection God willed for us.  We may even know God has been acting throughout history to restore us to relationship with Him through covenants or agreements He made with people starting with Noah, then Moses, then David and finally Jesus.  We may know the details of the covenant God established through Jesus shedding His blood on the cross of Calvary and giving his sinless life in exchange for our sinful ones, but until we ACT on those beliefs, until we experience the forgiveness that Jesus gives to each one of us personally, and the power He offers each one of us personally through the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we will not commit ourselves as the Apostle Paul did to whatever it takes to live our lives fully for Him, and to sharing the salvation we have received through Jesus with others.

Let's take a simple example from everyday life.  Let's say you are a researcher, and you've been working on a cure for the common cold.  You have been working on the product for ten years.  You've been testing it for the past five years.  You now know beyond any doubt the product works--and it has no side effects.  It's a natural combination of fruit and vegetable juices that has eliminated the common cold in two days in every person who has used it.  Now, here's the question:  How will anyone else know whether your product works?  It won't be through reading all the reports of the clinical trials you held.  It won't be through analyzing the chemical reactions you have isolated in the product that eliminate the cold viruses from the human body.  It won't be from reading the endorsement of the product you have received from the American Medical Association, and hundreds of users in the trials.   Yes, people could become convinced your product would work by those means. Or people could say you had faked the reports and trials, and that the American Medical Association has also endorsed many other products over the years they later found to be harmful.

The only way anyone could actually benefit from your product and believe in its effects would be to use it.  The only way the Apostle Paul came to trust Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord was to EXPERIENCE His reality and power in his own life.  After all, Paul knew the Scriptures as well as anyone alive in His day.  He even believed they promised God would send a Messiah.  Armed with that knowledge, Paul sought to destroy the church---UNTIL he experienced Jesus first hand.   Let's never settle for trusting someone else's experience of Jesus.  Let's never settle for approaching the Bible by saying, "God wrote it.  I believe it. That settles it."  (After all if God wrote it--THAT settles it!) Our believing it, experiencing it and living it is what transforms us, and in the end leads to others seeing the reality of our faith and wanting it for themselves.   After all, if thousands of people started telling us about a product they had used to get over colds in two days, and they had experienced no side effects, we would be trying the product, too, right?

Let's pause right now and ask ourselves:  Do we believe God's word is true?  Have we experienced His reality in our lives?  If the answer to those two questions is yes, then no one can place a limit on what God can accomplish through us today as we yield control of our minds and hearts to Him!