COMING TO JESUS (1)

We receive life from Jesus, we noted last week, by coming to him and remaining in him. That’s the way God means it to be. The life he created us to receive – the eternal kind of life that he possesses in himself – comes to us through his Son Jesus. Adam and Eve received that life directly from God when they were created, but lost it when they rebelled against him. Now it comes to us through the Lord Jesus, the One God appointed to act as the mediator between himself and sinful humankind. He alone is “the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6). Apart from him we can receive nothing.

That’s why he repeatedly urged people to “come to him.” “If anyone is thirsty,” he said, “Let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37). “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).

But what is involved in this “coming to him”? We use the term freely enough, but do we really know what it entails? Our failure to understand such familiar expressions often robs us of spiritual blessing. That’s why we need to look at this basic one carefully. We cannot stumble here without losing what lies at the heart of being a Christian.

“Coming to Jesus” is the conscious act of looking away from ourselves to the Lord Jesus in love, devotion and dependence. The fact that we cannot see him doesn’t make this act any less real than turning to a friend for advice or some other form of help. In the same way that we go to them and put our thoughts and desires into words which we speak to them, so it is with our coming to the Lord Jesus Christ. It is a real, deliberate act of interpersonal engagement. It is something we can know that we have (or have not) done.

What matters most in this is how real the Lord Jesus is to us as a person. It is impossible to turn to someone and speak to them if you are not sure that they exist. To do so would not only invite others to question our sanity, it would be unconvincing to us as well. We have to be sure that “someone is there” before we can interact with them meaningfully. And we have to know what they are like if we are to engage with them confidently or intimately.

That’s why the first thing that is critical to coming to Jesus (both initially and in an ongoing way) is to know him. If we know he exists, and know what he is like, it will be realistic to approach him. The better we know him, the easier and more meaningful that will be.

The foundations for knowing Jesus as a real person lie in the written Gospel records in the New Testament. Here we encounter God the Son taking upon himself human nature and living among us as a man, Jesus of Nazareth, for a little over thirty years. We read of his birth, his baptism, his miraculous ministry, his powerful preaching, his death, his resurrection, and his ascension to the right hand of God in heaven. We get to know what he believed, what he was like, and what he wanted people to do. In the four Gospels and in the book of Acts and the epistles, we learn of his continuing life as the One given all power in heaven and earth. We learn also of what he plans to do in the future.

Given this there is no need for anyone to be unsure about his reality as a person. If our minds are open we can know that he is real, what he is like, and how we can meet him. Of course, we can never know him exhaustively – there are depths of mystery about his person that defy our comprehension. But we can get to know him well enough to make approaching him a credible (and indeed, necessary) thing to do.

Devout men and women through the centuries have realized the importance knowing Jesus through the Gospels. That’s led them to make a regular practice of Gospel meditation. They have read and studied other parts of the Bible too, but have never allowed themselves to be away from the Gospels for very long. They have turned to them again and again, much like a widow turns to the photograph of a deceased husband. Every glance calls an absent figure back to life as it were. It’s that repeated act that keeps the person of Jesus real to our minds and makes it natural to approach him. He becomes our closest though unseen companion.