Do You Believe?

I love the Gospel of John. I love all four gospels, but John is my favorite. It is not a synopsis of the life of Jesus, as Matthew, Mark, and Luke are. It is structured around Jesus’ encounters with different people, like Nicodemus, the woman at the well, the man born blind, and many more. These encounters each reveal something about Jesus, who He is and why He came. John’s gospel is also built on seven signs (or miracles) and seven “I am” statements. For example, Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life,” and then demonstrated that by raising Lazarus from the dead. These signs take place, for the most part, in the first eleven chapters of the book. However, nearly half of this gospel is about the final week of Jesus’ life, and what happened after He was crucified and then rose from the dead. John clearly puts the spotlight on the redemptive sacrifice for which Jesus came, the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ the King. 
 
John wrote his gospel primarily to persuade those who read it to believe in Jesus. He says so himself in chapter 20: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” John wrote to persuade his readers to the truth of who Jesus is so they will believe in Him and become His disciples. What does it mean to believe in Jesus? It is not the same as believing in most things we talk about. If someone says, “I saw where it is going to be sunny tomorrow,” you might say, “I believe it.” But your belief will change at the first sign of a raindrop the next day. Many people say they believe in Jesus, but their belief is simply a product of their intellectual agreement with a set of facts about Jesus’ life. But that’s not a belief that saves us. The word for believe, pisteuo, means to trust completely, to commit to, to put faith into something or someone.  
 
A classic illustration of this is the story of Charles Blondin, a Frenchman in the 1850’s who walked across the gorge just below Niagara Falls on a 2-inch cable, with nothing to save him if he fell. The cable was 1,100 feet long and 160 feet above the water. He walked across it, he walked it blindfolded, he did it riding a bicycle, he crossed it carrying another man, and he crossed it pushing a wheelbarrow. When he asked the crowd how many believed he could push the wheelbarrow across, the crowd all yelled affirmation. “We believe!” But when he asked who would get in the wheelbarrow while he pushed it across, no one believed. The difference is critical to our understanding of faith. The crowd gave intellectual assent to what Blondin could do, but their “belief” did not rise to the level of completely trusting him to the point they would put their lives on the line.  
 
If we believe in Jesus, we put our lives on the line, or better, we put our lives in His hands. We surrender all that we are to Him.