Finding Out Where Jesus Lives

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George MacDonald once said: “Did the fact ever cross your mind that you are here in this world just to understand the Lord Jesus Christ, and for no other reason?”

It was in the spirit of that same truth that Jesus told his followers: “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent” (John 6:29).

The statement was made as Jesus spoke to the crowds about the need to focus on the eternal rather than the temporal and it was bracketed by some remarks about miracles (6:26, 30). Some of those who followed Jesus in those early days didn’t really care about the miracles Jesus did as long as they got what they wanted. Others wanted Jesus to do more miracles to prove who He was. In both cases they wanted what would satisfy them, rather than what would satisfy God.

When the question was asked: “What must we do to do the works God requires?” (6:28), Jesus reduced everything to one simply statement: BELIEVE.

Truly believing changes everything.

Truly believing leaves you with a thirst, a hunger, for more of what you have come to accept as truth. Once you have met Jesus, the next question resembles that first question that John’s disciples asked Jesus when they first met Him: “Where do you live?” (John 1:38). We want Him to take us away with Him so that we can get to know Him better. We crave a quiet place just for Him and us so that our relationship can grow, so that we can understand everything it is possible to understand about Him.

The Gospel of John was written by a man who is described as the disciple “whom Jesus loved,” the one who was, of all the Lord’s followers, the closest to Him (John 21:20), the one into whose care He entrusted His earthly mother (John 19:26). John is an example to us of one who couldn't get enough of knowing Jesus.

It is out of knowing Jesus that everything else flows. We often get things backwards, plunging into “doing” for Jesus instead of learning to “be” with Jesus. We end up doing in our own strength what is only praiseworthy when we do it in the strength and wisdom we gain from knowing Him. Life becomes about us rather than about Him.

In Finding God, Dr. Larry Crabb writes: “...God matters more. He invites us to enter into relationship with him on his terms...He invites us, in short to find him. And he lets us know that in the process of finding him, we’ll find ourselves” (page 19).