The people are following Jesus everywhere...fascinated by His miracles and intrigued by His teaching. Reading their interactions with Him, I'm quite sure my questions would have sounded a lot like theirs - naive, demanding, and a bit too self-sufficient.
I especially relate to the question asked in Verse 28: "We want to perform God's works, too. What should we do?" More and more, I want to be used by God for His glory and in His Kingdom. But, like the undertone that I sense in that question, I also fight the same temptation to try to earn God's favor and look good in front of others.
The people who asked that question of Jesus must have thought that they were perfectly capable of performing "God's works". Maybe they thought there was a formula that went something like this:
Desire + Performance = Pleasing God= Eternal Life
They knew they already had the desire, so perhaps they just needed to figure out the right "work" to do, and then God might be pleased.
Are we so different? We are inundated by cultural messages which teach us that love is fickle and conditional. If earthly love is not completely performance-based, then it is certainly performance-enhanced. Not surprisingly then, we ever-so-slightly incorporate our experiences with human love with the love that is transcendent and divine, and we sometimes end up wondering what we can do for God to make Him love us more.
But Jesus said, "This is the only work God wants from you: Believe in the One He has sent (vs. 29)." The simplicity of the gospel and God's message of unconditional acceptance was God's reminder for me today. God is already pleased with me....and He is pleased with You. Not because of what we can do for Him, but because of what Jesus has done for us.
Jesus said, "For I have come down from heaven to do the will of God who sent me, not to do my own will. And this is the will of God, that I should not lose even one of all those he has given me, but that I should raise them up on the last day( vs. 38-39)." Whether or not we will be with him "on the last day", does not depend on our performance in this life -- thank God. For you and me, for our friends and our families, it simply comes down to this: Believe in the One He has sent.
2 comments:
Thank you for "centering" my thoughts on this. I too was caught by "We want to perform God's works, too". I was thinking that they wanted to perform miracles like Him - do bigger and better things than what I have been assigned. There really is no better thing than to "believe in the One", is there? ChriS
I can see it in two ways - wanting to be able to serve Him in big ways, but still for His glory. Or being caught up in a "look at me" mode, grounded in our sinful nature. Either way, it means nothing if we don't believe.
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