John 14: 23 – 24
Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him, and make Our abode with him. He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine, but the Father’s who sent Me.”
Would you like a test for the maturity of your Christianity? Well, here it is, delivered by Jesus himself. He told his followers, “Hey look, if you are going to be a follower of mine then you must keep my word.” That is why generations upon generations of believers have honored the Bible. If we are true Christians, i.e. followers of Christ, then we evidence, not only a reverence for the Bible but more importantly we follow its precepts and teachings. We are not followers of law but rather we live the Word. The answer is not in feeding the poor and housing widows. That is all good but the unsaved do that also. Those works are from a human ethos and will not buy our way into heaven nor show our love and devotion to Jesus. He said if we love him, we will keep his word.
I would posit that the first step to keeping his word is reading his word. How many “believers” do you know who never pick up the Bible? Frankly, there is a catastrophic epidemic of non-believing believers. How can we believe if we never read the book? In what do we believe?
The second step is to do what we see there. For example, the Bible teaches us to pray for those who persecute us and mistreat us. Do we do that? There are hundreds of places, literally, in the Bible which tell us not to be afraid. Do we ever battle the fear that attacks us? God said to lay hands on the sick and pray for them. Are we praying for the sick? This is not about perfection, nor about those times we fail. It is about intending to live what we learn from the Bible. Jesus is quite strong on this point. He says that if we do not keep his word then we don’t love him. It is just that simple.
Christian faith doesn’t have to be complicated. Jesus didn’t give us a laundry list of things to do. He gave us one commandment – love others as he himself loved us. Then he said, if you love me, you will keep my word. Honestly, that is pretty simple. If we love him, then we will find out what his word says and keep it in our hearts. If we do not do so then we may well have reason to question whether or not we really do love him. The prayer we prayed for salvation is not a ticket to get into heaven. It is a marriage proposal. And we engage our love through the Word. That’s it. Nothing else will do.