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Now, God is life. The moment you come to Jesus Christ and receive him, the Bible says you are grafted back into the vine. Jesus said, "I am the vine, the true vine. Ye are the branches." You are grafted in as a branch. The Bible says you become a partaker of eternal life, spiritual life, and immediately something happens. The Bible says the sap, the spiritual life of God, begins to flow through you, and evidences appear that you have spiritual life. You don't go on as a dead plant, as a dead branch. The leaves begin to sprout. Certain things begin to take place in your life. This life of God is yours, and the Bible says you will live as long as God lives. When the stars have fallen, when the moon has fallen out of its socket, we'll still be living because God is from everlasting to everlasting, and those of us who have spiritual life in Christ Jesus shall live forever. Oh, it's wonderful to be a Christian! And that's the thing that the world cannot understand. That's the thing that a person who has never received Christ cannot understand. He doesn't understand that flowing through you now is the life of God, giving you power, strength, and the dynamic to live the Christian life.

Do you have the life of God flowing through you? Have you received spiritual life through Christ? You should check to see whether you have life. The Bible speaks in about the full assurance of faith. The blind man said, "One thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see." Make sure! Can you say, "I was blind to spiritual things, but now I see. I was once dead to spiritual things, but now I have life. I was once in spiritual darkness, but now I'm walking in the light." Can you say that? If not, I beg of you to come to Christ and make sure. Has there been a moment when you received Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour? Paul said to the Philippian jailer, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." "No, Paul," you say, "that's an oversimplification. You're too simple, Paul. You should have given him something complicated to do. Paul, you should have told him all that's involved." But Paul didn't. Paul said, "Believe." Why? Because believing, if you understand the word properly, is the entrance, the beginning of new life in Christ.

Now, what does it mean to believe? The word believe involves your intellect. We must know Christ, and accept his claims. Christ claimed that he was the Son of God, that his death on the Cross was the only way to heaven, that he was God incarnate. You must accept Christ in all that he claims, or put him down as one of the biggest liars, hypocrites and charlatans in history. I had to decide in my own heart and in my own mind that Jesus Christ was what he claimed to be. I made my decision a few years ago. I stood at the crossroads and intellectually made this choice. I said, "Oh God, by faith with my mind I accept the fact that Jesus Christ is what he claimed to be and that when he died on the Cross it was not the ordinary death of an ordinary man, but it was God in Christ reconciling the world unto himself. It was Christ shedding his blood for our sins."

First is the intellect. Second is emotion. Emotion is involved in everything we do. You cannot separate emotion from the mind and the will. Love is emotion. Hate is emotion. When I come to Jesus Christ, I love Christ because he gave himself for me on the Cross, and I hate sin. Hate and love are emotions. I have very little time for a person who can sit in front of a television set and weep and laugh over "I Love Lucy," or go to a ball game and shout, "Kill the umpire," and yet condemns emotionalism in religion.

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October (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 52