Hey Cove Church, my name’s Tony Read, I’ve been the Safety Team director at our church and I wanted to bring you the devo that God’s put on my heart. This is probably the most simple word that God has given me through all the different devos that I’ve done. It’s about Jesus and it's about eternal life and it's about salvation. It reminds me of a song by Ian Wilson, “Let me tell you about my Jesus.” I love that song. I think when I first heard it, I just played it over and over and over and over again. It's just “let me tell you about my Jesus,” like "I cannot wait to tell you about my Jesus".
So God’s been having me read in John, and I got to John chapter 3 and how many people can quote, even if you were half asleep, John 3:16? But what does John 3:15 say? It says that “Everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” Well even the context before that, in John 3:14, it says “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of man must be lifted up.” And “That everyone who believes in him may have eternal life” follows. And then of course we have John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” I’ve said it before... whenever the same verse or the same chapter or the same book has something that is said multiple times, it’s pretty important. And eternal life is what is drawn from there.
Verses 17-18 go on to say, “For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only son.” And then later in another couple chapters, I was reading in John chapter 5:24, “I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned. He has crossed over from death to life.”
It talks about eternal life again in there. And that intrigued me, the idea of eternal life being mentioned in my NIV. Most of us who have accepted Jesus in our hearts, we can easily answer the questions, “Do you believe in God?”, “Tell me your testimony”, or “Tell me when you were saved”. Most of us can even visualize in our mind where we were when God was knocking on the door of our hearts and we answered.
My story starts in Kindergarten when I was in Awana, and the leader gave his testimony. I can’t tell you exactly what he said, but God knocked on my door. And on the way home I was asking my mom some questions and she sat me down at the table with my dad and my dad opened up the Word and led me to Jesus. I’ve walked away in times of my life, following the ways of the world and getting myself into trouble, but Jesus pulled me back and to the right path and the right walk with him.
Wherever you're at today, if you’ve been a follower of Jesus, if you say you’re religious, if you say you’re not sure, you’re on the fence, all that matters in this world is eternal life. So I pray that if you're not saved, that God will open that up for you, that He will just reveal himself to you. It will be stronger than ever. And if you are saved, remember to tell somebody about your Jesus!