Today, I am reading and commenting on John 14-16.

As is often the case, I am not quite sure where I am going with this today.  I will just start with my thoughts on the various pieces of this and hope they all fit together.  Jesus makes a statement that you will not be a Christian if you do not take in early in this passage: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”  He says this in response to Thomas asking “how can we know the way” to where you are going?  Jesus follows that up by telling Philip that if you have seen Him, you have seen the Father.  He later gives us an interesting expansion on that.  Just as He is in the Father and the Father is in Him, so those who believe in Him and obey His commands are in Him and He is in them.  Therefore if we have seen someone who truly believes in Jesus, we have seen Jesus, and since we have seen Jesus we have seen the Father.

So, how do we know who believes in Jesus?  Jesus answers that here for us as well: those who believe in Jesus will do the works He had been doing, and even greater works.  And what works had Jesus been doing?  We find the answer to that in Matthew 11:5: “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. ”  I would add to this, the hungry being fed, the thirsty receiving something to drink, and the naked being clothed.  So, when we see these sorts of things happening, we are in the presence of Jesus.  Further on in this passage Jesus tells us that we must be connected to Him the way that branches are connected to the grape vine and that any branches which fail to produce fruit will be removed (and those which do produce fruit will be pruned so that they can be more productive.  So, what fruit are we producing?  Look at that list above.  Figure out which of them you know you can do, and seek to do more of it.  You may not be able to give sight to the blind, but you can probably feed the hungry.  And if you can’t do that, you can certainly proclaim the good news to the poor.  Do what you can, and allow the Spirit to flow through you to do even more.  I want to emphasize that what I wrote was to myself.  If it also applies to you, then God be praised.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.