“I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25-26, NIV 1984)
I’ll never get golf right. None of us will. There are just too many aspects to master and too many days when even the masters miss the cut.
But here’s one thing I hope age is leading me to: a better perspective.
When I play match play, I like to win.
When I play stroke play, I want to go as low as possible.
But neither of these goals is, as they say, “a matter of life and death.” And that, like many things, has taken me a lifetime in the game to learn.
The irony, of course, is that life itself really is a matter of life and death. There is “a time to be born and a time to die.” We all live out this spectrum. No matter the span of our days, one day will come when our breath will cease and we will stand before God.
When that day comes, the Bible teaches, we have only one hope—the hope found in Jesus Christ.
When Jesus faced Martha, the sister of Lazarus, after her brother had died and been several days in the tomb, he delivered a truth about himself that was meant to assure her of his power over all things. This included power over the greatest of all physical enemies: death. He told her plainly, “I am the resurrection and the life.”
If you gathered up all the promises of Scripture and laid them before you to dismiss the lesser and retain the greater, you may find it hard to choose. After all, every promise of Scripture has been made by God. But you would be hard-pressed to argue against Jesus’ promise to Martha as the greatest of them all: “Whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”
This is a promise, however, that comes with a condition, one that Jesus posed in a question, “Do you believe this?”
No one else can answer this question for you; you must respond directly to God. Your reply may sound like that of the desperate father in Mark 9: “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” But don’t worry about such stuttering. Just get it said. Then live it. Live your believing.
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Jeff Hopper
July 9, 2013
Copyright 2013 Links Players International
The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.