E stands for Experience; A stands for Agreement; R stands for Revelation. Let’s investigate the first reason.
Experience
My brother is an electrician. I am not. There are so many things about electricity I know nothing about. But that doesn't mean I can’t know anything. If I want to know if there is power at a socket, I can find that out even though I don’t have a voltage tester or any other gadget. I just plug in my appliance, and if it works then I know there is power at that socket. And it doesn’t matter who tells me otherwise; it doesn’t matter how qualified they are. I know there’s power at the socket because my appliance, which was dead before, is now working.
For most people, this is the way they know that the Bible is God’s Word. They have “plugged in” and they found that it works – there is a power that surges through them now that wasn’t there before; they can function in a way they previously couldn’t. I know that might sound weird, but here’s what I mean…
The Bible doesn’t just make promises about the afterlife. It doesn’t just say that if you repent and believe on the Lord Jesus you will go to heaven when you die. It says that if you repent and believe on the Lord Jesus you will be “born again”, that is, you’ll receive a new life now. This is something that has been proven true millions of times over, and probably by people that you know.
Yes, there are loads of hypocrites – people who claim to be Christians, but their lives are a denial of what they profess. I can’t deny their existence, but I also can’t deny the existence of those whose lives have been powerfully, positively and permanently transformed, not by religion or therapy, but by an experience of receiving Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour.
If the biblical gospel does what it says it does, then that’s a good reason to believe it is what it says it is – the gospel of God.
I have spoken to many people who have expressed interest in the gospel, but they were hesitant to take that step of faith to Christ, and the reason is they say, “I couldn’t live the Christian life.” They know that Christians read the Bible, pray, go to church, and so on, and they just couldn’t live that way – they’ve tried reading the Bible and they found it boring; they’ve tried praying and nothing happened; they went to church and felt like they were in a foreign country. They couldn’t live like that for a week never mind the rest of their lives.
My standard response is something like this: You are right, you couldn’t live the Christian life, but join the club – we are all in it. No one could naturally live the Christian life. Please don’t think that Christians are people who just happen to enjoy praising God and reading the Bible. Before I was a Christian I had no interest in those things at all. But think about this, I couldn’t live a bird life either. I would make a lousy bird. I can’t fly, I don’t like worms, I can’t sit on a telegraph line. There’s just no way I could be a bird. But if through some miracle I could be born again as a bird, doing things that birds do would come naturally to me because I would have the nature of a bird. Now, you would probably have more success trying to live as a bird than trying to live as a Christian. What needs to happen is this, you need to be born again, which is exactly what the Bible says happens when someone receives Jesus as Lord and Saviour:
But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:12-13)
…having been born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word of God which lives and abides forever… (1 Peter 1:23)
When you are born again you receive a new nature, which means you have the capacity to live the Christian life – you will find that there is a desire for things that once seemed as dry as dust to you. Things are different.
There were many occasions when Jesus healed people of diseases with just the power of His word. If you were to interview these people who had been healed and you asked them to prove that the words of Jesus had divine power, they would just ask you to look at their own experience. The Before and After should be all the proof that is required.
Similarly, there are millions of people today who would say to you, “If you doubt the divine power of the Bible, just look at me.” The change wasn’t wrought by them, but it was wrought in them when they received the Saviour the gospel presents.
In the Bible we read about a man called Paul who experienced the life-transforming impact of the gospel for himself. He said, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes”. He had “plugged in” and he had experienced its power, and so have multitudes of others from then till now. It’s true. Salvation isn’t dry theory or dead theology – it is real and living.
In the next post we will look at other ways we can experience the reality of God through the Bible.
