A Fresh Perspective

In John  10:27 Jesus says:  “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.” Eternal life in John’s Gospel is as much about quality of life as quantity of life. It is not merely life without end; it involves a particular kind of life that is without end . This Gospel offers a rather simple, but profound explanation of what it means by eternal life. In John 17:3 we read: “This is eternal life,  that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” From the perspective of the Johannine community, eternal life is knowing God and Jesus Christ whom God sent into the world. This “knowing” is not simply knowing about, it is not information based knowledge. It is intimate knowing, experiential knowing, relational knowing, intuitive knowing; it is deep, innate, inner, spiritual knowing. Faith, of course, is vital in nurturing this kind of kind of knowing. It is critically impor...

Three times in the book of Acts, Paul’s experience of his encounter with the living Christ is told. In Acts 9, Luke reports the story. In Acts 22, Luke has Paul recount his experience to an unruly temple crowd. And in Acts 26, Paul retells his experience to Festus and King Agrippa. Paul’s own brief account of his encounter with Christ is found in Galatians 1:13–17. Paul explains this experience as a revelation— “God was pleased . . . to reveal his Son to me”—and as a calling through grace “to proclaim Christ among the Gentiles.” Paul says that after this encounter he did not “confer with any human being,” nor did he go up to Jerusalem to get the endorsement of the Twelve (“those who were already apostles before me”), but went, at once, to Arabia, and then afterward to Damascus where he began proclaiming that Jesus was the Messiah. We don’t know how long he stayed in solitude in Arabia, where he was apparently sorting things out. Paul underwent a major transformation as a result of ...