13 These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life.14 This is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.15 And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests which we have asked from Him. (1 John 5:13–15)
The knowledge that one possesses eternal life should change everything. I mean everything. It’s the hope of our salvation. The flip side is eternal death, and we certainly don’t want that! When you walk through life, it seems easier to fear death. Certainly our laws are written with teeth to cause us to fear wrongdoing. That’s why they call the judicial process the penal system, whereby there is a penalty for skirting the law that could be quite severe, which includes capital punishment. As Christians we should not be dwelling in a world that is always looking over our shoulder.
John writes to us to take early admission into eternal life, and shed the fear and worry. If Christians should be anything, they should be confident, because they are backed by Almighty God. That’s why they should be taking everything—everything—to God in prayer. What a friend we have in Jesus!
Our God is not distant, but very much present in times of trouble (Psalm 46:1). Of all people, Christians should be, in theory, eternally hopeful and confident people. After all, the same God who created the world down to the molecular level is on speed dial. We take everything to him in prayer, because, why shouldn’t we? And His intelligence is not artificial!
We scroll the scriptures for starters to find what we need, but even then, we have an ongoing perpetual conversation with him via his Spirit, an uncanny integration of prayer in all things, whereby we are constantly requesting that he provide the answers to life’s conundrums and he does! These answers may come from his written word, or through that “still small voice.”
There’s a song that talks about not knowing what you’ve got until it’s gone. Our confidence will never leave us. It operates in the background. We know without question if “we ask anything according to His will, He hears us! And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests which we have asked from Him.” (1 John 5:15)
This is Authentic Intelligence (AI)!
(Here’s my take on these verses from 10/7/18, before we had AI.)
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