John 5:39-40  You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about Me, yet you refuse to come to Me to have life.
 

Perhaps you have read books about the Christian life that tout the seven steps toward an effective prayer life or the five attributes of a Christian giver. To be fair, Scriptures often do address practical issues of the Christian life. But such how-to books can give the impression that our walk with God is a series of stepping stones that finally bring us home to the Father. In reality, our walk with God begins with the Father's sending Jesus Christ to us, thereby bringing us home. Out of the living faith He gives us, we respond by searching the ways in which Christ's love and forgiveness apply to our lives.

Jesus addresses just this issue here in John 5. We can diligently study the Scriptures without ever discovering their focal point. To learn "how to" without learning of Jesus and His saving work provides us with a manual for right living without giving us Christ's righteousness. So we are left destitute of the one and only thing that counts: the eternal life He wishes to shower on us.

But the Scriptures testify about Him as they grab us and make us see the futility of our own efforts at godly living. At the moment when we realize all is hopeless, they give us new hope because He suffered and died and rose again for us. So search the Scriptures, for in them is found His eternal life.

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