Once when the Lord Jesus was on the earth, on the last day of a feast, He stood up among a crowd and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink” (John 7:37). Why did He wait until the last day of the feast to stand up and speak this word? This is because it was on the last day of the feast, after the people had rejoiced a few days and were about to go away, that the sense of emptiness came. At that juncture, Jesus stood up and cried, “He who believes into Me...out of his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water” (v. 38). The “living water” and the “innermost being” mentioned here are both figures of speech, pointing to the fact that this Savior as the Spirit of life wants to enter into us as living water to quench the thirst of us who thirst.
Not only so, but today our Lord is also “breath.” After His death and resurrection, He returned to be among the disciples, breathed into them, and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (20:22). The Greek word for spirit is the same as that for breath. Therefore, here this can be translated as, “Receive the Holy Breath.” Our Lord, our God, is to us like air. Today all things exist altogether by depending on this breath of life. If there were no air, all living things could not live. Air is only a sign, whereas the Lord Jesus is the reality. He is the real air. The Lord wants to come into us. As the real life, He comes into us to solve the problem of our inward vanity. Our human life has hope only when we are filled with Christ within.
The Lord Jesus is not only our water of life to quench our thirst. He is not only the real breath of life coming into us to take away our emptiness. He is also our bread of life so that we who eat Him shall by no means ever hunger. When the Lord Jesus was on earth, He said to people, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me shall by no means hunger, and he who believes into Me shall by no means ever thirst” (6:35). In human history no writer of any book has ever dared to speak in such a way. Who could speak such words as, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink”; “he who believes into Me...out of his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water”; and “I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me shall by no means hunger, and he who believes into Me shall by no means ever thirst”? Only the God who created the universe can speak such words.
This God who created the universe and all things wants to be our bread of life and water of life. No matter whether our sense of human life is hunger or thirst, He can solve the problem for us. If we are hungry, He is our bread of life; if we are thirsty, He is our water of life. After saying that He is the bread of life and the water of life, one day He again spoke a very mysterious word. He said, “I am...the life” (John 11:25). In Greek, there are three different words denoting life: bios (Luke 8:14), referring to our visible, physical life; psuche (Matt. 16:25-26; John 12:25), referring to our soul-life; and zoe (Eph. 4:18; 1 John 1:2; Heb. 7:16), referring to God’s life, the spiritual life. The Lord Jesus said, “I am the life.” This life is neither bios nor psuche but zoe.
In other words, the Lord Jesus wants to be our life—not our bios life nor our psuche life but our zoe life. God desires to be our life, a life we do not have in ourselves. We have a physical life in the flesh and a soulish life as well, but we do not have the eternal, divine life of God. This divine life is what we need, and it is also what is indispensable for us. If we live by our created life in the flesh, we will not be satisfied, and our human life will be without a goal and without hope. This is because both our physical life and our soulish life are temporary and corruptible, not eternal.
Only God’s zoe, the divine life, is the eternal life. Some Bible versions translate eternal life as everlasting life. John 3:36a says, “He who believes into the Son has eternal life.” This means that those who believe into Christ have eternal life. The Lord Jesus said this word to prove His greatness, because in all of the sacred words spoken on earth, all that man can boast of is good doctrine, good teaching, and good philosophy. No man has ever said that he is life. No man is qualified to say this word except the Lord Jesus. The Lord Jesus can say so because He is life. He is the eternal life.
The Lord Jesus said in John 10:10, “I have come that they [men] may have life and may have it abundantly.” The Lord Jesus has come that man may not only have life but may have it more abundantly. How does the Lord Jesus cause us to have His life? The Bible tells us that He became flesh, passed through human living, and eventually went to die on the cross with our sins, thereby dealing with all of them. He died for our sins, was buried, and three days later He resurrected from the dead. Throughout human history, there has never been any leader or founder of a religion that has resurrected from the dead. Jesus Christ is the only One who died and resurrected.
Once He resurrected, He became the life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45b). Today He is on the throne in the heavens as the Lord of all. However, because He is the all-penetrating Spirit, He can be believed in and received by man by reaching man as “air.” This is the way He gives us life. For over fifty years I have been learning to work for the Lord, and I have traveled to a number of places where I have heard many testimonies of how people believed in the Lord. All those testimonies were nearly the same. The believers of the Lord Jesus all testified that before they met the Lord, their human living had been mostly empty and miserable. Nevertheless, after they received the Lord Jesus, and after He entered into them, their lives underwent a tremendous change.
Once a friend who worked in the customs office said to me, “Your words have solved my problem. I would like to believe in Jesus, but I do not know the way. Please tell me how to receive the Lord Jesus.” I said to him, “This God who is the Lord of the heavens and the earth became a man and died for us on the cross. Moreover, He resurrected from the dead and became the life-giving Spirit. Today He is in the heavens and on the earth. He is in every place where we are. That is why Romans 10:8 says that ‘the word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart.’ After you return home, find a quiet place to call on Him and say to Him, ‘Lord Jesus, You are my Savior, I confess my sins to You.’ Whatever feeling the Lord gives you concerning your sins, confess accordingly. When you pray to the Lord in this way, surely something will happen.”
This friend told me later that after hearing my word, he went back to pray to the Lord. The next day when he went to work, his colleagues were greatly surprised when they saw that he did not smoke as he usually did. Because he had believed in Jesus he spontaneously quit smoking. Not only so, he used to be a person who liked to tell jokes and make fun of others, but after believing in Jesus, he was delivered from all the outward pleasures of the flesh. Later his whole family also believed in Jesus. A few years later even the colleagues who lived in his neighborhood all believed in Jesus, household by household.
One time after preaching the gospel, a judge came and said to me, “I want to receive the Savior whom you preached. But I do not know how.” I said the same thing to him. I asked him to find a quiet place to call on the name of the Lord Jesus, and he did as I said. The next morning when he was on his way to the court, he suddenly felt that the heavens and the earth had changed their color. He could not help but laugh. As he arrived at his office, his colleagues noticed that he was different from before in that he had a smiling face, and they asked him, “What happened to you? Did you win the lottery?” He could not explain but just kept smiling. When he returned home, his wife saw him and asked, “What is the matter with you?” He felt that he seemed to have become another person. He truly had an unspeakable joy within. Not long afterward he quit his job as a judge and became a preacher to share with others the life that he had obtained.
I give you these two examples to show you that our human life is for God. The purpose of our existence is to receive God into us as life. Only in this way will we no longer sense the vanity of human life. In the New Testament there is an apostle named Paul, who said in Colossians 3:4 that Christ is our life. He also said in Galatians 2:20, “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” Not only so, he said in Philippians 1:20b and 21a, “As always, even now Christ will be magnified in my body, whether through life or through death. For to me, to live is Christ.” These words seem puzzling and hard to comprehend. How can it be that for us to live is Christ? Yet in nature, God has arranged something—grafting—to illustrate this.
We all know that in botany, grafting means to unite two trees. A farmer grafts a branch of a sweet tree into that of a sour tree so that the life of the sweet tree can enter into the sour tree and the life of the sour tree can enter into the sweet tree. Eventually these two lives are joined together to become one life. The fruit produced thereafter is the expression of the sweet tree through the sour tree. To the sour tree, the sweet tree is its life, so it is no longer the sour tree that lives, but it is the sweet tree that lives in it. If the sour tree could speak, it would declare, “As always, even now the sweet tree will be magnified in my body, whether through wind and frost or through rain and snow.” This is the life of a Christian.
This is not a shallow gospel. This is the mysterious yet simple truth in the Bible. All you need to do is open your heart and call on His name, telling him, “Lord Jesus, I believe in You. I want to receive You.” In this way you can obtain this ever-living Savior of the universe, and He will be in you to be your life.
(A message given on December 7, 1985 at a gospel meeting in Taipei.)