New Church Life Sep/Oct 2014 | Page 49

       evidence that He is. What that means is that if we’re experiencing doubt, the way out of that doubt is not simply going to be trying to find more evidence. The way out is to start living as if what the Lord says is true. That means submitting our lives completely to Him and striving to obey His commandments. Once we have done this, once we start to notice the changes in our lives that this brings about, then we start to see the actual truth behind what we’ve been learning. We’ll still have some doubt, but we’ll also start to see the truth more clearly. That seems backwards, but this really is the way it works. People over the years have noticed that when the Lord gave His commandments to the children of Israel, their response was not, “All that Jehovah has spoken, we will hear and do,” but, “All that Jehovah has spoken, we will do and hear.” (Exodus 19:8) The doing comes first, and only after that, because they have obeyed, are the people truly able to hear and comprehend. We see something similar throughout John. A major theme of that gospel is that only those who are in obedience to God will be able to recognize Jesus as Lord. So, John 3:20-21 says: “For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God.” It is doing the truth that allows us to come to the light. And so, in addition to adopting the affirmative principle – “I will believe what the Word says because it is from God” – if we want to believe, we need to act in obedience to the Lord. This is summed up in the short book Doctrine of Faith: If anyone should think within himself, or say to someone else, “Who is able to have the internal acknowledgment of truth which is faith? Not I”; let me tell him how he may have it: Shun evils as sins, and come to the Lord, and you will have as much of it as you desire. (Faith 12) That passage speaks of the need to shun evils as sins if we want to come into real sight of the truth. Our love of evil clouds our ability to see the truth. But the passage also speaks of one other vital thing: the need to “come to the Lord.” This is the other main thing we need if we want to have a sight of truth: we need to approach the Lord Jesus Christ directly as God, in thought and in prayer. We might not see immediately why this is the case; and we can only completely understand it once we’ve actually done it. But the general reason is this: the Lord Jesus Christ is God in human form, and when we think of Him, talk to Him, pray to Him, follow Him, and obey Him, we are drawn into a conjunction with Him in a way that is impossible if we have a vague or distant idea of God as an impersonal force. In Jesus, we see the true, human face of 435