- Right.
- You can't believe in Jesus and trust in your own works.
That's not salvation.
Because believing in Jesus doesn't mean
to just believe that Jesus existed.
Believing in Jesus means your trust is in Jesus.
Your faith is in Jesus.
You're believing in him as your only way to heaven.
See, a lot of times people misunderstand
the term believe in, okay?
So let me just explain this.
If I said to you, I believe in aliens,
okay, which I don't.
But if I said, I believe in aliens,
I'm basically saying that I believe that aliens exist
when I say that, right?
But let's say, for example,
you're gonna take a big test tomorrow, okay?
And I came to you and said,
hey, listen, man, I believe in you.
Now, am I saying I believe you exist?
No, it's different, isn't it?
I'm saying I believe in you,
meaning I have faith in you, I'm trusting you.
I believe that you're able to do what you've set out to do
or what you've said you're going to do.
That's what believing in.
So when we believe in Jesus, what do we believe?
That he's able to do what he said he would do,
that he's our savior, that he's our way to heaven.
We're putting our trust in Jesus.
In fact, the Bible will use the words faith,
believe, and trust interchangeably.
Flip over if you would to Ephesians chapter one.
It's just a page or two to the right in your Bible.
Look at Ephesians chapter number one.
It says in verse number 13, Ephesians 1.13,
"In whom ye also trusted after that ye heard the word of truth,
the gospel of your salvation, and whom also after that ye
believed ye were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise,
which is the earnest of our inheritance
until the redemption of the purchased possession
unto the praise of His glory."
Now, this is a great passage here, because it helps define
the word believe as trusted, OK?
Now, some people will say, well, the trusted
is in italics in verse 13.
The trusted is coming from verse 12,
because it says in verse 12 that we
should be to the praise of His glory, who first trusted
in Christ, in whom ye also trusted after that ye heard
the word of truth, et cetera.
Don't be one of these people that says,
well, that's in italics.
Throw it out.
OK, this is what a person who is ignorant of Bible
translation would say.
Well, that's not in the original.
Take it out.
But here's the thing.
There is a difference between Greek and English.
They're two different languages.
So sometimes when you bring something into a new language,
it takes more words to express the same thing
in that language.
For example, when you translate anything into Spanish,
it's usually about time and a half as long as it is in English.
You ever wonder why they talk so fast?
Because they have to say time and a half as much
to get the same point across.
So when you translate things into Spanish, they get longer.
So if you want to, for example, dub a movie into Spanish,
you have to cut out whole sentences or talk really, really
fast in order to make it fit.
So it's the same thing between Greek and English.
They use different amounts of words to say the same thing.
It's not that the King James Bible is just pulling this word
trusted out of thin air.
It's pulling it from verse 12.
But the way the English language works,
it has to be restated in verse 13 in order to make sense.
See in Greek, there are sentences that don't even have a verb.
Well, you know what, that's not going to fly in English, is it?
We need a subject and a verb in every sentence, okay?
Different rules of grammar.
So don't be one of these people that thinks that you're so smart
that you know more than the 54 experts who translated the King James Bible
because you looked at a Greek book once for a couple days
or because you took a couple semesters of Bible College Greek.
And you know, you run into these people all the time who tell you,
"Well, you've got to go back to the Greek and, oh, the King James is wrong here."
And these people could literally not even order food in a Greek restaurant.
They wouldn't even be able to ask for extra tzatziki on their gyros, okay?
But yet they're going to sit there and tell you,
"Well, unfortunately, the King James is an error here," you know.
And pastors do it all the time.
And literally 99 percent of these guys, probably 99.9 percent of these guys, are not fluent
in the language or anywhere near being fluent.
But they know more than all the experts who were fluent, who translated the Bible in the
early 1600s.