John 8:32 - The truth shall set you free

If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. As Scripture says, ‘Anyone who believes in him will never be put to shame.’ For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile – the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’
How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!’ But not all the Israelites accepted the good news. For Isaiah says, ‘Lord, who has believed our message?’ Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ.

- Romans 10:9-17

The art is one of Shauna Bucaroff's whimsical girls and when I did the pages I really wanted to include it. In retrospect I wish I had done something different now - the pages when I copy other people's ideas and thoughts don't seem to mean as much to me as the ones when I come up with my own ideas.

Having said that, a few weeks after doing this page I had to preach at church and I found the verses coming back to me again. The following is part of what I preached - part of what the verses led to after I'd done some more in depth study.

The first part of the passage is one of those verses which often gets misquoted, or at the very least, misrepresented. “The truth shall make you free” is carved in stone on university buildings around the world, used as newspaper slogans, and quoted often – for the vast majority of the time, the people who use it ignore the first part of the verse.

Will your own opinions and the opinions of others set you free? Will knowing the latest gossip about soap stars set you free? Or having access to endless news reports online, on TV or in newspapers and magazines?

No. The verse is talking about knowing the truth about Jesus. That truth is contained in the Bible. Admittedly, the Bible can be hard and sometimes uncomfortable reading - but this is what will set you free.

We know that the Bible is true. All 27 books of the New Testament were written while the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ ministry were still alive. Paul's letters were written 15 to 30 years after the death of Jesus. 1 Corinthians 15:6 he mentions the fact that 500 people had seen the risen Jesus at one time and that most of them were still alive. Most of the books were written before AD 70, within 40 years of the crucifixion, with the last to be written possibly only as late as around AD 90 – still within living memory. Think of it this way. If we were the writers of the New Testament now, for some of us Jesus would have lived in the late 1980s, for others the 1970s and perhaps for one, in the 1950s.  These aren’t stories of folklore that have been passed down for generations and changed with the retelling before being written down, these are contemporaneous accounts of Jesus’ life, ministry, death and resurrection.

If we accept that the Bible is true then that is the standard by which we can measure everything else against. I admit to struggling to get my head around this thought for a while, then I realised it’s actually very simple. Satan is the “great deceiver”, and I don’t know about you but I’ve heard a lot of sermons telling us not to believe the lies he whispers about us being not good enough, or not having done enough good, or having made too much of a mess of things to ever be salvaged. In the face of this, the Bible is the truth – we can never make too much of a mess of things to be redeemed, and we don’t have to work our way into God’s good graces. The Bible tells us the truth about who we are and where we’re heading.

In the second part of the passage, not only is Jesus offering truth to know our real worth in God, but He is also offering freedom. He talks about being a slave to sin, which is worse than physical slavery. Have you ever done something wrong and then been wracked with guilt, not able to forget it no matter how much you apologise or ask for forgiveness?

Jesus offers us freedom from this kind of slavery. In the next few verses he explains exactly what He means:

Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever.

The people listening – the Jews – would have embraced their biological relationship as descendants of Abraham and so didn’t quite understand what He was talking about when He spoke of slavery. However Jesus explained it to them – they were slaves to sin, but if they were to become His disciples they would know the truth and Jesus would set them free. They would join the family of God.

And in order to join God’s family, Jesus tells them in John 8:31

If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.

And that brings us full circle. Where do we find Jesus’s teaching? In the Bible. And only by knowing what the Bible really says can we make sure that we’re really following Jesus’s teachings, being His disciples, and fully part of His family.

Romans 12:2 - Do not conform... but be transformed

"And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect."

 - Romans 12:2

I journalled this verse over two pages, because there was so much meaning in it. For the first half of the verse, "do not conform", I drew a school of black fish to represent the world, then a golden fish swimming in the opposite direction to represent God's people. The picture had been in my mind for a while after chatting with friends who work at a conference centre who were thinking about a mural for the wall. They were talking about swimming against the flow, and it seemed to resonate somehow.

For the second half of the verse I drew a transformation, the simplest and most dramatic I could think of - the change from a caterpillar to a butterfly. Over the years I've heard amazing stories of people transformed after coming to know God - alcoholics suddenly not wanting to drink any more, drug addicts recovered, people finding a purpose in life, etc. My own transformation wasn't anything like as dramatic, but I hope I am a better, more Christ-like person because of my relationship with God.

This passage also reminds me of a study I once did on John 14:13 - "And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son." The question was asked how can this be true when God doesn't answer some prayers. The answer is Romans 12:2 - if we transform our minds to think like God, then we will be asking for what God wants as well. If we don't, then we're only asking for what we want - in our name as it were - and that doesn't always fit in with God's plans.

The pages were inspired by week 13 of Rebekah R Jones' Bible art journalling challenge.

John 19:28-30 - It is finished

The death of Jesus
Later, knowing that everything had now been finished, and so that Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, ‘I am thirsty.’ A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus’ lips. When he had received the drink, Jesus said, ‘It is finished.’ With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

- John 19:28-30

The death of Jesus is one of the defining moments of our faith. If He hadn't died, he couldn't have risen again, and so this passage is full of the weight of history. Jesus had finished His work on Earth (which then leads me to think about how we now have all that work to do...).

I wanted something striking to emphasise the importance of this passage, but I didn't want to go down the blood or cross route, as I see those images so often it sort of desensitises me to their impact. Instead I Googled images of Golgotha - the place of the skull - and used that as the image on the page. I used the big block letters to write 'it is finished' and did use reds to signify blood and to make them stand out.

Overall I'm pleased with this page. It's stark and cold and has no sign of life, which was the whole point of these verses - Jesus was very dead at this point. He had to be to pay for the sins of the world.

I used watercolour pencils and a black Micron pen on this page.