Before Class on Sunday, I felt God kind of telling me to go 'out of bounds' and approach the Class differently. We have been doing a series on discovering God, but this week's plan in the series was just a goof-off week, and the students - and myself included - don't really like spending our time in class playing games and just talking. We get a lot of that when we leave church and go to Fuddruckers or China Cottage or Applebee's or whatever. So today seemed like a good week to do it, and I just felt God telling me, "I want you to talk about this today. Don't worry. I won't make you look like a fool. And I won't let the class bomb-out either." So I prayed and said Okay.

We talked about some pretty deep stuff. What does it mean to believe in Jesus Christ? We acknowledged that the majority consensus was that believing in Christ meant knowing and believing to be true all the biblical facts about Jesus - but I reminded them that if that were the case, then many fallen angels would have stronger faith than us! If you look into the ancient texts and the original meaning behind Jesus' words when he says, "All who believe in me will be saved," you will find a deeper meaning, a meaning all but lost in our technology-driven, consumerist, modern era. To believe in this sense is to know Christ; and not to know Christ as you know the President of the United States or the Russian prime minister, nor even as we know our friends and family. It is a deeper and more passionate knowing; an intimate knowing. Jesus is saying, "All who are intimate with Me are intimate with the Father; and their intimacy will set them free... All who are intimate with Me will be saved."

We didn't stop there, though. I asked, "Is there really any way at all, do you think, that we can tell whether or not we're really intimate with God?" Nods of heads. "Okay... Like what?" No one knew, or at least no one spoke up, so I tossed a Bible at Jacque and she read some of John 14. The answer, she then gave, was obedience. We talked about how obedience is not salvation, but obedience flows from true salvation. Jesus says that those who are intimate with Him will obey Him; this is inevitable. The way we act always ties in with what we really believe; we never act 'out-of-line' with our beliefs. We always live up to them - or down to them. We all acknowledged the possibility of pretending to have faith when one does not, and even convincing oneself that he or she has faith when really, he or she does not. I left them - and myself - with a "challenge:" explore our own lives, sift through them, and see what it is we really believe.