You believe:  that is you love.  The grammar of the word works itself out inside you thus,—­believe, trust, love.  The truth comes in through eyes and ears and feeling, into brain and will; through emotion clear down into your heart.  You love.  You cannot help yourself.  You love Him, Jesus, the One so lovable.

John says that you may believe.  It is possible.  It is the reasonable intelligent thing to do after such a presentation.  John makes it easy for us to believe.  His telling of the story is so strong and convincing, though so simple and short, that believing is the natural thing.  Jesus Himself, as He conies to us through John’s eyes and speech, is so believable, so trustworthy, so lovable.

Now we may believe.  It’s the thing to do after a thoughtful kneeful study of the case as put by John.  We may believe clear into and through intellect and emotions and will, right down into the depths of heart and love, clear out into every action of the life.

And John sweeps in the whole crowd of the world in the way he puts it here.  Listen:  “that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ.”  That was for the Jew peculiarly in the first instance.  The Jew had been taught through generations that there was One coming who was God’s chosen One for the Hebrew nation.  He was the Anointed One.  The Hebrew said Messiah.  The Greek said Christ.  Both mean the same, the One chosen of God, anointed by Him as the King and Leader of His chosen people, and through them of all the race.

Listen further:  “that Jesus is the Son of God.”  That is for all of us, Jew and foreigner, insider and outsider.  This Jesus is in a distinctive sense the Son of God, the only begotten Son.  This pure loving pleading wooing suffering dying rising-again Jesus, this is the only begotten Son of the Father.  All there is in a Father comes to, and is in, an only begotten son.  This is God Himself coming to us in His Son.

Once let this sift into thought and heart, then who would not believe, and trust, and love, and fall on his face in the utter devotion of a voluntary slave before such a God!

And so believing, trusting, loving, touching, His life flows in and fills up and floods out.  We have it now.  That word eternal, used so often by John with the word life, is not a mere length word.  It is not a calendar word.  It tells the sort of life, the quality of life, that comes in through the opening door of our believing.  This is John’s back-door key, but it lets you clear in through the whole house.

Then there is the side-door key.  It hangs at the side, a bit towards the back.  It is in the Thursday night talk, as we commonly call it, that last heart-talk with the inner group on the betrayal night.  It is in chapter sixteen, verse twenty-eight:  “I came out from the Father, and am come into the world:  again, I leave the world, and go unto the Father.”