Come

You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life.
John 5:39–40

 Come is a verb. In the Greek it is erchomai, one of the most ordinary words in the New Testament. It means to come or to go. To move from where you are to somewhere else. It is a bodily word. A directional word. You cannot erchomai while standing still.

I didn't always understand that. For a long time, my faith lived mostly in my head and my heart. I wanted to know God. I wanted to feel close to God. And so when I felt called to ministry, my first move was to enroll in seminary. I told myself I needed to learn more, understand more, be more prepared. And that was true. But it wasn't the whole truth.
The whole truth is that I was studying about God when God was asking me to walk with God. There's a big difference.

The religious leaders Jesus is speaking to in John 5 are neither lazy nor indifferent. They are studious. Serious. They search the Scriptures. They know the text. But Jesus says something that we shouldn’t ignore. You search, and yet you refuse to come. All that knowledge, and they won't take the next step. They won't move.
I understand that more than I'd like to admit.

Seminary was necessary. But somewhere in the middle of it, God made clear that the education wasn't just for my personal enrichment. It was preparation for something that would cost me something. Ministry has changed my career. My income. How I see the world. It will eventually change where I live. What I thought was a decision to learn more about God turned out to be the beginning of handing my entire life over to God. Not just spiritually. Materially. Practically. All of it.

My choices are no longer entirely mine. They are God's. And that is not easy. It requires a surrender that doesn't always make sense, a trust I have to choose every day. I have had to put aside my identity as a leader and learn what it means to follow. That kind of following is harder than studying. It is harder than knowing. But it is closer to what Jesus means when he says come.

We talk a lot in church about what God does for us, and we should. Grace is real. Salvation is a gift we did not earn and cannot repay. But grace was never meant to be an endpoint. Grace is a starting point. It changes something in us that should prompt us to move, to listen, to follow, to become the hands and feet of the God who saved us.

The problem Jesus identifies in this scripture isn't that the religious leaders don't know enough. It's that knowing has become a substitute for following. And a trap that many of us get caught in. We remember how a sermon made us feel on Sunday and forget what God was asking us to do by Monday. We can quote the text and still not let it change how we treat people, how we spend our money, how we show up in the world.

Come is an action word. Walking with Jesus is active. It asks something of us every day, not just on Sunday mornings.

So here's the question worth sitting with this week: Is there somewhere God has been asking you to come that you've been studying instead of moving toward?

The text will still be there. But Jesus tells us life is in the coming.

Prayer
Lord, give us the courage to surrender what we cannot keep anyway. Teach us that following you is not a loss of ourselves but a new life with you. And when the path doesn't make sense, give us just enough trust to take the next step. We want to come. Meet us on the way. In Jesus' name. Amen.

Written by Jennifer Nelson