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Sunday after Pentecost, 2002

�-�This is eternal life�-?

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

What is eternal life? We should know this very well. The Lord came to the earth as a man in order to allow
us to have eternal life, in order to make us capable of eternal life. Many people do not understand what
eternal life is, what it is that the Lord wants us to be able to have. The Lord defines it in His high priestly
prayer just before He was arrested to be crucified:

�-�And this is eternal life: that they may know Thee,

the Only True God, and Jesus Christ Whom Thou didst send.�-? To have eternal life is to know Christ.

But what is it to know Christ?

He says also in His high priestly prayer that �-�they have received the word.�-? The word that He received
from His Father He faithfully transmitted to His apostles and disciples, and they received the word.

What is it to receive the word?

It means to do what He says! It means to live as He lived! It means to love the commandments as He
loved them! It means to struggle for virtue! Receiving is not just believing. The devil believes! The devil
knows more about Christ than we do. He knows the Scripture better than we know it. His intellect is far
superior to ours. But he has not received the word because he does not want to follow it.

Many people, within the Church and outside of the Church, have not received the word. Yes, indeed,
those in the Church too! Those tares, those weeds that grow up and at the end of the age will be gathered
and made separate and burned, those people have not received the word. Receiving it is to obey. Receiving
it is to know, and know intimately, our Lord Jesus Christ.

I�-?ve just been teaching about the Creed in the past few Saturdays, and this passage, more than any other in
the Scriptures, shows the utter equality of Jesus Christ with His Father. He says,

�-�the hour is come;

glorify Thy Son, that Thy Son might also glorify Thee: As Thou hast given Him power over all

flesh, that He should give eternal life to as many as Thou hast given Him.�-? And then He goes on a

little later and makes it very clear that He and the Father are One. He once said it in this way:

�-�I and the

Father are One.�-? He says, �-�Glorify Thou Me with Thine Own Self, with the glory which I had with

Thee before the world was.�-?

This should call to mind the beginning of the Symbol of Faith: �-�begotten of the Father before all ages;
Light of Light, True God of True God; begotten, not made.�-? Our Lord was not made; our Lord proceeds
from the Father eternally, and is Light of Light just as He is God and God the Father is God. And yet,
with His glory which He had before the world, with all of His prerogatives and His magnificence, He
obeyed His Father to come down, to be made a little lower than the angels, and to teach us �-? and most of
the people that He taught did not want to hear; we hear this in another reading, with the Gergesene
demoniac �-? and to die for us, and to make us capable of living.

In order to appropriate this eternal life, we must live as He has taught us, because otherwise we won�-?t
know Him. People make great mistake when they define Christianity by things that they should do or not
do, or membership, or the traditions they hold. Christianity is to be one as the Father and the Son are One.

Near the end of His prayer, He says,

�-�Father, keep through Thine Own Name those whom Thou

hast give Me, that they may be one, even as We are.�-? I was talking yesterday about how all dogma is