Jesus As the Perfect Student

Matthew 5:17 (NIV) -

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them.

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Recap:

- Submitting to God means completely giving ourselves to Him to be judged, without taking anything back.

- The Bible is our textbook, which we can study to learn how God wants us to live. But without an answer key, we can easily get confused and misinterpret what the Bible says.

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Imagine, for a second, that you are taking a test. There are 1,000,000,000 questions, and every single question has at least 1,000,000,000 possible answers. To try and guess the correct answer to every single question would be impossible, and even if you do know some of the answers, the chances are that you are going to fail the test. The only possible way to pass is to already know the answer to every single question.

In this illustration, Jesus basically becomes the equivalent of that straight A student who has done all of the study and gotten 100% on his test. Even better, He's decided that He's going to give every one of His friends a copy of His test so that they'll have the correct answer to every single question and be able to pass.

Jesus did what nobody else was able to do - He came to earth and lived a perfect life, because He was both fully human and fully God. As Jesus Himself says in the Scripture above, He came to fulfil God's instructions, or bring them into their fullest meaning. He showed us the complete truth of who God is and how He wants us to live. Then, He even died, taking the punishment that we deserved, so that we could live - like when a student is banned for helping others cheat.

The best part is, what He did also means that we can be free of sin and live with God - that's why we call it salvation. Jesus has promised that He will give a copy of His A+ test to all of His friends - the people who have a genuine relationship with Him - so we can know what all of the right answers are and pass the test as well!

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who will pretend to be fake friends so they can get a copy. They might say with words that they're friends with Jesus, but their actions and their way of living tell otherwise. Tomorrow, we will be looking at obedience as the evidence that we are in a true relationship with Christ.