Run the experiment

Thirty-nine days ago you started something most people never do: you went to the source. Today, Jesus tells you how to verify it.

In the middle of a heated argument about his credentials, where his teaching came from, and by what authority, Jesus refused to settle it with a debate. He offered a test anyone could run:

Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own.

John 7:17

That is an experiment, and the laboratory is your life. He does not ask for blind belief, and he does not ask you to feel certain first. He says: do the will, and you will know. The proof is not at the end of an argument. It is on the other side of obedience.

Try forgiving the person who does not deserve it. Try the second mile, the secret gift, the honest yes, the blessing prayed over an enemy, the towel and the basin. Then watch what happens in you, and around you. For two thousand years, across every culture and century, the people who have actually run this experiment keep reporting the same result: it holds. Not a life without storms. A life that stands in them.

Which is exactly the picture he chose to end his greatest sermon. Everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them, he said, is like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, the winds beat on that house, and it did not fall. Everyone who hears and does not act is like a man who built on sand, and when the same storm came, it fell, and great was its fall.

Both men heard. The storm came to both. The only difference in the story, the only one, is doing. Forty days of hearing means nothing by itself. You already knew that, which is why every one of these days ended the way it did.

Tomorrow: the last email, and the truth that sets you free.