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Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.
John 3:36 ESV
I will admit this is a tricky verse to look at, because in many translations the word obey is also translated into believe. I will say that in my opinion trust would be a good word to have in both places although believe and obey is the better option. You see our Christian faith is a combination of belief and obedience that stems out of our trust in God. What I mean is that our belief in God goes beyond just the intellectual to a deeper trust in God that leads to obedience. For example let’s look at our regular relationships, when we were kids I am sure we all scraped our knees at one time or another. Now often our parents would tell us that we would be okay and that we would live while in that moment we would feel like our world was coming to an end, but because we believed in our parents, we trusted them, we knew what they were saying was true and it would help comfort us.
We do this because we know that our parents have our best interest in their mind, even when they are disciplining us they are doing it out of love. Even though we may not like it at the time our belief in our earthly parents has us obeying them because we trust that they have the best intentions for us in the long run. God is the same way, we may not like what we are going through or may feel like obedience to God is killing our fun, but in the long term obedience to God will lead us to eternal life. Our pride will often say that intellectual belief is enough, that obedience is not needed, but remember we are told many times that our belief and obedience goes hand in hand. So how deep is your belief in God, is it the surface level intellectual belief or is it the deeper trust that leads to obedience?
