JESUS IS NOT JUST A MAN - Olivia Pereira

Jesus is not just a man: he is the source of my joy and the reason for my hope

In Jesus I have joy living every day knowing I am so deeply loved. Jesus knows us fully, even the worst parts of us, and he still loves us. The grace that he shows us is unbelievable. This doesn’t mean that following Jesus makes your life perfect and that you will be happy all the time, because life is still hard, and there is still suffering, and we can’t escape that. But because of Jesus, we don’t have to feel hopeless or that there is no point. Because Jesus brings us hope that suffering is temporary, and we will have eternal life in heaven.

Most of my family are Christian so I have always grown up believing God was real and so was his son. I believed in the existence of Jesus, but it wasn’t until I looked into the validity of the claims the bible makes for myself, that I understood that Jesus wasn’t just a man, he is my saviour. Jesus dying on the cross and rising from the dead isn’t just a story from the bible, but it was the moment that Jesus demonstrated his love for me, by taking my sins upon himself.

There have been times in my life when I questioned whether I wanted to follow Jesus. I didn’t feel like I was ‘good enough’ to call myself a Christian. But Jesus said ‘I have not come to call the righteous, but the sinners’. Jesus’ love for us is incredible. He doesn’t care what we have done, he still wants to have a relationship with us. He doesn’t ask for us to be perfect, he loves us as we are.