John 2: 23
“Now while he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Festival, many people saw the signs he was performing and believed in his name.”
Let’s take a second look at this verse. It states that people saw the signs Jesus performed and “believed in his name.” As we have seen just in the first two chapters of John’s gospel, Jesus is referred to by many names.
Q: What does it mean to you to believe in his name?
It appears, these people were beginning to believe Jesus could be the Christ, the Messiah, because of the signs Jesus performed. Beginning to believe who He was not why He had come.
To believe in Christ is to accept the conviction of the Holy Spirit that we are hopeless, unclean sinners, and the faith, trust, hope given to us in the ultimate miracle of Jesus. The eternal cleansing power of His personal sacrifice. His death and resurrection for our sins, when we repent and trust in Him.
I would say to believe in His name to me is to believe in that person,..we have all been given a name but not all names have come from where God resides,..no other name has been given to men under heaven by which we must be saved,..that’s I believe Acts 4:12,..and then there is a verse somewhere that reads something like,..the work of God is that we may believe in the one He has sent,..so I believe in Jesus for who He is and what He has done for me at the cross,..certainly sooo undeserved for someone like me,..but for some reason the King of heaven wants me,..I think I believe in Him sooo much that I rise in the morning with songs in my head and heart praising God and Jesus,..maybe it’s from the last song that I listened to the day before but still I rise with a song in my heart giving glory to the One who deserves my all,..
To believe in the name in Jesus is to believe in the promises of God.
Jesus, there’s just something about that name!
To believe in the ‘name’ of the Lord Jesus is to rule out and eliminate all other names, including our own.
Once our ‘eye is single our whole body can be filled with light’. It is at this point in our walk that what we do in the name of the Lord Jesus allows the Holy Spirit to lead us and guide us.
“The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”
Matthew 6:22 KJV
A late response today. I think about what it means to believe in someone’s name; it really means believing that what they are telling you is true, or that they will follow through with what they say they will do. I’ve been on both sides of that: believing in someone, and also hearing someone tell me what they can do, but not believing in them. Believing in Jesus’s name to me means believing not just that he exists, but rather that He will be faithful to do what He has promised. These are the things I believe in Jesus’s name:
John 6:37 “All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away”
Mark 10:29 “Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first”
John 14:21 “Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them”
John 15:14–15 “You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you”
John 15:9–11 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete”
Chris,
Thank you! Jesus is faithful to do all that he said he would and all that was prophesied about him.
But what if Jesus had been named “Joe” instead? Believing in the “name” is really a way of saying that we believe in the man behind the name. Whether “Joe” or “Jesus” it still adds up to “I believe in the Son of God,” the Messiah, the King of Kings.