What it isn’t: a mental subscription to the deity of Jesus Christ.
What it is: believing is trusting that the example and prescriptions that Jesus gives will produce the intended outcomes.
Let’s revisit my earlier example of the dance teacher. A student can’t claim to believe in her teacher unless she does what her teacher directs her to do. Anything less would be a false claim.
Similarly, when Jesus says love and pray for your enemies, if you believe in Jesus, you do exactly that.
If you put conditions on it or construct some sophisticated argument why you should bomb your enemies instead of loving and praying for them, you simply don’t believe in Jesus.
Believing is therefore not a mere mental subscription to the deity of Jesus. That’s never how the Holy Scriptures employ this verb.
In any event, such mental subscription will be inconsequential. A student can ‘believe’ in her teacher all she wants, but without actually doing what she is taught, her ‘believing’ achieves nothing.
It’s therefore not the mental subscription in Jesus that saves, but rather the process of becoming like Him as we do what He taught, like loving and praying for our enemies.