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God
put in us a desire to relate to Him and worship Him on a regular basis. In a
sense, to seek the light of Christ and keep that light on all the time. Not just at an occasional Sunday morning
service, or when a fox hole experience drives us to our knees - but always on. To make God something more than a spiritual
Web Site to occasionally visit
In
short, to increase your confidence in God go for an all-out swim in the great ocean of God
He is a minister today, but once, when
he was a little boy of five, he had an experience he would never forget. In his own
words, I relate his story:
“I
had my first experience with the presence of God when I was 5 years old. Arriving home from my half day of kindergarten, I
usually ate lunch with my mom and then hurried off to play. When I
would run out of things to do, I would resort to another favorite game, spying
on my mom. And so, on this
particular afternoon, I stood outside her bedroom and pressed my ear to the
closed door.
“I
heard a familiar sound, the voice of my mother, talking to God in prayer. Suddenly I
felt as if something had reached underneath that door and wrapped itself around
me while she prayed.
“I
felt the hair on my arms stand up, and my spine
begin to tingle.
“I
had an acute awareness that something good was happening all around me as my
mother worshipped God with tender words of prayer and adoration.
“What
happened? There was something going on in that room that was not of this world. Something
that was impossible to express with words.
There was a conversation being conducted between heaven and earth.”
Have you had that sort of experience yourself? And if your child or grandchild overheard you
pray, would it cause them to have this sensation?
What I’m talking about is the difference between singing songs about God and singing songs to God.
The difference between talking about
God and talking to God. Becoming emotional about God rather than
working hard not to become emotional about God.
Realizing that true worship isn’t tied to Sunday or the calendar.
What was it Jesus said… “Blessed are
those who hunger and thirst after righteousness for they will be satisfied. ”
Oh,
people can go for a long while with far apart times of feasting at the table of
the Lord. Just as people in the
concentration camps went without much food for weeks and months and even years, and some even
survived, but when the allies arrived, they were mere shadows of their
former selves.
So it is if we do not, on a regular
basis, feed our souls; we are shadowy skeletons of what we might otherwise have
been..
What I am saying is to take to heart the ongoing message of any
nutritionist, “You are what you eat. ” So too, if our spiritual diet is the equivalent of
spiritual fast foods, we will suffer from spiritual starvation, if not a
spiritual death.
So how to change one’s spiritual
diet? Indeed, how to want to change
one’s spiritual diet?
Part of an answer is found in the
following Greek legend:
The young man came to the old
theologian and asked, “How can I find - really find - God? Really experience Him?”
The
old theologian answered by commanding, “Follow me. .
He
continued to walk right into the sea itself, and said to the young man, “Come,
continue to follow me. ”
And when they stood side-by-side, up to their waists in the
undulating waves, the old man, with a surprisingly strong grip, grabbed the
young man by his neck and thrust him beneath the surface.
The
more the young man struggled, the harder he felt himself being pushed down.
Finally
when he was sure he would drown, he felt the grip lessen and he rose gasping
for breath.
“When
you want God as badly as you just wanted air, then you will find him in the way
you were asking. ”
(TO BE CONTINUED)
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