ARE YOU AS CLOSE TO GOD AS YOU WANT TO BE?

 

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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.”  And he led him down a rocky path toward the sea. 

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.”

          Most of you probably know the story of the Prodigal son which tells of another young man…but he was not looking for God, rather he was looking only for earthly happiness and earthly satisfaction.

 What he found was a poverty of mind, body and soul   And why?  Because he was looking in the wrong places.