If we diligently seek God, we’ll want to narrow the gap between our professed beliefs and our practical beliefs. We’ll sacrifice to LIVE whatever truths we’ve discovered. It’s not enough to believe what is true; we must engage it and make it our own.
We greatly benefit when we think about God. But the greatest good of all is that our minds are lifted out of our little concerns and caught up in the wonder of Someone who existed long before we ever had the need to think of Him.
Our malady was well diagnosed by J. B. Phillips’s famous five words: “Your God is too small.” Until we realize that the self-indulgent “worship” that passes for reverence today is an insult to God, it’s not likely that we’ll seek Him as we should.
Suppose the “God” we worship is not God as He has revealed Himself to be, but God as we have wrongly conceived Him in our own minds. Are we not worshiping a “creature” of our own making, an idolatry all the more dangerous because it is so subtle?
If we neglect the declaration of Himself that God has made, we die. Ultimately, there is no alternative. Jesus could not have said it more clearly: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6).
Like rich, fertile soil, our hearts must be receptive to the word which God intends to plant there. Although marvelous good things can come from God’s word in our hearts, this word can’t even take root in our hearts if they are hardened or unhearing.
When we disobey what we know to be God’s will, we are saying by our actions, “Not Thy will, but mine be done.” Sin is always a refusal to acknowledge God, a declaration of our independence and a stiff-necked resistance to God’s sovereignty.
Unlike the atheist who believes there is no God, we may believe we don’t really have to deal with the God who does exist. We may think that He can be ignored. But our disregard for God only shows us to be foolish. It does nothing to diminish Him.
Eloquent words about God may abound in some circles, and there is certainly no shortage today of profound discussion about spirituality. But our relationship with God is not determined by either the eloquence or the profundity of our talk.
In this age, we’ve discovered how to multiply our own words vastly, and we’re frequently reminded of the power of these words. But we dare not forget their danger. “The Lord is in His holy temple. Let all the earth keep silence before Him.”
The vivid account in Psalm 22, written so many centuries before Jesus’ death and corresponding so closely to the event, can be explained in only one way: David was enabled ...