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.
The human spirit was created to thrive on God’s beauty. When we long for God and reach for Him, when we devote ourselves with a whole heart to showing forth His goodness, we come closer to a beauty that was meant to surround us and delight us.
Many good things come to the obedient, and it would be naive to say we shouldn’t be drawn to these. But those can’t be our primary concern. Jesus taught that we get the good things of this life only by forgetting them and keeping our focus on God.
Diligent study only becomes the diligent seeking of God when the intellect is driven by a pure heart. And whether we’ve actually sought God or not is evidenced more by the tokens of devoted discipleship than by those of academic scholarship.
The question of God is the most basic of life’s issues. Whatever we do when confronted with this question influences our character at its deepest level. One can’t be a quality person and not deal in a quality way with this issue. Our choices matter.
Even when we acknowledge the primary role God must play in our progress, we sometimes still don’t move ahead. We fail to see the need on our part to take the spiritual steps we could take and to make the progress that is available to us each day.