Inspirational Thought

Dear Friend,

Our church's mission statement is: "Connecting People to God and Each Other Through Jesus Christ." The desire of our collective heart is to know God intimately through Christ, and to help others know God intimately through Christ, in the context of our loving community of faith.

It is difficult to get to know someone whom you cannot see, hear, smell, taste, touch, or intuit. Through these six senses we take-in information from the universe around us that helps us know reality. In the case of Jesus Christ, how do we get to know and feel personally connected to someone who lived two thousand years ago, and hasn't been seen since?

An agnostic found himself in trouble, and a friend suggested he pray. "How can I pray when I do not know whether or not there is a God?" he asked. "If you are lost in the forest," his friend replied, "you do not wait until you find someone before shouting for help."

Earnest seekers have asked for centuries: "How can we meet, personally connect with, and truly know Jesus?" I'd like to bring forth a few thoughts based in Scripture that suggest how we can come to know God.

1. God initiates our meeting Him. We can notice evidence of God's presence in nature and within our own heart and conscience. John 3:16 states that God sent his Son so that we would know God's love and salvation. John 6:44 notes that God the Father draws us to Himself. 1 John 4:10 tells how God lovingly takes the initiative to establish a relationship with us.

2. Those who want to find God can. Scripture suggests God provides some points of light that are visible to those who choose to look and see. As we've mentioned, there is the light of nature (Romans 1:18-20), and the light of conscience (Romans 2:12-16). There is also the light of Scripture that points to the greatest light, Jesus Himself (1 John 1:7).

3. God is not limited to what is visible. The second of the Ten Commandments tries to help us find God by forbidding us to think of him in visual terms (Exodus 20:4). It forbids us to use images as representations of the divine being. Jesus said, "No one has ever seen the Father." He also said, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe" (John 20:29). Dallas Willard notes how God's spiritual invasions into human life "seem by their very gentleness almost to invite us to explain them away, even while soberly reminding us that to be obsessed and ruled by the visible is death but that to give one's self over to the spiritual is life and peace (Rom. 8:6)."

God is not insensitive to our problem of overcoming the power of the visible world. He invades the visible.

Spiritual people, and particularly people touched by God's Holy Spirit, are those who draw their life from an intimate relationship with God. We do not live our lives merely in terms of the human order in the visible world; we have "a life beyond."

4. The "still, small voice"--the interior or inner voice--seems to be held up by Scripture as the most valuable form of individualized communication for God's purposes. In contrast to the noise and frenzy of the so-called "real world of the visible" the spiritual world whispers to us ever so gently. Generally speaking, God will not compete for our attention.

When we seek God earnestly and are prepared to examine every possible thing that might be his overture to us--including the most obvious things like Bible verses or our own thoughts--then he promises to be found (Jer. 29:13). We will find God only if we honestly believe that God will address us in ways suitable to his purpose in our life.

May we be attentive as God continually, gently, mysteriously guides us into a deeper knowledge of himself.

In His Love,

Pastor Duff Gorle