God

---

God

This morning as I began my prayer, I thought about what I should pray for and how little time I actually spend talking with my heavenly Father. I know that there are those out there who rise early and spend much time, perhaps even hours in prayer. Comparing myself to them, it feels like I am a shirker. However, I know that many times I have had deep conversations with God, his love and peace filling my unworthy heart and mind. Does the length of my prayer determine my depth of service to him, or somehow measure my love? If so, I am an utter failure. There is no way I can pray enough or long enough to gain his favor by the act alone of praying. I may be wrong, but God is more interested in the quality of our prayers than the quantity. Not to say that prayer is not important, but our communication with God extends beyond our prayers. The quantity of our prayers is more often the act of testing our faith, surrendering of our will, and preparing our hearts for God’s answer.  God’s voice is not limited to the time I am in prayer with him. His voice speaks at times when I least expect it, during the quiet of the morning or the busy of the day. When our hearts are turned towards him, our prayers are more about communicating with him than spending hours in prayer.

God is not something or someone we can choose to believe in if we want to. That would be very wrong. Just because he is not real in someone’s life, does not mean that he does not exist. He is not optional, like something we can add to life or decide to believe or not believe in. He has given us his word which is the Bible. This book tells us of his divine will for humanity. The story of how the earth is and what is in it, the fall of the human race into sin, and the coming of a Redeemer to save everyone is all there.

I can choose to ignore God and his existence if I want to. I can judge God as incapable of helping me, that is my choice. God does not force me to believe in him, yet his evidence is all around me. Even closer than that, each time I take a breath of air, or feel the beating of my heart, I know that I was not an accident. Only something or someone divine could design the human body with all its functions. That also means that if someone created me, then I must be valuable to them. It also means that I do not belong to myself; someone owns me. At least that is the way it is in real life.

If I want to build or make something, I first must get the ingredients or materials. It takes an effort on my part to obtain or purchase those things necessary to complete my project. When I am finished, because I own what I put into that project, it belongs to me. Isn’t it the same with us? That someone was God. We are created by him, so therefore we belong to him. Of course he set life in motion, so in reality he only created the first human beings, a man and a woman. After that they have continued to reproduce more human beings. And yet there remains a mystery in it all, because life and death are not in man’s choosing. He cannot decide when he will be born, neither can he decide when he will die, unless he takes his own life. All the diseases that plague humans are also a mystery. Doctors have come up with diagnoses for maladies, but they have not come up with ways to prevent people from getting them. This also gives evidence that man is not in control. God still retains control of life and the spirit in man. Doctors and scientists have done many amazing things, including being able to reproduce parts of the body from cells. However, man has never been able to create life or the spirit in man. These are gifts from God.

Man can make many things out of what he has available to work with, however only God can create something out of nothing, and make it reproduce itself over and over again.

Besides humans, there is the animal kingdom, the bugs, bacteria, the plants, the times and seasons, the earth and its eco system, rivers and bodies of water, the storms and sunshine, the stars and planets, as well as the laws of physics. Everything works in an order that is impossible to just have happened. All these things point to a creator, and owner, someone who cared and wanted to create something really amazing.

For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s. (1 Corinthians 6:20) This may not be correctly stated but God has owned us twice. Now I am speaking of the whole human race. First, he created humankind. Then they made a choice to listen to Satan and fell into sin. He whom God had created and loved, made a choice to listen to the voice of Satan and sin against God. Humanity, by rejecting God, made a choice to listen to Satan rather than God, and hence became the servant of an evil master. However, God did not give up so easily, so he made a purchase plan to buy them back. This he accomplished by sending Jesus, his only begotten son to pay the price for sin and set us free. That means we are twice owned. Once in our innocence before we were accountable for our sins, and secondly when Jesus covers them with his blood. That is where this verse comes in which says we are bought with a price, which was the price of the death of the Son of God. There is no other way to be rescued from sin except through Jesus Christ.

Considering these things, should we not worship God? Should there not be an awe and reverence for him? Too often God is like an afterthought. We go through the day with its challenges, taken up with what we are doing and God ceases to be in the forefront of our minds. This is normal, after all, he has given us a mind to reason, think, and to solve complex problems. We do not need him, or so we think, to direct us through the daily things of life. I usually do not need him to tell me how to do my chores or when to go to town, because he has given me the ability to reason and think for myself. In this way we may think we are independent and have no need of God. And yet, even being capable of processing and doing tasks, speaks of a miracle of God’s divine creation.

Man creates computers, and machines to do his work. However, that machine is only as smart as the designer designs it to be. It is programmed to do certain jobs, or to control certain things. Someone had to set the functions and parameters for it to work. In other words, it is only as smart as the designer made it to be. Using that same thought, we are soon to realize that humans are no different. There are some very smart people in the world, much smarter than me. Who gave these people their brain capacity? Who made them think the thoughts they think, or put the desire in their minds to use their smarts to design the things they do? It can only speak of someone who is much wiser, and smarter than them. It is God who endows man with all the wisdom and knowledge he has.

Humans are created differently than the animal kingdom. Animals are creatures of instinct and patterns. They reproduce, but they do not have the diversity of thought to build things and to have thought processes other than what is their nature to do. Man on the other hand has the ability to think, reason, and make choices. He has an eternal soul and once born will live forever. His body will die and return to the earth, but his spirit which is the part given by God, will live forever. An animal, when it dies, simply ceases to exist.

We could write of many more things about God and why he is worthy of our praise and adoration. No man on earth is able to fully understand God, his ways are past finding out. Take out the Bible and read in it, and you will find that though there are many mysteries, it all aligns itself in the same way and points to God, and man serving him. We do not have to grasp the full understanding of God to believe in him, and for him to bestow his blessings upon us. Through a surrendered will and heart, we can have access to his power which reaches beyond what we are able to accomplish. He can take a hateful heart and make it a loving one. He can take brokenness and heal it. He can take a sinner and turn them into a saint. He can do all these things and more if we just come to him and ask him.

And then there is the topic of his love. He could have turned his back on mankind when they chose to sin and turn away from him in the Garden of Eden. He could choose to turn away from us forever when we turn our backs on him and take our own way. He could look at the world with all of the evil and say that it is so bad that he wants nothing to do with it. He could do this and feel like he would be justified in doing so. However, his love for us is too great. He has invested heavens best in humanity. He created them in his own image and personal design. He gave his son to die for the sins of all. He spent all his time and energy, if we can say it that way, making this world a beautiful place for us to enjoy, and he continues to reach out hoping we will need him. He has given us his promise that he will not destroy the world like he did with the flood, and he has given us the rainbow as a token of that promise. He will not go back on his word. And yet he has appointed a day that the world will come to an end. We do not have any control over that, and Jesus said that only his Father knew when that would be. So, until then, we must live lives ready for his return. For many years people thought they would see it in their lifetime; even my father thought he would see it in his. But God’s love and grace continue to hold back that day of judgment so more souls can come to know him.

And then, after we know all these things, we think we do not have time to pray to him and learn to know him better! How foolish is that? Let us be ready for his return.