One of my greatest joys in recent years has been the opportunity to teach 12-13 year old kids the Old Testament in the Religious Education Program of a local Church. I view it as a serious and sacred obligation to bring them into a personal awareness of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, and help them see how Biblical events led to the fulfillment of the promise of God the Son, Jesus Christ.
My introductory class goes like this: Imagine you have worked hard in college and landed your dream job at a prestigious firm. You hope to grow, stand out as an excellent worker who obeys the firm’s policies and procedures, and ultimately get to the top ranks in the firm. You continue to work hard and hope to be noticed by the CEO for favor and promotion. The students often agree that this is a likely scenario.
Then I ask dramatically: How then do you not want to be close to God? He is the King of kings and Boss of the greatest bosses! He holds the lives of both the CEO and yourself in His hands. He created all of us and has our days numbered. Our next breaths are by His grace. When we sleep, we have no control over our breathing mechanisms, He does, and we awake only because He blesses us with a new day.
He created and maintains the universe in position. He moves the hearts and minds of kings and authorities in whatever direction He wants. He protects us from the enemy of our souls and everything we need is facilitated or provided by His mercy and grace. Our lives on earth are a pilgrimage back to His heavenly Kingdom, and He controls that journey, only asking that we follow His instructions as we travel along, for our own good. How can you not want to know, trust and obey such an infinitely powerful God? By God’s grace, the kids often tune in some more following this introduction.
This is who God is – The Lord our God. All powerful, Almighty, yet full of mercy, love and grace and attentive to all, even the least important of us. Unwittingly, we have a tendency to consider Him as some far-off Being and take Him for granted only because we do not know Him as well as we should. He is as near as our next breath.
We cannot know about Him in detail, understand the sheer awe of who He is, have a deep connection to what He did for us through the sacrifice of Christ, and not feel compelled to want to stay in His good books – especially as He supplies the grace to do so. We would at least have the desire to do so, our spirits determined to win the daily battles against our flesh. That desire is our choice to make, we must utilize our free will.
We pray that we will come to know God better through His Word, and as we humbly acknowledge our inabilities, may He give us the promised grace through Jesus Christ to obey His commandments. Amen.
Hilltop Thoughts, Valley Strengths 