Dear friend,
Let me challenge you to think about your life and all that you have personally experienced.
Can you think upon your life and name something that was done for you that you did not do, nor could have possibly done, for yourself?
You know, like giving yourself life? – Your parents did that
Like bathe yourself, feed yourself, clothe yourself until such time that you could possibly do it for yourself? – Again your parent(s) or guardian(s) did that
What about the last time that you had a headache, or a cold or an infection of some sort? – Although you may have taken it upon yourself to take some medicine, the reality is that even after the medicine was in you, you didn’t heal yourself. – The medicine did, or the regenerative cells, or the blood cells.
One more example. Is there a job that you had or an education you received or a relationship you were in that you couldn’t possibly have secured for yourself? I know you are thinking, wait a minute “I applied to that school” or “I sent out my resume, which shows MY skills” or “I reached out to that person to build that relationship”. And though all of that might be true, that person could have said “no” to offering you the job, accepting you into the school or reciprocating your friendship.
Anyway, I think you understand my point, there are things in your life and mine that we had no control over. We didn’t make it happen, nor could we have. In other words, where you and I are right now in life has a great deal to do with things, people, circumstances that are out of our control.
So why do I bring it up to you?
Because of this…
The reason you are alive is no accident. And it is (obviously) not because you made it happen! God Himself, your Creator, decided that He wanted to make you so that you would experience His love, and be born into the creation He made for you to live in and experience His goodness. Furthermore God then placed things, people and circumstances along your path in order that you might know Him, hear His voice, see His goodness and accept His invitation to a personal relationship.
I know, I get it, you might say, that just because there are things in your life that you didn’t have any control over doesn’t mean that God exists or that He arranged those things or even that He has a plan for your life.
And yet I am here to tell you, as an personal eyewitness of what God has done for thousands of people before you (feel free to ask me more about the things I have personally witnessed and can attest to), that indeed God does love you and has a plan for your life. As a matter of fact I want you to go back and begin looking through the annals of your life history and all of the things that you didn’t cause or create but they were “just there” and look carefully: do you see the hand of God? Do you see the careful attention of a loving Creator and Savior?
- That sunset: do you only see light waves passing through particles of dust and various atmospheric gasses? Do you only see light be reflected and refracted by the atoms it bounces off of? Or do you see the hand of God, painting out something beautiful in order to reveal His own beauty to the world?
- The breath in your lungs: do you only see water and minerals, tissue, muscle and bone evolved by happenstance somehow cohesing together for about 70 years and then dissolving back into its base elements? Or do you see the hand of God intricately weaving together humanity in His image to be able to think, feel and desire as He does, full of life and rejoicing in life and relationship?
- The basic stuff of life:
- The food that you eat that is made from the crops and the animals that co-inhabit this space with us.
- The abilities and skills that seem to come naturally to you
- Do you see in these things happenstance, coincidence, the random firing of synapses or the serendipitous existence of flora and fauna that exactly meet our nutritional needs?
- Or do you see the gracious heart and hand of God making it possible for humanity to have not just existence but a full and abundant life full of both functional and pleasing supply?
I will follow up with another article, but let’s leave this one here for now. In the Bible in the book of Romans in the New Testament the apostle Paul tells us that you and I can see God’s invisible attributes and His eternal power and His divine nature all around us. He also says that means we are without an excuse to say “I don’t think God is real” or “I didn’t know about God” but instead that we should see, take note and then come to know the God we see evidence of all around us. Please, let this article serve to help you consider all the times and places you have had something good in your life that really was God at work revealing Himself to you and calling you in His love to a personal relationship with Him. The point is that God wants us to acknowledge Him and receive the kindness, tolerance and patience of God which brings us to repentance and salvation.
You may not agree with me, I just want you to consider the possibility. What IF God is real? What IF God is the Creator of the cosmos and everything in it? What IF God gave you personally life and indeed has a personal plan for you and a desire to be in a relationship with you? IF any of this is true, can you see how there are evidences in your life of that God seeking to get your attention, giving you blessings and His love, and calling you to be in a relationship with Him? I hope you can at least admit that the possibility exists after analyzing the things in your life that you simply could not have made happen or done for or provided for yourself.
Pastor Michael Johnson 