While thinking about this coming year, and how we should approach it as a faith community, I landed on the following quotation we will use for our Bible study in 2018: “A Living God – A Living Faith.”
These words are very simple, yet so very profound. There are so many ways to try to understand them, and even more ways to try to put the understanding into real-life practice!
Take a pause, right now, and ponder a bit; see where it takes you before you continue reading!
I hope you enjoyed the exercise, and perhaps the few questions that arose in your mind. Feel free to send them to me, questions or just comments, as I’d love to hear any of them. Just hit the ‘comment’ link and I’ll get it sooner or later. 🙂
You see, we do have a Living God, not a dead god. What this means in reality is almost too wonderful to capture into words, albeit overwhelming just to consider. He’s not just alive, He’s everywhere. His ways are not our ways the Bible tells us, and we don’t really know what to do with that because the only ways we seem to understand are man’s ways, which, unfortunately, fail us repeatedly. So we tend to ‘think’ that God fails us, probably because we didn’t get the result we hoped for from some prayer we prayed trying to convince God to act the way we think He should! I’m very good at trying to pray a prayer that is worded so well, even quoting what I think His Word is saying to me, that, well, He HAS to grant the request! Hmmm. Perhaps I need to grow in my understanding of God being God.
A Living God. Yes. Indeed. Which, if believed in, would result in a Living Faith! I wonder if there is a correlation here? How does my ‘belief’ translate into my actual life experience? Is my ‘faith’ alive too? Does ‘faith’ have life? Can it grow? Can it move me, or direct me, or impact in any way what I actually DO in my own…life? I’m not trying to play some game here of stimulating a bunch of questions with no purpose. I think this is big stuff. I think how we approach God, dead or alive, and how we live our faith, dead or alive, translates into actual results here on Earth, here in our very lives!
We know that God wants to Bless us. He says so. And we do want the Blessings, no doubt! Perhaps we can enter into a more prosperous year of Blessings if we reinvigorate our Faith in a Living God, and then dare to actually Follow Him. Perhaps this year will bring many new trials our way, offering even more opportunities for us to be Alive in Christ, seeing Him lead us to new victories, His way!
(When I first typed this, two lines above, I typed ‘trails’ instead of ‘trials.’ Prophetic? I so look forward to the new trails too, which present their own trials, etc.)
Happy New Year
Pastor Skip
Deep thinking provoker!
I wonder if others suffer the same disconnect as I am afflicted with, that is to so TOTALLY believe that our God is Living – I’ve even begun to understand that the written Word is alive – but – (here’s the disconnect) – for ME?
In other words, He’s alive in the abstract, but I have to activate my faith, making it alive, and make a LEAP to connect with what I believe about my God.
One translation puts it like this, being “in union with the Lord.” Living meets living and connects.
It’s hard to verbilize such things.
Thank you for the deep think.