How relevant is God to you? Is he just a religious figure? Is he just something you pull down from the shelf and wind up on Sundays? Or is He a “quick-sand Jesus”, where you call out to him when you get in trouble and you don’t have anywhere else to turn?
In some ways, I’m sure it’s difficult for some people because God doesn’t usually appear in a tangible form. He did back in the Old Testament days, and I’m not saying He couldn’t now, but for the most part, it’s probably not going to happen. That’s why He tells us to walk by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7). What does the Bible say? “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1)
Is it logical to say science disproves the Bible and God?
But think about this, you can’t see the wind, but you can feel the effects of the wind. There’s evidence of God and the Creator, especially when you get out in nature. You see a lot of big, beautiful trees, a fire burning, or just having a good day, that shows me there’s a God. The same goes for thinking about the complexity of the human body and other things. It is too complex for there not to be a designer. I can’t understand atheists who just say there is no God. And the the Bible describes such people in Psalms 14 that “the fool has said in his heart, there is no God.” Evolution is not even consistent or believable when you consider the complexity of all things objectively. For example consider, you find a watch on the beach, you don’t pick it up and say, “Oh, look, this watch evolved here.” You know there’s a designer to it. And yet, something as complex as a human body, people want to say, “Well, we just evolved through a process of primordial soup up through some monkeys and became humans.” That’s just ridiculous to me. It takes more faith, I think, to believe in evolution than to believe in God. I submit to you true science confirms the things that the Bible says, because the Bible talks about the Earth being round ( Isaiah 40:22), it talks about life being in the blood (Leviticus 17:11). The Bible amazingly talks about lots of different things long before there was any science to confirm them. The Bible is continually confirmed in science and archaeology. Read my past article about the Bible.
But what about you? How relevant is God to you?
He should be relevant in everything that you do. He should come alongside everything that you do. He’s omnipresent, He’s all around you at all times, in all places. And yet, we don’t acknowledge Him, we don’t see Him because of where we focus most of the time. All we focus on, and I’m guilty of it too, is our own aches and pains and our own problems and things like that. We don’t take time to really just nurture the presence of God around us and acknowledge that he is everywhere if we will just look a little deeper. That is so important. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come naturally. I don’t know if it’s due to the fall of man in the Garden of Eden or what, but for whatever reason, even people who claim to be Christians still have trouble and struggle with nurturing the presence of God. If you ask them, they’ll say, “Yeah, I believe in God.” But then let something terrible happen, sickness or someone die, or you lose a job, then all of a sudden God’s got you crying out, “God, help me, help me!” And then when He doesn’t help you like you think he should then the doubt begins. Remember last week’s article? Sometimes it doesn’t seem like He does, because He doesn’t help us immediately. He can, and I’ve known plenty of instances where there have been miracles performed. But even if that doesn’t happen, is He still going to be relevant to you, or are you going to be mad at Him because He didn’t give you what you wanted? Don’t dismiss him too quickly, if he is indeed relevant to you He’s got to be relevant in everything that you do.
Do you believe God is with you through good and bad?
Is he there even in common everyday things like paying your bills? Do you think about him providing for you? He’s got to be there. Whether you’re sitting and enjoying a good day or when you’re in pain having a bad day, you still can believe in God. When I had cancer, I couldn’t have gotten through it without God because He gave me a supernatural peace that He was with me through it all. He could have healed me miraculously, but I had to go through some suffering as I endured chemo treatments, and those were no fun at all. But I see the miracles of God in it, though. I was never throwing up sick, so I got through it pretty good. I still have some effects from it. I’m 69 years old, and between old age and cancer, my body doesn’t do what I want it to do, so it really limits me a lot in what I want to do and what I can do. But he’s relevant to me. I feel His presence whenever I think about him. I feel His presence everywhere I go. But it’s something you have to nurture, it doesn’t come natural.
It’s something you have to nurture.
When you walk into a room, you’ve got to understand that the Holy Spirit is in you. I feel like the Holy Spirit spoke to me one time when I worked at Walmart for a while, and I went into the break room and everybody got real quiet. I wasn’t a controversial figure or popular or any reason for everybody to get real quiet, but they got real quiet. And I feel like the Lord spoke to me and said, “Every demon in that room got quiet and they knew the Holy Spirit in you could cause them problems.” But most people, when they walk into a room, don’t realize that demons tremble and that they’re afraid. And unfortunately, most of the time, they take comfort in the fact that people don’t do anything. We should walk into every room with the attitude to make a difference. We should walk in a room confident and be friendly and nice and all that, but under our breath, we need to be praying and binding evil spirits and praying for the people in the room that God will meet their needs.
God’s relevance carries over into everything that you do.
He’s got to. There’s not a time when it’s like, “it’s your time and then there’s God’s time.” That’s not what a relationship is about. How long would your marriage last if you just were nice to her when you needed something from her? A lot of people treat their relationship with God that way, and they say they have a good relationship with God, but they really don’t. God’s listening, He’s looking over you even when you’re asleep. I just believe He’s relevant at all times. You can have a beautiful life, even going through difficult times if you see God in everything and just realize that He’s there with you and will never leave you or forsake you (Hebrews 13:5). He’ll be with you even to take that final step through death’s door and into eternity. I believe that we miss out on so much when we don’t acknowledge His presence and when we don’t nurture His presence and have an awareness of God all around us.
You can really see God when you get out in nature.
I love camping, I love nature, and there are so many things when I look and watch even a tiny little lizard crawling, or I hear the sound of the water rolling over the rocks, or the beautiful sound of the wind in the trees. A lot of people just take so many things for granted. I don’t take them for granted. I see God in it. I wrote a book one time, it’s still out on the market on Amazon if you want to read it, “Fire, Water, Earth, Air.” In it I talk about seeing God in nature because it’s His creation. We use the word nature, and we understand what that means. Nothing wrong with using that word, but technically it is His creation that we’re looking at, and if we would realize that, then He will show us things by revealing things to us.
He is always with us.
I used to teach primitive survival skills pretty heavily in the ’80s and ’90s. I’m still skilled but I just don’t teach it as much. I remember even making pottery, I would fire it in the fire like the Catawba Indians did, and realized there are so many lessons that you can see just from that. For example, life turns up the heat sometimes, and the things that we go through, the problems we go through, whether we’re fighting cancer or whether we’re just trying to pay the bills or we’re struggling with our kids in some way that they’re not living right and they’re getting in trouble or giving us a hard time, it’s trying to stress us out. We’ve got to not let the enemy get to us in those things, and we’ve got to acknowledge God in them, because He’s there. He’s never not there. When you see things bad happening, it isn’t evidence that God’s not there anymore. It’s all the more evidence that He is with you because He’s going to walk you through whatever you are going through. I think a lot of the way that you go through things and the way you deal with things is probably more of a witness to people than trying to preach them to death and preach them down. It’s more important to live the life before people; that’s how you can really see God in things and let people see God in you, because, like somebody said, “You might be the only Bible some people read.” I think that’s probably true. Some people never actually pick up the Bible, but maybe part of the reason is that they see somebody who is not living a life that claims to be a Christian. You can live by the life you live, people are watching more than you realize. Your life can be a witness. And that’s the main thing, the way you deal with stuff and the way you line up with the problems of the world and your personal problems, says a lot about who you are. In fact, you find out who you really are when you go through a hard time. I love the analogy someone said about us being like a sponge. A sponge only absorbs whatever you put it in or whatever you expose it to. If you soak up a spill or something, like water, and if the water’s dirty, then the water in the sponge will be dirty. When you
squeeze that sponge to get the water out of it, you see what’s in it, you see the dirty water coming out, or whatever is in it. That’s the same with us. When we get squeezed in life, we find out what we’re really made of, we find out what’s really in us. That’s why it’s so important that we fill ourselves with faith and the Holy Spirit and fill ourselves with the word of God, because when we do that, then that’s what’s going to be in us. And when the devil or life squeezes us, that’s what’s going to come out of us. I jokingly heard somebody say, “I want to be so full of the Holy Spirit that if a mosquito bites me, he’d go away singing, ‘There’s power in the blood.'” It’s pretty funny, but there’s some truth to that. When life comes against you and things start happening, if you’ve really prepared yourself and gotten to that place where you trust God, then bad news, even is going to cause you to still trust in God and to still praise Him. That shows what’s in you; that’s what you put in you in advance. David said, “I’ve hidden Thy word in my heart that I might not sin against God.” (Psalm 119:11). But it wasn’t until he hid the word in his heart that it had an effect, that it had power. That’s so true.
The Sword of the Spirit
People walk around all the time saying, ” the Bible is the sword of the spirit,” but the printed Bible is not the sword of the spirit. The sword of the Spirit is when you read that Bible and it becomes revelation knowledge to you. It reads you, it shows you things about yourself, and you find out some truth in there that makes you say, “Wow, I didn’t think about it that way,” something you can really acknowledge and that you can identify with. There’s a Greek word for that called Rhema, which is the revealed word of God. That’s when it becomes the sword. So the Bible is more like a storehouse for the swords. It’s not the sword of the spirit. The sword of the Spirit is good, but you’ve got to, get it in your spirit, for it to be a powerful sword that can be used against the enemy.
I ask again, just how relevant is God to you?
Don’t let Him just be like something you wind up when you need him. That’s not God at all. You can’t just wind Him up on Sunday and then live like you want the rest of the week. This is not a guilt trip. It’s just saying if you’re not living any differently than anybody else, and you’re living differently on Sunday than you are the rest of the week, then you’ve got some spiritual problems anyway. You may not even be saved. So anyway, something to think about.
Even in other philosophies and religions there’s something called mindfulness. A lot of times, Christians want to turn that away because it’s understood to be a Buddhist concept or something, but it’s not a Buddhist concept. It’s just because they acknowledge it and make it part of make it part of their disciplines more prominently but it is actually a discipline that everyone could benefit from. It does not mean that it doesn’t apply to a Christian too, because mindfulness is just basically an awareness of everything around you. Not just spatial awareness, but just an acknowledgment of where you are and what you’re looking at. Don’t just look at the forest and not see the trees. Take time to smell the roses, as they say. Take time to acknowledge everything. That’s mindfulness, it’s being aware. In fact, you can calm yourself down from an anxiety attack greatly if you just take time to even look at an object and just think about that instead of what you’re going through. Think about every detail of it. Look at that rose and look at the petals on it, look at the thorns on it. Notice all these different things. It helps your mind to focus on the right things instead of the wrong things..
In conclusion I hope I have challenged you to see God a little more in all things not just when you go to church or read the Bible. You may be surprised how much you will see him in places you never saw him in before if you just nurture that awareness of his presence and make him relevant in all that you do.
I hope you enjoyed this article and the video below and share it with others if you would, maybe it’ll help them too. I’ve got other videos also on my YouTube channel called “Lessons Learned.”
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