“Then Christ will make His home in your hearts as you trust in Him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong. And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep His love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.” (Ephesians 3:17-19 NLT)
Though I’ve walked with the Lord for many years, there are times when He seems so massively huge it’s hard to conceive of how he would even know I exist. It’s like I’m a grain of sand on the seashores of the world. Then I hear the words of Jesus when He said: “And the very hairs on your head are all numbered” (Matthew 10:30).
Think about that for a second. Have you ever bothered to count the number of times your sinks get clogged? By what? Your hair! What does that tell us? We lose hair every day! So? God keeps track! That’s how vitally important we are to Him.
Think about the ministry of Jesus while He walked the pathways of this earth. Here was God, this mammoth Creator of everything that is, taking the form of a human being – becoming the proverbial “grain of sand” with all the rest of us – becoming a picture of God that we could see, touch, hear, know! What a miracle! Yet too often when we think of Him or speak about Him with someone it’s like: “Yeh, He’s great. Could you pass the mustard?”
Somewhere we’ve picked up the idea that this immeasurable Being we call God can be known by going to a building a few times a month, reading a few pages from His Book, saying a few innocuous prayers, but otherwise going through our lives as though He doesn’t know or care about anything else we do.
What if we treated our spouse, boss, or friend like that? What kind of relationship would we have with them? Do you realize that we can be around Almighty God our whole life, doling out a little bit of our lives here and there, but keeping a safe distance? We can regulate the measure of closeness we’ll have with Him, so much so, for all intent and purpose, we have no relationship, we only have an idea of Him.
We can so compartmentalize our “god” that there’s really not a Person to whom we relate, it’s merely an idea we conceive that follows our directives and does what we say. He’s OUR servant, rather than we being His. Ron Hutchcraft wrote: “We make serious mistakes because we forget, or we don’t know, how very big our God is. We overestimate earth-stuff and underestimate our Almighty God. A safe distance turns out it really isn’t safe at all. Don’t just believe in Him, pursue Him with everything you’ve got. The closer you get, the more amazing He looks.”
Paul writes in the verses above that God, the One who uses the earth as His footstool, is willing to allow His Spirit to make His home in our heart and life, giving us insight and understanding of who He is, enabling us to put down deep roots into His love. We’ve got to stop treating God like He’s our servant and get on our face before Him, pledging all we are or ever hope to be to Him, so that in some miraculous, unexplainable way, He will use us to gain glory and honor for Himself.
If the God you think you “serve” is not demanding you take up your cross daily and follow Him, you’ve likely missed the God of the Bible. If your god isn’t ordering your life around His service and stretching and challenging you to become more than you could ever be without Him, your god is far too small.
You need to meet the God of the Bible. His name is Jesus and He loves you. He will forgive, fill, and enable you to become more than you ever dared dream you could be, but you’ve got to trust Him and allow Him to direct your life. Click on this link to find out for yourself if your god is too small. Ron Hutchcraft
Blessings, Ed 😊
Walking With Jesus 