In our small town of five thousand people, we have thirty churches. Not surprisingly, some of them do not agree regarding what constitutes the truth about God. For the most part, we tend to get along fine, but everyone who attends church here has, to some degree, made a decision regarding what is true and migrated to worship at a place amenable to it. At least, I hope that is what they have done.
This world, after all, is full of choices. Understanding God is the most important of them and like the other choices, I can make it the easy way or the hard way. The easy way is to look around for godly-seeming people first to see what they've chosen. What does their life look like, are their marriages healthy, or did their children seem to turn out all right?--the Bible word for this is 'fruit'--then hop on their bandwagon with confidence that I'm on the right track. That can work for awhile, but at some point I will go off course because I have chosen to follow a fellow man who I may love, but who is only a man.
God has another way:
No one has ever seen God, but God, the One and Only, who is at the Father's side, has made Him known.--John 1:18
We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God so that we may understand what God has freely given us.--1Corinthians 2:13
God doesn't say "Follow him," He says "Follow Me." Through His Spirit and Word, He makes Himself known and through His Spirit and Word, we can find Him. This takes work, of course, a lot more work than examining and comparing ourselves to one another. God is the measure. He is the guide. He made the world and the rules, then gave us a way to discover them.
This is what we speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words.--1Corinthinans 2:14
God gave us Truth and wants us to know the glory of discovering it so that we are not looking around, but looking always at Him. His Truth calls to us from behind only one of life's many doors. We cannot successfully follow any other person through the right door for any length of time. God extends His mighty hand to each one individually and He always waits behind Door #1.
Thought for today: How do you choose?
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