MERRY MONDAY- PARRIS BAILEY
Growing up in the late 50’s early 60’s, my thought was that everyone believed in God and that was that. If you said you were an atheist you were considered different. But believing in God and having God live through you is entirely different. James 2:19 says, “even the devils believe and shudder”. I struggled through church services when I was young, fell asleep trying to read the Bible and pondered how Christians could be Christians. It was to me a foreign concept. Even today when I hear someone say they believe in God I smile politely knowing that word has so much more meaning. C.S. Lewis says, its like someone trying to describe honey when they have never tasted it. God isn’t a set of multiple beliefs that one can unite together in one peaceful movement of love. At the young age of 16 I found myself radically and ridiculously caught by God. Cataracts fell off of my spiritual eyes? Why yes! Heart of stone taken out and replaced with a Heart of Flesh? Why yes! The itching sore of lust gone? Why yes!
Spurgeon preaches; “Redemption is no new thought with God—no expedient to snatch the world from an unexpected accident—no patching up of a broken-down purpose. Redemption is the center of the divine plan; the focus of the manifestation of God, the summit of the mountain of revelation. Herein is love! Herein is God!”
To say we believe in God means we agree that we were bought out, purchased from another. We were owned by one kingdom and now bought by another, a heavenly kingdom for “your life is not your own”. (1 Cor. 6:20) This brings us to a new thought. What exactly does it mean that our life is not our own? To believe in God is to believe in the whole divine plan that he put in place. We accept the sacrificial substitute of Christ blood as payment for our sins. In turn we live out the rest of our lives on a mission of love.
Spurgeon goes on to say, “When our Lord entered in, He had by His sacrifice also dealt with eternal things and not with matters of merely passing importance. He offered Himself by the Eternal Spirit and by that offering He took off the mortgage from the eternal inheritance and bade us freely enter upon the predestinated possession”
What is the master plan for your life? To create your own hodgepodge of beliefs that you “feel comfortable with?” Don’t settle with a God that you have already boxed in and figured out, and the Bible you learned in your school chapel. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands”. Acts 17:24 Be man enough to go find this God.