Communication With God Part Three

By Johnny Angel

But if from there you seek the LORD your God, you will find him if you look for him with all your heart and with all your soul. (Deuteronomy 4:29, NIV)
Okay, I have a confession to make. I have an addiction. I know. I know. You're thinking it's awful. But I can't hide it anymore. I can't deny it anymore. I'm addicted to the Bible. I'm not exactly sure how it started. But one day I looked at a verse. I think it was in Matthew. But I couldn't put it down. Pretty soon, I looked at another verse. I just kept on reading. I started stashing Bibles everywhere. I kept one at the McDonalds where I worked and looked at it every chance I got. I had them in my car, in my backpack, by my bed, everywhere. Then, one day I understood what it was saying. I knew that God loved me. And I asked Jesus to come into my heart.

The paragraph above is a summary of what a speaker at a recent conference said to open up his sermon. I felt like it would fit well here. Are you addicted to the Bible? Are you addicted to Jesus?

I think a lot of Christians get caught up on being saved just meaning that we are in good standing with God and we will go to heaven instead of going to hell. As a result, many believers settle for just having their name on the Lamb's book of life and going on with their life. They occasionally get spiritual during something big that happens at church or in a Christian organization they participate in. But after the excitement is over, it's back to the same old routine.

For a long time, this is how it was for me. I went to church all the time. I looked at the Bible occasionally outside of church. I sometimes listened to Christian music. But about three or four years ago, I was shopping at the new Christian bookstore in my hometown. I picked up a book called "The One Minute Bible". It was designed to have one minute of reading a day out of the Bible along with some thoughts about the daily passage. It covered all the famous Bible passages and challenged me to think about what they were saying.

As time went on, I started reading daily devotions. Then, a girl at church handed me a Christmas present. It was a planner that told me what chapters of the Bible to read each day in order to go through the whole Bible in a year. I took this as a hint that I should start reading the Bible a little more.

So the more I was seeking God, the more I was finding Him. But then something else happened. I started actually allowing God to take things out of my life that were in the way like some music I was listening to and some things I was trying to do so I could look cool. That was when God started revealing more and more to me and helping me to be more and more interested in him.

I have learned that the more we forget about our life and allow God to have our lives, the more fulfillment we can find in Him. (If you think about, he did make us, so he should get to use us!) Jesus said that He came to give us life more abundantly. He means for us to have an enjoyable life. But the only way we can truly enjoy it is to totally surrender to His will and His way.

So I hope you see that we should daily communicate with God so He can make our life enjoyable and show us many things that will bless us.

Today has been a weird day filled with God's presence. I was walking along campus when I bumped into a man who looked familiar. But I could not place who he was, and I still can't figure out who he was. But he knew that I was sick and wanted to know what the doctor said about my cold. I told him I hadn't been yet. He said you better go and get that throat check out. So it wasn't just that knew I was sick, he knew my throat was the problem. Now he could have known this because I have laryngitis. But I wonder if it wasn't just God speaking through someone. I hesitate to say that it was an angel because our society builds up angels so much and forgets that Jesus is what it's really about. But Hebrews 13 does state that we are to entertain strangers because some of them could be angels. Anyway, that's not the point to the story as one of my friends always says when I'm getting away from the subject. The point is that God can speak to us in many different ways. Sometimes he uses other people to say things to us. So that's why you should always say something when you really feel the Lord telling you to say something.

Well I did go to the doctor's office. It was my first time to a doctor here in my college town. I went to the one that someone had recommended. His office was closed with a notice to go to another doctor's office down the road. So I went down the road. They said they could take me in that day for an appointment. And now I have a doctor to go to as well as some medicine to help me get over this throat irritation. (If you think I'm talking a lot, it's because I can't talk out loud right now, and it has to come out somehow!)

While I was waiting to go to the doctor's office, I stopped at a Christian bookstore near the doctor's office. Actually, there are two located side by side. I started to go in one but felt God telling me to go in the other. So I did. I walked in and saw a whole table stacked with CDs and a sign saying they were $5 each. I started looking, and I immediately found some stuff I had wanted that would cost at least $15 at the bookstore next door to this one. The more I looked, the more I found. And I didn't just find anything. I found exactly the kinds of Christian rap, dance, r&b, etc. that I had been praying to find for a really long time. I found songs that I had lost because of misplaced tapes, and I found earlier recordings of some of my favorite groups that aren't very popular and don't have lots of CDs out.

When my church had a prayer conference earlier this year, our pastor went to this same bookstore to find a book for the speaker. It was a rare book. The speaker had told us all sorts of stories of what God could do through prayer. It only added to it when he held up the book and said he had been praying to find it for years.

My purpose in sharing all this is that the more we seek God by communicating with Him, the more we will find our fulfillment in things of God. And God knows what makes us happy because He created us. He knows that I love late 80s/early 90s rap,r&b, and hip hop. He knows that I like dance music. A few years ago, there wasn't hardly any Christian dance music or r&b. Within the past year, I have seen so much of it that I know God had to have heard my prayer and the prayers of others.

When we see the command "Pray without ceasing" in the Bible, we may think, how can I do that. Well, we can simply set our minds and hearts on Jesus like the Bible tells us to do. We can keep new testaments stashed here and there like the guy in the opening paragraph. We can read them when we're waiting for class to start, when we are waiting for someone to call, when we are taking a break, etc. We can listen to music about Jesus and about the full and meaningful life that He wants to give us. We can talk to one another about Him. And we can look for Him in places that many people wouldn't even think that He is at. For example, I was watching a ninja movie with my cousin last week, and the way that a certain character gave up his deity, died as a human, and reobtained his deity was just like what Jesus did for us. He became one of us, died a cruel death, and rose again.

We will only be truly happy as Christians when we view salvation as a relationship with God that grows daily as opposed to a fire escape from hell. Jesus wants to give us a great life here and hereafter! Let us strive to allow Him to do this!

N Prayer,
Johnny <*}}}><