Thursday, December 19, 2013

Experience An Encounter With God

By Harriett Crosby


One wonderful aspect of Christianity is how easy it is to have an encounter with God. All you have to do is ask, with a sincere desire to meet God and a certain humility, also known as brokenness. No one who thinks himself the center of the universe will truly seek to know God.

When God reveals Himself to you, that's the first and perhaps most important encounter. A person who puts every hope in God's hands and believes that an answer will come is ready to be 'born again' to new life in Jesus Christ. The old life and the old man (human nature) dies when the heart and spirit bow before the Father, and a new, eternal life begins.

The first thing you need to do is realize that you are created in God's image, but you are not God. You can be a sibling of Jesus, but you will never be God. You are a sinner and as such cannot be in the presence of holiness. However, a blood sacrifice can pay for your sins. You are dead in your sins, life is in the blood, so blood is required to restore you to new life. Jesus has made that sacrifice for you. Acknowledge your sin, confess that you cannot save yourself, ask His forgiveness, and turn your life over to the Lord. When God looks at you after that, He sees Jesus.

God made man to have a need to believe and to form relationships. Although people substitute almost anything for the Lord's presence, life works best when God and not man is in control. Men act because they want something in return: power, wealth, property, or other things to fill the need they feel but don't necessarily understand. God acts through love, asking only love and obedience in return. The first hours of salvation will be something you'll never forget.

The first encounter may be the sweetest and the most memorable, but it won't be the last. Jesus tells us that He will never leave us or forsake us, and that He will be present through every joy and every trial. His direction and guidance, as well as help, comfort, and healing, will make your life full of miracles and special moments that are more precious than gold.

People who know God have a testimony of answered prayer, intervention in times of stress or danger, or answers to dilemmas. The more people turn to Him and ask, the more He steps forward. He never intrudes - actually, He rarely intrudes. There's the man who, about to leave for the mission field, was telling the Lord that he had married the wrong wife when the Lord roared at him. He surrendered his right to complain, and he and his wife had a fruitful and loving partnership for decades in South American jungles.

The Lord waits for us to accept His free gift of salvation and relationship. You can shut Him out of your life, as many do. However, the things that you think more important than God will not sustain you in this life with joy and peace, and you can't take them along into the next life.

An encounter with God is the most important thing anyone can have in this life, since it paves the way for great things in the next.It also makes 'this vale of tears' more than bearable; the kingdom of God is yours from the moment He becomes your lord and savior.




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