The God They Gave You

In our efforts to open our hearts, minds and spirits to God in our lives, one of the major obstacles is the image of God we have unknowingly created. Thomas Keating says, The spiritual journey has a great difficulty in getting off to a good start if we are carrying a load of unexamined and unquestioned negative attitudes toward God.[i]

No one is immune. We each create an image of God out of our childish experiences and also through the way we saw our authority figures in our lives. That is not God. That is the God they gave you. Most often the spiritual journey is about breaking away from that God into ever broadening experiences.

Jesus taught us to see God just as we see Him. He gives us a great tool and spiritual exercise that will aid us on our spiritual journey of knowing God for who He really is. Matthew 6:6,9 are parts of Jesus’ teaching about prayer, But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you….Pray then like this: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Praying is the spiritual discipline that leads you to a more authentic experience of God. You may learn how to pray by praying with others, but the best kind of praying happens behind closed doors. All that matters then is your heart and your God. God is in the secret place, God is in secret. Never pray as if you know what God thinks or feels. Pray to the God who is in secret. He is the God you want to know. He is the God who is real and mysterious and majestic and sovereign. He is more than your mind can conceive. But if you need to conceive Him, think of Him like your Father. Think of Him like a Father unlike the best father on earth. Think of Him as a Father who will reward what happens in secret.

Jesus gave us a great tool to increase our experience of God as He really is when He taught us to pray to Our Father. Just those two words are packed with wonder about the God who is our Father. He is a Father who is in heaven. He is hallowed. His name is above all names.

The God they gave me is so far from the God I am coming to know. Though I am confident of the God I know, I know for sure that the God I know is not who God is. He is above my own knowledge and experience. He asks more of me than I could ever imagine. He wants me to give Him my whole heart and that is when I begin to understand Him.

Your spiritual journey of knowing God should make you more aware that He is more wonderful than you previously imagined and far beyond the goodness you could attribute to Him.

Fifth Monday in Lent through Palm Sunday

Fifth Monday in Lent: Righteousness Needed Jesus is all about bringing us righteousness yet we are too worldly focused to think we have much of a need for righteousness. Most of us think we need healing or exciting miracles. We might try to get a little righteousness by going to church on Sunday and giving some spare change to a beggar. God sees the bigger picture and knows that there is nothing which we are more bankrupt than righteousness. He sees that we are totally incapable of getting the righteousness we need through our own actions, so He sent Jesus to give us His righteousness through His sacrificial work on the cross. Lent is a season of repentance and preparation for the Easter celebration. No matter how sacrificial your Lenten fast, it could never be enough to earn your righteousness. I have been practicing Lent for years, and every year at the end of my fast I come face to face with how far I am from righteousness. Some of the first recorded words of Jesus in th

A Pilgrimage that Started with Tears

Who would think I would shed tears deciding to set out on a wonderful journey that I have longed to take for many years? Before I was ready to fully accept God’s invitation for a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, I had to journey to a place of agreement between what my soul wanted and what the Lord wanted for me. For years I have been declining opportunities to travel to Israel—not because I didn’t want to go but because I wanted to go with my husband by my side. I know that God could have arranged that for me, but instead He asked me to accept that He wanted me to be willing to go and leave everything behind. When I was asked to make a decision about going on a Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, God gave me this verse in answer to my prayer -- Debi, observe therefore all the commands I am giving you today, so that you may have the strength to go in and take over the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess (Deuteronomy 11:8). I decided through tears that I would go on

The Troubled Christian Life

When I surrendered my vocation to God back when I was seventeen-years-old, He called me to a life of walking through the most broken realities that people face in a first-world country. The verse that led me to this life was 2 Corinthians 1:3-4. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God . I began counseling others at the ripe age of 23. I looked like I could have still been in high school, and the patients given to me rightly had their doubts. I had my doubts too. I knew that I didn’t have the wisdom to counseling people double my age. I didn’t have a lot of experience of deep wounds either so I couldn’t talk to them from my own experiences of deep brokenness. I was only helpful to them because I relied totally on the word of God and the presence of the Holy Spirit

AnonymousOctober 14, 2011 at 5:17 AM
My extraordinary parents did me the great favor of introducing me to God and they did a pretty good job of it. I was also lucky enough to have an earthly father whose primary goal was to emulate his Father in heaven. So, yes, as I have matured in my faith, gaining personal knowledge of the Bible and personal experience with my Saviour, I have grown in my understanding - but what a great foundation I got from Ruth and George.

Soul Sister Time

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