The God Who is Here (Pt. 2)

I love my people.  I love my church.  It's so great to be a part of something I believe in.  You guys are great!  Thank you.  

If we do serve a God who is here, a God who is now, a God who wants to know me; then why can I count on one hand the number of times I have had a genuine intimate encounter with Him?  “Well, I know I encountered God on this mission trip, and I know I felt God during this time of worship, and that one time when I prayed that I would find my car keyes and I did.”  It seems like an intimate God who is as big as we say He is should be a bit more involved with our lives than the few camio appearance we can remember.  Oh, but He is.

Here’s where I think the problem lies.  We seem to think that the only way we can encounter God is through what I like to call, “extra-terrestrial life encounters.”  These are the moments in our lives that seem so far removed from the everyday; kind of like when God speaks to Moses out of a burning bush.  It’s like the only way we expect to experience God is through some type of event that is so far removed from the world we live in, something that has little to do with the life I live from a day-to-day basis because God can’t be that interested in my life anyway can He?  I think that He is.  In Deuteronomy it says that Lord is our life.

There’s this guy Elijah who has a really interesting encounter with God.  You can read about it in 1 Kings 19.  Elijah is on the run from king Ahab and his wife Jezebel because they had killed all of his friends.  The Lord sends His word to Elijah and tells him to go stand on the mountain and that He will meet with him there.  Elijah goes to the mountain and something really peculiar happens.  The Bible says that there was a great and powerful wind that tore the mountains apart, but…the Lord wasn’t in the wind.  Then there was an earthquake, but…the Lord wasn’t in the earthquake.  Finally there was a fire; certainly God was in the fire.  Nope.   The Lord wasn’t in the fire.  The Bible than says that after the fire came a gentle whisper.  When Elijah heard it he went out and met with God.

Sometimes, probably most of the time, God speaks to us in whispers.  This isn’t a voice that stops us in our tracks or a voice that we can’t help but hear; this is a voice that we have to listen for.  Maybe it is a voice that is speaking all the time.  Maybe encountering God isn’t about waiting for Him to show up in some “extra-terrestrial life encounter”, but instead about discovering how eternity is right under our noses all the time.

God isn’t far removed from our lives, in fact, He is our life.  I think we need to ask more “why questions.”  Things like, “Why do I long to love and to be loved?  Why do I hate when my favorite movie is over?  Why does it bother me so much that people suffer who didn’t do anything to deserve it?  Why does music move me the way it does?  Why do I get so upset at bad drivers?”  If we ask more of these, “why questions” I think we will discover that God has a lot to do with what it means to be a human being and that He is very involved in our lives.  God is here, God is now, and He is our life.