Do you think the God of the Bible doesn’t exist or that He is a malevolent mad man that shouldn’t be trusted?  If you said yes, then you are a person just like I use to be.  From your perspective, the information about God on this web site seems foolish and trivial.  However, I hope and pray you continue to read because perhaps you will come to the knowledge of God’s revelation of truth without having to experience the 2×4 of His Amazing Grace.

Like I said, at one time I was an agnostic, one who believed that you could not know God or know if He existed.  I liked stories about Science Fiction, where men and woman had “evolved” capabilities and lived together in harmony and exploring places where “no man has gone before” … but now I see that in reality we live in a morally declining world where everybody is in conflict with one another and the place that men want to explore is the woman’s bathroom and the place that woman want to explore is the man’s bathroom.  Oh, how far we have fallen in vision and purpose from the fantasy Science Fiction I dreamed about.  Yes, at one time I thought Alien “god like” beings planted us here on earth so we would evolve and be “god like” one day … of course I never bothered to ask the critical question “who made the Alien beings?“.   Now, that I am a Christian, I know that alien beings really do exist … they are called “Angles” and they are created by the same God that created man and they live in a place called Heaven, a place where I can too can live one day … if I choose to believe in Jesus as my Savior from sin.

The point I am trying to make is that you can’t invent a better purpose and reason for your life that what God has planned for you.  That purpose can only be realized by being Spiritually “born again” through His Son, Jesus Christ.  You can try to ignore God and run from His grace but you can’t hide from God since God is “outside” the reality of this world that He created.  God is always pouring out His grace upon you so you will see the sinfulness of this world, the moral corruption within us and around us, the meanness among men, the selfish way we naturally react to the circumstances of life, the decay and sickness and death that is all around us.  This is God’s sign to us that something is seriously wrong with this earth … it’s called sin!

In my case, I knew about God and was raised in Church but I didn’t know that God wanted a personal relationship with me.  I believed that man was basically good and Jesus could make him “better” and if you just tried to be nice and “please” everyone, everything would work out lovely.  But my house of “nice” came tumbling down when my wife left me for another man and at the same time my boss requested that I be transferred to an office in another State.  Of course I was devastated, my whole world and world view was torn apart and I became depressed.  I started looking for answers to why being nice to people didn’t work and I started to realize that I wasn’t really very nice.  I actually was very selfish because I worked all the time and I didn’t talk to my wife about her needs.  Thank God as I was pondering the meaning of life, a lady at work shared with me the message of the gospel, that all people are selfish and sinful, and Jesus came to save us from this condition of sin.  This rang true to me and I asked Jesus to be my Savior.

I think God applied the 2×4 of His grace upon me by revealing the sinfulness around me and within me.  I think, for most people, this is how God’s grace breaks though our human reasoning to revel to us our sinful condition and our need for His redemption.  Like John Newton sang “Amazing Grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me“.  It is in acknowledging our “wretched self”, that we see our need for God Amazing Grace.  When a person get’s thrown into jail, instead of someone bailing him out and having a lawyer cover up the wrong doing, perhaps this is place God is using to bring that person into His Kingdom.  If you talk to enough people about their salvation, most of the stories are about a rock bottom rescue God made to save them from themselves.  

However, because of the free will that God has given man, God will let you run and He will let you pretend that you don’t sense the conviction of His presence … what some people have called “the bloodhounds of Heaven”.  I think that God is doing everything He can to let people see the foolishness and destruction that is caused by choosing to follow their sin nature.  God is using the 2×4 of His grace upon each person because He wants none to perish but all to come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9).  However, if you continue to ignore the 2×4 of God’s grace upon your heart, this will harden your heart toward God’s love and the reality of sin.  Continuing to choose to ignore the “reality of sin” will cause you to loose touch with reality, and it will cause you to go insane and think that you are your own god and eventually it will cause you to forget who you are!  This is what hell is … it’s choosing your will above God’s will.

 – Rogersings

0

0