HOW TO MEET GOD (PART ONE)

For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as there are many gods and many lords), yet for us there is one God, the.
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Abraham added up what he knew about God and about His promise that Isaac was the promised seed, reached a conclusion, and acted. He knew God would have either to resurrect Isaac or to provide a substitute. He chose to trust the One he knew has the power and is faithful. What if, like most Americans, Abraham had just guessed, based upon vague remembrances of a Sunday school class, movies, fiction works, and paranormal inspirations?

We can assume that he would have worshipped the idols of his father Terah. A right concept of God is a Christian necessity because a wrong notion of Him is the very foundation, the starting point, for idolatry. In brief, the essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him.

God makes this clear at Mount Sinai after making the covenant with Israel and giving them His law. In Exodus 32, Aaron, confronted by the sinful pressure of his peers, became carried away and made a stupid Golden Calf to rescue them from their perceived dilemma. Aaron and the Israelites revealed that their false concepts of God remained.

God had the idol immediately destroyed. Israel sinned in attempting to determine the nature of God based on their own reasoning, and many died in a punishing demonstration of the true God's wrath at this egregious sin. The Israelites of today are still at it, as this discouraging survey reveals; modern Israelites are fantasizing about God.

The idolater simply imagines a conception of God and then acts as though his conceptions are true. He is deceived and certainly does not know the true God as Abraham did.

How Do You Have A Relationship With God?

God seeks out those with whom He desires to make the covenant. At that time, all they understand about Him is in broad terms. They are then to seek Him out to know Him more precisely. Those who make the New Covenant with God are required to seek out intimate details regarding His nature, purpose, and character. Besides being powerful, what is God like? What are His attributes?

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What is His character in any given situation? What does it take to please Him? How may we glorify Him? How can we become like Him?


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How can we show Him love and glorify Him? How does He live His life? The last question is not unimportant. Therefore you, O son of man, say to the house of Israel: Turn, turn from your evil ways! For why should you die, O house of Israel? The Old Testament was written without punctuation of any kind, and in fact, punctuation was not added until about 1, years after Ezekiel wrote this. As God's answer to the question of verse 10, verse 11 would read better if a period followed the words "Lord God.

When Jesus came as a man, He did exactly that. Jesus declares in John However, William Barclay's commentary on this verse contains a simple and meaningful difference of opinion with that concept. Barclay contends that Jesus is speaking of something very good, one to be much desired. Living forever is not necessarily good unless the quality of life is also good. Therefore, "eternal" describes the quality of life God lives endlessly.

Knowing God and being able to follow His example are vital to our living as He does. Jesus implies that, if one truly knows God, he will also live that way as an effect of his intimate relationship with God. Yet, truly coming to know God creates one of the more difficult and continuous problems for church members. In fact, one commentator called it the church's biggest problem, and Romans How unsearchable are His judgment and His ways past finding out! We can indeed find out a great deal if we are devoted to seeking Him, an endeavor that requires thorough searching, evaluating, and adjusting of our conceptions.

Certainly difficult, but not impossible! Nevertheless, we must still seek Him, since this verse suggests that we can indeed learn much. It helps that God desires us to know Him, so He is willing to reveal Himself further. However, so many opinions, conceptions, and misconceptions about Him exist that a unity of true belief and understanding of Him is difficult to reach. My concept of God is surely not perfect, but this I know: The foundation for my understanding of God began a few years before I was converted.

My search was jump-started by reading a small book written by the main translator of the Phillips' translation of the New Testament, J. This little book of less than a hundred pages, titled Your God Is Too Small , stirred my imagination as never before, laying a foundation for my conversion a few years later. The book has long since disappeared from my library, but in it, Phillips complains that people visualize, in most cases, a one-dimensional God.

There are those who see Him as the Resident Policeman. Many, he says, perceive God as a kindly, soft-touch Big Grandfather in the Sky , some, as the Absentee Landlord , and others, as the Disinterested Professor. Many of those remaining believe in His existence, but their concept is so vague as to amount to nothing more than the Eternal Ethereal Nothingness. He mentions a few more misconceptions that I have forgotten, but his general theme lodged in my mind.

Between reading that book and my conversion, I continued to seek out a firmer conception of God, but without doubt, most of the basic concepts about the true God came through the teachings of Herbert Armstrong a few years later. Though I have been thinking about this subject longer than I have been in the church, this process is not unique to me. It happens to most of us. I have learned through nearly fifty years in the church that developing a more concrete and truer sense of what God Himself is like is a continuously evolving process.

The fundamental differences are in how important God is to each and how accurate their thoughts about Him are. Coming to a truer conception of God is not easy. It can be honestly said that God hides Himself, but this is true only to a small degree. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and [divine nature], so that they are without excuse.

God Himself declares that at least some knowledge—a basic, foundational understanding—is available to virtually everyone. However, an interesting danger is revealed here. Note how this unfolds: These people knew God, just as the people addressed by Isaiah and Amos and in Hebrews had knowledge of God.


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    • Yet, they obviously did not honor God by conducting themselves according to what they knew of Him. They failed to put their knowledge into action, and instead, let their imaginations run wild and began worshipping things apart from what God had revealed of Himself. Their imaginings, Paul says, led them straight into idolatry. In other words, they did not hold fast to what God gave them.

    How Do You Have A Relationship With God?

    What did they worship? Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things. Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever.

    Does this not sound like a slice of Exodus 32? These passages teach us a principle: We cannot imagine God in terms of what He has materially created because what He has made is not God. In the process that ends in idolatry, the first thing a person loses is his sense of awe, his reverential fear toward the majesty of God. This is what Paul means by "became futile in their thoughts. For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.

    And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting; being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil mindedness; they are whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful; who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.

    Additionally, the moral slippage resulting from misconceptions about God affects dress: Once Satan and sin enter man's life, man hides himself from God, and God must seek him out before a relationship and revelation of true knowledge of God can even begin. Despite the fact that Adam and Eve literally saw God, they sinned because they really did not know Him.

    Contact With God Is Essential. Since eternal life lies in the relationship with God, it is extremely important how frequent and accurate our thoughts about Him are.

    Many influential people in this world are convinced that He does not even exist. By definition, agnostics are not sure, so how does their uncertainty affect their worship of Him? This is a major reason why Jesus says in John 6: He adds in Matthew Adam and Eve's summary dismissal from the Garden was among the most serious punishments ever inflicted on mankind because it severed contact with God. Without contact with God, a true conception of Him was impossible, and wholesale sin followed. We can conclude that what one knows about the true God Himself and how one uses that knowledge are the two most important issues in life.

    Seeking God is the most serious challenge of our lives! The quality of our present lives and the continuation of those lives everlastingly hinge on these two factors. Baylor University's Christopher Bader, an analyst of the survey results, remarked, "You learn more about people's moral and political behavior if you know their image of God than almost any other measure. It turns out to be more powerful a predictor of social and political views than the usual markers of church attendance or belief in the Bible.

    Thus says the Lord: For in these I delight," says the Lord. This thought, with John His evaluation of the relative value of things ought to be of great importance to us. Carnal men look to their riches as their glory. From God's perspective, then, the knowledge of Him and His purpose is by far man's most important glory. It has more value than any human, material riches an individual might labor and sacrifice to obtain.

    For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. The breathtaking element in this is that God makes this glory available to each of us, despite our being the weak of the earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American philosopher and essayist, wrote insightfully, "It behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming. I used to agree with Herbert Armstrong that the most common of all sins is ingratitude.

    Ingratitude is indeed very common, but I no longer believe it is the most common sin.

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    First, notice that Jesus starts out with the word our , not the word my. The reason is that God is not only the father of the person praying, but of others also. Note that the relationship is not that of a wife to a husband, two people dating one another, or a neighbor to another neighbor. It is a child to a father relationship. They might call him creator or god perhaps, but not Father. If you would like to find out more, click on the link below.

    Click here to learn how to get right with God. Once the relationship is started by getting right with God, you need to make the second step and develop your new relationship into a personal relationship. A good way of showing what a personal relationship is can be illustrated by showing you what it is not.

    In the Roman Catholic Church, people are told that anyone who is not a member of the Catholic Church can not get right with God. However, if the church, priests, Mary, and saints are between you and God, you do not have a personal relationship with God at all.

    Fortunately, the Bible reveals that none of the things mentioned in the preceding paragraph are needed to have a relationship with God. A time will come when we will literally meet God. We do it by following a two step communication process. The Bible tells us that God listens to our prayers, and we can use the model prayer above to get us started. You will notice it contains four parts:. These are mostly self-explanatory. If God is really God, He does deserve our praise and support. Further, as our Father, we can expect Him to help us in our lives. By the way, God will not grant every request.

    As children may not understand why their parents will not let them play in the street, there will be times we do not understand why God does not seem to answer our prayers. In time, we will add more information about answered prayer, but for now you should know that God will give you what is best for you, long term. Read the story of Joseph, which starts in tragedy Genesis chapter 37 but ends in triumph Genesis chapter 45 to get a glimpse of how this is possible. Although not part of the model prayer, when God does answer our prayers, it makes sense to thank God for what He has done.

    We do not like ungrateful children, and there is no reason to believe that God appreciates our being ungrateful to Him. By the way, many people have learned that keeping a written record of what they have asked for is helpful. We also need to ask God to forgive our sins. Each of us can make a mistake, and although the Christ's sacrifice will pay for every sin , it will not pardon us of one excuse.

    Then once you confess your sin, do not do it again. To do so would make your confession a lie, wouldn't it?