New Believer's Bible Sample - Flipbook - Page 8
How You Can Know God
FROM THE MOMENT YOU WERE BORN , you have been on a quest. At the beginning, you probably didn’t have a clear idea about what you were after, but you
knew you wanted your life to have some kind of purpose. You wanted to know
the meaning of life . . . and you wanted to be happy.
All of us want exactly the same thing.
A philosopher named Hugh Moorhead once wrote to 250 of the best-known
philosophers, scientists, writers, and intellectuals in the world, asking them,
“What is the meaning of life?” Some offered their best guesses; some admitted
they just made up a purpose for life. Others were honest enough to say they
had no clue. Several even asked Moorhead to write back and tell them if he had
discovered the purpose of life!
Clearly, we all need to know where we are going in life and why. If we have
no goals, no purpose, and no guiding principles, we will waste our lives (and
many have!). If you’re young and looking ahead to life, you should be asking
these questions, because life goes by more quickly than you can now imagine.
We search for meaning and happiness in relationships, sex, possessions,
accomplishments, fame, drugs, drink, and even religion. We are all searching
for meaning and purpose in life.
I’d like to relate a famous story that Jesus told some 2,000 years ago on this
very topic. His story tells us what God is like. That’s important, because some
people envision God as an angry, hostile, uptight Supreme Being who is perpetually in a bad mood, just waiting to nail you to the wall when you fail or
sin. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Others look at God with a jaded eye because they have seen hypocrites who
claimed to be Christians. May I apologize for all those people right now? That
is not who God is.
So what is God like? Is he a smiling God or a frowning one? How does he look
at us? Does he approve or disapprove of us?
Because the Bible often refers to the Almighty as “Father,” we normally associate God with our earthly fathers—and that can be good or bad, depending
on what kind of fathers we had. If your father was distant and aloof, or even
harsh and abusive, you may feel that God is, too. If your father was kind and
approachable and fun loving, then you may transfer those positive associations to God. But regardless of how good or poor a job our earthly fathers have
done with us, we must look at God in an entirely different way. We must look
at God through the pages of Scripture, where he reveals himself most clearly.
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