Finding your peace in God by having a personal relationship with him may sound easy but it is not. Why? Because you let things get in your way. It’s about returning to the relationship with God that he has always intended for you to have. Only in that relationship can you have the real life; only in that relationship can you live fully.
So when you heard the words, "If you thirst, come to the waters," what has gotten in the way? What has stopped you from accepting this gracious invitation? If you were dying of thirst and water was made available, nothing would stop you from taking it, would it? But some have been stopped. The same things that stopped others can stop you.
You have important duties on earth, but you must never allow them to preoccupy you in such a way that you forget who you are or where you are going.
Don’t let things get in the way. Material things are not necessarily bad things; indeed, many of them are absolutely necessary - see how long you'll make it without food, water, shelter, clothing, and medical care. But if you are always looking down and never looking up you'll miss the best things, the things that God really intends for you. It can happen to anybody.
But it doesn't have to happen to anybody because this invitation to life is for everybody.
That's good news but even such good news can be a stumbling block for some. That's because the Flesh sometimes wants to limit the guest list to those who are like you or to those who you think deserve to be invited. Don’t forget that God made and loves all people whether they are like you or not and that if the invitation was limited to the deserving you wouldn't be invited, either. But to live the real life, to live life in God's presence, is to live with God's blessings and with God's people.
"The most precious gift of all, the gift of life in God's presence, is free. All that can exclude you is your insisting that there are place you would rather be. Why would you ever decide that? Because you want to determine the menu, you want to be in control of the company you keep."Your menu is limiting your stuff, your way, your viewpoints, your opinions, your standards. Your company is so limiting: your kind, your race, your religion, your class. But God's menu is limitless: real life, eternal life, abundant life; life lived in the kingdom as a child of God, life filled with his love and his grace and his wisdom. God's company is so limitless.
You have to learn to see life God's way and that requires repentance. You have to be moving toward seeing things in God's way, and that's a challenge. "For your thoughts are not His thoughts, nor are your ways His ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are God’s ways higher than your ways and His thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9). God's ways of thinking and doing are well beyond yours, but he calls you to be ever moving more and more toward them.
The truth is that by living in relationship with Him, by accepting the real life that he gives for free, and by entering into the Spirit, you’ll find your true way of being.
Learn to close your eyes to those things and to those attitudes that blind you? Helen Keller said, "I can see, and that is why I can be so happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a man-made world."
Choose life as you choose to see the God-made world rather than the world that you have made. Jesus died and rose again so that you might see that world and so that you might live in that world.
See and live life in God's way? You can. You really can.
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