We can know about God and connect with Christian people and Christian activities without being impacted by the reality of a faith encounter with God. This is particularly so if a person has a religious upbringing.
My parents came to faith in Christ when I was very young. That led to them taking me to church, reading me Bible stories and teaching me to pray. For the next decade of my life I continued going to church, reading the Bible and praying. But each of those things was just a routine thing to do.
I found church fairly boring. I struggled to remember to do Bible reading and often rushed through it, as an unwanted chore. And my prayers were formalities which I prayed religiously, not with a sense of communicating with God.
In my teen years I was able to explain to others that once they become a Christian they need to go to church, read the Bible and pray to God. I could suggest why they were good things to do, but in my own experience I had not found any delight in them. I didn’t know there was anything more to experience than just going through the motions.
In my late teenage years all that changed. My mother was miraculously healed. Despite being warned against all meetings where people claimed to be touched by God, Dad took Mum to a meeting where a man prayed for the sick. Her long-term back problems were excruciating. When family friends received miracle healing that startled my parents and so they went along in hope, but grave caution. Mum came back completely healed, touching her toes, waving her arms and glowing with joy and amazement.
That shocked me. I had worshipped God formally for years, and never expected Him to be anything but a distant God who gave orders and left us to prove ourselves faithful. I was determined to ‘endure to the end’, but had no hope of God’s love and resources helping me.
After seeing my mother’s healing I quietly said to God, “You really are there!” Then I felt guilty at admitting ever doubting God’s existence. I saw that God was more than theoretical. God is personal, powerful, and actually in touch with mankind on an individual level. That was amazing and wonderful.
Mum’s healing led our family to look for what other things in the Bible were real in today’s world, such as Gifts of the Spirit, angels and answered prayer.
Through that process all the religious things I knew were wonderfully changed by becoming real instead of religious. Church was no longer a religious practice, but opportunity to worship God and encounter Him. Bible reading was now the unfolding of God’s revealed truth that was seed for growing faith and spiritual fruit. Prayer was a conversation with our loving Heavenly Father who wants us constantly connected with Him, being real with Him, humbly relying on Him and receiving from Him.
All the things that were stale and mere routine in my life came alive and were exciting and special. My family began attending multiple church meetings each week, delighted to sing songs of worship, amazed at testimonies of our God active in our world, delighted to have the Word of God opened to us and made relevant to us in the here and now, and in awe as we received prayer or saw others prayed for with wonderful effect.
In a recent conversation with friends I heard about the same delight as routine Christian things came alive for them, each in different ways. One lady told how God gave her a vision of a huge key which Jesus offered her to unlock her bound up life. Another person told of how being instantly healed of a serious knee injury convinced her God is real. A man shared about how God stirred a hunger in him to go to church and how from that very first service he felt swept into the things of God. A lady shared how she wanted proof that God cared about her personally, and how God revealed to her that Jesus’ death on the Cross was for her. She wept for ten minutes, at the impact of that revelation.
Friends, if you have been faithfully doing the right things, but never enjoying the kind of connection with God I am talking about here, then I urge you to pray, “Lord, Make it Real”. Ask God to reveal Himself to you and rescue you from mere religious devotion, good as that is, so you can enjoy personal connection with your Lord and your God.
Keep asking God to make Himself real and lead you into a deep and wonderful personal connection with God.
And if you are helping others, you can pray for them that God break through in their lives and make spiritual things wonderfully real in a unique personal experience for them.
And may it always be for you, your family and your loved ones, that you can delight in God’s answer to the prayer, Lord, Make it Real.
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