That was a very mistaken and harmful idea which it has taken me
years to obliterate. We think of God as "up there," or as one who
made the world six thousand years ago and then retired. We must
learn that He is not confined either to time or space. God is
not to be thought of as merely back there in time, or up there in
space. If not, where is He? "The word is nigh thee, even in thy
mouth." The Kingdom of God is within you, and God Himself is among
men. When are we to exchange the terrible, far-away, absentee God
of our childhood for the everywhere present God of the Bible? Too
many of the old Christian writers seem to have conceived of God
as not much more than the greatest man--a kind of divine emperor.
He is infinitely more; He is a spirit, as Jesus said to the woman
at the well, and in Him we live and move and have our being. Let us
think of God as Immanuel--God with us--an ever-present, omnipresent,
eternal One. Long, long ago, God made matter, then He made the
flowers and trees and animals, then He made man. Did He stop? Is
God dead? If He lives and acts what is He doing? He is
Making men better.
He it is that "worketh in you." The buds of our nature are not
all out yet; the sap to make them comes from the God who made us,
from the indwelling Christ. Our bodies are the temples of the Holy
Ghost, and we must bear this in mind, because the sense of God is
kept up, not by logic, but by experience.
Until she was seven years of age the life of Helen Keller, the
Boston girl who was deaf and dumb and blind, was an absolute blank;
nothing could go into that mind because the ears and eyes were
closed to the outer world. Then by that great process which has
been discovered, by which the blind see, and the deaf hear, and the
mute speak, that girl's soul became opened, and they began to put
in little bits of knowledge, and bit by bit they began to educate
her. They reserved her religious instruction for Phillips Brooks.
After some years, when she was twelve years old, they took her to
him and he began to talk to her through the young lady who could
communicate with her by the exceedingly delicate process of touch.
He began to tell her about God and what He had done, and how He loved
men, and what He is to us. The child listened very intelligently,
and finally said:
"Mr. Brooks, I knew all that before, but I didn't know His name."
How often we have felt something within us impelling us to do
something which we would not have conceived of by ourselves, or
enabling us to do something which we could not have done alone.
"It is God which worketh in you." This great simple fact
Explains many of the mysteries of life,
and takes away the fear which we would otherwise have in meeting
the difficulties which lie before us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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