God (Christianity) -- Worship and love; Spirituality
Our pursuit of God is successful just because He is forever seeking to
manifest Himself to us. The revelation of God to any man is not God
coming from a distance upon a time to pay a brief and momentous visit to
the man's soul. Thus to think of it is to misunderstand it all. The
approach of God to the soul or of the soul to God is not to be thought
of in spatial terms at all. There is no idea of physical distance
involved in the concept. It is not a matter of miles but of experience.
To speak of being near to or far from God is to use language in a sense
always understood when applied to our ordinary human relationships. A
man may say, "I feel that my son is coming nearer to me as he gets
older," and yet that son has lived by his father's side since he was
born and has never been away from home more than a day or so in his
entire life. What then can the father mean? Obviously he is speaking of
_experience_. He means that the boy is coming to know him more
intimately and with deeper understanding, that the barriers of thought
and feeling between the two are disappearing, that father and son are
becoming more closely united in mind and heart.
So when we sing, "Draw me nearer, nearer, blessed Lord," we are not
thinking of the nearness of place, but of the nearness of relationship.
It is for increasing degrees of awareness that we pray, for a more
perfect consciousness of the divine Presence. We need never shout across
the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our own soul, closer than
our most secret thoughts.
Why do some persons "find" God in a way that others do not? Why does God
manifest His Presence to some and let multitudes of others struggle
along in the half-light of imperfect Christian experience? Of course the
will of God is the same for all. He has no favorites within His
household. All He has ever done for any of His children He will do for
all of His children. The difference lies not with God but with us.
Pick at random a score of great saints whose lives and testimonies are
widely known. Let them be Bible characters or well known Christians of
post-Biblical times. You will be struck instantly with the fact that
the saints were not alike. Sometimes the unlikenesses were so great as
to be positively glaring. How different for example was Moses from
Isaiah; how different was Elijah from David; how unlike each other were
John and Paul, St. Francis and Luther, Finney and Thomas a Kempis. The
differences are as wide as human life itself: differences of race,
nationality, education, temperament, habit and personal qualities. Yet
they all walked, each in his day, upon a high road of spiritual living
far above the common way.
Their differences must have been incidental and in the eyes of God of no
significance. In some vital quality they must have been alike. What was
it?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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