Looking For God

If you search for God on your own, you will find your own god!

Do not mistake my statement with the fact that youir Salvation, coing to Christ and your relationship with God is a personal experience and will be, at the moment that it happens, between you and God.  What I am stateing is that if you are a person who does not believe in organized religion and seek your answer to who God is by examining all religions you may just end up producing a god of your own making. 

This goes bak to the man I wittnessed to two wednesdays ago, but also to anyone who has made God what they want God to be without truly seeking to know Him.  To refresh your memories, a couple of weeks ago a a man came into the Chapel during our Wednesday night Bible study.  He was looking for "Holy Books".  When I approached him to help him out we fell into a discussion about what he was trying to do.  With that he indicated that he was fed up with organized religion, being raise Christian, and wanted now to look at all the religions to find God for himself.

I have thought about this a lot since then.  I was for many years the very same way.  I believed that if there were a God that he would not care how we believed as long as we did believe.  Throw in a touch of me thinking that being a good person also weighed in a lot to everything and I got what I had, no god at all.  I did what I wanted, how I wanted and when I wanted, up to the place where I drew my own line.  So with this man, who is seeking answers from many sources, he will get what he is looking for, he will get what I had, my own made up god.

Now you may be asking, what is wrong with finding the answers from many religions about who God is.  Why is one any better then another, why not even take the best of them all and make waht works best for me?  Simple fact is that there can only be one absolute truth.  There can only be one God and anything less then that God is just an idol, a stop gap for us that allows us not to have to have real faith in Him.

So what must occur is acceptance of what this absolute truth is.  The purest way to find that is to ask God to reveal it to you as you whole heartedly seek Him.  Not an intelectual excercise, not a sentence in a book that finally reveals to you who He is, but with all your heart, mind, body and soul knowing and wanting to be in a relationship with Him.  When you look in that manner you will be given the answer that you seek.

By this young man being angry at organized religion he was relly angery at "fallen men" who were not satisfing his need which only God could fill.  He was placing percieved standards onto what the people of the church should be and when they did what all men do, fail, it became his excuse to deny God in that situation.  Where he went wrong is by not allowing God to be God and man to be man.  He was not giving man the same grace and forgivness that he was looking for in God.  He had even made the Church the god instead of God being God.  He also looked from the perspective that he was ok and everything around him was amiss.  When we want people to fill all of the emptiness in our hearts that only God can fill, we will remain disappointed.

The point to all this, and what I explained to this young man is this, you will most of all never find a perfect God in a man.  This only happened in Jesus Christ, perfect man, sinless.  You may find aspects of God in men, some more then others but never sinless perfection.  With this you will never find a perfect religion, a perfect church or organization, they are made of imperfect people.  The only way to find the perfect God that you may seek is when you come to Him, in asolute openess and devotion and ask Him, the one who was perfect into your heart to guide you.  Only then will you see the perfections that you seek, only then you will know God only then will you find absolute truth.

You can make God what you want Him to be.  You can look for Him or not in many places.  You can blame the people of the Church for not finding Him.  You can look in every book and every place but as long as you look for Him in other things He will not be what He is, He will only be the god you want Him to be.  Open your heart to the Truth, the absolute truth of the one true God and you will then find what you seek.

Lord Jesus, reveal your truth to this young man and to those who truly seek you.  They may have been looking in other places but when they ask you personally to be in their heart then you will be there.  Amen