Are you truly abandoned to God?

We all love having experiences with God because they strengthen our faith and give us a fresh glimpse of His power. I have had many powerful encounters where God became real and alive to me and the whole world seemed to stop. But what happens when the world starts moving again and we go about our lives? If we are not very careful, we can quickly lose our closeness to God and can easily become distant, empty, and powerless. We can so easily become self-dependent and complacent! It’s not that we aren’t intentional about keeping our intimacy with God or that we become careless about Him but it takes focused effort to remain a humble vessel in the hand of The Master and to follow even the faintest whisper of the Spirit. It’s good to keep praying and reading the Bible but if we want to keep our hearts on fire for Him we must evaluate our hearts daily in light of The Word. Prayer ought to be more than just a daily habit, we need to make it our day’s highest priority and we must give time to prayer, until we no longer pray but Christ makes His prayers through us. Oftentimes, we expect God to honor our standards when it comes to our relationship with Him but He calls us to seek Him with our whole devotion and to allow Him to become everything to us. Most of us try to read the Bible on a daily basis but how do we read it? Do we give our full attention so that we can then apply it in our lives or do we read just to know it? When life seems peaceful and we live comfortable lives, do we still seek God desperately as we did when we really needed Him? It can be quite discouraging to find ourselves living in mediocrity because it sometimes seems impossible to rise from it but we need not lose heart! The very reality that The Holy Spirit is making us aware of the condition of our lives is the first step towards change. God is still at work even when we seem to have become stagnant but we need to continue pursuing Him. He allows feelings of discontent with our relationship with Him for the very reason of making us aware that we are missing something. We might be obedient in many areas of our lives but God wants every area to be submitted to His authority and sometimes it takes time for us to figure out which area His finger is pointing to. Though God sometimes reveals Himself to us by His own initiative, He does expect us to seek Him by following His way. Isaiah 55:6-7 says, “Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.” In order to find God, we need to separate ourselves from everything that hinders our relationship with Him. All it takes is sincere prayer and patience. Just as our distancing from God doesn’t happen overnight, so our pursuit of God takes time. God promises to lead us but we need to listen, “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you. Be not like a horse or a mule, without understanding, which must be curbed with bit and bridle, or it will not stay near you” Psalm 32:8-9. Could it be that God has been trying to get our attention in regards to a specific area of our lives? Let’s turn from our ways and abandon ourselves fully to doing His will in all things!