Dear Friends

There is a splendid moment in the movie ‘Jurassic Park’ when palaeontologist Allen Grant, who has devoted his life to the study of dinosaurs, suddenly comes face to face with real live prehistoric creatures. He falls to the ground, dumbstruck. The reason is obvious. It is one thing to piece together an informed image of dinosaurs by picking through fossils and bones, but to encounter an actual dinosaur in real life – well there can be no comparison.

There is a spiritual parallel here with how people look upon God and the Bible. Individuals will sift through the Bible examining this or that fact about God and what He is like; they will learn about Jesus and what He taught and how He lived, but all of this is as far as it goes, they never move on into the next dimension which is actually to have a personal encounter with God and experience the reality of God for themselves.

Time and again the Bible states that we can have a ‘close encounter’ with the Living God and what we read is referring to a real Living Entity or Intelligence that wants to have a personal relationship with us on a one to one level. This experience or encounter can be ours, and ours right now in this life, but we only have such an experience if we fulfil certain conditions laid down by God Himself. These conditions are spelt out very simply in John, chapter 14, by Jesus Himself. ‘The person who obeys My commandments is the one who loves Me, and I will love him and reveal Myself to him’. There we have it plain and simple, directly from the mouth of the Lord; He will personally reveal Himself or manifest Himself to the individual who OBEYS Him: obedience is the key to a close encounter with God!

Often, when I am out visiting, people will ask me how they can experience God for themselves. They want to move from that dimension of simply reading about God in the Bible, to the next dimension of personally experiencing Him for themselves.

They will ask: - Should we go on a retreat? Should we pray more? Should we meditate? Should we read the Bible more or go to more church services? How do we move on the next stage? I always say the same thing to this line of questioning “All these things may be helpful and useful but they all miss the central point, tell me, what does the Bible itself say?” The usual reaction to my response is a dejected look from the inquirer who finally uses the very last word most people ever want to hear ‘obedience’! The plain teaching of Scripture is that an encounter with the living God can be achieved but only first by being obedient and thereby making Christ the Lord of one’s life. This is the key reason why so many people complain that God seems far from them. They will ‘dabble with Christianity’, they will quickly take and appreciate all the comforting and reassuring passages in the Bible, that God loves them and will be with them in their trials and tribulations, but when it come to responding to ’the challenge’ which comes from God, that they must change their hearts and place Him first and foremost in their lives by obeying Him day by day, well they will try absolutely anything else but that! The result is they never really feel the assurance and reality of God’s Presence that they could have. If only they were willing to obey.

Is it really such a difficult thing to put God’s will before our own day by day and hour by hour? Of course not, others do it, so what’s the problem?!

Your pastor and friend