“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1, NIV)
I’m looking around my home in Oklahoma and watching the tree leaves change color and fall off. It won’t be long before golf will become very challenging to play here as the temperature cools off and the snow and ice blow through. It has been a great season of golf, but that is about to change.
Life is about seasons of change. We are born, we live and work, and we get old and die. Is that all there is? Is there any real purpose to it? I think these are the age-old questions that everyone must ask. Why were we born and what are we supposed to be doing? What is the point of a life that moves through the seasons only to find death in the end?
Atheists believe when it’s over it’s over. They choose to live life without the benefit of believing that God exists. Agnostics can’t decide if God exists, so they choose to live their lives without faith in anything but their own efforts. Still, most people lean in the direction that there is something outside of us greater than we are, and they might call that something God. That belief does very little to influence how they live. Meanwhile, Christians believe in a God who is personal and involved in their lives. They believe we are pursued by him and that believing in him requires certain things from us.
So who is right?
That’s the big question all of us have to answer, because what we decide will influence how we live and what will become of us in the end—when the seasons of our life are over. If God really wanted us to believe and serve him, why doesn’t he just tell us so and show himself to us? Why isn’t there a big neon sign in the sky that directs us to him? The answer to that question is that God chose another way to reveal himself. Putting a sign in the sky wouldn’t make us love him—it would only bring fear and resentment that we were required to do something. We wouldn’t be free.
The God of the Bible has in fact revealed a plan for mankind as a whole and each of us specifically. If you want to know this God, you must seek him with all your heart and you will surely find him (see Proverbs 8:17).
If you don’t want to know God, you can turn your back on him. This will not change who he is or what he has done for you, but he gives us all this choice. God doesn’t want us to love him because he forces us to love and obey him. He wants us to love him out of true desire. But to desire him, we must get to know him. This doesn’t happen by accident. We get to know him by seeking him with our whole heart. It is an active process: We seek him and he reveals himself to us.
So learn! We can learn about God by looking at how nature declares his glory—nothing that beautiful has ever been created by man. We can learn about him by reading his revealed Word, the Bible. It clearly describes his original plan and his plan to redeem mankind to its original purpose. Ultimately, we get to know him when we trust him with our life. We take a leap of faith from the seen world we live in to the unseen world he inhabits. It’s like trying to explain what a hole-in-one feels like to someone who doesn’t play golf. If you have not experienced it, you can’t really understand it. You must leap from trusting yourself to trusting the unseen God with your life. When you do that, you will know who he really is.
Now the question is: Is this the season when you place your trust in God?
—
Linda Ballard
November 5, 2015
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The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.