Where is God?
Reflection can be a good thing. There are times when I sit back and think about my childhood church home. I remember singing in the choir. One of the songs I sang was called “Take Me Back”. The chorus of the song says, “Take me back. Take me back dear Lord, to the place where I first received You. Take me back, take me back dear Lord, where I first believed.” I remember how on fire for the Lord I was when I first accepted Christ. Oh, how I so wanted to please Him. But over time, my flame started to flicker. The burning desire to continuously seek Him began to fade. Going to church, participating in ministry and singing in the choir became ritualistic and traditional. It began to be something I HAD to do instead of something I WANTED to do. Reading and studying my bible became a chore and I had to put more effort into it to do this on a daily basis. I stopped praying like I should and merely just existed. I now understand that salvation will never leave you, but at the time, I fell so far away from God, I felt I needed to accept Him again. I felt like the Holy Spirit disappeared from my life. How can I flow in God’s anointing if I don’t feel like He has anointed me and has chosen me for a purpose? What happened to God when I first believed and how do I get back to Him? Where is God?
Let’s look at the woman with the issue of blood. The bible says that the woman had a hemorrhage for twelve years and could not be healed by anyone (Luke 8:43). Now imagine if you were that woman. Because of your “condition”, know one pays attention to you. You are irrelevant. Everyone ignores you like the plague. Everyone just sees you but not the God in you. Because everyone else is rejecting you, you begin to feel like God is rejecting you too. You begin to believe that you are not good enough, even for God. To continue to read and pray and worship is meaningless if you are feeling God’s rejection. This was probably the life of this sick woman. She knew how powerful Jesus was. She just had to get to Him. Imagine her day. Silence. No one seeing about her, no one checking on her. Maybe she knows that God has anointed her for His purpose, but imagine trying to worship with no anointing. You’re just going through the motions. Imagine trying to pray with no anointing. They’re just words with no meaning behind them. Imagine trying to walk into your destiny with no anointing. You’re just going in circles. God needs you to witness to people, to pray with people, to spread the Good News but your spiritual life is dead. Where is God? How do you touch the hem of His garment? In the biblical narrative, Jesus is in a place where He is visible and can be touched but what do YOU do when you can’t find the Hem?
FREE YOUR MIND. Let it go. Pray and ask God where do you put your hurts, mistakes and failures. Submit everything to Him. Purposely release the negativity that is surrounding and trying to consume you. This includes family and friends. Refuse the enemy’s tactics of unbelief. Begin to walk in total freedom.
EXAMINE YOURSELF. This blog is all about finding where God is, but I must ask the question: where are you? Why do we pray to God only when there is trouble? How come some of us only read the bible when we have time to fit it in? There is something to say about when we want God to heal our loved ones, open up this door, close that door, make sure we are safe and protected, and the list goes on. Yet, we go day in and day out without even acknowledging Him. Some of us even eat our food without praying over it first. Yet, this same Jesus died for us. Examine yourself.
REALIZE THAT GOD NEVER LEFT. God has always been by our side from the very beginning. He didn’t lose us, we lost Him. When everyone else left, God was the only One who stayed. If your prayer time and your bible study time was where it should be, I don’t think there is an opportunity to question where God is. We would already know where He is. When you begin to question where God is, just remember His promise: “For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened (Matthew 7:8 NASB). This means that He knows when you are trying to seek Him which means He is always there. But we have to diligently seek Him which means there is action that needs to be done on our part.
Maybe we need to ask God to take us back where we first received Him. Maybe we need to ask God to take us back where we first believed. Maybe we need to just start all over again. Maybe we need to start running back to Him. We already know where God is but where are you?
Forever hoping for you,