"It's as simple as praying a prayer like this". As a preacher, I find myself saying this quite often (and particularly on the Alpha course). Becoming a Christian is really that simple, and I have seen so many lives transformed when people pray a simple prayer turning to Christ in repentance and asking him to be their friend.
It's the start of a great adventure, and there is so much more that God wants us to experience and to do.
God gave Ezekiel a wonderful vision of this in Ezekiel 47.
Ezekiel saw a river running from the temple. First of all it was ankle deep, then waist deep, then so deep you had to swim in it. And the river brought life to parched land, and even to the Dead Sea.
This speaks of perseverance, of choosing to be in God's life-giving river and of going deeper.
In 1 Corinthians 14, Paul writes:
"Follow the way of love, and eagerly desire spiritual gifts and especially the gift of prophecy"
As a church, we encourage people to seek to hear God speaking and we share prophetic words and insights with each other. It never ceases to amaze me that God speaks to us as we choose to listen to him. I love spending time with people who have made it their aim to get close to God and to hear him speaking.
Recently Vanessa and I were having a pub lunch, and Vanessa said to me that she felt God saying she should tell one of the other customers that God loved him. She went up to him, and he soon told her that he had been considering suicide that day.
"But why would God send you to speak to me, and not to any of the other customers…" And then it dawned on him that the reason might be that he needed to hear this.
There is a challenge here – we can all hear God speaking if we choose to listen, but why did Paul write 'eagerly desire …..the gift of prophecy'?
Talk to people who hear God clearly, and you find that having this as an aim takes effort: choosing to put God first, pressing in to hear him, choosing to obey his promptings (even at the risk of getting it wrong). But they wouldn't want it any other way – they would rather walk in step with the Holy Spirit than merely live a life that looks Christian. And they began with small steps into God's ankle-deep water, as they gained confidence in their relationship with God before living a life more fully committed to God.
It is a challenge that God clearly wants us to take up.
Tim Norman
Read the Bible in a year: Proverbs 26:23-27:4, Ezekiel 4:1-6:14, Hebrews 5:11-6:12
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