Exposure to the Living God

Recently, a member of our faith family challenged me with this brilliant quote:  “A Christian lifestyle alone might cause your children to long for Christianity, but only regular exposure to the living God will cause them to long for Christ!”  Wow!  Powerful.  Don’t you think?  But it begs another question.  What does regular exposure to the Living God look like?  That’s a question worth considering.  Can I offer a few ideas?  Of course we are exposed to God through His Word, the Bible.  After all, that is what the Bible is – the revelation of God.  Regular time in the Scriptures is regular exposure to God, and it seems that the more time we spend in the Scripture the greater our appetite for it becomes.  In the case of our kids, an appetite for the Bible seems all but absent in most cases.  There is so much vying for their attention, and so much that is (seemingly) more appealing.  But the exposure to God that is gained through time spent in the Word is a component of authentic relationship with Christ that cannot be done without.  The Bible is a staple, a mainstay of spiritual nutrition.  Without it we starve to death.  So sad is the diminished priority of regular time in God’s Word amongst those who claim to seek deep and rich knowledge of God.  I’m afraid that we have mislabeled our infatuation with religion and the good feeling that we think it will afford us as genuine, take-up-your-cross-daily / fellowship-of-His-sufferings pursuit of God.  Just how believable is our assertion that we long for Christ when we struggle to recognize the necessity and ready availability of the clearest and most comprehensive revelation of God at our disposal – the Bible.  Well that’s a start.  We’ll consider other means of exposure to the Living God in posts in the near future, but for now this is conviction enough – at least for me…

"...That I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death,  that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead."  Philippians 3:10-11