For nearly a year and a half of my life, I was involved in a religious cult, following a woman who referred to herself as Divine Mother. She claimed to teach a direct path to God. There were no written materials just short expositions followed by meditation sessions during which she instructed us to focus on letting go of this world and tame the “rascal mind” to find god within each of us. At first, I found such an approach refreshing and I thought I was finally achieving the inner peace for which I was searching. After a few months, I realized the inner peace I was searching for was something much deeper and profound than letting go of random thoughts and detaching from this world. My inner peace was craving for a relationship with God. Meditating and detaching from the world was not the answer. I was searching for a relationship that could never be broken by pain or ended by death. I was searching for the true God, not a god of my creation, hidden below layers of my personality and ego.
If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of mankind? Why have you made me your mark? Why have I become a burden to you? Why do you not pardon my transgression and take away my iniquity? For now I shall lie in the earth; you will seek me, but I shall not be.”
Job 7:20-21 (ESV)
Job was frustrated because he wanted something more from God. He wanted a Savior. Thousands of years later, his cry and the yearning of the entire Creation was answered by God who sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to live and be crucified on the Cross, and resurrected to glory three days later.
“Truly I know that it is so: But how can a man be in the right before God? If one wished to contend with him, one could not answer him once in a thousand times. He is wise in heart and mighty in strength —who has hardened himself against him, and succeeded?
Job 9:2-4 (ESV)
I was frustrated because I knew that there was more to God than this woman. I hungered for a relationship, a true relationship with the living God, not with a self-proclaimed prophet, or reaching an imaginary god within myself. Tossing and turning in my bed in the early hours in the morning, a week before Easter in 1982, I had enough. I yelled out into the darkness, “Ok God! You win!”
At the moment that I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, the Holy Spirit immediately indwelled within me and began to reveal to me that indeed, there was something more. God had revealed Himself through His Son, Jesus Christ. It was not a relationship built upon the denial of reality. It was a relationship built upon the acceptance of the living God, Jesus Christ.
Love and trust the Lord; seek His will in your life.
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