So, you can feel the rain that rolls down your face like a tear not so long forgotten. You can feel the wind in your hair as it takes you back to a memory that brings a smile to your soul. You feel the warmth of the summer sun on your skin and it calms you. Your world surrounded by a gentle hug from the sun. As you feel the grass or maybe the sand under your bare feet instantly you are taken back to a time or a place of youth or happiness or loss or love. A smell of food or perfume brings a loved one’s face before you. The feel of a certain fabric in your hands reminding you of a time when your children were infants. All this sensory input is derived by having lived life and being a part of a life lived. You would never have been able to go back to those memories even as you are reading this, if you had never experienced them. If you had never lived them.
At various times I have read the word of God to different groups of people and it is always interesting to see their faces as the word speaks to them. You can literally see the expressions on the faces, or lack thereof. Those who have experienced the life of the living word of God and those who have lived a life according to the word of God. As I have read and applied the word in my life, I have become aware of how a spiritual sensory over load on the human body can not be hid. Just as when Jesus said in Matthew 5: 14- 16 “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill that cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light so shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your father who is heaven.” Your light, that life lived in the Word experienced before others gives light to all that are in the house. It doesn’t happen by merely existing; it must be experienced so that all that are in the house may see your life as a Christian.
Somewhere we have bought the lie that Christianity is a place on a pew in a church. That we can just come in and exist and that somehow spiritual osmosis takes place and we just become all that we hear. We find a place in the church to hide out, on the praise team or maybe in children’s church, existing in our osmosis coma showing others how to be masters of this spiritual absorption so that soon they are all like us, cookie cutter molds of a plague of existing and not living.
To experience God’s work in our lives is to live a life of praise. Praise is an outward expression of an inward feeling or emotion. That said, it is an experience that you must be living if others are to experience Christ through you.
Please take a moment to look back over your Christian walk. Ask yourself, are you experiencing the life of the living word of the almighty God or are you just existing. God’s word is meant to be lived by all that believe in him. Just think for a minute about the scripture in Luke 19:39,40 when Jesus was riding in on the colt to the Mount of Olives and the pharisees asked Jesus to rebuke his disciples for loudly crying out praises to Him and His reply to them was that if they did not praise Him the rocks would cry out in their place. In other words, He would cause the rocks to have life to praise him. Because existence is not life and it takes life to be able to praise HIM. That’s powerful. Please live the word with me. Understand that the power of the word of God is a living thing not an existence. Matthew 10:10 Jesus tells us, “…I have come that they may have life and that they may have it more abundantly. Today I ask you to choose to live a life that can only be experience by living in the Word of God.
M.U.S.C.L.E. 