Life fully connected with God

Every day we're reading or listening to part of the Bible together and sharing thoughts with you. Today it’s Bern Leckie:

What did I like about today’s passage?

Sometimes I find myself separating my “faith” life from the rest of my life. As if I could meaningfully do that! It’s one thing to separate church time from work time, but it should feel harder than it does to find anything feeling unconnected with such a root belief that God is real, knows and loves us, all day every day.

What I like here is that, for his people, God was working to connect everything in their lives with the patterns of connection with him that he was establishing through gatherings and sacrifices. God was not to be a weekend hobby for his people, but a whole-of-life belief put into practice.

The number of explicit links between worship offerings and everyday behaviour like making or breaking promises seems onerous to me. But I find myself awestruck by the expectations these must have raised about God’s concern for our whole lives, not just religious stuff.

What did it show me about Father God, Jesus or the Holy Spirit?

God made his concern to connect with people visible through an elaborate system of rules and rituals. He later sent Jesus so that, by following him, we could connect fully without all of these things in place, almost as if they were training wheels, but now we don’t need them.

So faith in Jesus is meant to be far more than a belief which brings us to church. God does not want us to be hobbyist believers, separating our faith life from the rest of life. Instead, he can give us transformed lives with guilt and sin fully dealt with.

What am I going to do differently as a result?

How can I ever forget that God wants me to connect the whole of my life with him? Over the next few days, I will pay more attention to the times when I may have disconnected, perhaps because I’m doing something wrong, or just being thoughtless about God’s love and its potential to change my life.

Who am I going to share this with?

We’ll be starting a new run of “The SHAPE of you” course next week with a look at God’s kingdom and his purposes for us. I hope I’ll have something fresh to share about what God has been showing me about the strength and depth of his connection to my life.