Where are you?

“Where are you?” called the Lord God to the man and woman hiding in the bushes for fear and shame after violating God’s simple commandment not to eat the fruit from a certain tree.

Today, we who claim to be His children, don’t run and hide from God, but we boldly and confidently go about our business believing we are living according to His simple commandment to love Him and love others.

Yet, I wonder if in our confident obedience, God is not still saying to many of us, “Where are you?”

What if all the Christians spending time seeking deeper encounters with God in prayer and worship (I’m all for encountering God!), and all the Christians seeking “revival” – whervever that might be and whatever that might mean (I’m all for seeing lots of people turn to the Lord!), and all the Christians defending the faith against heresy – as they understand it - (I’m all for sound doctrine!) … What if they spent most of their time and energy serving Christ where He is thirsty, hungry, and naked, and in prison - don’t you think it might become clearer to the world (and the church) what it truly means to be a follower of Jesus?

What if we are seeking to find Jesus in places that He never promised to be found?
How do know it is Him we are finding in all of our ardent seeking?

Follow me. I am hungry. Where are you?

Follow me. I am thirsty. Where are you?

Follow me. I am in prison. Where are you?

Blessed are those who spend their lives serving Me where I said I would be found.

~ Jesus

But I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.

~ Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus

 

On the day when each of us stands before the Lord to give an account of our stewardship of the many gifts God had given us over our lifetime, Jesus will be asking us questions.  He even told us what these questions would be so we could order our priorities around what really matters in the end (and perhaps see through the fog of the many deceiving voices and divisive doctrines that cloud our way).

These questions do not include:

“Did you sing to me when I wanted praise?”

“Did you seek revival?  Did you experience revival?”

neither will there be a 50 question test on sound doctrines…

 No, the questions Jesus will ask go like this:

“Where were you when I was _________”. You can read them in Matthew chapter 25.

Notice the appropriate response is not a verbal one.   The only response Jesus is seeking is what we did – our actions.

Let our response to these questions of Jesus be the test of the genuineness of our encounter with God, or the accurate blood pressure reading of our spritual vitality, or the benchmark of the soundness of our doctrine.

 

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