Lake View Activity Center

WILL WE OPEN THE GIFT?

One of the many tragedies of life is that God’s grace — his free gift of unmerited favor and love — is too often left as an unopened package. And if Jonah had chosen not to receive God’s free gift of grace, he would have forfeited his hope of salvation, his chance for reinstatement, and his opportunity to become reusable and reclaimed for God’s work.

The conclusion of the movie The Fugitive has uncanny parallels with Jonah’s life. As Dr. Kimball continues to run from the police and the federal marshal, he learns the identity of his wife’s real killer. In the end, Dr. Kimball eludes each of his potential killers, only to be arrested by the federal marshal.

However, after Dr. Kimball slides into the backseat of the federal marshal’s car, the marshal takes off Dr. Kimball’s handcuffs and hands him an ice pack. Since at the outset of the chase the marshal had said that he didn’t care if Kimball were innocent or guilty, Dr. Kimball says to the marshal, “I thought you didn’t care.”

The marshal replies with a chuckle, “I don’t. Don’t tell anybody, OK?”

In Jonah’s story, it appears that God didn’t care. With the storm threatening Jonah and the large fish swallowing him, it even appears that God was trying to kill Jonah. But he was not. God cared (and, unlike the federal marshal in The Fugitive, he wanted all to know it). He was trying to save Jonah. He wanted him to live not as a fugitive but as a free man.

When we stop our running and accept the grace that God offers, we also will live in freedom and fulfillment.

OUR SEARCH FOR JESUS CAN’T WAIT

If we don’t find God, we have missed the very reason for our existence. Compared to knowing the One who made us, everything else is just crumbs.

Deep down inside, all people have this hunger. God’s handprint is on us. His very breath spoke the world into existence. He set eternity in our hearts. We, therefore, are incurably spiritual by nature. That’s why every human society — no matter how primitive — has some concept of a higher power, some vision of a reality that goes beyond the natural. On one level, this explains why science has not eradicated religion from the earth. Technological achievement cannot meet the deepest needs of the human heart.

People are hungry for spiritual truth and if they cannot find it by normal means, they will reach for anyone or anything claiming to give them an answer. Something inside us drives us to seek ultimate meaning outside ourselves. God puts that something inside us. Augustine passed on this oft-quoted prayer: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” All of us are on a search for the Savior. We desperately want to find him.

The search for God can’t wait. The longer you wait, the more clouded the mirror will get. Seeing the whole picture merely requires the clarity that discovering God can bring. Searching for God is good; finding him is much better....