A desperate appeal … for Tupperware?!
The lady driving the big Suburban SUV I saw this afternoon must have exhausted all measures known to her. Finally, she had taken shoe polish and scrawled along the back window of her vehicle the following message:
“LOOKING FOR TUPPERWARE, CALL ME …” and then she had written her phone number.
I don’t know what the problem was. Did she find her cabinets full of Tupperware lids but not nearly enough Tupperware dishes to match?
Had she contributed to so many potlucks that the dishes had not been returned and now she was in lack?
Whatever the issue was, she seemed to be in desperate need of Tupperware, and so determined to find her cherished storage containers of choice that she was going public.
We human beings respond differently when we’re frantically searching for something specific, and that includes when we’re desperately searching for God.
What do you do when you’re desperately looking for God?
A lot of people call their pastor. Others talk to a Christian friend. Still others boot up their computers and start googling. We tend to search for God every place except where He is directly.
First, God is omnipresent, He’s everywhere, so He’s really easy to find!
Second, the best place to “see” God is where He reveals Himself, and that’s in the Bible. The Bible is the primary way God has chosen to reveal Himself to humanity. He wants us to see Him, to know Him, to understand Him — and to be able to find Him! — so He provided us with the Bible so that we really can know Him, learn about Him, and have a growing understanding of Him.
Third, since He is everywhere, just talk to Him … find Him in prayer. Talk, but then listen.
And finally, if you’re a Christian, then God’s Holy Spirit is living inside you! Our relationship with the Holy Spirit is probably the least developed relationship in most of our lives, but why is that? Why would we not want to make knowing the Holy Spirit one of our greatest relationships, so that we have a remarkably intimate communion with the Spirit of God who has taken up residence in us?
Pastors and Christian friends and others can help point us to God, but He’s not hard to find if we really want to find Him … and if we look where we know He is.
But even when we know where to find God, we often still miss Him, because sometimes He’s not who or what we’re looking for.
“His purpose was for the nations to seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him — though he is not far from any one of us,” Acts 17:27.
God is not far from you. If you’re looking for Him, look where you know you can see and hear Him, and then draw close.
“Come close to God, and God will come close to you …” James 4:8a.
Scotty
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